Matariki master: How a secret, old manuscript led Dr Rangi Mātāmua on a celestial mission

Sunday, 9 July 2023

It could have been a storyline in one of his beloved sci-fi shows - a secret, old manuscript leads Dr Rangi Mātāmua on a celestial mission. Kahu Kutia meets the Matariki master and 2023 New Zealander of the Year.

Dr Rangiānehu Mātāmua doesn’t get a lot of time off. I’m conscious of this when I meet him at a busy cafe in central Pōneke/Wellington. Both of us are in standard office-wear, collared shirts, lanyards, nice leather shoes. It’s very different from the standard attire in the place that we both come from, Ruatāhuna, in the heart of Te Urewera.

In Ruatāhuna, attire is generally red band gumboots, sturdy pants and a hunting jacket in mossy green.

The last time I saw Rangi, he was in his gumboots and jacket on the ride-on mower, hooning over the lawns at Mataatua Marae back in Ruatāhuna.

If you don’t know who Rangi Mātāmua is, he’s most well-known for his work on Matariki – aka Pleiades – as well as the maramataka, which is the Māori system of knowledge and time structured around the lunar cycle.

I first came across him when I bought a copy of his 2017 book Matariki. I’d heard of Matariki and the maramataka before then, but didn’t really know anything about it. Even at that time six years ago, the conversation around how our ancestors used the sky to tell time was not very common outside of certain knowledgeable circles.

Today the maramataka is something observed in the homes of all kinds of New Zealanders. It is embedded in some of our kura, and Matariki is a public holiday for the whole country. Rangi’s book is a milestone moment amongst many others in that trajectory.

Sci-fi kid

Rangi Mātāmua’s grandfather was from Te Urewera, but his grandmother was from Mūaupoko. He grew up with that side of his family in Levin, with his high school years spent at Hato Paora College in nearby Feilding. But always thought of Te Urewera as another of his homes.

“It was the environment that was most memorable for me and also knowing I was connected to a much bigger community,” says Mātāmua. “Seeing the epic landscape, the big lakes, big hills. In Levin everyone spoke English, and then we’d go back to that community where te reo Māori was the norm.”

A fascination with the stars is consistent throughout Mātāmua’s life. Long before he knew anything about the tradition of star lore in his whānau whakapapa, he had a strong love for sci-fi. He was a fan of Sapphire & Steel, Blake’s 7, Buck Rogers and Doctor Who.

“I used to watch a lot of sci-fi with my dad,” says Mātāmua. “I’d watch shows like Star Trek, thinking about phases, teleportation, warp speed, all of these things really fascinated me.

“The science was encapsulated in these wonderful stories. It was sci-fi, but there were still some scientific principles that sat at the basis of that kind of entertainment. I remember on my wall, having this iconic poster of Luke Skywalker and Darth Vader with their lightsabers crossed.

“When that movie came out I remember watching it and thinking about the broad expanse of the universe and asking questions of myself. How did that come to be and what’s our Māori kōrero about it?”

It wasn’t until much later that he would get the answers to some of those questions. In 1992, Mātāmua moved to Wellington to study at Victoria University. At that time, the renaissance of the Māori world was in full stride. Mātāmua attended a talk at Te Papa, where Tūhoe tohunga, Hohepa Kereopa, was talking about Matariki. He was also following Professor Sir Pou Temara around by then, immersing himself in the knowledge of Māori academics.

Mātāmua went home and decided to ask his grandfather if he knew anything about Matariki. His grandfather was one of those of his generation who quietly knew a lot, but did not often share, he says.

“He got up, went to his cupboard and he got this manuscript. I opened it up and it was page upon page of star lists. It had a star map in it, all of this information.

“I said to him, I ain’t got time to read that! Can you give me the truncated version? I gave the book back and I came back down to Wellington, and I started my own research. Probably in my second or third year it dawned on me what my grandfather had. I went back and I asked him for that manuscript, I just blatantly asked him.

But he gave me that manuscript and said, ‘You can have the manuscript and you can go through it but you’re not allowed to give it away. It’s just for you.’”

“Knowledge that isn’t shared, isn’t knowledge”

The manuscript is a 400-page compendium of star knowledge compiled by his great-great-great grandfather Te Kokau Himiona Te Pikikotuku, as well as Te Kōkau’s son, Rawiri Te Kōkau between 1898 and the 1930s. The book has the look of a historical ledger, with a thick cover, beautiful red thread in the binding, and each of the double-sided pages are filled with words in tiny, cramped frilly handwriting.

It includes a star map which may have been given to Te Kōkau by ethnographer Elsdon Best, when Best was living in Ruatāhuna in the late 1800s. The front end of the manuscript starts with cosmology, stories of the origins of the universe, genealogy and traits of cosmological bodies.

The middle of the book is an incredibly specific curriculum of how that lore can be taught. That section includes hand signs for each of the phases of the moon, and the Māori lunar months which are now taught in primary schools around the country. The back end of the book includes waiata, karakia, more whakapapa and a rich supply of scientific observations

“It will give a date, it will give a star that’s rising in the morning, it will give the appearance, it will talk about the colour, the size, whether it’s just above the horizon or quite high before the sun rises,” says Mātāmua.

“Then it will say, ‘Coincides with the blooming of this tree, the first sign of the return of this bird happened two days before’. It talks like that. There’s around 986 stars in there, so it’s dense.”

Te Kōkau and Rāwiri Te Kōkau were writing at a time when many Māori weren’t yet speaking English, especially in Tūhoe, and when the sharing of such significant esoteric knowledge came with a set of clear requirements over who got that knowledge and how.

To me, the manuscript marks incredible foresight on behalf of those ancestors, and an ability to pierce the veils of the future, where this knowledge would be all but lost if not for them.

“I can only speculate that they saw massive change,” says Mātāmua. “Massive moves to Western forms of education, but they were tohunga Māori and I think their practice and their knowledge was important to them and so they wanted to at least find some way to preserve it.”

It was a foresight that Mātāmua’s grandfather Timi Mātāmua also experienced, in the days before he passed.

“On his deathbed he called me in. I was in my 20s, in the middle of some really difficult years I guess and he said to me, ‘I’ve been thinking about that book. Don’t ever let that book go, that is an heirloom. But the knowledge in that book, if you don’t find a way to share the knowledge then it’s going to become nothing.’ He said, ‘Knowledge that isn’t shared, isn’t knowledge.’

And that’s been a mantra for me from that moment through all my academic career.”

It took a while for Mātāmua to figure out how to do that. By the time his grandfather had died, Mātāmua had finished a masters, a PhD and had completed Te Panekiretanga, the programme that takes te reo Māori beyond fluency to artistry.

He was living back home in Te Urewera trapping possums and picking up the odd piece of academic work. Eventually he released his Matariki book in 2016, a book which referenced only four and a half pages of the manuscript alongside other research.

“I never ever share anything with the notion of trying to tell people how it is,” says Mātāmua. “I do it because I hope that it helps other people find their narrative and connect in their own way. I do it because my grandfather charged me with doing that, and hopefully it inspires other people to find their own kōrero.

One giant leap

Today he plays a key role in supporting the sharing of that knowledge to the wider world. Former Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern asked him to sit as chief adviser, Mātauranga Matariki on the Matariki Advisory Group which is a panel of esteemed experts: Hoturoa Barclay-Kerr, Rereata Makiha, Victoria Campbell, Dr Pauline Harris, Dr Ruakere Hond and Jack Thatcher.

More than 400,000 people watched the livestream from Te Papa last year where Matariki was celebrated as a national holiday for the first time. Mātāmua and many of his peers were at the centre of that delivery. And even for chilled out, low-key Dr Rangi Mātāmua, it was an emotional one.

“Once the karakia had finished I found myself to be really emotional, and that’s not my normal state. I went to get interviewed, and I just had this sudden flood of emotion. My grandfather came to mind, and I started to wonder how he’d be feeling about this. Coming from his very humble upbringing, in a dirt floor whare puni with his grandparents.

He’s the only thing really that gets me emotional, and he came back in that moment. I started thinking about home and our relations. This knowledge was a gift from him, from the communities that we’re from to the nation, and it’s pretty significant. I got a little bit emotional, for like a couple of seconds, then I was all good,” he laughs.

Mātāmua’s work has earned him an array of accolades. He’s a recipient of the Prime Minister’s Science Communication Prize, the Callaghan Medal, and in 2021 he was awarded Fellowship of Royal Society Te Apārangi. As of 2023 he’s an Officer of the New Zealand Order of Merit, and has also taken home this year’s prize for New Zealander of the Year.

Mātāmua spent 42 weeks on the road in 2022.

He has children in their 20s and one mokopuna who he doesn’t get a lot of time with.

Being someone who holds a lot of knowledge that is desperately desired by our people can be a lonely life. But when he does get spare time, like all Tūhoe, he likes to get back to the bush in Te Urewera. To hunt, to observe the skies, and to spend time with our people. He also has a love of music and is in a band called Love Tuna alongside Leon Blake, Korohere Ngāpō, Pania Papa, Puka Moeau, Ngāhuia Kopa and Paraone Gloyne.

Like his childhood self who sat watching sci-fi shows with his dad, Mātāmua today is passionate about finding ways that mātauranga Māori and Western science can connect. Mātāmua has taken mātauranga Māori into spaces where we haven’t seen it before and he is working to share that knowledge further.

He plans to establish a whare kōkōrangi Māori (an astronomical house of learning) which would action and enable the dense curriculum included in his ancestors’ manuscript.

It’s a project which may one day see other Māori take on the mantle of Matariki and the maramataka as defined by Te Kōkau, and to direct that knowledge into their own whānau, hapū, and iwi.

“In 30 years’ time, I hope Matariki, Puanga, the Māori new year, will be normalised. That we won’t even need roles like the adviser Matariki because people are just out here doing it. I hope that we have a generation that is able to walk both in mātauranga Māori as well as western science,” he says.

“When we launched Matariki, I suppose I knew something significant was happening but I didn’t exactly know what. It wasn’t until a couple of weeks later I realised that there was something significant that had happened for us. We had brought mātauranga Māori back to a national space. Every year now, the entire country will stop to acknowledge mātauranga Māori. I think that is so significant a step into our identity as a nation.”