E oho! Ngā Tohu o te Maramataka: The science of living by the moon, stars, land and ocean

Speakers

Te Kahuratai Moko-Painting, Zoe Roland

Mihi and acknowledgement

Te Kahuratai Moko-Painting: Ki runga. Ki te whai ao ki te ao mārama, Tihewa Mauri Ora.
He tai, he tai, he tai o Rēhua; He tai ora, he tai mate.
E tangi mai ana te reo, whakarongo, whakarongo ki te uru.
Ko te whatitiri tuhi ai tōna ara ki te uira.
Ka whakaraupeka tātou i ō tātou mahara ko rātou kua riro atu ki te rerehua o te pō i te tau ka wehe.
Ka arohainatia i tēnei wā o te tau hou.
Ka tatao te kohu ki ngā maunga whakahī, ko te tino koha o ngā ahi kā roa he atawhai ki te tangata.
Kia kotahi te kupu ka rite te ara a Puangarua ka tū nei te huihui o Matariki i kīia ai ko Matariki-kāinga-kore.
Kāhore nei hoki he kāinga tūturu mō tātou te tangata ki tēnei ao.
Ka maiangi nei te kāhui takirua e, hikihikirangi e, ki te pae o Taihoronukurangi, Tihewa Mauri Ora.
Tēnei te mihi ki a rātou mā kua mene ki te pō. i tēnei pō, i tēnei kaupeka, i tēnei peka, i tēnei tau.
Kua haohaotia te kupenga o Taramainuku, kua whetūrangitia ngā rangatira o ngā wā o mua.
Ka huri aku mihi ki a tātou katoa kua huihui mai i tēnei wā.
Mauri mai ō koutou mate.
Me mihi ka tika ki a koe, me kī, e te kaikōrero e te kaiwhakapā wairua.
Nāu i whārikihia ngā whakaaro tūturu, ngā whakaaro hōhonu o tātou te Māori kia hanga ai te arawhata ki ngā rangi tūhāhā.
Tēnei rā te mihi.

Ka huri aku mihi ki a tātou katoa kua huihui mai nei i tēnei wā. E āwangawanga au i tēnei atatērā pea e ua ana, e taka ana te ua, korekau he tangata e tae mai i tēnei poupoutanga o te rā, he kōrero ki te rorohiko noa iho. Nō reira tēnei te mihi ki a koutou katoa kua tae mai ki te whakarongo mai.

Me mihi ka tika ki a koe hoki Zoe, ki ngā kaiwhakahaere katoa i whakarite ai i tētahi kauwhau mā tātou katoa. Tēnei te mihi, tēnei te mihi.

Ka huri au ki te reo tuarua kia mārama ai tātou ki ēnei momo kōrero kia tīmata te kaiū i ēnei kauwhau a tātou.

So I probably not going to translate that because I've only got 45 minutes [LAUGHTER], and I was told to talk about Maramataka, and it's pretty hard to condense 5,000 years of Indigenous knowledge of mātauranga into 45 minutes. But I'll do the best I can. I am also notorious for going over time, so I'm going to try stick to it. But I wanted to start off with this.

Looking at the stars in the Matariki season

I think, at this time of Matariki, which some people - - we're now in the Matariki season, don't actually spend enough time actually looking at the stars. So I just wanted you to start off having a look at these stars here.

This is what the sky is going to look like at 5:45 PM tonight, looking towards the East. And I just want you to have a think about who you can see, when you're looking at the sky, in terms of what stars you can see, planets, celestial bodies, what can you know from looking at a picture like this?

And the last question, a bit of a cheeky one, if it's Matariki season, where is Matariki? All those people pointing down. Good guess. We'll get into that. But good if you, you come to a maramataka talk around Matariki time, cyou can find it. So that's one of the outcomes we'll get to.

But looking at this picture, I can see that there's more light to the South and the North, as there is to the East, so I know that this is about sunset. Because I can see Mahutonga up high the, Southern Cross, and I can see Te Matau o Māui, Māui's fishhook, Scorpius. I know that at sunset, that means that this is around Piripi. This is around June.

If this was sunrise, however, and I saw this exact same sky, I'd know it would be in Te Waru o Rehua. That would be in the month of January-ish. Because I don't see the moon in this part of the sky, I know that it's not a quarter of the days of the maramataka.

Interpreting the stars

And if I was actually outside looking at the stars, I could look and see the twinkling of the stars, and that could make predictions for the weather.

If you're using specific stars a specific time, you can predict the climate, the changing of the seasons. If I look at the high stars versus the low stars, the bright stars versus the fainter stars, there's more mātauranga to be held there, too.

Interpreting the signs of the environment

If I look at the colour of the sunset, that tells us a lot about the coming weather.

If I look at the arrangement, the movement of the clouds, and the colour on them-- if there's one thing that I really want to emphasise is our mātauranga is way deeper than I'll ever get to in my lifetime.

One of the beautiful words that I've found in researching maramataka is Manawarangi, which is just a cloud tinged with colour. But what it also says is Manawa is like the heartbeat, the pulse. So when you're taking the vitals of the sky, you do it when those clouds are touched with colour.

That's the heartbeat, the pulse of the sky, looking and seeing the colour touching the clouds. And there's some common things that we all feel, like, the feel, the temperature of the wind at these times. But what about more interesting maramataka things?

What about the smell of that wind? What about the taste of that wind? If you know your local environment, you know if the wind's coming from the seaward direction, and you're up on a hill. And it's a really strong wind, you'll be able to taste the sea. If you know where the trees that are in fruit around you, you'd be able to taste the different flavours, the different smells of flowers, of fruits, all from where you are.

And if you know how far away they are, how strong the wind is. And now, mātaranga has more than a hundred words for clouds, more than 200 words for rain, more than 300 words for wind. Instead of giving it a number, we give it a specific word. We put those winds into whānau. Rereata talks about hau mangere, meaning lazy. Hau mangere are the ones that aren't strong enough to move a walker. A metaphor for useless person, hauarea[], is a wind that blows, but isn't able to move anything. So we've got this beautiful poetry in our knowledge of the winds.

Another one is haututū, little playful kids running around, and hey stop beinghaututū. Those are the ones that blow, and they play around your ankles, as these dance around you, just like the kids do. Haurangi, when you're drunk, that's a wind that blows, but you can't feel it on the land, but you can see the tops of the trees swaying, just like a drunk person.

So there's so much mātauranga in just words. And I tried not going on a tangente, but I already have.

Different Maramataka

So this kōrero is living by the moon, the stars, the land, and the ocean. And I've just kind of tried to show you how deep it is and how much more I have to learn even, because you can't do Maramataka like I would in Te Tai Tokerau here in Te-Whanganui-a-Tara.

It's so specific to the land and to the ocean that you're on. We've got more than 500 different Maramataka just in Aotearoa. And Maramataka wasn't something we created in Aotearoa. It was something we brought with us. So our Maramataka is very strongly connected to the Maramataka of Tahiti, to the Maramataka of Rapa Nui, to Maramataka of Hawaii.

To the point that if you do the substitutions of letters, you can map them perfectly. So I want to start off with a whakataukī] which is Ko Tātai Arorangi te kaiarataki o te rā. The activities of the day are governed by the celestial bodies. And what I mean by that is, the naming of the stars, planets, and the moon, and the movement of the heavens were embedded in the practice of everyday life.

This wasn't specialist knowledge before contact with Pākehā. Children knew the names of the maramataka, like we do the days of the week. They could identify the stars in the morning, that we do identify months of the year. They could tell pūrākau of those stars, those planets, the moon, just like we do characters on a TV show.

So this was not specialist knowledge. This was common to everyone, where even a child knew the names, position, movement pūrākau of more than 200 stars.

Colonisation of time — the Gregorian calendar

And that really touches on a point of the colonisation of time. When the Gregorian calendar was brought here, it was brought from a different culture.

It has the names, the atua of a different culture, and it's connected to a place, but that place isn't here. To the point that right now, we're in June, and Juno is a God of fertility and marriage. Because it's the middle of summer, and that's when you get married in the northern hemisphere. Summer weddings are great, winter wedding though you get rained on like crazy.

So it's not really the time for marriage and fertility here in Aotearoa, but we literally have stars for that Kōhitātea, Kaitātea . If you know te reo Māori, you know exactly what you should be doing at that month.

Decolonising time — Reading tohu | signs

So the decolonisation of time then is, all Māori having access to this mātauranga returning to having your days governed by the celestial bodies, reconnecting to our identity as Māori-- our identity as Māori as astronomers.

And how that tātai ararangi actually connects us very strongly reconnects us to our environments through mātauranga. And how we do that is tohu. So coincidentally, there's an exhibition called He Tohu. Our rain coming in the morning, we'd say, oh, he tohu. And if we're up,at Ngāpuhi .

He tohu pai te ua hei whakatapu i ngā kōrero.

But tohu are any signs or indicators could be as big as, oh, this is the coming tsunami, and could be as small as, I can't find my socks. He tohu, I wear different ones. But signs and indicators as Māori, if you see a sign or something, an indication of something, that's also an instruction. The word tohu is no different for a sign, as it is for an instruction.

So when you notice things, you're supposed to act.

Ngā tohu o te Maramataka

So this kōrero -- and I’m just going to check my time. This kōrero is about Ngā tohu o te Maramataka. I start off with how I got here because it's a pretty interesting story. Bit by chance, and I'm very fortunate to end up in places like this after just doing the classic Māori thing of, if you turn up enough, you're available enough, then you get invited back next time.

I'll go into how specific our Tai Tokerau Maramataka is for today's date. And to do that, you need to know a bit about Tamanui-te-rā, the sun, Hina-te-Marama, the different nights of the Maramataka, ngā whetū, the stars, and the different kaupeka o te tau, the different lunar months of the calendar, and then also ngā peka o te raumati, the different branches of the seasons.

All of which are named after stars. And since it's Matariki, I also added some when and how to celebrate Matariki based on te kahu rautau if you've got your own tikanga. If you're listening to some other people, and they contradict or we contradict each other, kei te pai. If you have a tikanga, and you know the mātauranga behind that tikanga, you go hard.

Because, again, there's 500 different Maramataka, so there's probably 500 different ways to celebrate Matariki. And we've got Taranaki-whānui. And depending on where you are around the tipuna maunga, you might celebrate Matariki. You might celebrate Puanga. You might even celebrate the setting of Rēhua.

The science of living by the moon, stars, land and ocean

How I'm going to do this was just tell some stories we're all familiar with, a 1-minute version of them.

Look into them some more, if you haven't heard them before. But what I'm want to really emphasise and what I decided at 8:00 PM last night was that I was going to chuck in a bit more of the science of living by the moon, the stars, and the ocean, and look at some of the scientific literature around Indigenous astronomies.

What we practise is actually supported by the science of how the sky and the celestial bodies interact. Well, I'm going to leave the stories of Matariki and how Tāne arranged the stars. Will leave those for Rangi Matamua. Go look up on any one of his kōrero, and he really does an amazing job at communicating.

But with a public lecture like this, I just wanted to look at some really common pūrākau that we probably all heard or read as children.

How I got here

But before that, how I got here? I'm from Tokerau, Te Tai Tokerau, and this is Te Awa Tapu o Taumārere. I was born in went to school in Oruamo in the North Shore of Auckland.

But from up North, and went there very, very regularly and still do. With petrol prices, it's getting more and more expensive, so sometimes, I Zoom now. But I went to Te Puāwaitanga and bilingual education all the way through. And I remember the first time I found out that stars were something that could be Māori.

We were at the Star Dome, and I think Rēhua was up at night, so it must have been around Matariki time before it was big, like it is now. And someone pointed out, oh, Scorpius, Māori saw this as Māui's fishhook. So then I was just obsessed with finding this one constellation every time I could.

Don't know how the sky worked, but every time a clear night, I was like, OK, we can-- oh, it was there. Oh, no, it's there. Oh, no, I can't see it. Oh, well, and just went about my business. But I was always into maths, got into science, studied biomedical science, applied mathematics, did every astrophysics paper that we had at Auckland uni. There were only three.

But what I was really fortunate to be a part of was the tuakana programme at Auckland Uni. And the professor of zoology, Mike Walker, was my boss at the time, found out I did biology, found out I did maths, and asked me to do some modelling. And I was like, OK. I don't know what that means, but cool.

Whatever you say, Mike. And then, he went on this two-hour rant around Maramataka and how mātauranga knew more than he ever did around the ecology, the zoology of species in Aotearoa. And it was just me and him geeking out really, talking about science. So how I got into Maramataka was from science and a conversation with a scientist.

And he said, go read Living by the Moon, the Maramataka o Te Whānau a Apanui . But what I found was a full moon, or planting day, or a good fishing day in the middle of winter is very different to one in the middle of summer or in the middle of spring. So you needed to go to actually understand a bit further about Maramataka was actually looking to the stars that's around the moon in the night.

And back in 2016, when I got into this, it wasn't as accessible as it is now. You couldn’t just jump on Facebook and stalk Rangi Matamua.

Navigation

But what I did happen upon, there was an open wānanga, up at the Te Aurere there, at Sir Hekenukumai’s [Busby] house, run by pou navigator Jack Thatcher and Stan Conrad and their crew.

It was a fundraiser. I was like, cool, here's my money. I'm coming. And what ended up happening was that I went to awānanga, where people, as young as 10 and as old as 70, were learning about Tātai Ararangi, waka hourua. But because we’re speaking in English, we’re using scientific terms, like right ascension, declination, zenith, and Meridian, and things that I’m trying to teach my students when I was working in the physics department.

But for some reason, I struggled to teach it at university, in a university setting. But here, all these people, of all different ages, it just came naturally to all of us. It was a bit hard sometimes, with the numbers and the geometry, but we all pushed through and got there to have this really deep understanding as an introduction of the night sky.

And we went and looked at the stars in the middle of winter. And one time, we ended up staying out there from sunset to about 2:00 in the morning, way after the crew and everyone had gone to sleep. Because it was just like we were able to see more. We were able to understand more.

We were able to know what was going to happen and know the names of those stars that we were looking at.

Decolonising science

And this was quite a paradigm shift for me because what it really demonstrated is when science is part of our identity as Māori, it is so natural for us to be so good at science.

So then, what I really wanted to explore is, how can we actually decolonise science, just like we’re decolonising in time so that these scientific knowledges within our mātauranga is how we base our teaching, how we base our researches, something that's super Māori to be good at science, super Māori to be good at astronomy, as opposed to, oh, you're Māori, and you're good at science? That's weird.

That's something less Māori. Not that that's something that people say all the time, but it is something that certain people with a certain background have said to me a number of times.

Indigenous astronomies

But what has happened from there is that I have had amazing opportunities to speak to my people back home, speak to tamariki, speak to pākeke, speak to my hapū, go to my iwi and talk about Maramataka, what to look at, how to look at it.

But I've also connected to Indigenous astronomers all across the world and being part of research collaborations and amazing conversations with Navajo, Cree, Cherokee, Anishinabe, Mapuche, Mayan, Hawaiian, all of these different cultures. And what we all have in common is one we have something about Matariki.

It must be something really important going on for us all to have this. And it's also a common starting point for Indigenous astronomers to find that cluster first. What I also found was that Indigenous astronomy is very much about connection and reconnection. Connection to who you are and where you are, but also who you're from and where you're from.

The environment and biology

So to speak about a bit of the science, we have environmental cycles. We have a day, every 24 hours. We have a year, every 365.25 days. But what people don't know as commonly is that we have environmental-- we have biological rhythms that predict these environmental cycles.

Circadian rhythm is very much researched in scientific spaces, so too are seasonal rhythms. What isn't as confirmed a bit more contentious is these lunar rhythms, the tide's coming in and out every 12.4 hours, and the phases of the moon changing every 29.5 days. And the biological rhythm's associated with it.

But there is some more. Current research, more recent research looking at that, and they found that there's actually a lunar rhythm to our sleep pattern. You're more likely to go to bed later and sleep less on a full moon and the days before or around the full moon, and that depending on the phase there is a shared shift.

And this doesn't matter if your Indigenous community disconnected from technology or are completely urbanized peoples. There's still a shift based on lunar light. We've also found that dolphins, their use of echolocation changes based on the phases of the moon, but also the position of the moon in the sky.

And if you're talking about tides that changes how we fish, but we don't just fish on every tide. It depends on the position of the sun and the moon with that tide, which is all about tidal rhythms and cycle lunar rhythms that determine when we go fishing. So there's a lot of science saying that there's some legitimacy to this.

And some other scientists a bit more contentious, but we don't need to pay attention to all the science.

Where is Matariki?

So I wanted to start off with this picture again and ask, where's Matariki? So some people have their guesses. Talk to the person next to you, chuck out a guess. It's all good if you don't have a clue.

[CHATTER]

OK, kapai. I saw some pointing. I saw some lifting. I saw some hands moving. This is a picture of sunset. So if you saw Matariki was anywhere on this picture, gotta remember that all Indigenous astronomies, the important time, the most sacred time is in the morning, so you can't see Matariki here [LAUGHTER].

Te Waru o Rehua — Antares

But as I point out, this star, that red star just under that Te Waru a Rehua , can you find Te Matau a Māui-- Māui's fishhook? You talk to the person next to you. Make some noise. You don't have to be silent.

[CHATTER]

Oh, thank you. Hopefully, you started from that star I pointed out, and you move around like that, and around like that, and that's it there.

And we call that Te Matau a Māui. We have this one drop of blood in the handle, and then we have this beautiful fishhook. But then, when we look at-- one moment. When we look at the night sky, and we follow Māui's fishhook as it moves across the heavens, we start to see something really interesting.

So if we find that star there, and we know that we can see tamatoa Māui, we can actually watch these stars move across the heavens as the day goes on. And you can see the time down here. That's about 7:30, 8:00 o'clock, 9:00 o'clock. And we can see that this star goes right above our heads.

In particular, that star there is literally at 12:30-ish, 12:00 o'clock. It'll be right above our heads, meaning it's a zenith star. That will only happen in Aotearoa or in countries around our latitude. And then, that Māui's fishhook that we can still see, will start to move 2:00 in the morning. 3:00 o'clock, 4:00.

How to find Matariki?

And when you get near, really close to the horizon, the sun starts to rise. And if you look towards the East, there's a familiar picture that we see. Rangi Matamua would say, here is Matariki. But this only works if some of these stars are up. So I'll zoom in a little bit.

And I guess, if you chuck this in now, if there's one takeaway I want you to have, let's start with these three stars over here, Tautoru. And you can see a matikara, which is from this fingertip to this fingertip, outstretched hand. This is very different to this, not too strain. Don't tense. You'll get sore. Relax. A matikara there, and the width of your hand, the ringa there.

And if you put your matikara on the left side Tautoru, and your ringa next to that triangle Te Kokota, that's how you find Matariki. So find Tautoru and just go like this. If you can't remember which way-- if you go that way, and there's a really bright star, this one here, you know you've gone the wrong way.

But if you go that way, and you find a triangle constellation with a red star, you know you've got the right way, and you have a ringa. And if you don't know the angle, just linger around, and you should see Matariki somewhere on the left of it. Kapai?

So now, when we show you this picture, can you find Te Matau a Māui? Can you find Rehua, that red star, quite easily?

And if you stay up all night, you can even trace it all across the heavens, up to right above you, sitting in the morning, with the stars of this time of year rising.

Tama-nui-te-rā | The sun

But where will Tama-nui-te-rā rise? Any answers? East. Yeah, good guess. You're only going to be right twice a year, though.

Tama-nui-te-rā arises from a different place every day, as it moves across the sky. And we have a very common pūrākau about that. Here's a 1-minute version. Māui, because of the sun moving across the heavens so quickly, wanted to catch the sun using a net, and convince him to go slower across the sky.

So him and his brothers went and gathered some harakeke, weaved this beautiful net, to trap the Tamanui-te-ra and convince him. But he was still very stubborn and resistant, so he dropped Te Matau a Māui onto the horizon to threaten him and convince him to start making the days longer again.

Where will the sun rise?

And this is a picture from NASA that I changed to be more Matariki-focused, starting in June. And you can see how the sun will start making its way further and further south, as the days get longer and longer. September will be the Equinox. The length of the day and the night will be about equal.

Then, we get to the summer solstice. Around December the 22nd, we have the longest day. Then, you'll have the March equinox where they're equal again, and then we'll come back to where we are now, very close to the winter equinox, around the 22nd of June. But there's some science, some mātauranga around that pūrākau.

One, it's telling you, the sun moves. It doesn't always rise at east. But also, it tells you when you should harvest harakeke, before the winter solstice. Because we shouldn't be harvesting harakeke at night, in the rain, in the frost, in the wind, or when in the kōrari , when in flower. So that only leaves you a very small window of not wind, not rain, not night, not flowering.

And that window was just around autumn time, just before winter starts. And what that also talks about is Māui bringing down to Te Matau a Māui, and that's what we see here, when we look back at Rehua. We see, Te Matau a Māui smashing on the horizon and convincing the days to start being longer again.

And that's when that happens in the solstice, the sun starts moving further and further south, and the days start getting longer. So astronomical knowledge, ecological knowledge, botanical knowledge, all in a very simple pūrākau. But it's only there if you know how to read it.

So there's another way of seeing it. We see that there's a short path across the sky and winter, and equal path across the sky in spring and autumn, and then in summer, that longer path across the sky, the days being longer. People are always surprised. It's like, oh, it's only 5:00 o'clock, and it's already getting dark.

I was like, yeah, it's winter. Happens every year. Or, oh, it's 10:30, and the sun's still up. This is crazy. I'm not even tired. Yeah, happens every year, too. It's called summer. So moving on to the sun. So we know that the sun moves now, and we know a simple pūrākau to explain that.

Mārama — Rona and the moon

When we talk about Hina-te-Mārama. It's another very common story about that as well. And it leads me to ask, which moon is your moon? The left or the right? Give you 5 seconds. Look in and answer. Talk to the person next to you. Tell them, left or right? [PAUSE] And while you're thinking, I'll just tell a very quick 1-minute version of Rona.

So Rona was a woman on the Earth, who was tasked, on a full moon, to go collect some water. So she collected up a tahā. And because the full moon was shining, she didn't take a rama. She didn't take a torch. It wasn’t easy to see where she is going at night. She went all the way to the waipuna and collected up the water.

But then, a cloud moved in front of the moon. She couldn't see where she was going, but she was in a rush, tripped over the root of a ngāio tree, smashed the tahā all over the ground, and the water went everywhere. In her frustration, she looked up at the moon and said, the only Māori swear word I know: upōkokohua — I cut your head off, put it in a pot and boil it — to the moon.

And the moon was infuriated by this statement and decided to grab her by the ankle and pull her up. In her desperation, she reached around what was beside her. She grabbed atahā, and she grabbed the roots of the ngaio tree. But the pull of the moon was so strong, that both of those ended up going up into the face of the moon with Rona.

And for me, knowing that pūrākau, I know that the left one was the right one. Because I know that pūrākau teaches you the anatomy of the night sky, of the moon. Where that’s, Rona's tahā and this is Rona, grabbed by the ankle, so she's upside down, but holding on to this very heavy ngaio tree.

And if you see that-- and this is my friend Ben Thomason's artwork. Now, when you look at this, you know which one it is. And this is the moon at the Eastern horizon, rising on the full moon. It might be a bit rotated because the moon libates at you.

But an interesting thing about the moon is that it orbits as it rotates, so you always see the same face of the moon, which is why some people call the back side, the dark side of the moon. We can also see here that the moon falls in front of this, becomes full, and then ends up on the right.

And that's, again, in the pūrākau because you start with the tahā then you have Rona getting it, then you have a tripping up, smashing the tahā because of the ngaio tree. So you see the tahā, then you see Rona, then you see the ngaio tree. Then the tahā disappears into the moon, Rona disappears into the moon, and then the last thing you see is the ngaio tree.

Moon phases in the Maramataka

And how much of the moon you see depends on its position relative to the Earth and the sun. When the moon is right next to the sun, you can't see any of it because the back is all lit up. When it's a full moon on the opposite side of the sun, you see all of it. And they have *Pākehā words with waxing, and waning, and Crescent, and Gibbons, and quarters.

No one keeps up with these words, really, because there's too many of them [LAUGHTER]. But we, as Māori, have 30. Every different phase has a different name. And this is based on a Maramataka yet again. Yeah, so this is a Hokianga Maramataka, this one. But I'm from the East Coast and the West Coast, so I use both, depending on where I am.

Because the most important Maramataka to use is one that's close to you, but also on the right coast. A very old school way of breaking up these Maramataka, seven days of the week means nothing. Environmentally, it means nothing. Celestially, it means nothing.

So what we used to have was, we'd have ngahuru, which is ten. So you go from Rākaunui to the middle of Tangaroa, important phases, and there'll be about 10 days. You'll go from Ōtāne to the middle of Tamatea, and that'll be 10 days. From Tamatea back to the Rākaunui days, and those will be 10 days, and you could count nine lots of ngahuru, and you'll be going from Matariki to the spring solstice.

Nine ngahuru, and you'll go from the spring solstice to the summer-- the spring equinox to the summer solstice.

Game to remember moon phases

I won't teach you ngāhuru. I won't teach you the 30 days because we only got, I don't know, 10 minutes left. But what I thought I'd start off with was just four simple phases and a little hand action to help you remember. So everyone clap. OK, let's have one clap, toru, whā, and that was about seven. One more time, toru, whā. Some people in the middle, I think it is. But, oh, well, we'll move on. OK. OK, I want you to clap after toru, whā, like this, and say Whiro. Toru, whā, Whiro.

We'll move on. There's no time to get this right.

[LAUGHTER].

Whiro

So we want to say Whiro. Whiro is the atua of darkness, disease, the unknown. He was one of the people who didn't want Ranginui and Papatūānuku to be separated. So everything he does is try to return people to te pō. So this is a time where you do things associated with te pō. So those aren't things of te Ao Mārama, like running, and yelling, and being energetic.

These are things like wānanga, remembering those who we've gathered in the night. So it's not a time to do nothing. In fact, this is the start of the Maramataka, so this is the time to plan out the next lunar cycle. This is also a time for whakaraupeka mahara , memory work. You don't remember everything like our tohunga, kaumātua do without actually practicing how to remember and practicing what you remember.

Toru, whā [clap] Whiro.

So one guy at the back really caught off with that one. All right, Whiro. And we clap because you see none of the moon. Right.

Tamatea

And then I want you to put your left hand up. I say, again, lift, and wave it up and down like this and say, Tamatea. Yeah. And Tamatea is when you can see the left half of the moon, which is why you put up the left hand.

And Tamatea is a ingoa kārangaranga, a nickname for Tāwhirimātea. So then these are the days of the wind, the storm, the weather, four seasons in one day type weather, four seasons in one person type behaviour. So it's a bit of a high energy time, but it can be a bit uppy-downy.

You could be one of those days where you're like, I got this. Lunchtime, I don't got this. And then you're talking to your mate like, oh, no, no, we got this. And then by the end of the day, you could be going home, was like, you know what, I did nothing today. Tamatea. And the weather can be the same.

Our kaumātua always took an umbrella. Because even if it's sunny, it could be raining. So we go from Whiro. Tamatea. So if I'm seeing nothing to seeing the left half, and then we put both hands up and go, Rākaunui.

Rākaunui

And a rakau is a tree or another thing, but we won't get into that. And it could be a very big or great tree.

So this is a time of high energy. We can see all of the moon. And it's a time when people can act a bit erratic. So part of that story of Rona is, on the full moon, people do crazy things, like swear at the moon. Lunatic, that word is literally from the fact that people act a bit crazy when the full moon's out.

So you have a lot of energy, but you need to put it into constructive places. Otherwise, it'll come out in destructive ways. What we also find is that some people are exhausted during the day on Rākaunui and they're like, oh, I'm going to go to bed early and just rest this night all through the night and get a no sleep.

It's really common to feel a bit more tired right up until the moon rises and then have this random kick of energy. So just anticipate that. Don't try to get an early night. In fact, this is a good night, if you have all-nighters for work or going to need to stay up for things. So you really want to just talk ad nauseum about something. Rākanui is a good day for that.

And then from RākanuI, so we got Whiro, Tamatea, seeing all the moon, then this side starts to disappear. And then right hand comes down, and you chuck it out and go fishing because we're in Tangaroa.

Tangaroa

We've got Tangaroa-a-mua, Tangaroa-a-roto, Tangaroa-a-kiokio, Ōtāne, Ōrongo.

So these are the days of the forest, of the seas, of the gardens, and all the food that comes from it. So these are the very productive time. So these are the time say whatever you try to achieve you can get it done over this week. And what we'll see is, if you know just those four main ones, you can see any one of these moons, and you can work out, like for example, that one there is not a Rākaunui, but it's not quite a Tangaroa, so we're going from Rākaunui to Tangaroa.

And just from four simple hand actions, you can know a little bit more about the moon. And if you know those phases, you can watch how the moon moves across the stars every night, if you look out at the same time as well. There's so much more we can talk about.

Tides

We can talk about how the moon, relative position, why is it at a different time, its highest point at a different time sits at a different time, and also how that relates to a moon on the East Coast, not on the West Coast. On the horizon means that we're a high tide, and a moon at its highest point or lowest point under the ground would be a low tide.

On the West Coast is a three-hour time difference, so it's a bit harder on the West Coast. So I'm lucky I'm on the East Coast. It's easier for me. But just based on the face, you can know when the moon's going to rise because it rises 15 minutes later-ish every day. And based on that, you can work out what the tides are going to be doing to the land connecting to the oceans.

2/3 of the tides is determined by the moon, the position of the moon, and 1/3 is determined by the pull of the sun. So when we have Whiro or Rākaunui, the sun and moon and pulling together. We have higher high tides or spring tides. And when they're pulling it right angles to each other, we have neap tides, the smaller high tides, the smaller low tides.

We can break these down into different ways as well, once we get those full quarters down. And we can group days together in a way that makes sense to us. And then once you graduate from grouping days together, you look at the individual tohu of every different day. For example, on Tangaroa-a-kiokio, the tohu for that is tuna, kiore and pātiki.

Seeing those kararehe out during the day, it is tohu that you're in the Tangaroa-a-kiokio, and there'll be more active at that time than any other one. Māwharu, for example, the tohu for that would be a kōura moving around and being more out and about than usual. Good day for diving for kōura or using tāruke.

Ngā Whetū – The stars (and planets)

Well, we've also got, as our last pūrākau, 1-minute version is Māui thought he was stillborn at birth and was wrapped in his mother hair and gifted to the Maona, which is why one of his names is Māui-Tikitiki-o-Taranga, wrapped in the top of his mother, Taranga. He was found by Kiwa, raised, taught all of this amazing mātauranga and tikanga, and then returned to his people, but his brothers were not as accepting of the youngest knowing so much.

So they went on a fishing expedition and didn't want to take Māui with them, didn't want to let them create fishhooks or taura with them. So he went to his grandmother who removed her lower jaw and gifted that to Māui to be Te Matau a Māui. He weaved a taura and did a karakia to make it unbreakable.

He snuck onto the waka, when out at sea, popped out, and I'm here now, and I'm ready to go. And they wouldn't give him any bait. So in his frustration, he whacked himself in the nose, and a single drop of blood landed on his fishhook. He threw that into the sea and fished up to Te Ika-a-Māui, the North Island.

So that's a common story. And you can see how the North Island, when flipped the right way up, where this is the north and Muriwhenua is the tail, we can see that the North Island very much looks like a fish.

And we've literally got Te Matau a Māui around Hawkes Bay, where the hook was hooked into that fish.

So it's written on the land and the water, but it's also written in the stars. We can see Te Waru o Rehua and Te Mataunui-a-Māui as a fish hook. We can see Rehua, that one drop of blood, that Māui used to fish up. And we can start to see that there's some milky cloudiness that this a special has hooked into.

And if you were a Greek astronomer, you'd say, oh, that looks a bit milky. We'll call it a galaxy, from the Greek word for milk. And then we'll name that galaxy the Milky Way. But for Māori, we call this Te Ikaroa, Te Ikanui, Te Mangaroa, Te Mangonui, and we see that if we go back to Rehua, and we jump back to midnight again—[PAUSE] wait. What is going on here?

Oh, right, there we go. Hard to see from this angle, but I was actually on it the whole time. What we see here is that we've got Te Matau a Māui, and it's hooked into this big fish. Māori is gaseous clouds to draw fish scales onto this thing. And instead of calling it a galaxy looking like milk, we call them Ikarangi, looking like fish in the sky, and that's our word for a galaxy.

And we can see that this fishhook, hooking into that fish, actually draws it up into the sky. And there's a lot of mātauranga associated with that, where the time you see the fishhook and it starts rise in the sky, that time of Te Waru o Rehua , we wait for the fruiting, the ripening of the Karaka berries, te tahu o Rehua and that's the tohu for us to go fishing.

Our fishhooks the time to go there and start catching our fish, and this is why the fish starts to come out of the horizon, then the fish goes all the way to the top of the sky, like we saw that one dot, that one star, Uruao , on top of us. And we know that the fishing season has ended, and it's time to start preserving our fish.

And then we have that Te Matau a Māui coming down on the horizon, smashing on the horizon to tell the sun to make the days longer. So one thing to also note is that it's very common for stars to have different names, to be evolved with different pūrākau, to make different constellations, depending on the time of year.

And it was only in 1922, where the International Astronomical Union decided that, that's confusing. We're going to have 88 constellations, and we're going to have one name for each star, and we're all going to agree on what those are. But before that, there were multiple names for multiple stars based on multiple seasons and multiple tohu o te whenua.

Waka o Tamarereti

So when we get to this time of year, and Rehua just sit over there on the horizon, which we have-- this is how the waka navigators teach it, Te Waka o Tamarereti, where we can make a waka all the way from the Te Tauihu o te Waka, from the end of Māui's fishhook through the pointer stars, te taura, pointing to Mahutonga, the upside down Southern Cross, these two big sails, Kaipātiki, Piowai, with our captain Atutahi up there flying, and our tohunga Taukura sitting at the back, and the taurapa with Puanga and Tautoru.

What we also want to touch on is that these stars, they're right above our heads. Twinkling as weather predictor

These are actually-- we can use the twinkling, the stellar scintillation as a predictor of seasonal changes in weather, both in indigenous cultures around the world, but also in scientific terms. Because that twinkling is determined by wind movement, the turbulence, as well as variations in the density of the atmosphere, the humidity, and the temperature.

If the stars look a bit bluer than they usually do-- but you need to know what they usually look like-- that's a sign that there's humidity because water absorbs the green and the red spectrums of light, leaving the blue colour, making them look more blue when rains are coming. But you also need to look at the edges. If they're like jagged and blinking really, really quickly, that's a sign that there's some really bad weather, could be a storm, could be a cyclone coming.

But if it has really clear edges and it's twinkling really fast, that's actually a different sign for really clear weather. And this was all published in scientific literature, looking at the basis of these things. So when we have wind moving up above us that we can't really see, but we can see its effects on the stars, that turbulence produces moving pockets of air that vary the density.

They end up refracting, bending the light in different ways. And the speed of wind determines how quickly they're twinkling. So you can see the changing of the trade winds, the changing of the seasons, the different ones, bringing different weather as the seasons change through that. It's different if you're looking through a lot of atmosphere.

So those on the horizon will twinkle a bit faster than those right above you. Brighter stars need more wind to be twinkling like that. And the fainter stars, like these. And then the top stars versus the ones on the horizon, those ones are really twinkling, that's a really strong sign that weather is changing, that weather is coming.

Matariki as predictor of season. But at this time of the year, when we're using Matariki, there's actually a publication published in Nature that talks about Incan farmers using the apparent brightness of Matariki at the time of the winter solstice in the season of Matariki, forecasting short-term climate for the growing season from around October to May, just like we do as Māori for kūmara.

And you can forecast inter-annual. So between-year variations of summer rainfall and yields of autumn harvests. And what they use to predict these four things-- the apparent brightness of the cluster, the date you first see it, because that can change depending on the atmosphere, the size how spread out it is and how tight it is, and the brightness of different stars.

Because what we're actually seeing if we have poor visibility of Matariki at this time of year, that's actually caused by clouds we can't see, subvisible Cirrus clouds, the top layer of icy clouds. And those, you have a lot of that when you've got an El Nino year coming. So if we've got some icy clouds making Matariki look really spread out, looking really big, amplifying its brightness, that's usually a sign of good weather.

Whereas, if we don't have that, and it looks a bit tighter, and you might have some humidity, that's a sign that we're not in an El Nino year. So they correlated atmospheric weather data to predictions of Indigenous people, and they were correlated very strongly. So our tikanga is actually not only informed by science, but it informs the science of now.

And you can see that as reading the stars to see the unseen, to see what you can't possibly see with your eyes, or you can interpret it as listening to the stars who tell us what's there, what's left unseen.

Observing Rehua

So what we can also do, is called Te Waru o Rehua because it's associated with the eighth kaupeka, the eighth lunar month.

I mean, instead of watching it move over the night, it does that movement over the year as well. So this is where Rehua is tonight, but also where Rehua was in January in the morning. This is where Rehua was in March. And if we do a matikara, two matikara, a double shaka or awanui, we will come down from Rehua and find to Poutūterangi, the star of the 10th month, Te Ngahuru o Poutūterangi.

If we look to Te Whānui, next to Poutūterangi, and that's about a-- don't have a Māori measurement for it, but a Spider-man. A Spider-man from Poutūterangi to Te Whānui] and a ringa down, at a wide angle, you can come to Te Ngahuru mā tahi, the eleventh month of Paengawhāwhā. And then a month later, you'll see a Koti, the length of your finger, down in the same line, you'll come to this triangle.

And to the left of that triangle is Te Ngahuru mā rua o Haratua. And last new moon, instead of calling it Pipiri, we added in a 13th month called Te Ngahuru mā toru o Ruhanui. And why we did that was, if you have a 29.5-day lunar cycle, and you times that by 12 lunar months, you get 354 days. And there's a seven day slippage from 365 days, eh.

So then what do we do? Well, after one year, you're slipped by 11 days. After two years, you're slipped by 22 days. After three years, you're slipped by 33 days. And Māori would just say, oh, you just chuck an extra cycle, and you're back on track. And that's what we do every three years or so. We chuck on a 13th-month named after Ruhanui, who is associated with leisure, and relaxation, and fun, really.

Lunar months

If you got an extra month, do some extra things. So there's all of these different lunar months. There's different descriptions of them. And there's the order, starting with Pipiri, all the way down to Ngahuru mā rua o Haki Haratua. And sometimes, all the way down to Ngahuru mā toru o Ruhanui. And then we've got tohu for each of these lunar months.

We've got a description of that star because all of these months are named after a star. We've got stars we can look at, like Puanga, Matariki, Tautoru rising and Rehua setting. We can look at the tohu whenua] like the miro fruiting and a the kūkupa migrating to those miro groves to eat. We can break those tohu whenua into another branch of these seasons, but we also know that the [MĀORI], manawa, the raureka, the kohekohe, the maire, the tāwhaki, the rangiora, are also in flower.

We know that the karamu, karuao, pā tōtara, raukawa, kohekohe, and maire, miro and pipiri in that order, are going to start fruiting. We know that the kūaka have probably just finished migrating, that the tāiko (fledgelings), the kākapo, pūkeko and kūkupa are good to be snared. Although, that was made illegal in 1865.

But what this is really is that not every month is the same. This is a low energy month. The days are short. You have less time to do things, like Māui and his brothers. But it's a low energy time to reflect, time to remember. Make those memories. Share those memories. Time to celebrate and time to plan. And it's also the time for the winter solstice.

Ngā Peka o te Raumati - branches of summer

But on top of that, for us in Te Tai Tokerau, we actually have branches of summer, where instead of using just the moon and the stars, we actually use different tohu for branches of the seasons. And we don't have spring or autumn. We have kūmara time summer, not kūmara time winter. Very different to here in Wellington.

Because if we use a the tohu of Te Tai Tokerau, we were in winter in February. So that doesn't work. But we'd use the fruiting of Rimu, the flowering of Puawananga, the blushing of pohutukawa, the cracking of the land, the landing of pollen on the fields, the seeds falling, and then leaves following that fall to tell which phase of summer we're in.

And sometimes, things can change. Sometimes, it's just the day. Sometimes, they last three months. And sometimes, they don't even pop up that year.

Ngā Peka o te Takurua | the branches of winter

And then, we've got branches, nga peka o te Takurua as well. Wero-i-te-ninihi, Wero-i-te-Kokota, Wero-i-te-whakataka-pungarehu, Takurua-a-uru, Takurua-a-ngana, Takurua-āio. And we have different tohu based on the winds and the temperature. And also, what you should be doing to determine that.

Nga Tohu o te Maramataka

So in terms of Nga Tohu o te Maramataka, today's date, you may have noticed the moon, it was past Tangaroa, but it wasn't quite Whiro. So we are in Ōrongonui, we are in the 13th month, Ngahuru mā toru named after the star Ruhanui, and we're in the North, in the season of Wero-i-te-Kokota. Because we've had that piercing wind but we haven't had that period of warm, where we go mixing our ashes into the fields to fertilise the land.

And that is very different date to Wednesday, the 14th, random number. No environmental reason at all. Named after Juno, the goddess of fertility and marriage, named 2023 days after the birth of Jesus. See how all of that is steeped in a culture that isn't from here. That isn't related to this whenua versus todays date and Maramataka.

It's also very connected to a place. It's not here. It's up in the North. That's OK. Closer than Jerusalem. It tells us knowledge of the stars, and it also tells us knowledge of how a specific star relates to a specific ecological feature and how that lets the environment tell us what time is instead of telling the environment what time is and saying that spring is late.

Winter is really warm. Winter's too hot. Winter is coming a bit late. Oh, winter's here again. Here come winter's winter. Winter does what winter wants to do. Summer is summer, and it does what it wants to do. Our job isn't to make expectations on it. Our job is to listen and be able to tell when it happens.

When to celebrate Rehua, Puanga and Matariki

So I'll just wrap up, because I've already gone over time, with a couple points around when to celebrate Rehua, Puanga, and Matariki. The main point is after you see them, don't celebrate Matariki, Rehua, or Puanga before you see these things because how are you celebrating it, if you're not going out to have a look.

And if you go out to celebrate, and it's clouded over, go out the next day, celebrate again, and see if you can see it next time. If you realise you've picked a spot that was beautifully, artistically chosen to have your hautapu, but there's a tree in the way of exactly where Matariki is, don't cut down the tree. Pick a different spot.

[LAUGHTER]

So if you're celebrating Rehua, you celebrate when Rehua sets, and that's approximately. It changes based on the climate, the 16th of June. And you want to do it in the right lunar phase. So for us in the North, we do Rehua, as well as Puanga, as well as Matariki, sometimes, where Whiro is when you do your tuku wairua.

The art of te pō makes sense that you've send the spirits of those who are deceased to Whiro. Then we'll get up in Puanga. Puanga is seen a week before you see Matariki, around the 8th of June. And in the right lunar phase for us in the North is Ōturu. On the East Coast, the day before the full moon. On the West Coast, the day of the full moon.

Because it determines the weather of your local environment. So if you're going up on a rainy day, and it's always raining that day, you're not going to see much. And Matariki rises about a week after, around the 16th of June. Start looking in the 14th. I've never seen it then. 15th, you can see it sometimes and 16th is pretty reliable. I've seen it then.

Because the sky moves about half a kōnui every day. So if you go at the exact same time, the sky will have moved half of your thumb. And the right time to celebrate that, according to me, according to Rangi Matamua is Tangaroa. And I did it in this order for a particular reason, because it's a beautiful whakapapa, where Rehua and Whatitiri, two stars, give rise to Puanga, Hine Takurua and Matariki.

And why the whakapapa looks like that is Rehua and Whatitiri are setting in the West. They're going to bed together, and their marriage gives rise in order Puanga rising, Takarua rising. Because it's a really bright star, you could usually see it earlier, even though it comes up from the horizon later. And then Matariki, the youngest.

So again, just a really short whakapapa, but so much astronomical knowledge held within.

When is Matariki a public holiday?

When is the Matariki a public holiday? Always after Matariki has risen, so after the 16th of June. In the Tangaroa lunar period because that's the time we have a week to celebrate to whatever you put your mind to, you can do it.

And this is a bit weird, but it makes sense. It's always on a Friday. That way, you go home on Friday, and you spend the weekend with your whānau, spend the weekend with your hapū, your iwi. And that's why you can see it changing. So last year, it's the 24th of June. If we had 11 days slippage, it would have been on the 13th, and Matariki wouldn't be up yet.

Just chuck an extra month, and now we're celebrating in July. 11 days slippage, 11 days slippage, chuck it in July. 11 day slippage, 11 days slippage, chuck an extra month. And it's not exactly every three years because there are three days, but it's around that time. Does that make sense? Cool.

How to celebrate Matariki — tangata whenua?

How to celebrate Matariki? It’s different when you’re mana whenua. Tirotiro whetū, actually see the stars. But at the same note, it talks about how you go out at sunset, and you watch the stars. You tell all the stories until Matariki rises. That's why you do it on a full moon. Good night for an all nighter, but also that moon is a clock, that when it hits the horizon, you know Matariki is up.

Tell the pūrākau and wānanga, the knowledge that's held within them. Matariki, the theme for this year is, Matariki Kāinga Hokia. So it should be about mana whenua returning to where they're from and mana whenua running kaupapa so that people can return there. Remembrance, start off with a Karakia, Tuku Wairua, Poroporoaki-- name and honour those who have passed since the last rising of Matariki.

Look to the future, have a hautapu and a karakia to each of those stars that you're celebrating, and look forward to the promise of a new year, and then celebrate the present with the Hākari. Have a big feed, the most Māori thing you can do. And I do it in this order because, as Māori, we remember the past and bring it into the present.

But before we act in the present, we also think about the future. The past is our foundation, and the future is how we decide what we're doing, and then we act in the present.

How to celebrate Matariki — families and communities

Families and community who aren't mana whenua, who aren't tangata whenua, join in where appropriate. There's so many things happening now. It's everywhere.

Look it up. Google it. If you don't want to join in somewhere, you just want to do something with your family, watch the rising of Matariki and share any stories you so choose. Remember those who have passed on, celebrate the present, gather together with your friends and your whānau. If your family is, traditionally, from Christchurch, get your whole family to get back there.

And then look to the future, and look forward to the promise of a new year from this Matariki to the next one. And I put a picture of fireworks as a reminder, don't do fireworks. They block the sky. You want to be looking.

Where to start?

Where to start? The programme that I use is Stellarium. It's free. Google it. Check it on your laptop. Have a tutu.Look up local events. Look up podcasts. Look up YouTube. There's stuff everywhere. Have a watch Rikki Solomon's E Oho! kōrero, Rangi Matamua's Mānawatia a Matariki kōrero, specifically around those corrido of Matariki, Rereata Makiha's Waka Huia for basics of Maramataka.

And then have some time to read and look at Living by the Moon by Wiremu Tawhai, Matariki by Rangi Matamua, Puanga by Sam Rerekura, and read those sections, as those celestial phenomenon are happening. Read every bit, every day for a whole lunar cycle, and you'll get way more out of it instead of reading it like a book.

So that's our kōrero. This is what we did. And what I'll leave you with was this whakataukī: Kia kaha te titiro, te whakarongo, te mātakitaki, te whakaaro. Ā te wā ka mārama. So carefully look, carefully listen and feel, carefully observe, and carefully think. And with time will come understanding. Kia ora mai rā ō tatou!

Questions

Zoe Roland: Ngā mihi nui.

You are a master educator. I love how these really complex ideas you convey with humor and in a really accessible way. I've seen you speak a few times, and it is incredible the way that you communicate, especially to those of us who might be new to some of this. I do feel like we need a whole series of wānanga, though, so we might look into that.

We've got five minutes for pātai, but we might stay on, if people would like to. But feel free to eave at 1:30. I have got some questions online. We had about 400 people registered online today, which is really amazing. We've got some mics in the room. So do we have any pātai?

[INAUDIBLE]

I feel like I'm on the Jerry Springer Show.

[LAUGHTER]

Is the Maramataka different in Hawaii?

Audience member 1: Kia ora, e hoa. Recently went to Hawaii and it made me think about Maramataka katoa i roto i Te Moana-nui-a-Kiwa. And I might be wrong here, but I had a whakaaro.

You know, Hawaii is one of the motu that are located in the northern hemisphere, I believe. Yet, they celebrate Matariki as well as part of their tikanga. And then most of our other motu are in the southern hemisphere. Have you any whakaaroaround that, or have you thought about that before?

Te Kahuratai Moko-Painting: Pai te pātai. Yeah. Well, that actually speaks to exactly what happened in Aotearoa, when Pākehā came. They came from a different hemisphere, but they kept their calendar system. So Hawaii did the same thing, where they had a southern hemisphere calendar, and they took it to the northern hemisphere.

A lot of the names of the stars are the same. They’ve kept those. A lot of the tikanga is the same. Like, for example, we wouldn’t just celebrate Matariki‘s rising, we'd also celebrate it setting as a symbol of the year that's come to an end. So they still celebrate Matariki in their winter, but the rising of Matariki in the morning, although their environment is different-- remember, it's a tropical environment though.

They have two seasons, too. A wet season and a hot season. And the wet season is still pretty hot. So their maramataka would be adapted from where they came from to where they ended, just like we did with ours. And if we knew the tohu of those days, we would adapt our maramataka based on what we were seeing.

But it's really interesting if you keep in touch with some of our ‘ai marama in Hawaii. Their weather systems are similar to what's happening in the rest of the Pacific, and you can keep track of those changes like that. But also, their maramataka, their days of their moons are exactly the same.

They have hilo, but for Whiro for us, and in Aotearoa Whiro is the atua of death, of darkness and the unknown, but he's also a master navigator. So they have a whole island, Hiro. They are maramataka next to each other. The days are almost exactly the same. But instead of having Tamatea days, they'd have Ku days, their version of Tūmatauenga associated with coconut.

Instead of having the rākau names, name specifically, they have rākau tahi, rākau rua, rākau toru, just the three days of that. They have the three days of Tū. They'd have the three days of tangaroa, which they called Ka’aloa. So it's almost exactly the same.

But understanding that maramataka is so adaptable that we adapted it 500 different times, just in Aotearoa, of course, we could adapt that to a completely different island nation and a different hemisphere, but it's making sure that we listen to an environment that needs those adaptations instead of just taking it and chucking it on an environment that's foreign to us. Kia ora.

[PAUSE]

Te Kahuratai Moko-Painting: Kia ora.

When we are looking at stars, we are looking back in time

Audience member 2: What really interests me is that when we're looking at the stars, we're always looking back in time, all right? So even the brightest stars, probably, the image we're seeing is probably about four years old. Some of the duller ones may be even up to 100 years old. So is there any instances that we recognise of where stars are disappearing?

So we are seeing them, but they're not there anymore or even the other way around, where stars are appearing that haven't been there before. So we can't see them today, but suddenly, they appear tomorrow.

Te Kahuratai Moko-Painting: Pai te pātai. Yeah. [MĀORI]. Yes, in short. There's a beautiful poroporoaki that Rereata Makeha shares that literally talks about shielding your eyes from the death of a star. And he uses that to identify exactly when our tūpuna in Te Tai Tokerau left Hawaiki. So this is examples of that. If we're looking astronomically, right now, Pūtara, Betelgeuse is 50% s brighter than it is usually because it's a variable star.

Science doesn't quite know why that is, but stars do vary. Stars do get brighter and get this bright as well. But what also happens is over really long periods is that the North and the South celestial pole changes. So what is the North Star right now, 5,000 years ago, would have been a completely different star.

And a lot of indigenous astronomies not only put that North Pole, that South celestial pole, where the sky rotates around as the middle of the sky, but the middle of that 24,000 year rotation as the middle of the sky. Because they've been watching-- it's not observed over a lifetime. It's not observed over a couple generations. This is observed over thousands of years, and that's how we got to our tātai arorangi in Aotearoa.

So they're very familiar with these longer periods of changes of the night sky and how you'd need to change your mātauranga in terms of how to navigate that, also, of the brightness of stars changing, stars disappearing, stars coming out of nowhere. But I’d separate the two different types of knowledge of the night sky. tātai arorangi which is for everyone as Māori versus tohunga kōkōrangi.

So being able to identify those stars and how they lead our everyday life is different to knowing really specific the depths of those more nuanced, more subtle changes, and how they determine how our hapū and an iwi would behave. So in short, yes, now they have it. They have so much. They have these amazing things. However, not all of that is meant for everyone [PAUSE], including me.

Concerns about sharing mātauranga online?

Zoe Roland: Anymore pātai in the room? Online, we have a compliment. A compliment and a question. “Awesome presentation. Thank you for sharing this information. So clearly, tikanga informs the science, and the science backs up the tikanga. Is there any way we can get a copy of your PowerPoint presentation?” [LAUGHTER] And that follows on from what I was going to say next about our online presence.

Te Kahuratai Moko-Painting: Yeah, probably not.

Zoe Roland: People following any of your work, is there any way they can follow your work?

Te Kahuratai Moko-Painting: I’m kind of like a patupaiarehe here in terms of that, where you just pop up somewhere, I want know, me neither. But here I am. But this one will be recorded online. So I think what I advocate for is not separating the mātauranga from the occasion they are shared. So my koko said it to me very clearly. He was like, he asked me, whakapapa mai tō whakapapa ki a Maki.

Do your heke, do your genealogy to one of our tūpuna. I was like, kei runga taku rorohiko. It's on my computer. He's like, koretake te waiho ki te rorohiko me tuhia ki te roro. It's waste of time having it on your computer, you need to have it in your mind. So I try not to share these because the way that we're supposed to hear our mātauranga is being shared by someone and not separated by the person who's sharing.

Zoe Roland: And I should have said, actually, we'll have this recording online in about six week's time. And I think the links that you put up at the end, maybe we'll put those separately, so people can find extra resources. Are there any other questions before we close cause we're a little bit past 1:30 now.

Western institutions versus mātauranga

Audience member 3: Kia ora. This is a question that just popped up in my head the last five minutes, but I was interested to know, when you're exploring and sharing such mātauranga in the depth and the wairuatanga that's also applied to your thinking and how it unfolds, where and how do you create safe space for our mātauranga to unfold, given it's sitting within a Western scientific platform in some spaces.

And where and how do you navigate that space as a kaiako operating in institutionalised frameworks, like Western institutions, and libraries, and universities. What does it look like carrying that mātauranga alongside a Western science, where we've seen over the last couple of years, It's not always a safe interchange. So I was interested to know what it's like for you, how safe do you feel, how well-- sorry—Aroha mai, big question to ask.

Te Kahuratai Moko-Painting: How safe do I feel? Well, let me unload on everyone, shall I Pai te pātai. Tēnei te mihi ki a koe i whārikihia ēnei whakaaro rangatira e pā ana ki tā mātou mātauranga nei. One thing I'll share is, when we're given mātauranga in the right way, we're also given the responsibility to share it, but to share it in the right way as well. There are some things that have been shared with me that is meant for me to hear, but not hold, some things that have been shared with me for me to hear and hold, but not share.

Sometimes, some things that have been shared with me for me to hold and decide when to be sharing it. So part of this kōrero was looking at science, really positioning myself in maramataka as someone who came from science, so I don't want-- yeah, my goal and my research is not to be Rangi Matamua, not to be Rereata Makiha. He tohunga kē tērā. Waiho mā te whare wānanga ngā tohunga e akiaki.

What I want to do is redefining science so that Māori scientists who know the science, know these tools of science can be of use to our tohunga. You raise a really interesting point around being situated within a university. And when you work with your whānau, they're very quick, if you're doing the wrong thing, to resituate you in that university as well.

But I think all of us operating within these spaces and these universities, Crown research institutes, government agencies need to understand that we are in those, and when we are operating in those within our capacity, we should be operating within how we should operate within those institutions.

However, when we move out of those, then we can share more fully. When we’re in wānanga, we we’re in marae, when we’re in noho, when we’re talking to our tamariki we can get into the depths that has been shared with us. Because those are the right ways to share it. When we're talking in forums like this, I like to share really simple stories that everyone's heard before, like Rona, like Māui and tika Māui, like Tamanui-te-rā, and Māui.

Because those are simple stories that also have depth. So then, you're not sharing anything that's too tapu, but you're exploring the depth of things that we take for granted. But yes, how safe do I feel? Sometimes, super safe. Sometimes, super unsafe. And depends on the day and the situation and where at the end of the spectrum I sit on.

But what I find comforting is that doing this this way isn't new. Māori scientists who have been grounded into Te Ao Māori have been doing it for decades. And if you meet up with them and have good conversations with them, they can help guide you to do things in a safe way.

They can challenge you to put yourself in sometimes vulnerable situations, too. But they also have conducted research in a way,as scientists, that means that you don't have to be a scientist without being Māori, be a scientist without bringing Te Ao Māori with you. Did I answer the question? Ka pai.

Confirmation bias?

Zoe Roland: So just one more from online. This person says, you said, in the context of maramataka, we don't need to listen to all the science. How can we help Māori determine what scientific truth is without encouraging them into confirmation bias?

Te Kahuratai Moko-Painting: Yeah. Well, I think that's one of the things in the statement, we don't need to listen to all science, is that science claims objectivity. Science claims to be unbiased. But we, as Māori, have seen how science is a system in terms of the teaching, the research, the legislation, the policy, who decides who's funded and who's not, what we call those funds, like Endeavour or the James Cook fellowship is very much not determined scientifically.

So it's not to say that just because we want to feel good about this science, that backs us up. I think what I was more advocating for is understanding, sometimes, scientists need to understand their position. If they're researching mātauranga with the very explicit goal to disprove it, they can set up their research, such that they find something.

So it's not we don't have to listen to all science maybe, but it's, we have to be aware of the research, the science that we're doing, the researcher who's doing that science, and what their position is when it comes to Te Ao Māori. Because sadly if you can come up with a beautiful scientific research project based on Te Ao Māori really innovating and empowering, advancing, and also protecting mātauranga, depending on where in the system that's positioned, it might not get funded.

It might not get published. It might not be disseminated as legitimate science. So not saying, just pick the science you like. But when people are saying things that support you, look at where their position, what their motivations are. And when someone is saying something very disrespectful about indigenous knowledge, also look at their position, what their motivations are, and whether their claims are scientific or ideological.

Because I acknowledge that my position is biased. I acknowledge that I'm ideologically-driven, radical, political, even. But what I'd also argue is that almost every scientist is. You can't be unbiased. You can't be objective. You can't be-- if you're maintaining the status quo, that is a political position.

If you're trying to advance against a progressive movement, that's a political position. And me trying to redefine what science is, is again, a political position, an ideological position, and informed by my positionality, my grounding in Te Ao Māori as a scientist. But as a Māori scientist, who is more focused on their Māori identity before their identity as a scientist.

Closing

Zoe Roland: Ngā mihi nui. And now, I think we'll bring this to a close. I'd like to thank you for allowing us to all go back to work and say, we're low energy. It's the maramataka.

[LAUGHTER]

I'm going to get myself the calendar, and I'm going to be-- yeah. So thank you for coming down with your beautiful whānau from Tāmaki.

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