Out with the old, in with the new year
Laura Walters
On Friday, Aotearoa will celebrate its first official Matariki holiday in style. There will be fireworks (a contentious decision, but that’s not what we’re here to discuss), pre-dawn ceremonies, traditional kite flying, musical performances, rongoa Mā ori classes (Mā ori healing) and visual art displays.
There is advice on how best to hold a Matariki feast, and opportunities to learn about the astronomy that underpins the dawning of the new season.
The scale, expense and focus on the holiday, which celebrates the rising of the Matariki star cluster and the dawning of a new season, shows where we are starting to place our emphasis as a nation.
Te Pā ti Mā ori co-leader Debbie Ngarewa-Packer said Matariki was not just about a holiday or ‘Mā ori New Year’.
“This is helping to bring back a culture, and normalise a belief system that had otherwise been wiped out.”
Matariki – and all the fanfare surrounding the public holiday – was a chance for all of Aotearoa to learn, grow and reconnect, Ngarewa-Packer said.
Matariki presented an opportunity to reentrench a belief system, which had been threatened by colonisation and specific legislation like the Tohunga Suppression Act.
Now, this holiday allowed us to see these beliefs from a place of beauty, rather than a place of fear, she said.
“It’s more about the respect of bringing back the narratives that belong with this land.”
Dan Hikuroa, a senior lecturer of Mā ori studies at Waipapa Taumata Rau (the University of Auckland), said the idea that something born out of matauranga Mā ori would become a public holiday would not have been contemplated even a few decades ago. Yet, here we are.
“In the simplest terms, it shows we’re growing up as a nation and that we’re maturing as a nation.”
Contrast this focus on the new public holiday with the limited festivities to mark Queen Elizabeth II’s platinum jubilee earlier this month, and it paints a picture of the direction the country is headed.
To mark 70 years of the queen sitting on the throne – the longest stint for any British monarch – New Zealand was the second of 50 Commonwealth capital cities to light a beacon. Earlier in the year, there was a 21-gun salute, and defence force displays.
Of course, there were the expected calls for this former colony to throw off its shackles of oppression, and all hail the republic! But, by and large, the Queen’s jubilee came and went with little public recognition.
Ngarewa-Packer said, for many, the monarchy was decreasing in relevance.
“What does this mean for us today? What did it mean in the middle of a pandemic? What does it mean in the middle of climate change? What does it mean for lifting trauma off our kids, when we have homelessness and poverty and suicide?”
It was important to acknowledge and respect the Queen’s leadership, she said, “but the reality is that it’s OK to grow and let things go”.
“We shouldn’t feel guilty because we have our own sense of identity and culture, and that’s not necessarily connected to anything royal.”
Hikuroa said, if anything, Matariki was an opportunity for the nation to come together, born out of observations that could only have been made in Aotearoa.
“It does speak to the nation exploring nationhood, and things that are from here; of this place.”
Our gaze had moved from looking back across the seas, to looking at who we were, and where we were, as a people.
“The detail around Matariki is clearly Mā ori, but the opportunity to come together, to celebrate, to explore, and to be really connected with the place that is home for us, that is for everyone.
“That is the gift; the koha that Matariki is for us.”
‘‘This is helping to bring back a culture, and normalise a belief system that had otherwise been wiped out.’’