Marking the Maori New Year
Building the Climate Change Message into Seasonal Rituals
While those in the northern hemisphere are dreaming of summer holidays, many in southern lands are enduring cold wind and heavy rains. In the New Zealand Maori expression, “Matariki tapuapua”. It’s winter, “where pools lie everywhere”.
With the advent of winter comes the opportunity to mark the change of seasons. A related article on Suite 101, Celebrating an Autumn Easter, suggests ways that people in the southern hemisphere can create a meaningful ritual around what in the northern hemisphere is a spring festival. This article looks at winter solstice celebrations, including the Maori New Year, Matariki, and their potential for reinforcing the climate change message.
People in Europe and North America may be able to make a similar connection between sustainability and their “longest day” or advent of summer rituals.
Matariki, Also Known as the Pleiades
Matariki (“little-eyes” or “the eyes of god”), a bright cluster of seven stars otherwise known as the Pleiades, disappears from the southern skies in late May and reappears in June. With the first new moon after its return, Maori traditionally celebrate the new season with feasting, music and cultural exhibitions, as well as remembering the dead who have gone to the stars.
According to Julia Batten in Celebrating the Southern Seasons (North Shore: Tandem 1995), Maori began this winter New Year celebration after coming to temperate New Zealand from warmer Polynesian islands. In New Zealand, where crops such as kumara, taro and gourd must be grown in a seasonal cycle rather than all year around, it must have made sense to formally reflect on the onset of winter.
The bounty of the earth in providing food is an important part of Matariki. Winter was the time for hunting and preserving birds, which were then preserved in their own fat in deocorated airtight containers and laid away for the coming cold season. Batten quotes Maori elder Tamati Kurupae of the Taupo region: “And the birds never decreased in those days, when snares and spear were used more than the gun”.
Seasonal Rituals and Preserving the Earth
According to Patricia and Waiariki Grace in their book Earth Sea Sky: Images and Maori Proverbs from the Natural World of Aotearoa New Zealand (Wellington and Nelson: Huia and Craig Potton, 2003), the conservation message is important to Maori cultural practice. “It is through care of, and respect for, the lands, water and atmosphere that our physical and spiritual sustenance and survival is assured”.
Observing non-Maori New Zealanders struggling to make seasonal occasions such as Christmas fit in the southern hemisphere, Batten comments that “incongruence between celebration and nature illustrates and ensures our alienation from the natural world”.
Creating a Solstice Ceremony
So what can be done? A related Suite 101 article Why Symbolic Acts Matter observes the power of rituals to actually make change as well as to mark it.
As both Maori and European mid-winter traditions include the sharing of warm or preserved food, it could be appropriate to build into the rituals a time of reflection on climate change, and its implications for world hunger. Rice and wheat shortages in drought-stricken Australia and around the world suggest that scarcity may no longer be a seasonal issue.
With World Environment Day falling on June 5 (the day in 2008 before Matariki begins), additional information and resources are likely to be available from media and public libraries to those who wish to “environmentally develop” their seasonal rituals.
In this way, celebrating the present could be combined with efforts to safeguard the future.
Look to the Night Sky
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