Te Ara: The Encyclopedia of New Zealand

Te Ara is New Zealand's own national encyclopedia, published by the government's Ministry for Culture and Heritage, and this record states a specific, checkable editorial practice rather than a general claim about official reliability: its entries on Maori religion are written and reviewed together with Maori scholars, and are deliberately written in the present tense about living atua rather than treating Maori religious belief as a purely historical, past-tense subject. Use it for established facts about Maori religion and cosmology as this national encyclopedia, reviewed with Maori scholarly input, presents them; a claim needing deeper specialist ethnographic or linguistic detail may need a dedicated academic source alongside it. This atlas also holds a separate record for this encyclopedia's own article on Matariki, the Maori New Year; that article is one entry inside this same national project, so citing this general record alongside it for the same claim is one editorial body's voice counted twice, not independent corroboration.