 Maumai kaitumanga ko kopua wharatu te awa ko takitimu te waka ko Ngāti Kahungunu me rungomai wahine oku iwi. Ko Pauline Harris ahau no te whānau whānga, no te whānau tāumata hokei, he mahi mahana ki a koutou ka toa. E te wharei etu nei, tēnā koe, e te papa takotu nei, tēnā koe. Te mana whenua o te wahi nei, tēnā koutou. Ki ngā tātā no ngā hau e whā, tēnā koutou, tēnā koutou, tēnā koutou ka toa. Kia ora everybody, my name is Pauline Harris and that little bit of kōrero or thing that I just said, I acknowledged the gods of the sky and the earth, the people in this local tribal area. I greeted them and I also greeted all the people who have come from the full winds. So everybody who has come from everywhere around the world. So just to give you a bit of a background, I'm actually an astrophysicist by training. So I did my PhD at Canterbury and Neutrino Physics with Dr Jenny Adams. And then after that I got involved, actually during my PhD I wanted to learn more about Māori astronomy. I'm going to talk to you a bit about how and why it's important for us to learn about our traditional knowledge and in particular Māori astronomical knowledge, which is very important to a significant number of the population of our country. And then after my PhD, I'm actually part of the moa, the micro-lensing team, so hai moa. So we do modelling at Victoria as well with Professor Dennis Sullivan and Dr Ana Korpala. But my primary role and my primary funded role is to do a project around the collation of Māori astronomical traditions and knowledge and also around the Māori moon calendar. And we try and tie in scientific aspects that will be useful for us to utilise in order to investigate our traditions and be able to understand and recreate knowledge that may have been lost. So it's quite an exciting thing to do. And I've found that it's a lot healthier too for me to go in and start learning our traditional knowledge as well, instead of sitting in front of the computer screen doing modelling all day. Am I still there? So, hello? Okay. So I represent, well two organisations, I better say I represent my university or else I might get in trouble. I'm the head on that Victoria University, kind of in the School of Chemical and Physical Sciences and then in the Māori Department as well at Takawa-Amawi. But I'm also the chairperson or the chairman for the Society of Māori Astronomy Research and Traditions. And these are a collection of Māori knowledge experts. These Māori knowledge experts are some of the most respected knowledge experts in New Zealand and are very highly regarded throughout the Pacific as well. So it's a great honour. I look quite young, but I'm not. So that's why people always try and give me advice and stuff. I'm like, I just have my 40th. So yeah, that's why I'm the chairperson as well. My skill is to bring knowledge experts together so that we can effectively work together to revitalise this knowledge. So we have a significant chunk of our members as well as our local navigation revitalisation people. So we call this waka hūrua. So these people have been working with Hawaiians for many years in order to revitalise the ancient crafts of travelling across the ocean using the stars as well as the currents and the clouds and the weather in order to travel long distances. Polynesians were known and very, very famous for their ability to be able to cross an extensive and vast Pacific Ocean. And they did that for thousands of years. Extremely well. So we have Hōtūroa Kū, we have Jack Thatcher and we have Heke Nukumai Buzby. So they're the real significant people in terms of navigational. And at the moment, I don't know if anybody's here from the states or if there's any Americans, but at the moment we have the crew from the Hōkulia, which is one of the first Hawaiian oceanic waka, double-hold canoes that was used to revitalise Hawaiian navigation. So they're here at the moment. And after I have to rush off because we're welcoming them as they sail into Wellington tomorrow morning. And then we have, it's very important to have local tribal interaction. So I know there's a few people from Australia. But here it's really important for us to engage with Māori and tribal leaders. We make up a significant proportion of the population. So it becomes standard practice for us to engage frequently with Māori and Pacific Islanders. You're actually in the Pacific Hub of New Zealand. There's a huge number of Polynesians in Auckland. So here we have local tribal leader, Taku Porai, who is from the tribe Ngati Toa, which is based in Porirua near Wellington. And then we have other people from different tribes. So it's very useful to have people from different tribes so that we can all collaborate and also connect into the people from their local areas and their knowledge in their local areas as well. So, you know, there isn't going to be a standard Māori astronomy across all in New Zealand because we're a diverse group. And not as diverse as in Australia, where they have completely different languages. We have the same language, just different dialectical variations. But our traditions can vary as well. So we have from Ngāpuhi, which is in the Far North, Ngāti Raukawa, which is just a bit south from here. Aki Simmons, and he's really into the Māori Moon calendar, in particular fishing by the Māori Moon calendar. So about 20 years ago, they were a bit dismissive about, you know, the effect of the moon in terms of fishing and the cycles of aquatic species. These days there are more open to it, and there's actually a professor here, Michael Walker, who's working on that, doing scientific experiments, investigating that. Other knowledge experts, Taikirirangi Smith, and he's a master carver, so he builds big waka, big marae, those big meeting houses. And he's also a knowledge expert. He's also been gifted a PhD on top of the PhD he really had. So he's very humble, like, you wouldn't, you know, he's just right really quiet, but extremely knowledgeable. And we have Dr Rangi Mata Moa, who's our principal investigator for our large Māori astronomy project now. And we just recently got awarded a Marsden, I don't know if Marsden is like the big grant. So we're very, very happy that we got one of the big Marsden grants. And he's at Waikato, and then we have our vice chair, which is Tuwa Waka. So they all have different interests in terms of Māori astronomy. There's lots of different aspects. Dr Rangi Mata Moa is more interested in the linguistic component. How was star knowledge used in language? So if I called someone the star Canopus, kō koe kō atutahi, I would be likening you to someone who stood apart from the rest, who was someone of significance. Okay, because that star stands away further from the rest of the main pack in the milky way. Yes, okay, so carrying on. So now of all, yeah, okay. So here's just some little action shots. Pōtūrō, who I talked about before, they go out all the time, they educate our young. They're currently trying to recruit young members, unfortunately, as 18 to 26. So I don't know, there might be some in here that age, but they're recruiting people to teach them the art of doing long distance voyaging. And they regularly do that. And we'll just skip through. And here, here, I just have to show this because that's when they gifted him his PhD on top of his PhD, which is always nice to say, very clever man. But the person he's standing next to is Hector Busby. He was one of the ones that was fundamental in bringing celestial navigation and revitalising it in New Zealand back in the 70s. So he was one that really started it with some of the Hawaiians. The reason why celestial navigation is... Oh, hang on, I'll just jump for this. So just to give you an idea about what our core objectives are. So our core objectives are, of course, and preserve and revitalise our traditional knowledge pertaining to Māori astronomy. But it actually goes broader than that and I'll show you soon because even though you think of it just as a star, it actually infuses its way towards the traditions and beliefs and ways of just living in a traditional context. Another thing of ours is that we actually, you know, we want to be able to revitalise our knowledge. So our knowledge we call Mātodanga Māori. But we also want our children to have access to scientific career paths and scientific knowledge. So that's a really big thing for us. So a big part of it is going out to our communities and interacting with them, doing outreach with them in terms of science and trying to encourage them into some sort of career STEM pathway. And then so in order to do that we have a research program. Then we have an education program and we try and grow our people up from when they're young to engage them in education outreach when they're very young. So the youngest people I've ever had are five which was really challenging. And then also to have annual events that's quite important, especially with the Māori New Year. So that's just a bit, I'd better just put up what our projects are. So there's our grant. It's Te Māori awhiti toy. The sky is a cultural resource Māori Astronomy, Ritual and Ecological Knowledge. So I'm on that with Dr Rangi Mata Moa Waikato University, my first cousin Dr Hemi Whanga and myself and some other people at Waikato. So we were quite happy about that. And at the moment I'm fully funded by what we call MB, Ministry of Business Innovation and Employment. They probably should be here. And that's actually more concentrating on traditional calendars and the relationship of fishing and the Māori Moon calendar. And then some other projects. So in terms of Māori astronomy, so Māori astronomy actually infused its way through much of tradition and culture and beliefs. So of course we started with cosmology. It's important, as in many other cultures, with the cosmological models and the creation of the universe. We also have, especially in terms of agriculture and fishing, but these are part of traditional calendrical systems, calendar systems. So we might have heard about these in other cultures, but no one's actually done the work, the hard yards and the work to truly understand a Māori perspective on these areas. And then also, of course, prophecy, you know, prophesising future events based on astronomical events that have occurred. And also, my friend was very interested in the linguistic record. And you would see a lot of star information found in chants in, so, more te-te-a chants. Fakatokia, proverbs, proverbial sayings. You would have them in prayers, which are karakia, and you'll have them in waiata, which are songs. So there's a lot of information in those, but you have to be a language expert really to understand. Understand. Current language I'm trying to learn is C++, which drives me crazy. Probably drives everybody crazy. Yeah, so just to give a cultural context and why we actually have to even bother trying to revitalise and collate our knowledge. So you have to have a historical context of what's happened. Because actually we don't get taught about it in school, why things are the way they are. And that's part of control mechanism from way back, which is set. So, you know, dominant education system, which doesn't allow for Māori knowledge to blossom. So to give you a context, Māori arrived here about 800 years ago. But when we arrived here, we had knowledge that we've been developing for thousands of years in the Pacific. Okay? So they come here, but then when they get here, they have to modify it for its the current weather conditions. It's a lot warmer up here, but if you're in Wellington, you know that you really have to significantly modify your practices, because it's really cold. And some of the food they would have been used to growing up there would not grow down there. And then contact with Abel Tasman in 1642, but real contact with James Cook, in 1769. And unfortunately, as has happened in many indigenous cultures, introduced diseases, had huge decimation effects. Decimated our population significantly. And if you can imagine if we had a disease that decimated our population, a lot of our old people would die. A lot of our knowledgeable experts would die. And a lot of our young people would die. So it affects your ability to be able to continue knowledge. And then other things which suppress the continuation of traditional knowledge. More so, not so much the Tohunga Suppression Act of 1907, but indeed the Native Schools Act in 1867 was significant. I'll explain that in a moment. Flow from rural areas into the cities. So if you have a village or what we call a hapu sub-tribes or a tribal group, you have a structure, you have your knowledgeable experts, you have your families. But when people move, you truncate your ability to have knowledge flowing from the higher knowledge holders down to the lower. OK. And then so that affects your knowledge loss, you end up with knowledge loss and you end up with language loss. And therefore we end up with not really knowing that much. And then we have to set up these projects to find out. OK. So the Native Schools Act was really interesting. I really found out about this in the last couple of years because we're not taught about it. So the first schools that they had at the beginning were taught in Māori. And so they were taught in Māori. Most Māori knew how to read Māori. And this is by the missionaries and then they could also, some of them could actually write Māori. But what happened is that after the Land Wars they introduced this Native Schools Act, which said that the schools, they set up public schools and then those public schools were only allowed to be taught in English. So that truncates, you know, language is the method of knowledge transfer. OK. So if you truncate the language, you truncate the knowledge flow. And that's all part of assimilating a society into something that they want to create. Also in my parent's generation they got the strap if they spoke their own language in school. OK. So as the education system developed Māori knowledge and Māori language were sidelined. So we had a significant impact in what we knew. So for example, when I was at school, well, I'm just saying this is just all the facts, right? There's no pointing fingers. We're just all, I'm about solutions. But when I was at school we learnt about rangi and papa, which is the Skyfather and the Earthmother in art. And I think I learnt how to do one to ten and some colours. Yeah. I think there's some kiwis here that would know the songs with the colours and the numbers. But yeah. So it wasn't very much. But these days, we know we're really addressing this problem. But we need to address it more. Because our current population is 684,000 and it's growing significantly in 50 years' time half the country will be Polynesian. So we need to address this issue. We need to address it quite significantly in order to be able to prepare for our future population. So we need them to be culturally competent and who they are, but also we want them to be competent in many areas including science. So we'll be revitalising lots of knowledge. Over the last 30 years, we've been trying to revitalise our te reo Māori, our Māori language for the last 30 years. They set up schools for the little ones. Well, the little ones gone now. But yeah, for the youth, they're called kohanga reo. They set up Māori schools, which is Māori language schools. And they've been revitalising their language, growing practices. A whole wad of things, which is really exciting. Well, we're really excited. I think it's important for other people to know what we're doing. Yeah. So here we have just an example that the navigators were really a significant stat to revitalising Māori astronomical knowledge. So let's just move on. So in terms of Māori astronomy, the real big push for revitalising it occurred in about the 1990s, or early 2000s. There came about this resurgence of the practice of the Māori New Year, which is based on primarily the stars Matarehi, which is Pleiades, and the star Rigel Puanga. OK? So we know that the stars rise, that we can see certain stars at certain times of the year. Yeah. So these were the two stars that were used as the indicators for the Māori New Year. And that occurs around about June. So with that huge revitalisation resurgence, we started to embark on trying to collate our astronomical knowledge. Yeah. And so we started that. I thought it would be a three-year post-doc, and, hmm, I think I'm at Year 7. I can't remember. I've lost track. That's OK. My friend laughed at me, and he says it's at least 20 years pulling. So, yeah. So I think it's important for us to just go through some of these aspects that I went through before. So remember that Māori astronomy is infused in different areas. So we'll start off with the cosmology, and we'll talk a bit about the calendrical systems. So our cosmological origins start off from what's something called te kore, which is, some people call it the nothingness, but really it's kind of like the potential, the potential for something to form. And then what came out of nothingness was te pō, or a whole series of phases called the night. They have the, they go like te pō uri uri, te pō tango tango te pō te kitia. There's a whole, like, I can give you four points up here, but there'll be pages and pages of what actually goes in, and then a whole lot of information that fills in those pages as well. So multiple layers of information. And then from that, we say that the skyfather and the earth mother came about, and they actually were trapped in their embrace and love, and they procreated and had many children. They had about 70 children. So of those 70 children, a lot of their children were the ones that ruled up in space. So we have, for example, the god of the forest and the creator of human beings Tani Mahuta, or the god of the sea is Tangaroa. If you go to Hawaii, it's called Kanaloa, so they change the T to the Ks, RSL. And Kame is their god of the forest, I think. So what they say happened is that these children were actually trapped in their parents embrace and they plotted to separate their parents and basically rip them apart. So there's a whole series of narrative around the different eons of time that it took to push them apart. And so when they were actually pushed apart in some of the narratives it talks about how it's Tani Mahuta who actually adorned his father. So in this we have El, which is to some they say is the supreme being, the supreme god. That's debated whether or not that's actually real or introduced concept from Christianity. But they say that El instructed another god, Rehua, which could be serious, we'll start at serious, to get Tani to fetch the Basics of Knowledge and within one of those Basics of Knowledge contain the sun, moon and stars. And in order to do that he travelled up the 12 levels of not really heaven, but 12 levels of something. Sometimes it's hard to translate it properly but 12 realms in order to fetch those baskets and to fetch the sun, moon and stars. In order to understand our relationship with the stars this is something that we try and we can say we'll automate up a star dust and from a scientific perspective, yes. But from a Māori perspective or a traditional Māori perspective we were created by Tani Mahuta who was the god of the forest and he mounted some clay and blue life into her who was called Hene Ahulne and then they created humanity. Whereas the Rangi and Papa the Skyfather and the Earth Mother created these two people over here at the top that then created the sun, moon and stars. So that's our relationship in terms of that model if you want to call it a model. I like calling it a model. It's just different people's interpretation of their understanding of the universe. So in terms of how the sun, moon and stars got up into the sky it was actually Tani who went to go and ask his cousin I forgot his name he went to ask one of his cousins to take up, use his canoe to take up this basket up into the sky so they went up into the sky and they went and started putting all the stars nicely into the sky but then he kicked over the basket and then the stars all fell out and spread out across the sky so he left them there so that's how and why they look like that spread out across in a because he just kicked it over and then they left the waka or the canoe up there in the Talascopio Atamareti it's called Te Waka Atamareti which is the canoe of a person named Atamareti So to give some sort of understanding about just some of the main constellations and the main star groupings that Māori have understandings of so this is Te Mangorua which is the Milky Way and Te Mangorua is also known as Te Ika Māui which is the fish of Māui it's known as the parent of the God of the Sea and also it's named after some other entities particular for my tribe called Paia that's another story going to that we have the sun which is we personify not just our environment around us but we personify the stars and the sun and moon so the sun was of masculine form so he was a male, he had two wives and so his first wife was Ima Ti which is his summer wife and then he also had Heni Takuro which is his winter wife and that has to do with different stars in the sky I'm still getting my head around that but that's okay and there's a whole lot of legends and narratives around the sun and the slowing of the sun to do with Māori snaring the sun and slowing it down are there many Kiwis in here? i.e. Māori we learn that at school and then we also have Marama which can be masculine or feminine depending on which narrative you read but in this one it's not a man in the moon as such even though the moon will be personified as masculine or feminine but there's actually a woman in the moon Koruna and with her cabbage tree tikoka tree and what happened in that one is that Uruna was walking along and she was going down to collect some water with her kalabash down at the river and the moon was lighting her way and then the clouds covered the moon and she looked up to the moon and basically called the moon a cooked head which is a big insult and so the moon reached down and grabbed Uruna and then dragged her up and she ripped out the tree as well so carried them both up into the tree so you can give that a go and see if you can find Uruna and her cabbage tree because some people can I kind of think I've seen it it's hard when people don't show you because there's not many people around that know where it is he is Sirius which is called Takurua he named Takurua one of the wives of the sun and it also could be Rehua as well so that's just variations tribal variations you guys don't need that you should know where everything is if the pictures are upside down never mind sometimes we just grab them from different places here we have Te Takurua or the Southern Cross sometimes known also as Mahutonga which is actually to do with it being a plug hole to the Southern winds and some other interpretations it's known as the anchor to the Waka of Tamaririti who is the one that took her up into the sky and spread all the stars so that's one indication of it give the talk to the kids and here we have the pointers which are actually the rope connecting to the anchor and then we have the Scorpio which is the Waka so see if you can draw that one out and then we have Pohanga which is really significant in terms of the Māori New Year and that's just an example of that's the laryum actually that's something I'll come into in a minute that's just some of the constellations that we've put up there and some of the planets then also Māori astronomy in terms of systems I'm still working on some of the relationship in terms of the sun and how that was used but we all know that the sun moves across the horizon well appears to move across the horizon or rising at different places and then moving back and forth for your equinoxes and your solstices but more importantly it's the stellar cycle which is important so we have a whole lot of stars that we use to use to tell the time of the year so even specifically months and whether or not that was used in conjunction with an alignment on a certain ridge or mountain or whether or not it's just when it rises up out of the ocean or above the horizon really depends on where your tribe is and your onography or your around in your environment so that's why it's important to collate the knowledge in terms of iwi specific tribal specific knowledge around the country that makes sense I should know all the basics of astronomy okay so I see before about Matarihi and Puanga being really important for the Māori New Year so around June we'll see Matarihi rising up above the horizon and it's the heliacal rising which is really important for people dawn and this could be yeah I can't remember the date it was this year whether or not it was the 12th of June or not but somewhere around about June but it could also be in conjunction with a new moon or maybe a full moon which really just depends on what tribe you're from but other people who are from different tribes got a little bit annoyed because they're like well hang on my tribe uses Rigel so we had to have a strong acknowledgement that they used that star Rigel because it's very important to them so that's actually for quite a significant number of tribes in the far north towards the west coast and Taranaki as well as Ngai Tahu down the South Island and there's been a part of this huge resurgence of Matarihi it's just been huge so you'll go into different like the Hawkes Bay they'll have celebrations for a whole month Te Papa was really big on revitalisation of the practice and of the discussion around it and that's how I started actually by giving a talk at Te Papa way back in the day How long do I have? Two minutes? Another cycle is the moon cycle as I mentioned before and instead of having a seven day week we had a 29 to 30 phase phases of the moon and it wasn't midnight it took me a wee while to get my head around I was like, ah, yeah, I might slip over at midnight which is stupid but when you're used to something a transition happening at a certain time but actually the transition is a tidal transition so when a tide occurs then it's the new phase so your new day starts at midnight your new phase starts at a certain tide and then within these we actually have different descriptions so if people give you a maramataka or a Māori moon calendar they'll go, here you go it's got to be used for something, right? so what they used to use it for was planting and fishing primarily but also for business as well conducting business and so we have examples here bad day for planting and fishing the sea is disturbed good day for planting sunset, good night for catching eels so they have for each phase descriptions of that and this is about survival and this is about being smart and not wasting your energy and resources going fishing and there isn't going to be anything there and I think it's quite I suppose from a modern perspective sometimes I do find it interesting what people used to be dismissive about because really females are lunar, animals are lunar species are, you know not all of them, but a lot of species are lunar as well so they might get hungry at a certain time so they'll come out more in abundance trying to find food and then another species will go they're out more, will come out more because there's more food and then the whole cycle continues so it wouldn't be a simple set of equations to describe that would be really complex, probably need some grid computing but yeah OK and in terms of a contemporary context the practice around the Māori moon calendar is building momentum but not as much as the star Māori astronomy knowledge but we're working on that and it's quite interesting the Auckland City Council has become really interested in the Maramataka and they're starting to implement or looking at implementing some of the practice around planting to do with the Māori moon calendar which is great and I think it's particularly relevant for here since they've got such a high population of Māori and Polynesians so just a bit I'll just flick through some of the things that we're working on so basically we're trying to collect the knowledge we're looking at all these different areas of Māori astronomical knowledge we're looking at manuscripts we're interviewing people we're looking at chants and songs and we're also trying to conduct experiments to understand what the the narratives are talking about we're trying to conduct observations we're even going into the planetarium asking if we can play with the dome because that gives you a good idea of when stars rise and form what does that really look like because you actually have to really look at it sometimes it's not good enough on a flat screen and so that's been really important and what we're trying to do is you know how we can do all this research but what are we going to do with it and I think I'm quite passionate about making sure it gets out there so make sure it gets into our curriculum and to our children because there's not much point doing at all but no one else is going to find out about it so what we try and do is that we're looking at one of them is a large publication if anyone knows anything about Māori astronomy the last good one was written in 1922 so my colleagues working on that story books for kids anyone knows the magic school bus similar kind of thing anyway I'm currently working on that that's to do with Rangi and his dog anyway they go up into space they learn about Māori concepts they learn about scientific aspects similar to the magic school bus also star maps if anyone knows a really good quality star map program or you can go and modify it and it produces a high quality one that we can muck around with please let me know as I've been trying to find one that you don't have to give them the information you just want to use the software and develop it because some of the stuff we're not allowed to share so if you know anything please let me know also I've already been through this sorry the other cool thing is the Larium so the Larium is good because you can get the code and you can just modify it to be able to put it in and then you've got your own modified version you now have to give it to them so that's been really good and really useful just trying to tackle trying to put the images in but that's going to be fun because it maps it and when you change the view of the sky you know it's going to do a transformation anyway okay so we do have a website and we have a Facebook page so mardiastronomy.co.nz if anyone's interested and we're also on Facebook and just rounding up this is one cool thing you'd probably like is that we have an education program called the StarSmart program we go out to very rural areas so I went out to the Uruweras which was really interesting because we were trying to get out there if you're used to just driving around in a city that is all gravel road but we went to a Māori school out there and it was really cool because when we got there they're like they said a Māori, inside the classroom you can speak English but outside you have to speak Tuhoe which is really for us it was really quite amazing they're very strict that they have to stick to their tribal language outside the classroom and they let us speak English inside the classroom because I wasn't competent enough to deliver it in Māori language that's quite a significant thing if you're Māori it's like really admirable that they're so staunch so anyway we went out and did this program, what we try and do just to give you a look if anyone wants to do an indigenous program mixing it with science and stuff we've got a really good outreach program at Vic but we do stuff on planet hunting of course but we also try and incorporate little games you do with particle physics we get into throwing a ball trying to mimic a neutrino detector trust me you can do it deal with lollies in a sheet and you're getting to throw the ball and try and hit the nuclei which is the lolly, if they get the lolly they get it and it's quite hard but they determined and you know just basic things lucky we get to take a superconductor if we can and yeah just some other things but we make sure we tie it all in to Māori knowledge and also inspiring them and having positive role models because there's actually quite a lot of us that we're just not visible so in conclusion we're very passionate about what we do we're trying to revitalise our knowledge and we need to revitalise our knowledge because our population is changing and it's important to us of course that's the main thing but we need to address it as a country and make educational knowledge more relevant for the populists that are coming through our educational system and we need to be ready and looking forward to our future and also it's really important for us to get out to the communities as well and do a lot of outreach and I really do enjoy that it gets you out from behind the computer so thank you very much yeah that's it