Téâ Kanaké is the primordial ancestor of the Paicî country of central Grande Terre and, by extension, the archetypal first man of Kanak tradition. In the narratives of origin recorded in the Paicî and neighbouring valleys he stands at the beginning of the ordered world: he founds the first clans, sets the rules of alliance that bind lineages in marriage and exchange, and institutes the cultivation of the yam, the plant by which ancestral time is measured. He is said to pass through a succession of lives, dying and returning across the generations, so that the ancestor is never wholly absent from the land his descendants tend. The chiefly title téâ borne before his name marks him as the very source of chieftaincy. In the twentieth century his figure was lifted into the emblem of a shared Kanak identity.