As Matariki celebrations increase across New Zealand, bringing light to historic practices of reading the stars, the arrival of an El Niño weather event raises the question of whether the cluster could have been used on its own to predict it.
Ururangi, one of the nine stars of the Matariki cluster, is responsible for the nature of the wind, foretelling weather patterns and atmospheric conditions in the Māori calendar.
Te Ao Māori News spoke to Rangi Mātāmua on the topic, whose predictions for upcoming periods were similar to those forecasted by weather specialists.
What is El Niño?
El Niño is a weather phenomenon that occurs every 2 to 7 years and can alter the chances of floods, droughts, and heatwaves across the globe, depending on where a country sits in relation to the Tropical Pacific Ocean.
It occurs when predominant, or ‘trade winds’, weaken or reverse over the Pacific Ocean, causing warm water that naturally flows towards Indonesia to go back toward South America, leaving countries like New Zealand and Australia to become drier and windier, while other countries may be hit with wet weather and even floods.
Mātauranga Māori and Science Align
Mātāmua explains that the cluster can be read to give insight into the conditions of kai, water, weather and so on.
“Mēnā he tāwhitiwhiti ana, he tino tau te pīataata mai o Matariki, he kaha whiti mai, mōhio koe ka roa te tau, ka pai te tau, he tau makuru,” says Mātāmua.
He says reading the stars can change by region and offered his own predictions.
“This year, I looked at the cluster, and it was quite a good spread. So, I think it’s going to be quite a longish summer,” says Mātāmua.
“I think the weather should be relatively stable. There will be periods, like all weather, that it will be rains and winds, but what I saw from where I was reading, the weather should be dry,” says Mātāmua.
Meteorologist for Earth Sciences New Zealand Chester Lampkin echoes Mātāmua’s predictions, saying the winds play a major role.
“Wind is one of the drivers of all weather phenomena. It’s important in meteorology, it’s important for Aotearoa, it’s important for us in a spiritual sense, in a scientific sense, in every sense of the word,” says Lampkin.
“The overall pattern for the entire country, especially northern and eastern areas of both the north and the South Island, is for drier weather to occur, drier climate regime to take over for much of the spring, summer, and maybe into the autumn of next year,” he says.
Matariki not “a blanket” for predictions
Despite similarities in forecasts, Mātāmua says the conditions of upcoming events cannot be told by stars alone, light-heartedly labelling the practice of doing so as “hori-ology”.
Although Ururangi can tell us about the wind, he says other stars like Atutahi show the direction of it, and that traditionally signs from across te taiao were used in conjunction and can change further depending on location.
“It’s important to give you a general idea, right? But don’t be bound by it... You cannot silo your knowledge and say Ururangi is the only thing that’s going to determine the nature of the winds. No, that’s one of many, many markers,” he says.
“You look at behaviours of birds. If you’ve got coastal birds flying really far inland and settling, you know something is upset out on the coast,
“When you have something like a kūmara, which wasn’t here, that they [tupuna Māori] brought here, and then evolved a culture around it, then the calendar shifted to include that,” he says.
Mātāmua says, “What we’ve done is we’ve stopped updating it because we’ve westernised our calendar and now we think that a maramataka is set in stone. It’s not set in stone. It’s meant to be constantly updated, and we need to have the courage to actually address some of the facts that it needs to shift as our environment shifts and as we shift as people”.
Climate Change alters predictions
Both experts agreed that one of the prevailing messages of the topic is that climate change will affect predictions for the future of El Niño phenomena.
“There’s been at times I’ve thought, “oh yeah, that’s going to happen”, and it hasn’t,” says Mātāmua
“That’s also understanding that we are in a period of massive climate change. So, some of these markers, I am probably coming to terms with the fact that they might be changing,
“We’re talking about things like birds and fish and all these other things being markers. When they don’t exist anymore, you can’t use them as markers, right?” Mātāmua explains.
Lampkin says the El Niño event coming is predicted to be on par with or more intense than those of earlier years, dating back to the 1970s. The current forecast points to this one being the strongest ever recorded globally.
Lampkin echoes the same understanding as Mātāmua, saying there isn’t yet surety that climate change will make the event worse.
“We are moving into a new climate... we don’t really know how that’s going to impact ENSO and El Niño in the future. We don’t know if this is going to be a new normal where they change more frequently. There is just a lot we don’t know,” he says.
Mātāmua concludes that several signs used in conjunction can help prepare for the conditions of the future, but importance should be placed on changing our own habits.
“The climate’s not going to change because we want it to... We need to adjust ourselves,
“It’s less climate change and more people change that we need to focus in on, and I think that’s the beauty of our traditional environmental systems of time and understanding and observation. It’s empirical science, but it also compels us to change our behaviours,” says Mātāmua.
