In Māori mythology, Hawaiki is the mythological homeland of the Māori and, more broadly, the ancestral homeland of Polynesians.
Māori oral traditions describe ancestors travelling from Hawaiki to Aotearoa in ocean-going waka. These traditions preserve the memory of ancestral migrations, although the popular nineteenth-century “Great Fleet” account is now regarded as an oversimplification rather than a single, historically documented voyage.
Hawaiki is not simply another name for Aotearoa, which is the Māori name for New Zealand. Tahiti and Rarotonga are real Polynesian islands, but neither is the standard answer to this question. Some traditions and scholars associate Hawaiki with Raiatea, while others treat it as a symbolic or ancestral place rather than a precisely identifiable island.
The name has cognates throughout Polynesia, including Avaiki, Havaiki, Savaiʻi and Hawaii. In several traditions, Hawaiki is also connected with the underworld, perhaps because both the ancestral homeland and the spirit world were understood as places where ancestors reside.