The young woman who became a cultural and feminist icon playing the prophesied leader of a Maori village in the groundbreaking independent film "Whale Rider" had a confession to make.

"I can't swim," said 15-year-old Keisha Castle-Hughes, who is in Honolulu this week for appearances on behalf of Pacific Islanders in Communication and the Girl Scouts Council of Hawai'i. She is also promoting the national PBS broadcast of "Whale Rider," which airs Sunday at 8 p.m. in Hawai'i.

"I've never been much of a water person," Castle-Hughes said. "I'm more of a lay-on-the-beach-and-get-a-tan girl."

In fact, while Hughes' climactic scene in the film found her character, Paikea, plunging beneath the waves on the back of a whale, the real-life Castle-Hughes had her hands full this week just trying to stay afloat on a surfboard.

"I was just hanging out when a wave flipped the board over," she said, laughing. "The instructor told me to let go of the board or it could snap, but I said, 'No.' I was holding on for dear life upside-down in the water."

Of course, Castle-Hughes isn't here to show off her water skills.

The youngest actress ever to be nominated for an Oscar for best actress in a lead role (she was 13 at the time), Castle-Hughes has become a role model for young indigenous people in the creative arts.

Castle-Hughes met with more than 100 local Girl Scouts yesterday as part of a national community outreach campaign developed by Pacific Islanders in Communication and local and national Girl Scout programs.

"It's a weird sort of thing to be considered a role model," she said. "I'm just humbled by the fact that I've done something to make people happy.

"The best part of the movie is that it got a story out there, and stories like that aren't told or haven't been told," she said. "It's good to get stories that need to be told out there to people who connect to them."

In the film, Castle-Hughes played an adolescent girl who had to overcome social and cultural barriers to fulfill her destiny as a leader of her people.

A surprise commercial success, "Whale Rider" (directed by Niki Caro and based on a novel by Sir Witi Ihimaera) has been considered a milestone in indigenous filmmaking and a sensitive but powerful feminist affirmation.

Ruth Bolan, executive director of Pacific Islanders in Communication, said the film — and Castle-Hughes — could not have come at a better time.

"Right now the world really needs Pacific islander storytelling," said Bolan, who studied folklore and mythology at Harvard. "It's time for Pacific islanders to start telling their stories, otherwise people of Keisha's generation will spend the next 20 years correcting all the misrepresentations of the past.

"Keisha, maybe unwittingly, has come to represent this for this generation of kids," she said.

Castle Hughes said the success of "Whale Rider" is connected to the universality of its themes and the story's integrity.

"In most cultures, the males dominate and the females are constantly trying to be accepted," she said. "There are young girls everywhere who relate to this. The relationship was the same with my father, with me trying to be accepted because I'm a girl.

"The thing I loved about 'Whale Rider' was that it was real," she continued. "We didn't change the dialogue so that Americans could understand us better or tone it down so that the English wouldn't be offended. Maybe that's why it was accepted so well. People who come from other cultures and who have lost their culture as they've become more European or more American, they're searching for that."