Matariki

Matariki is the Pleiades in Maori reckoning, and the year begins when the cluster is first seen rising in the east just before sunrise, in the depth of winter. The event is not a date on a calendar that happens to fall in June. It is an observation, and it is made by people who go out in the dark and look.

What is done with it has three parts, and they are usually given in that order. The dead of the past year are remembered and released, their names called to the stars. The present is marked with food, since the harvest is in and the storehouses are full. And the year ahead is set: what will be planted, what is intended, what is hoped for.

The individual stars were read as well as the cluster. Different accounts assign them to fresh water, salt water, the forest, the cultivated crops, the winds and the dead, and their relative clarity on the morning of the rising was taken as an indication of how each domain would fare in the season coming.

Observance was heavily suppressed and had almost stopped by the mid twentieth century, surviving in a few places and in the memory of a few people. Its revival from the 1990s onward was deliberate, led by Maori scholars and communities, and it moved quickly.

In 2022 Aotearoa New Zealand made Matariki a public holiday, the first anywhere in the country tied to an indigenous observance, and the way the date is set is the interesting part. It is not fixed to a day of the month and it is not the nearest convenient Monday to something. An advisory group of Maori astronomers and knowledge holders determines it from the Maori lunar calendar against the rising of the cluster, and the dates have been published years ahead on that basis.

That is a state adopting another calendrical system rather than translating one into its own. The holiday moves through late June and July, and the reason it moves is astronomical and cultural rather than administrative.

Not everyone reckons from Matariki. Some iwi, particularly in the far north and on parts of the east coast, mark the new year from Puanga, the star Rigel, either because Matariki is difficult to see from their horizon or because that is simply their tradition. The holiday legislation and the public material acknowledge this rather than flattening it, which is a small thing that matters.

The revival has also driven a considerable amount of documentation. Maori astronomical knowledge that existed in a few hands twenty-five years ago is now taught in schools, and that is a direct consequence of the holiday.