Abstract
As the rate of affiliation to Christian identity continues to decline in Aotearoa New Zealand (only 49 percent of the population said they were Christian in the last census), public space has become more receptive to other forms of religiosity. In particular, community rituals around the winter movements of the Matariki (Pleiades) constellation have gained support since the year 2000. For instance, the capital city, Wellington, has replaced a centuries’ old British fireworks festival, Guy Fawkes, with an enlarged version of its Matariki celebrations: an action seen as a tipping point in the incorporation of Māori spiritual values into public life. Interactions between European colonisers and Māori have been characterised for more than 250 years by tensions between the relational thinking of Māori who see human beings as both participating in and constrained by an environment resonant with divine energies, and the quantitative, hierarchical, ‘Great Chain of Being’ model that had long been dominant among Europeans. Now, when the natural environment worldwide is under strain from population and economic pressures, it seems to some both appropriate and vital to look to epistemological and spiritual models that are intimately responsive to the specificities of location.
Highlights
As the rate of affiliation to Christian identity continues to decline in Aotearoa New Zealand, public space has become more receptive to other forms of religiosity
The Church, in the form of Methodist and Anglican missionaries, used soft power to offer Māori an alternative to the inter-tribal wars, resourced by the muskets Europeans had provided, that wrecked havoc on Indigenous communities from 1820 through to the signing of the Treaty of Waitangi in 1840 (Salmond 2017; Mikaere). The results of these missionizing efforts were that by the time of the Census in 1916 95.7 percent of the population, including the most 4.6 percent of the population who were Māori identified as Christian (Statistics New Zealand Digital Archive), in many cases the new religions did not erase the power of kōrero tahito/ancient explanations from people’s minds
More than 500 people, from a variety of ethnic groups, turned up to the first instantiation of the ritual, it was held again in 2018 and the positive response ensured that it has been scheduled for future years. These new patterns in the public culture of New Zealand—the thousands who attend Matariki events up and down the country, the hundreds who attend rituals with a strong religious or spiritual character—have been enabled by the Māori insistence that its partner, the Crown, embodied in the government of New Zealand, honour the commitments it made in the Treaty of Waitangi to both grant
Summary
New Zealand was established as a secular British colony in 1840, secular in that there was no state religion established and all religions were to be treated Islam because of increased immigration (Statistics New Zealand 2013), the retreat from Christianity is notable. In the 1960s when Māori and European New Zealanders were the largest population groups, 90 percent of the inhabitants identified as Christian, yet in the last census data available (from 2013) only 49 percent of the population affiliated to a Christian identity. Religions 2019, 10, 431 another (Elder 2019; Williams 2019). Spontaneous behaviours at such traumatic times may suddenly make manifest what is a series of gradual, underlying changes in how a society sees itself
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