Something popped up in my Feedly this weekend from Waatea News, the Māori-supremacist “news” outlet that spends half its time pushing co-governance and Māori-only entitlements, and the other half pumping out cost-of-living crisis sob stories disguised as journalism. Here’s an example of them using an AI-generated picture, where they probably used the prompt:
”Hey Grok, can you create an image of an overweight Māori single mother with her children, standing outside a supermarket with an empty trolley, looking sad?”
Anyways moving on. The headline I read was: “Māori navigators and tohunga were reading the stars to guide their waka.”
And right there “whanau’ we have the problem. This constant, almost obsessive need to tell us that Māori once looked at the sky and somehow that should make us all swoon.
Humans have been looking up at the stars for hundreds of thousands of years. Ancient Egyptians built the pyramids in alignment with celestial bodies. The Babylonians mapped the heavens. The Mayans and Greeks developed entire scientific frameworks for astronomy. Somehow, here in New Zealand, we are expected to treat Polynesian star lore as if it was the pinnacle of human achievement.
This is the thing, they didn’t know where they were going. They did not have charts, satellites, compasses, or even a written language. They stumbled upon New Zealand by chance. Calling it “reading the stars” is not science. It is romanticised marketing for a culture that is currently being elevated beyond reason. Sh*t, they didn’t even know what a wheel was.
Now our schools are integrating “Māori astronomy” into the curriculum. Children are being taught star names, myths, and navigation tales as though they hold equal weight to real astronomy. The problem is obvious. Without a written record, everything has been passed down orally. And anyone who has played Chinese Whispers knows that oral history changes rapidly. Add centuries of retelling and you end up with heavily altered, sometimes completely invented stories.
Why exactly should a child spend classroom time learning mythical explanations for the universe when we have the actual science at our fingertips? We have telescopes peering deep into galaxies billions of light years away. We have mapped the positions of planets, moons, and stars with incredible accuracy. We can send probes beyond the solar system. Yet we are prioritising teaching that Māui fished up the North Island and that ocean crossings were achieved by “reading the stars” without proof beyond word-of-mouth legends.
This is not just an academic issue. It is ideological. It is part of a broader trend of replacing objective truth with politically fashionable myth-making. Matariki is now a public holiday, and while there is no harm in cultural celebration, there is a real danger when cultural stories are treated as equal to scientific fact. Once that line is blurred, we are not educating children. We are indoctrinating them.
Three hundred years ago, many Māori believed the world was shaped by gods, demi-gods, and magic. That is perfectly fine to acknowledge in history or cultural studies. But putting it alongside Newton, Galileo, and Einstein in a science classroom is absurd.
Our children deserve a curriculum grounded in evidence, not oral traditions that cannot be verified. Teach Māori star lore in the same way we teach Greek mythology or Norse legends, as interesting cultural history, not as science. Otherwise, we are not just failing our children. We are lying to them.
Matua Kahurangi is just a bloke sharing thoughts on New Zealand and the world beyond. No fluff, just honest takes. He blogs on https://matuakahurangi.com/ where this article was sourced.
5 comments:
Bang on.
Make a few name substitutions and we have a re-run of the creationist 'equal time' campaign of the 1980s.
What Maori lore and Middle Eastern lore have in common is that neither are based on scientific reasoning. Unfortunately, science in schools and even universities tend to be taught as a set of postulates that must be 'believed'. What we need in science education is far more emphasis on what science is - an investigative process to establish whether something is true or not (an epistemology). Science's epistemology is centred on the empirical testing of claims made. No claim can ever be 100% validated, but it can be shown to be 100% false. Hence, if a claim is unfalsifiable, it does not feature on science's radar screen.
Until people understand how science comes up with its explanatory models, they will tend to regard myth and magic as being legitimate competitors with science.
It's the very old strategy of getting the kids at a young age and you have them for life believing your indoctrination.
And Labour (and Communist )families in particular demonstrate the life long dedication to the Party.
We can't explain 95% of the Universe .This is Dark Matter ( about 25%) and Dark Energy ( about 70%) , neither of which we can directly see or fully understand. We know Dark Matter exists because of its gravitational effects on the things we can see .Dark Energy is even more mysterious , but thought to be responsible for the expansion of the Universe.
In no way am I justifying mythology in science classes but Darwinism is being challenged by people including atheists as lacking aexplanation of all aspects of life . It is a theory but being presented in schools as a fact.
I am not suggesting creationism but simply a more truly scientific attitude , which is that science doesn't have an explanation for everything , even in the physical world.
We still don't know what gravity is but experience it all the time.
Maori along with many other native cultures have a Creation story which , I believe could be acknowledged , but not taught in science classes., since we as yet have no explanation for the origin of life . Abiogenesis , ( labelled by some as the atheists' myth) is being seriously challenged by a renowned bio- Chemist at Rice University , as well as others including a leading mathematician at Yale University who is not Christian.
Consider a photon travelling at the speed of light - time ceases and distance is everywhere ( It is everywhere at once ) . This is predicted by the Einstein time dilation and Lorentz distance contraction
- Einstein's special Relativity and Lorentz's interpretation of it. This phenomenon is not observed but extrapolated .
For homework explain : looking at stars a long way away using light ( photons) when light is every where at once so how can we see stars?
Science progresses through self-criticism and argument. And of course ongoing research which may sometimes result in a major change to theory. This is the great strength of science.
In 1928, a fellow at Cambridge coined the expression "God of the Gaps" as a way of 'explaining' what science could not [yet] explain. The paradigm was soon used to describe the human tendency to attribute anything not [yet] understood to a god or gods. This is epistemologically unsound as gods do not exist in the empirical domain and so they can't 'explain' anything in the empirical sense. It's best to not try to plug gaps in our knowledge of the universe with spooky mythical beings. Just say "we don't know [yet]" and keep observing and experimenting. Try a bit of intellectual honesty, anathema as that is to a religious believer.
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