... In the morning of the world, there was nothing but water. The Loon was calling, and the old man who at that time bore the Raven's name, Nangkilstlas, asked her why. 'The gods are homeless', the Loon replied. 'I'll see to it', said the old man, without moving from the fire in his house on the floor of the sea. Then as the old man continued to lie by his fire, the Raven flew over the sea. The clouds broke. He flew upward, drove his beak into the sky and scrambled over the rim to the upper world. There he discovered a town, and in one of the houses a woman had just given birth.

The Raven stole the skin and form of the newborn child. Then he began to cry for solid food, but he was offered only mother's milk. That night, he passed through the town stealing an eye from each inhabitant. Back in his foster parents' house, he roasted the eyes in the coals and ate them, laughing. Then he returned to his cradle, full and warm. He had not seen the old woman watching him from the corner - the one who never slept and who never moved because she was stone from the waist down. Next morning, amid the wailing that engulfed the town, she told what she had seen. The one-eyed people of the sky dressed in their dancing clothes, paddled the child out to mid-heaven in their canoe and pitched him over the side.

He turned round and round to the right as he fell from the sky back to the water. Still in his cradle, he floated on the sea. Then he bumped against something solid. 'Your illustrious grandfather asks you in', said a voice. The Raven saw nothing. He heard the same voice again, and then again, but still he saw nothing but water. Then he peered through the hole in his marten-skin blanket. Beside him was a grebe. 'Your illustrious grandfather asks you in', said the grebe and dived. Level with the waves beside him, the Raven discovered the top of a housepole made of stone. He untied himself from his cradle and climbed down the pole to the lowermost figure.

Hala qaattsi ttakkin-gha, a voice said: 'Come inside, my grandson.' Behind the fire, at the rear of the house, was an old man white as a gull. 'I have something to lend you', said the old man. 'I have something to tell you as well. Dii hau dang iiji: I am you.'

This housepole was made of stone and it had figures on it, we can read. The peoples in the Northwest region of America had housepoles made of wood. An example of such a 'totem pole':

I suggest the hei tiki figures are to be understood in a similar way, they visualize that the present is connected with the past. There is no separation from the earlier generations.

"According to Horatio Gordon Robley, there are two main ideas behind the symbolism of hei-tiki: they are either memorials to ancestors, or represent the goddess of childbirth, Hineteiwaiwa ...

Because of the connection with Hineteiwaiwa, hei-tiki were often given to a woman by her husband's family if she was having trouble conceiving." (Wikipedia)

In the name Hine-te-Iwaiwa we can perceive the negation of iva (= 9), in other words ivaiva ought to mean 'not 9' (not death but birth).

Another possibility is to understand iva-iva as short for 2920 days, with 99 referring to the number of lunations needed to keep up with Venus:

... After five complete cycles totaling 2,920 days, the movement of Venus fill eight idealized years of 365 days each and come within hours of spanning 99 lunations ...

The green colour of grass and of the hei-tiki figures suggests Venus, too. And above was the Tree, which surely must represent Jupiter.

Grass has a unique capacity to survive fires and they will be quickly growing in the ashes of the previous 'world':

	Yucatec	Quiché	Aztec
12	Eb	E	Malinalli (grass)
13	Ben	Aj	Acatl (reed)