A comment by reader Chris Slater called my attention to this article from GeoNet, an organization described as providing “geological hazard information for Aotearoa New Zealand.” It’s also
. . . . sponsored by the New Zealand Government through its agencies: Natural Hazards Commission Toka Tū Ake, GNS Science, Toitū Te Whenua Land Information New Zealand (LINZ), the National Emergency Management Agency (NEMA) and the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment (MBIE).
The hazards include volcanoes, earthquakes, landslides, and tsunamis. Useful, right? And of course the monitoring is done using scientific methods (see here for earthquakes, for instance), because you must use modern science to make the best predictions.
But this is New Zealand, and so GeoNet had to drag in some indigenous knowledge to satisfy the Zeitgeist; in this case, the addition was arrant superstition. This article, which you can read by clicking on the headline, invokes gods as a cause of earthquakes. It’s all metaphor, of course, but it’s done to satisfy the claim that both kinds of “knowledge” is the optimal mixture for understanding the world.
The subheadline echoes the headline:
The weaving together of different knowledge strands, Mātauranga Māori and western science, strengthens our understanding of our whenua (land) and supports conversations on how we can be better prepared for natural hazard events, such as an Alpine Fault earthquake, together.
Note the assertion that combining indigenous “ways of knowing” with what they persist in calling “western science” (which is no longer western) will make for a better understanding of nature. But Mātauranga Māori doesn’t just include practical knowledge gleaned from trial and error: it also includes superstition, ethics, morality, legend, and religion. And here they bring in the religion.
An excerpt (my bolding)
The Alpine Fault is the longest naturally forming straight line on earth. It marks the meeting of two large tectonic plates and has formed over millions of years, stretching longer, lifting our landscape up out of the ocean, and creating the peaks of Kā Tiritiri o te Moana (Southern Alps) with every large earthquake it generates.
According to Ngāi Tahu creation stories, earthquakes are caused by Rūaumoko, the son of Ranginui (the Sky Father) and his wife Papatūanuku (the Earth Mother). Māori have experienced rū whenua, which means ‘the shaking of the land’ for centuries.
Science tells us that Rūaumoko rumbles the Alpine Fault about every 300 years, and the last time was in 1717. These big earthquakes have been happening for millions of years and the next one is not a case of if, but when. The next large Alpine Fault earthquake will be long and strong and significantly alter the landscape of Te Waipounamu as we know it. Landslides, liquefaction, river changes, flooding, tsunami, and aftershocks are all likely.
A large Alpine Fault earthquake happening in our lifetimes is no doubt a scary thought! However, understanding how our whenua has moved in the past helps us prepare to move with it in the future. While we can’t predict when it will happen, we can work together to be better prepared for it by sharing our mātauranga (knowledge), science, and experiences of past earthquakes and emergencies to raise awareness, build understanding, and strengthen our relationships. The better connected we are beforehand, the easier it will be to support each other during and after a catastrophic event.
This is a hot mess. Dragging in Māori religion not only doesn’t add anything to the prediction of earthquakes, but is likely to confuse students who think that religious mythology is inherent in this prediction. What on earth can it mean to say that “Science tells us that Rūaumoko rumbles the Alpine Fault about every 300 years. . “? That is simply a flat-out lie. The pressures on the tectonic plates makes them slip roughly once every 300 years. It’s not due to the actions of a god who decides to rumble the earth about every 300 years (does he get bored?).
It is a disservice—in fact, an insult—to geologists to add to their science the idea that gods are shaking the earth. It is an embarrassment to New Zealand’s government that they are more or less forced to mix indigenous myths with science to pretend that they can reinforce each other. And that pressure comes from trying to sacralize the indigenous people and satisfy, so they think, are the demands of the 1840 Treaty of Waitangi. But that treaty says nothing about indigenous ways of knowing being made coequal to modern science.
Yes, indigenous knowledge may be a useful addition to some limited scientific endeavors, but this is not one of them. Get the gods out of geology!
“And so the dialectic continues.”
-Delgado and Stefancic
Critical Race Theory – An Introduction, p.66, 3rd Ed., 2017
Your comment is simply sublime. A perfect sententia.
And here I thought it was Poseidon.
I love Science… You learn something new every day!
Or, in this case, something old.
>Science tells us that Rūaumoko rumbles the Alpine Fault about every 300 years . . .
My Ceiling Cat, the original really does say that! Sorry but I had to check, just against the off chance that he decided to mess up your copy-and-paste function, being bored but not ready for another earthquake just yet.
Yes, it’s the “science tells us that. . . ” part that curled the soles of my shoes!
Oy!
So Rūaumoko and Papatūanuku are the names of the tectonic plates? 😉
What nonsense! How do they suggest we propitiate the gods to prevent earthquakes? Next they’ll say that disease is caused by evil spirits.
Don’t give them ideas.
I hope that as we progress in solar energy technology that we consider how Helios and Eos ride across the sky, and then also make sure that when Helios travels back eastward in his golden ship that we are informed of the progress so that we can accurately tune our electrical grid needs to his travel times. Am I doing this right?
That only works in Greece!
You need to broaden your horizons.
“…broaden your horizons.”
Maybe all the way out to the ice wall.
Oh for f’s sake.
There’s a Chris Rufo style book in this long running, worsening kiwi crisis. I write a quick, extremely lazy column, but maybe I should write that book. I bet it’d sell well in Oz and NZ.
And I wouldn’t know how deranged that otherwise lovely country had become in recent decades without WEIT.
A big part of it, I think, is NZ is importing this nonsense from what they wrongly feel are their “betters” – the big boys of the anglosphere. Aping the metropole is a thing in many, many countries. Including in la Francophonie, as they call it.
And it is just a vibe, I have no evidence, but I think like woke here, it is young and female coded.
D.A.
NYC
ps – They have great volcanoes though. I grew up climbing them in Auckland.
Either importing this nonsense or using it to bolster home-grown nonsense.
For some years Paulo Freire, the prophet of critical education, has been regularly invoked in highly theorised, local educational ‘research’ by those who think boosting Maori content in education for everyone will boost educational outcomes, rather than by looking at how other small counties such as Finland and Singapore achieve excellent educational outcomes.
Just yesterday, looking at an op-ed justifying the use of race and the Treaty of Waitangi in setting drug purchasing priorities to eliminate racial inequities in public health, I noticed that it was written by two youngish-looking women and that their references included Ibram Kendi and Robin DiAngelo.
This kind of thinking is deeply embedded in public service bureaucracies and academia.
Can you share a link please?
Sorry, Wahine. Since I don’t keep records of op-eds etc which I’ve read, I’m not sure where I found it, or its title and authors.
After some blundering about and searching, the link below looks like it could be a version of it, but the layout is definitely different and only DiAngelo is mentioned in the references, yet I clearly recall Kendi as well; given my advanced age, my clear recollection could be confusing another op-ed on the same topic, read at the same time.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1326020024000426?ref=pdf_download&fr=RR-2&rr=8a15e99d2ffd1c4d
Thank you, I was interested in who the authors are. Elana Curtis is the daughter of Sir Toby Curtis, a notable Māori leader who could reasonably be described as part of the Māori elite. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toby_Curtis.
Sir Toby was deputy vice chancellor at Auckland University of Technology, where his son Michael Curtis (who now styles himself ‘Mikaere’ and was a Green Party list candidate) was employed as a lecturer in the business faculty, despite having only a bachelors degree in commerce and by that time, was only a couple of years out of university.
Dr Elana Curtis notes that a race preferential programme (‘MAPAS’ – Māori and Pacific Admission Scheme) “made it possible to get into medicine. I probably went in with some of the lowest marks in my year.” https://www.auckland.ac.nz/en/news/2023/06/20/elana-curtis.html
As the daughter of Sir Toby Curtis, I’d speculate that Elana would have enjoyed considerable privilege throughout her career, given her father’s influential connections. #Nepobaby
Perhaps it is because I’m not a Kiwi and it is not biology that is being mucked with but this strikes me as fairly benign. It is prefaced by “According to Ngai Tahu creation stories…” and it seems like this is not much worse than NORAD ‘tracking’ Santa Claus, fables for tots.
It looks benign on its own, but combined with all the other incursions of superstition into New Zealand science, it amounts to a damaging assault. Or, as Pink Floyd said, “It’s just another brick in the wall.”
The actual highly objectionable word in the title in ‘weaving MM and western science to strengthen our understanding’ is the term ‘Western’.
If one removes ‘western’, one is left with the statement ‘weaving MM and science to strengthen our understanding…’.
This edited statement can imply, if we want a mass of people ( which in a normal distribution curve means half are below average in IQ ) to have their collective understanding increased, use best practice to appeal to those in the group who can understand science reasonably well, and use any other means possible to appeal to the lower slopes of the Gaussian curve, the superstitious, the dumbasses or the woke.
Of course, Matuaranga Mahabharata predicted plate tectonics centuries before Jesus, when the ancient Polynesians were the proto-Lapita culture. I just wish the educated Indian tech people imported into NZ embedded Mahabharata ditties into NZ government computer software.
“Still muddy!”
Actually, it’s “Stand still, laddy”. I thought I should clarify. We used to love to make fun of the parents screaming at their kids amidst helicopter racket… You know, “How can you have any pudding if you don’t eat your meat?!” Somehow, in our teenage, American brains we heard “still muddy” where they were saying “stand still, laddy”. Things are never funny when they need to be explained. Excuse the bother.
I thought the embedded video was actually pretty good. The main point was to urge residents to be prepared for a major Alpine Fault earthquake, and the old guy telling what was presumably his granddaughter an old story to drive the point home in a symbolic way was fine in context, which gave full weight to the science. The text itself was more problematic, since it seemed desperate to imply that matauranga Maori had something of actual scientific value to contribute, without actually stating anything specific. We see this sort of thing a lot here – broad claims about the wonders of “indigenous knowledge” and precious few specifics.
This is a-scientific, I certainly agree with that. But I disagree with David Anderson’s suggestion that NZ is importing this from elsewhere. My sense is that this is internal. I don’t live there at the moment, so I am not sure what the discourses around things like this are, but I feel like it has become a totem of distinctiveness. And some people would like to think leadership. From what some of the other correspondents on this page say (e.g. Leslie MacMillan re. Canada) and from my own experience in other parts of the Pacific, what NZ is doing is (for better or worse) being seen as a model or a licence to replicate it. This is why it deserves continued attention and contestation.
To use an evolutionary term, it’s convergent.
A close friend of mine who regularly visits NZ from the UK as her daughter married a NZ farmer and emigrated there some years ago, on her return fills me in with whats going on down under. Sadly your post comes as no surprise.
A few years ago she told me, following a visit to her daughter and family, that following one of the many and regular earthquakes (one just prior to her visit) a major ‘artery’ road/route was completely blocked by fallen rocks. Could the Highway Authorities remove the debris to allow flow of traffic again? No way. The earthquake was an act of first nation’s ‘Gods’ and therefore it was – ‘meant’ and clearance was and remains out of the question.
Result? The route, though allowing access to properties from either direction, is now no longer a viable and formerly essential throughway from point A to B.
My friend’s daughter (and husband) have a ‘resigned’ attitude to the madness. Questioning or criticism of Government policies regarding ‘first nation peoples’ is off limits, except in private.
I wonder if it’s the N/S road to Christchurch that was blocked during the earthquake. I hadn’t heard the story about failure of clearance. If you have a link to that explanation, please post it here. Thanks.
Definitely not State Highway 1 which re-opened 13 months after the 2016 quake cut it at Kaikoura. We visited there in February-March 2017 and yes there was a challenging detour to get from Christchurch to Picton as described here:
https://www.nzta.govt.nz/projects/kaikoura-earthquake-response/moving-mountains/the-challenge-restoring-road-and-rail-routes-and-a-marina/
During the reconstruction (long after we came home), there was time-restricted one-way access into Kaikoura from either side. The town had been entirely cut off by land until these temporary accesses were created.
I can’t say of course that no through arterial road blocked by slips in any of many earthquakes was ever left uncleared, whether due to financial limitations, engineering realities, or political obstruction. But I’d want to see evidence in the form of a specific road. NZ moved heaven and earth, literally, to get SH1 re-opened. NZ’s road network is thin, especially on South Island where we visited. Closing any through road would make a long, painful detour, as with the 2016 quake.
The road (I don’t know where) may well have been cleared later, but the point was that at the time there was notable frustration (according to my friend) that normal Highway clearance of obstructions had, in this case, become a ‘sensitive’ issue (the rocks having fallen from maybe a ‘sacred’ rock feature?) and very frustrating for the many who needed to use this road.
I hope you realize how damaging it is to relations if this resentful hearsay story turns out not to be completely true as described. This website is read around the world. Unlike the Comments section of many blogs — our host doesn’t like to call his own a blog and I think this is one reason why — people here by convention stick to things they can prove and are called out when they don’t. Living in a country where there is some well-founded resentment toward indigenous sacralization and rent-seeking, I am keenly aware of how dangerous a fake story can be when told by either side, even if the teller believes it to be true (or really really wants it to be.)
Good point, Leslie.
Backup and sources are important.
D.A.
NYC
Never heard of this incident if it’s in the Sth Island it’s a different country… 😁
But this sounds like to me little effort and funding problem. NZ Transport has been under funded, under pressure in recent years.If the road is an essential arterial route it would be cleared. Christchurch roads were cleared without exceptions after that earthquake.
We do have infrastructure and repair delays sometimes for years as we are finding after the cyclone that hit Auckland Jan 2023. I had never seen any thing like this, born here and living here most of my life.
However, we occasionally have to deal with holdups to highway construction while we appease a taniwha.
Western science? This ignorant statement drives me insane.
Taniwha: “water spirit, monster, dangerous water creature, powerful creature, chief, powerful leader, something or someone awesome – (this could be you Herr Host) taniwha take many forms from logs to reptiles and whales and often live in lakes, rivers or the sea”.
I find this very hard to believe. Road blockages are unfortunately not uncommon here, whether caused by flooding or earthquakes (eg here: https://www.nzherald.co.nz/northern-advocate/news/northlanders-fear-more-slips-closures-of-brynderwyn-hills/SWAOHC7VQJG77CCUNALCTN6LME/), but every effort is made to clear them as quickly as possible, and I’ve certainly never heard of one being held up to avoid offending the gods.
There was a ridiculous business with a “taniwha” causing a delay in construction of a new highway a few years ago, but that’s the only vaguely similar thing I’ve heard of. https://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/taniwha-halts-work-on-highway/L6PLP3QA2BC5HUNMMTNELTXGXI/
It could have been the road Lyttelton to Sumner as that was blocked by large rocks on the road and unstable cliffs above the road threatening to send down more. It was the route out of the port all the Dangerous Goods used to go as they weren’t allowed in the tunnel’
That took years to clear. They wouldn’t open it early because of the loose rocks above the road and the regulatory authorities were gunshy. My son, a geologist was involved in restoring it, but he didn’t have to know about any Maori gods.
Thanks for that. I know exactly the road you refer to. We spent a week in Christchurch before our tour around South Island and that was a disappointment that we couldn’t use that road to complete loops by bicycle. We arrived while the Port Hills fire was burning, too. I hope we contributed enough to the economy to justify the resources we consumed. It was about 6 months after the quake iirc. New Zealand was still in a bit of shock.
It strikes me that this isn’t just a way to sacralize indigenous people but to talk down to them as if they’re isolated from modern science. Imagine you’re a geologist transported back in time to the New Zealand of 300 years ago. When you try to warn the Māori of a coming earthquake using scientific language they have no idea what you’re talking about. So instead you try framing it in their own familiar terms.
“Earth gods angry, will shake big mountains. Māori must make sacrifice and move to distant land, come back later. Our white elders of the village over the sea have spoken to the gods — make haste!”
That’s a much better conversation, one that fosters understanding between two different worlds. Afterwards, if you want, you can go in and cautiously start explaining the science using analogies to ancient legends. This works with children; it ought to work with the indigenous. Give them only what they can handle. Bring beads.
Or, they get the best of modern science and their mythology to parse a phenomenon. No need to talk down, Maori beleive they are changing a world veiw for the better and that is the problem.
The fantasy part is not required and neither are the beads. Cultural Identity is paramount to their perceived survival after a battered past.
Activism aside, this to me is misplaced and there is room for regonition but in the right fields of science and culture.
As Eric Kaufmann says (in his new, highly recommendable book, in which he analyzes and criticizes woke “cultural socialism” and its “progressive illiberalism”):
“Woke is more mythos than logos: an identity like nationalism or religion more than a philosophy like liberalism.”
(Kaufmann, Eric. Taboo: How Making Race Sacred Produced a Cultural Revolution. London: Forum/Swift Press, 2024. p. 4)
Can you double check that book title? It’s not showing up on Amazon.
It’s easier to find on UK Amazon.
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Taboo-Making-Produced-Cultural-Revolution/dp/1800752660
US Amazon has it under “unknown author”
https://www.amazon.com/Taboo-Making-Produced-Cultural-Revolution/dp/1800752660
Thanks!
The Kindle edition is only available in the UK. Weird.
There’s no misspelling: https://swiftpress.com/book/taboo/
Thanks. The entry on Amazon.com lacks an author name and doesn’t include the Kindle version. It looks incomplete.
I ran into that problem a few months ago with another book published in the UK. No kindle version.
It’s very hard to contact Amazon so I just gave up.
I just happened to notice that Kaufmann’s book has been published in the USA&Canada by a different publisher (Bombardier/Post Hill Press) under a different title (The Third Awokening). Knowing this, you will find it easily on Amazon.com (Kindle version included)!
No problem finding “The Third Awokening.”
Thanks.
I’ll probably buy that. I’ve seen Kaufman on some interviews. Impressive guy.
D.A.
NYC
Reminds me of when Brian Tamaki said the 2011 Christchurch Earthquake (which my dad survived as he was there on business) was God’s punishment for abortions and immoral lifestyles or something.
I’d like to know how we determine that something like a rock slide that closes a road is caused by a benevolent god that wants us to avoid using the road rather than a malevolent one who is trying to block the road to prevent people from using the road in a manner that would be pleasing to the good god, in which case the road should be cleared as soon as possible? I hope that the NZ universities offer geology courses that address such issues as this is so that decisions can be made in a scientific manner.
I would also like to know how god responsibility work in cases such as this in other areas of the world. Do certain gods have local jurisdiction? How do we settle on which god did which? In the case where multiple cultures have conquered the same land, how does science determine which god is actually the cause of natural phenomena? As ignorant western science adopts the more enlightened knowledge of the role of indigenous gods, these kinds of questions will be critical to the advancement of science. I hope these are covered in Other Ways of Knowing 101.
You pose some profound questions. Further research is most definitely in order.
The sacrilisation of Maori Culture is the new religion of the femme bureacrat. It follows the paristism of institutions by American Marxism, which is Maoist. What one is seeing is 1. Maoist mysticism, which infected the Nicaraguan revolution, and 2. As a comment above notes it is the dialectic at play. Norms, in this case one of epistemology under the opressor- opressed paradigm in the Communist Manifestoe, makes science the oppressor. This is deductive logic madness.
As diangelo and Sensoy in their educationalist tract on equality state there are 3 types of knowledge: 1. Common sense (which is being undermined) 2. Traditional academic knowledge (which is being undermined) and 3. Critical Theory knowledge scil social justice activism which requires a life long commitment thus a cult. The later is religion, which the femme bureacrats and those of RNZ are deperately looking for in the imaginary revolt against the patriarchy scil western culture.
From a Viking Saga I once read, they seem to have been ahead of Maoris nearly 1000yrs ago, which IIRC puts that before they arrived in NZ.
In the saga, a boy asks his father what was causing the volcano that they were witnessing. I expected an explanation involving some god, but instead the father replied along the lines that it was coming from forces deep within the earth.
I’m a NZer who has just emailed a couple of the government ministers responsible for GeoNet. The email includes the following:
I’ve been alerted to the GeoNet news article entitled ‘Weaving Mātauranga Māori and western science to strengthen our understanding of the Alpine Fault’ (https://www.geonet.org.nz/news/7jQ9BUiWfkBi59jzpiCl6f). I highlight this article’s use of the term ‘Western Science’ which is an oxymoron widely used to devalue modern science. Science strives for knowledge that is evidence based, universal and objective. This requires it to be free of all bias including cultural bias. The process of modern science including the recording of measurements using carefully calibrated instruments and standard measurement units, statistical analysis, peer review and publishing are all designed to eliminate bias including cultural bias. Labelling modern science as ‘Western’ has consequences. At best it devalues science as just one of a set of alternate and equal ways of understanding the world and hence values it no more than mythology, spirituality etc. This undermines any aspiration for a shared understanding of reality and hence any informed rational debate and decision making that relies on such a common understanding. It undermines the one thing we rely on to separate fact from fiction and myth from reality. And at worst, it labels science as a colonial imposition to be shunned and rejected.