This opening chapter contextualizes the work of the contributors within a Māori worldview. In particular it deploys the highly formalized structures of traditional speech making (mihi/greeting, korero/talk, kaupapa/purpose, and waiata/song or prayer) to place, as all Polynesians do, ‘the past before us’. Te Moana Nui a Kiwa is therefore a traditional invocation to consider, first, the ancestral origins of the Pacific Ocean, and ‘the ocean’s mysterium’ – the myths and ways of thinking that establish an Indigenous perception of the Pacific’s past. These include the stories of Paikea, the whale rider, and Ruatepupuke, the east coast ancestor who is attributed as having brought the art of carving to the world from the ancestral house of Tangaroa, the Māori god of the ocean.