This is one small example, but an important one, of how science in New Zealand is being corrupted by trying to comport it with the indigenous “way of knowing”, Mātauranga Māori (MM).
The article below, from the July 4 New Zealand Herald (the biggest newspaper in the country) describes a science fair in the town of Rotorua, highlighting one student project that “tests” whether they could “prove” that a legend might be true. (There are other projects highlighting MM and indigenous knowledge.)
This was sent to me anonymously, for of course criticizing stuff like this in New Zealand could cost you your job and/or your reputation. The indigenous people, their myths, and their “ways of knowing” are regarded as sacred and untouchable.
The story is that of the love story of Tūtānekai and Hinemoa, recounted in Grey’s ‘Polynesian Mythology’, first published in 1855. The legend involves a Māori man who wanted to run away with a woman, and lured her to an island in a lake by playing his flute:
Every night Tūtānekai sat on a high hill and played his flute, the wind carrying his music across the lake to Hinemoa’s home. But Hinemoa did not come. Her people had suspected her intention, and they had pulled all the canoes high up on the shore.
Every night Hinemoa heard the sound of her lover’s flute and wept because she could not go to him. Eventually she wondered if it be possible to swim across to Tūtānekai.
Hinemoa took six hollow gourds and fastened them to her body to buoy her up. The night was dark and the great lake cold. Her heart was beating with terror, but the flute played on. She stood on a rock by the shore and there she left her garments, entered the water and began to swim.
In the darkness she could see no land, having only Tūtānekai’s flute to guide her, and led by that sweet sound she arrived at last to the island.
At the place where she landed, she found a hot pool and went in to warm herself, for she was trembling with cold.
And all went well after that. I find it bizarre that a group of students wanted to test whether this was true, when what they were really testing whether it was possible.
Click below to read:
Bolding is mine, and the excerpts from the article are indented:
A group of Rotorua children have used science to prove whether the basis of the legendary love story of Hinemoa and Tūtānekai is true.
They concluded it very well could be.
Te Arawa Lakes Trust’s Te Tūkohu Ngāwhā Mātauranga Māori Science and Design Fair is in its third year.
It aimed to celebrate the intersection of Mātauranga Māori (Māori knowledge) and science, and give students a platform to showcase innovative projects and designs.
There were 35 exhibits in its first year. Last year grew to about 40, and this year more than 100.
Topics covered five categories and ranged from projects focusing on water quality and rongoā (traditional Māori medicines) to investigating a legendary love story.
The latter involved a group from Te Rangihakahaka Centre for Science and Technology looking at the legend of star-crossed lovers Hinemoa and Tūtānekai.
[Rongoā involves not only herbal medicines, but prayer and massage.]
The story, told in the song Pokarekare Ana, is about how beautiful chief’s daughter, Hinemoa, fell in love with lower-ranked suitor, Tūtānekai, and swam across Lake Rotorua to be with him on Mokoia Island when she heard his flute calling to her.
The students decided to test whether she would have been able to hear the sound of his flute from across the water.
The group looked at how various conditions impacted on how loud the flute would have been and how it would have gotten louder as Hinemoa swam across Lake Rotorua.
With transmission loss expected between 30-40 decibels, it would have been soft at first: “a sound like wind in the trees”.
Conditions needed to be calm. No wind; glassy water; cold; overcast and no ripples.
Conclusion: “it would be audible”.
This, of course, depends on how loudly Tūtānekai was playing and whether conditions were right (which of course we cannot know), but I suppose if he was playing to attract his lady love, it would have been loud. (I saw the famous island when I was in Rotorua.)
But the problem with this is that it melds legend with science and, by so doing, mistakes the question “is the story not ruled out by analysis of sound?” with the question that science would ask: “what is the evidence that the story is true?” And since the story is based solely on a legend transmitted orally and then written down by a European in a book on Polynesian mythology, it has low credibility from the outset. There are of course dozens of such stories that could be analyzed to see if bits of them are ruled out by what we know of physical reality, but saying that “they’re not” is not the same as “proving” them. In other words, the Bayesian priors for the truth of this myth were low at the outset, and the probability that this really happened is not substantially increased by analysis of flute sounds.
Further, there are dozens of Māori legends that could not have been true, like the claim that their Polynesian ancestors discovered Antarctica in the seventh century, and in a canoe made of human bones. (This claim is still being advanced by a group of Māori academics.) Maybe there should be a science-fair project seeing if a canoe made of human bones could even float!
There’s a bit more:
Te Arawa Lakes Trust environment officer Keeley Grantham said categories were broad, which meant there was an “amazing array” of projects.
. . .“We’re not just looking at Western science, we’re looking at mitigating environmental issues through a whole heap of different lenses, especially through our te ao Māori lens.
“And enabling kids to broaden their scope of knowledge and just really build upon what they already know and just continue networking and sharing their kaupapa with other tamariki and other people that work in this field.”
About 16 kura (schools) were involved and “at least” 250 children. Groups and individuals could take part.
We have the usual mischaracterization of science as “Western” (science is now worldwide), as opposed to another way of knowing: “looking at things through our “te ao Māori lens.” A translation of “te ao Māori“:
Te Ao Māori encompasses the holistic worldview of the Māori people, reflecting an interconnected relationship between the natural world, people, and spirituality. The values embedded within Te Ao Māori offer a framework that aligns seamlessly with collectivist ideals, fostering a sense of unity and shared purpose.
With this kind of stuff encouraged by teachers, is it any wonder that science in New Zealand is circling the drain? Trying to comport it with indigenous legend is simply going to confuse people and, perhaps, drive them out of going into what the article calls “Western” science.
**********
Translation of the other terms above, taken from the Māori dictionary (note that they’re presented in an English-language newspaper without explanation, and I’m guessing very few readers understand them):
kaupapa: topic, policy, matter for discussion, plan, purpose, scheme, proposal, agenda, subject, programme, theme, issue, initiative.
tamariki: children – normally used only in the plural.
Tūtānekai and Hinemoa is a wonderful love story, I hadn’t heard it before.
[ sigh ]
I’m again drawn to Feynman:
“In general we look for a new law by the following process. First we guess it. Then we compute the consequences of the guess to see what would be implied if this law that we guessed is right. Then we compare the result of the computation to nature, with experiment or experience, compare it directly with observation, to see if it works. If it disagrees with experiment it is wrong. In that simple statement is the key to science.”
-Richard Feynman
The Character of Physical Law
1965
Looks like a nice little social studies (not social science) demonstration which includes understanding (learning about) some of the science of sound waves. An exercise for fourth or fifth graders who are studying indigenous tradition.
Science project questions: Are teachers and education bureaucrats who suffered from low self-esteem as children, particularly regarding weak skills in math and science, more likely to support multiple “ways of knowing,” elimination of course grades, removal of algebra in middle school, and similarly enlightened views foisted on us by members of the education establishment? From what distance can we hear these pied pipers play?
‘The indigenous people, their myths, and their “ways of knowing” are regarded as sacred and untouchable.’
Certainly NOT by those NZ’s who I have heard from (especially those with children at school) and whose views probably reflect the majority of the population of those of European heritage.
They are just as concerned and annoyed by this over zealous ‘mea culpa’ guilt fixation that their government has fallen for, along with many other governments with perceived ‘colonial baggage’ obsession.
For young children with developing minds, the aphorism – ‘give me a child until he is seven’ now seems very ominous for the future of rationality.
This “knowing” business is swamping Canadian education systems, among other things. The Kamloops Indian Band, despite irrefutable evidence to the contrary, gleaned from extensive and accurate records, had a “knowing” that 215 (or was it 200) children were buried (by their peers) in an apple orchard at the school. “We had a ‘knowing’.” The jokester PM, all levels of government and worst, the mainstream media, bought into the “knowing”. No investigation has ever been done or allowed to be done because the “knowing” trumps all, apparently, and is not to be argued with. To say wait, all evidence points to this being a false claim is to be racist and a “denialist” (new word to describe people who ask questions about how the “knowing” is somehow truth). The federal government is doing its best to make asking questions about the “knowing” hate speech punishable by prison terms. It’s a weird strange world in the great white north. And not in a good way.
They’re also spreading the lies at the UN.
Trudeau is a disgrace.
Everything I read from NZ these days is dispiriting.
I went to Mokoia Island in Lake Rotorua once as a kid. Didn’t hear any flutes. Guess my magic needs to be recalibrated.
(sigh)
D.A.
NYC
I fail to see how establishing that certain wavelengths of sound can travel a certain distance under certain conditions establishes anything, as we cannot know the wave legths produced by the flute or the conditions of the night in question. All we have is a cute story, why not let it remain as such, like any other fairy tale? I don’t expect anyone to determine the tensile strength of Rapunzel’s hair or whether unicorns existed, so why bother to determine the veracity of the carrying power of flute notes? This isn’t Science.
Finding out whether the sound of a flute carries is pretty low-level for what I assume to be a bunch of undergraduates. They should have aimed higher: getting one of their number (or perhaps several, to check repeatability) to strip off, tying six (no more or less) hollow gourds to each of them, and making them swim to the island. Crucial experiments are sometimes described as ‘sink-or-swim’: this one could be literally that.
Next up: could Jesus really have walked on water? The experts from Te Rangihakahaka Centre for Science and Technology seek out the truth.
This project doesn’t bother me since I think it resembles a Mythbuster episode. Could a flute be heard under these particular conditions? It’s a testable claim, and the result could just as well have falsified the myth. That, then, would have been reported by the children.
The surrounding rhetoric and what we know of the recent incursion of superstition into science is perhaps coloring our judgement here. As long as the experiment is sound, I don’t think it matters where the claim came from. If it’s a religious, spiritual, or otherwise “sacred” belief, putting it up to any kind of empirical scrutiny and risk of being found wrong is a step in the right direction.
+1
This is in the category of people who search for remains of Noah’s Ark. If they find any old remains of a wooden boat, they then declare that the flood story must be true.
If they calculated loudness loss over distance, created a testable hypothesis and then confirmed the result using an experiment, that is a good use of a science class, though the conclusion would be “it could be audible” and not “it would be audible”. It doesn’t prove the myth, but it is a way to provide children with a way to learn about science in a manner that is interesting. A physics class could ask kids to figure out whether a cow could jump over the moon: calculate escape velocity, the amount of propulsion required, how much time it would take, etc. I don’t have a problem with that. Heck, go ahead and figure out how big of sandals and the construction of the sandals that Jesus would need to wear to walk on water if you want.
However, something tells me that if any of these NZ projects disproved the legends that they would not have been allowed to present results. If the experiments were guided so that they “proved” the indigenous myths, then that is a big problem.
+ 1
It also trivializes a beautiful story.
The odds are there were plenty of romantic flight between nobles and serfs back then and this story was inspired by it. But come on!
1I’m involved in trapping pests in NZ as part of the “Predator Free NZ 2050” project and come across some interesting ideas…..
Such as https://predatorfreenz.org/stories/predator-trapping-by-the-moon-the-influence-of-maramataka/
Read down to “possum night clubs” and see what hypothesis might be being tested – phase of the moon or prebaiting inert traps to overcome trap shyness and familiarise populations with the traps?
Depressing really. At least two null hypotheses being discussed. Either worth a write up. And no, i can’ 1t find anything published although a commercial trapping support colleague also related this to me as a way to engage the local Maori iwi in conservation projects…there are a lot of articles in media about this and similar effects on farming, fishing or hunting. If anyone can source a published study I’d love to know if the claims are evidence based. Its amazing to think how many deep and challenging scientific enquiries have been solved by Matauranga Maori in the 350 years before Europeans and their pesky world science pitched up (sarc off).
I call BS The island is almost exactly 2 miles (3.2 km) from the closest mainland. A train horn can be heard one or two miles. A flute? Gimme a break.
Please do not use this uncivil language to other commenters. Have you read the Roolz?
The results of the experiment would suggest otherwise.
On a quiet night a train whistle can be heard 10 miles away.