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Introduction
Life-cycle of the Teve
Medicine and famine food
Teve as a support for the sky
Teve in Aotearoa
Teve is quite a plant, both in its remarkable appearance and the legends associated with it. It consists of three components, two ephemeral but highly visible -- the flower and leaf, which appear in sequence at the beginning of the rainy season, and one constant but hidden undergound -- the corm. The plant is native to South and Southeast Asia, New Guinea and Northern Australia and has been carried to the edges of the Austronesian world, from Madagascar to Vanuatu and Polynesia as far as the Marquesas and Tahiti, but not to Hawai'i or Aotearoa.
Life-cycle of the Teve
 Teve is basically a wild plant in much of its range, although over the centuries many cultivated varieties have been developed. In the Austronesian-speaking areas of New Guinea, where it is still sporadically cultivated, Malcolm Ross (The Lexicon of Proto-Oceanic, Vol. 3, p. 273) notes that it "is not as valued as other taro types an does not play a role in feasts and wealth exchanges." It seems not to be cultivated any more in Melanesia, but is still available as a food in time of famine.
The plant is dormant in the dry season, and the spectacular inflorescence appears (in favourable circumstances) at the beginning of the rainy season – but in some areas where the plant has been naturalised, for example the Cook Islands, flowers are rarely seen. When and where they do appear, they are a spectacular sight, a bit like a giant arum lily with the stalk bearing the flower section about 10 cm long, supporting a spadix (the stalk from which the flowers emerge) up to 20 cm long consisting of a purple "appendix" at the top, then closely spaced male flowers and in the lowest section very tightly compacted female flowers. These are partly surrounded by the sheathing leaf-like spathe about 20 cm long, purple inside and greenish outside. While the flowers are developing they have a foul smell which attracts butterflies and other insects which pollinate them. The spadix (flower stalk) actually heats up as the flowers develop, intensifying the aroma and perhaps also energising the insects. The fruits are one-seeded oval berries, red when ripe.
After the plant has flowered (or would have, had flowers been produced) the leaves appear, generally one to a plant. The single leaf has a stout stalk mottled green and white, often also with purple and pink blotches, 60 cm to a metre or more high, covered by a protective sheathing when it emerges, and expanding into a single compound leaf with three major branches further subdivided up to 80 cm long by a metre wide, with glossy pointed leaflets up to 15 cm long by 5 cm wide. The flower and leaf will disintegrate during the dry season, leaving the corm, up to centimetres 20 cm long by 30 cm wide and weighing up to 25 kg resting happily underground until it is exhumed.
Medicine and famine food
Although it is now rarely cultivated in most islands, the plant was once widely grown in tropical Polynesia for use as a food in times of emergency. It is generally found naturalised in disturbed places, abandoned cultivations, and sometimes forest margins. It is still cultivated in the Marquesas, and may be found in cultivated or previously cultivated areas from near sealevel to about 800 m on many islands.
The wild plants are poisonous unless cooked, and the cultivated ones only a little less so. The corms and other parts of the plant contain calcium oxlate crystals that have a caustic substance on the surface. If not well cooked the crystals would cause the eater's mouth to become inflamed and swollen. The crystals can be rendered harmless by thorough cooking; they are also broken down when the plant is thoroughly dried out. These crystals (raphides) are also present in nettles, but in aroids (the family of the teve, arrowroot and taro) they are laced with poison, not merely sharp. Nevertheless, in different places the sap from the petioles (leafstalks) has been fermented as a treatment for diarrhoea, the dried root has been used to treat piles, and the fresh fruit (in India) in remedies for acute rheumatism. In Samoa the juice from the leaf-stalks was sometimes used to treat eye problems like blurred vision.
Methods of preparing teve in Polynesia during times of want noted by Art Whistler (Plants of the Canoe People, p. 36) include thorough cooking followed by mashing, preparing it as gruel, or making it into a "malodorous dough" which was allowed to ferment in specially dug pits. In her account of the settlement of Ra'iatea, Teuira Henry quotes from a traditional narrative mentioning the use of Teve in a time of famine:
Tae aéra i te hoe tau i o’e ai teie fenua i te tau o te ari’i ra Noho-ari’i; o te oe i taohu ’i o Uturoa e, o Uturoa i te Rere-a-fara, e fara te maa; o Uturoa i te fa’a-araea, e araea te maa ; o Uturoa i te Haha-teve, e teve te maa; o Utu-roa i te Tupa iri ava, e tupa te maa !
There came a time when there was a famine in this land, in the reign of Noho-ari’i; this was the cause of Utu¬roa (Long-cape) being spoken of as Utu-roa fleeing to the fara—fara [pandanus] was the food; Utu-roa of the red clay—red clay was the food; Utu-roa resorting to the acrid teve, for that was the food ; Uturoa of the bitter-backed land crab””— land crabs were the food ! [Ancient Tahiti, p. 414]
In Samoa apparently it had in the past also been used as a punishment for adulterers or other criminals who were sentenced to bite the raw stem or a piece of uncooked corm repeatedly. This was not a minor punishment, as the after-effects could be severe and even life-threatening. One observer described the sensation of biting the corm as like filling the mouth with cayenne pepper.
Teve as a support for the sky.
Teuira Henry notes that the Teve "is widely famed in Polynesian folklore as having served among other plants to prop the sky when Rû left it upon the hilltops" (Ancient Tahiti, p. 58). There are many versions of the story of Rū raising the sky, and Rū in some narratives is identiied as a great navigator, in others as the father or grandfather of Maui, and sometimes as a fusion of both. However the use of teve to support the sky is common to most. A Mangaian version as recounted by Johannes Andersen (Myths and Legends o the Polynesians, London: Harrap, 1928, pp. 222-3) states that the sky was built of solid blue stone, resting on the broad leaves of the teve and the smaller arrowroot, flattening them out as they bore the enormous weight.
Rū, who lived in the celestial Avaiki visited this world and felt sorry for the people having to scurry about in such a confined space, so he raised the sky a little with some strong stakes "firmly planted at Rangi-moho, the centre of the island and the world". The sky was raised to its present height as a result of an altercation between Maui and Rū, which ended in Rū, sky-stones and all being hurled beyond the stars, in which Rū became entangled and eventually his bones fell to earth in the form of pumice.
A Tahitian tradition has Rū commissioned to raise the sky but being only partially successful, using teve, pia (the Polynesian arrowroot, Tacca leontopetaloides) and auari'iroa (the "umbrella tree", Terminalia catappa) to support the sky above hilltops on Rangiatea and Porapora:
Tauto’o a’era o Rû i te ra’i ia Rumia, no to’na ari’i, o Anâ-iva o te ra’i. A toto’o rà i te ra’i, e ni’a roa i Mou’a-raha i Porapora, e i Moua-avarivari I Havai’i Tauturu a’e ai i te pia, te teve te auari’iroa' parahurahu, e i te farero roroa o te pa’u tai.
I afa’i noa a’era o Rû i te ra’i i ni’a, e aore i maraa, i taua to’ora’a ra, pu’u ihora te tua, fera ihora te mata, totoro ihora te a’au mi’imi’i no roto ia Rû i Rapae, topa ’tura i te pae o te ra’i i Porapora, riro atura ei ata o te ta’o hia e, o te Rua-nu’u-a-Rû i teie nei a tau.
At last Rû drew up the sky, Rumia (Upset), for his king. Aster, the ninth of the sky (Betelgues'e in Orion), So he drew and drew the sky until it reached the summit of Mou'a-raha (Fiat-hill) on Porapora and of Moua-ava'rivari
(Slender-hill) on Havai'i (or Ra'iatea). And he propped it with the flat tops of the pia ..., the teve (..., the auari'i'roa ..., and the tall tree coral from the shoals of the sea.
Rû only lifted the sky, but he did not succeed in quite raising it when he became hump-backed, his eyelids became ectropion, and he got badly ruptured, so that his small intestines dropped away and settled in the horizon of Porapora, - and there they became clouds which are called the Rua-nu'u-a-Rû (Source-of-hosts-of-Rû) to this day.
[Ancient Tahiti, pp.409-10]
.In a Tahitian version of the story, it is Tāne, not Maui, who completes the task. In the war between Tāne and Atea, Tāne's father Te Hau told him to descend to earth, and if he saw ants gathering at the stump of a toa (Casuarina) tree, to plant the seeds he had obtained from his grandfather Mata'i-i-te-ura-re'a, and he would know what to do. The narrative continues:
So Tane and his hosts descended to the earth and found that the ants had collected round the toa tree and were feeding upon its flowers, and then he planted his pia seeds, which soon grew. Upon the spreading top of one of the plants he sat, and he chanted the following lines :
Turu, turu ai toa e,
I te pou o te hoa o te rai e,
E huea i tara o te rai e !
O Rû-roa ta'ata,
Turu hia e ra'i i turu hia.
Tuturu ai toa e.
Noho ai rà te ra'i i ni'a,
I te pia, te teve, e i te auariiroa.
Prop, now props the warrior,
With the pillar of the friend of the skies,
Cast up by enchantment will be the skies.
Tall Rû, the man,
Propped up the sky which is propped.
Now propped by the warrior.
Remain up, now sky,
Upon, pia, teve, and the umbrella tree.
Then the pia plant rose up higher and higher with Tane, who thus extended the heavens and fixed them in their proper places, as he continued to chant in the same strain. [Ancient Tahiti, p. 351]
There is a lot more to the story than that, but the teve fades from the scene at this point.
Teve in Aotearoa
Teve was remembered in Aotearoa in tewe, a bitter fermented juice, the only non-poisonous (albeit possibly intoxicating) product of the tutu shrub -- a plant even more unfriendly to people than the teve as its toxins are not destroyed by heat. Teve's companion in supporting the sky, pia, the arrowroot, may possibly be half remembered as a source of starch and paste in pia, the term for sticky exudations from trees, but that word is more plausibly descended from a Proto Malayo Polynesian term for exudations of other kinds, and their associate auariiroa, the umbrella tree, is reflected in a Māori tree name -- kawariki.
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