Matariki is often described as the Māori New Year, but different iwi across Aotearoa have traditionally observed it at slightly different times during winter.
Through astronomy, observation and cultural knowledge systems, students investigate how people use the sky to understand time, seasons and their relationship with the environment.
You might hear people say, “You can only see Matariki in winter when it heralds the New Year.”
Understanding why we have a seasonal sky
The sky changes as the Earth rotates and orbits around the Sun. In the grand scheme of things, it takes thousands of years for stars to show proper motion, that is, moving against each other. What it means for us here on Earth is that we will see the same patterns up in the sky for thousands of years at the time. What changes, however, is which side of the sky we are looking at.
Because of Earth’s rotation and its orbit around the Sun, we see different stars rise on the horizon approximately every month. These patterns repeat every twelve months. This is how calendars were invented.
Cultures differ in their sky interpretations
Māori, Indigenous Australians and Native Americans are some of the few cultures left in the world to use a seasonal sky. That means they give different names to the same stars at different times of the year and use these stars in different combinations.
For example, in November, the same cluster, M45 – The Pleiades, is part of a grand asterism called Te Waka O Tamarereti as the canoe’s feathers. Other times of the year is part of Te Waka a Taramainuku as its prow.
Traditionally, the star cluster was called Matariki only in wintertime. The institutionalisation of Matariki as a national holiday in New Zealand made the name mainstream and synonymous with the Pleiades. But if we are to respect the culture it came from, we must observe that the star cluster has different other names at different times of the year.
GOOGLE SLIDES PRESENTATION – THE TIMING OF MATARIKI
Right now, Matariki is a public holiday that occurs yearly for everyone. However, Matariki the Māori New Year tradition, is observed a bit differently by different tribes. This presentation talks about the seasonal sky, asterisms and various ways in which Matariki is calculated.
