Why Evolution is True is a blog written by Jerry Coyne, centered on evolution and biology but also dealing with diverse topics like politics, culture, and cats.
This article at The Conversation, by a climatologist at the University of Wellington and a lecturer in design (?) at the University of Auckland, is a desperate attempt to buttress Māori “ways of knowing” by showing how they align with modern science conducted in Antarctica. It is purely performative, meant to sacralize Māori “science,” but in fact adds nothing to modern science. Its only aim is to show that if you twist Māori lore sufficiently, and squint hard enough, you can sort of see some similarities with modern science.
The article is embarrassing and should not have been published in The Conversation. Its appearance can be understood only as an attempt to make up for earlier oppression of indigenous people by overstating their contributions to modern science. This of course is one of the aims of New Zealand’s government, and the article and attendant trip for the authors to Antarctica were in fact paid for by several sources of government support, including the Royal Society of New Zealand’s Marsden fund designed to
. . . drive world-class research in New Zealand by supporting and incentivising excellent researchers to work on their best and boldest ideas leading to new knowledge and skills with the potential for significant downstream impact for New Zealand.
Shoot me now!
UPDATE: I’ve learned that part of the Marsden Fund also supports “Vision Mātauranga” projects designed “to unlock the innovation potential of Māori knowledge, resources and people to assist New Zealanders to create a better future.” I suspect that this is why Winton and Hoeta produced such a misguided paper, extolling Māori knowledge but not giving examples of how it’s informed modern science.
Have a look at the piece and see if excellent research with big potential is described (click on the headline below to read):
First, though authors and government support are shown below:
Now that we’ve determined that the NZ taxpayer is funding this palaver, let’s look at what it’s about. As the beginning shows, it’s merely an “exploration” of how one might comport Māori lore with modern science. There is nothing in the whole piece that shows how Māori lore can add to modern science. All the bolding below is mine:
Antarctica’s patterns of stark seasonal changes, with months of darkness followed by a summer of 24-hour daylight, prompted us to explore how a Māori lunar and environmental calendar (Maramataka) might apply to the continent and help us recognise changes as the climate continues to warm.
As if there aren’t better ways to measure the effects of global warming! Reducation of fixed ice and movement of animals, for example. But let’s proceed:
Maramataka represent an ancient knowledge system using environmental signs (tohu) to impart knowledge about lunar and environmental connections. It traces the mauri (energy flow) between the land (whenua), the ocean (moana) and the sky and atmosphere (rangi), and how people connect to the natural world.
During matiti muramura, the third summer phase that aligns with the summer solstice, the environment offers tohu that guide seasonal activity. The flowering of pohutukawa is a land sign (tohu o te whenua), the rising of Rehua (Antares, the brightest star in the constellation Scorpius) is an atmospheric sign (tohu o te rangi), and sea urchins (kina) are a sea sign (tohu o te moana).
When these signs align, it signals balance in nature and the right time to gather food. But if they are out of sync (such as early flowering or small kina), it means something in the environment (te taiao) is out of balance.
These tohu remind us how deeply land, sea and sky are connected, and why careful observation matters. When they’re out of sync, they call us to pause, observe and adapt in ways that restore natural balance and uphold the mauri of te taiao.
Have a look at the last link to see if there are any practical implications of observing sea urchins and stars and birds. And remember, this is from Antarctica, but the implications are apparently for New Zealand. (Note also the plethora of Māori words, whose presence is irrelevant to nearly all readers but constitute a big sign of virtue for the authors.)
Why on Earth did they go to Antarctica to suss out things to do in New Zealand? No explanation is given, but note that the sentence in bold above denotes not a search for truth, but an “exploration” of how Māori lore might allow things in Antarctica to help people in New Zealand. The connection is still unclear to me.
A bit more “exploration.” Again, this exercise is not to find anything out, but merely to construct metaphors:
One of the key tohu we observed in Antarctica was the mass arrival of Weddell seals outside New Zealand’s Scott Base at the height of summer.
Guided by Maramataka authorities, we explored other local tohu using Hautuu Waka, an ancient framework of weaving and wayfinding to navigate a changing environment. Originally used for navigating vast oceans, wayfinding in this context becomes a metaphor for navigating the complexities of today’s environmental and social challenges.
That is not science, and it’s not even sociology. It’s simply storytelling. And it’s opaque.
Remember, the NZ government sent two researchers to Antarctica (not a cheap proposition) to produce stuff like this:
While the tohu in Antarctica were vastly different from those observed in Aotearoa [JAC: the Māori word for “New Zealand”, untranslated, of course], the energy phases of the Maramataka Moon cycles aligned with traditional stories (pūrākau) describing snow and ice.
At Scott Base, we observed feather-like snow (hukapuhi) and floating snow (hukarangaranga). Further inland on the high-elevation polar plateau, we found “unseen” snow (hukakoropuku), which is not always visible to the naked eye but felt on the skin, and dust-like snow (hukapunehunehu), akin to diamond dust. The latter phenomenon occurs when air temperatures are cold enough for water vapour to condense directly out of the atmosphere and form tiny ice crystals, which sparkle like diamonds.
In te ao Māori, snow has a genealogy (whakapapa) that connects it to wider systems of life and knowledge. Snow is part of a continuum that begins in Ranginui (the sky father) and moves through the god (atua) of weather Tāwhirimātea, who shapes the form and movement of clouds, winds, rain and snow. Each type of snow carries its own name, qualities and behaviour, reflecting its journey through the skies and land.
Note the religious aspect of MM that worms its way into the “science” above.
And here’s the part where the authors implicitly claim that indigenous ways of knowing (Mātauranga Māori, or MM) supplement modern science. This is the basis for the government’s and educators’ attempts to teach MM alongside modern science as an alternative form of “knowing”.
Connecting Western science and mātauranga Māori
Our first observations of tohu in Antarctica mark the initial step towards intertwining the ancient knowledge system of mātauranga Māori with modern scientific exploration.
Observing snow through traditional practices provided insights into processes that cannot be fully understood through Western science methods alone. Mātauranga Māori recognises tohu through close sensory attention and relational awareness with the landscape.
Is there anything in the following actually contributed to science by MM, or anything new at all? Not that I see. The stuff about ice cores was figured out by modern science:
Drawing on our field observations and past and present knowledge of environmental calendars found in mātauranga Māori and palaeo-climate data such as ice cores, we can begin to connect different knowledge systems in Antarctica.
For example, just as the Maramataka contains information about the environment over time, so do Antarctic ice cores. Every snowflake carries a chemical signature of the environment that, day by day, builds up a record of the past. By measuring the chemistry of Antarctic ice, we gain proxy information about environmental and seasonal cycles such as temperature, winds, sea ice and marine phytoplankton.
The middle of summer in an ice core record is marked by peak levels in chemical signals from marine phytoplankton that bloom in the Ross Sea when sea ice melts, temperatures are warmer and light and nutrients are available. This biogenic aerosol is a summer tohu identified as a key environmental time marker in the Maramataka of the onset of the breading season and surge in biological activity.
I’m highly doubtful that the traditional Māori lunar calendar incorporates “biogenic aerosol signals from marine phytoplankton in the Ross Sea.” Or do they just mean that it’s getting warmer? The embarrassing piece ends this way (again, my bolding):
The knowledge of Maramataka has developed over millennia. Conceptualising this for Antarctica opens a way of using Māori methods and frameworks to glean new insights about the continent and ocean. Grounded in te ao Māori understanding that everything is connected, this approach invites us to see the polar environment not as a remote but a living system of interwoven tohu, rhythms and relationships.
Most of those who claim the importance of indigenous knowledge systems make the argument that those systems show that “things are connected.” But of course that’s nothing new to science! To make such a claim not only bespeaks desperation, but also adds nothing to modern science. The sentence in bold above gives not one example of how MM can help us “glean new insights about the Antarctic continent and ocean. That also goes for the whole article. Weak parallels are not knowledge.
I conclude that the authors, especially Dr. Winton, should be embarrassed to have written this piece, that the attempt to beef up modern science with indigenous knowledge is a pretty futile effort, and, as always, that New Zealand should not be funding this kind of endeavor. If the indigenous people are still suffering from decades of oppression, well, fix that suffering. But don’t try it by mixing indigenous “knowledge” into modern science! That’s harmful to both Māori and the other inhabitants of New Zealand.
UPDATE: I learned that Dr. David Lillis has also analyzed the Winton and Hoeta paper in a piece at BreakingViews@Co.Nz called “Intertwining Knowledge Systems.” I deliberately didn’t read it before I wrote the above, but now I have, and we come to the same conclusions.
Lillis takes The Conversation piece apart paragraph by paragraph. Here’s just one example. The first paragraph is a quote from the Winton and Hoeta paper, the second Lillis’s analysis:
“In te ao Māori, snow has a genealogy (whakapapa) that connects it to wider systems of life and knowledge. Snow is part of a continuum that begins in Ranginui (the sky father) and moves through the god (atua) of weather Tāwhirimātea, who shapes the form and movement of clouds, winds, rain and snow. Each type of snow carries its own name, qualities and behaviour, reflecting its journey through the skies and land.”
Here we have a charming allegory. Of course, we can teach it to children, along with similar allegories from other populations in New Zealand, but not literally nor as science. Of course, science also has names for various types of snow, each characterized by particular formation and texture. These types include powder snow, packed snow, corn snow, crud, slush and ice.
His long and devastating piece concludes that the pablum pushed by Winton and Hoeta is not science in the way it’s practiced now:
Let us preserve and value traditional beliefs but not confuse them with modern world science. We owe it to future generations to get this very critical matter right.
Amen! Sadly, they’re not getting it right in New Zealand.
45 thoughts on “Another desperate but failed attempt to show that indigenous “science” improves modern science”
The Conversation is very left-wing and publishes a lot of trash.
It’s academia, Jake!
(A variation on “Forget it, Jake. It’s Chinatown.”, from the neo-noir Roman Polanski movie Chinatown (1974) – it took me quite a while to figure out why Jerry every so often uses this expression, “It’s …, Jake.”)
I always wonder where PCC(E) gets that one. I knew it was from a movie I’d seen from that era but I could never put my finger which one – thx.
Love it.
D.A.
NYC
I thought it was from “Three and a Half Men”. I suppose that program could have taken it from “Chinatown”
I took it from “Chinatown.”
Thanks for the clarification!
Agreed. My university promotes The Conversation as an outlet for faculty members to do community engagement, but only progressive views or topics are encouraged.
In a related story, Tractor Supply Company has a great price on a blue/green manure shovel:
There must be a lot of pressure on NZ scientists to toe the line and produce horse**** like this. Tough times.
There’s tremendous pressure on young academics in NZ to toe the line. Some are told explicitly ‘You’re no use to our people if you’re not doing this. Our people don’t need more ‘Western’ academics. Our people need activists who can disrupt and dismantle the system.’ Of course, when the fashion shifts, these same academics will step back and say ‘yes, it was wrong, it was silly, but I was young.’
Scholarly integrity is still very much out of fashion.
I unsubscribed from The Conversation a couple of years ago.
The use of Maori words/concepts in this article and similar ones ensures that the article(s) will not receive serious consideration by anyone not conversant with those words simply because no one knows what the authors are talking about unless the latter provide a lot of links to these concepts. And what reader in his/her right mind will go to the trouble to figure out what the authors are actually trying to demonstrate?
Crazy stuff.
I look forward to reading Mr. Lillis’ take tonight.
The M.M. calendar stuff reminds me of the Aboriginal Periodic Table of Elements last year (reported here I believe) from my homeland…. which is an absolute gem.
There are few areas of science that can’t be culturally enriched by indigenous science it seems.
Let’s also remember a few years ago the (former, Olympic level woke Jacinda Ardern gvt) financed “Maori psychiatry” to the tune (I did the math myself) of twenty dollars (US) for every NZ citizen.
And then there’s the whale oil rubbing kauri tree scandal. We should follow up on that, see how the trees and whales are doin’.
And The Listener scandal with Univ of AKL (British) Susan Freshwater’s response still …. unforthcoming apparently. We’re not holding our breath.
PCC(E) seems miffed that it appeared in The Conversation.
I respectfully dissent.
The Conversation is well known to publish some REALLY off the wall stuff, some of which has me yelling at my screen (a low bar, I admit, prob about Palestine), so this comes as no surprise.
And I want them to – like I’m very happy when WEIT reports on this nonsense and it gets amplified via Dawkins or Pinker’s twitter/x accounts. And my account since I joined twitter/x.
Without free speech we won’t ever know how horrible and terrible our intellectual enemies are!
“Haeri Ra” (farewell in Maori – my primary school memories!)
D.A.
NYC
(formerly of Remuera, Auckland, circa 1970s and 80s)
Auckland V-C Freshwater resigning as of 2026. Somebody from U Auckland might have inside information.
I’m surprised that the current NZ government coalition, which appears to range from bland Right to ideological nutbar Right, goes along with such obvious nonsense. Anyone know why they have left such an easy target alone?
Fear.
Maybe they have the same attitude many gender criticals have to trans activist palaver: Hey, by all means, #LetThemSpeak! (So the world can see how full of guano they are.)
The current government cut Marsden funding from humanities/social science a few months. I suspect this stuff was from previously approved grants (and explains why funding cuts were made)
Small point of clarification: As many people in the Humanities and Social Sciences (your truly included) pointed out, it was a bit unfair to target HSS for cuts when much of the research that as cited as shoddy or objectionable was funded in STEM and Business.
I bet it was little more than camouflage while they did real work behind the show.
Then, that is even more pathetic.
I’m guessing that this is right. Looking at Dr Winton’s record, she seems to be a serious scientist with a track record of sensible publications. This particular trip seems to have taken place over a year ago, and was mainly for proper scientific worklike taking ice core samples. It looks as if the bogus maramataka junk and the presence of the design person and “maramataka practitioner” was most likely to secure funding. Also “Hoeta, a Maramataka practitioner of the traditional Māori lunar calendar, sought to trace the lands her ancestors had traveled through more than 1,300 years ago.”
While I respect deception and subterfuge, I consider it professionally unethical.
I’d sooner get it done, then say what I did and leave that institution for overseas.
Two points: 1) Many years ago (the 1970s) I would do editing for some of my college friends. A lot of them just couldn’t write well. They would look over their term paper and know it had problems, but they didn’t know how to fix it. Nothing formal; we would meet for beer and I would take it home and clean it up and we would meet for beer again and I’d hand it back, ready to turn in. They would get a better grade and I would get beer. Fair enough. I eventually helped with a few masters theses and a handful of publications, most of them involving anthropology and archaeology. There was one anthropology paper in particular I had real trouble with. I corrected grammar and reorganized part of the presentation for clarity, but I just couldn’t get a handle on it. The author didn’t distinguish between what he had expected to see and what he actually observed. The conclusions were more speculative than I would have expected and it was unclear which conclusions were his own and which were those of previous, uncited researchers. When I gave it back to him, I explained that it had problems I really couldn’t fix and asked him to clarify things. His explanation was a lot clearer than the paper. He had gotten a grant and was expected to produce a publication. The grant proposal was apparently pretty vague; not testing a particular hypothesis or measuring a specific value, but rather a general exploration of a topic. He had really expected to find something interesting and worked hard on it, but nothing came of it. Everything was amorphous and contradicted by something else. He compared it to trying to track down that really amazing story that your roommate’s brother’s cousin’s neighbor swears is true. It sounds so cool, but you just can’t find it. In the end, he had to publish something and this is what he came up with. I know that was a long story, but it’s EXACTLY the impression I get from this paper. For whatever reason, they really expected to find something. Why they thought the Antarctic would line up with material from New Zealand mystifies me, but that might entail “mission creep.” They changed questions and perspectives as they went, but ultimately had to come up with SOMETHING and this is what we got.
2) I have some sympathy with the indigenous folks here. Subsistence living is challenging and you really have to be observant and have a good memory. I am sure that observations involving the correspondences among all kinds of natural phenomena were useful and important. Knowing that the migration of a particular beast meant that the roots of a particular plant were ready to harvest would be important. Organizing all the useful information into a system that made sense or was easy to remember would also be helpful. It could involve the gods or the ebb and flow of unseen forces or whatever. If it meant finding what they needed to keep their families above ground, great. They believed it. Some of them still do. I can’t help but believe that a lot of the desire to shoehorn these beliefs into a state of harmony with modern science comes from people of European ancestry who just think that it OUGHT to be that way out of a simple sense of fairness. They either believe it or are vulnerable to being talked into it. Regardless, it’s anathema to science and they ought to know better.
You do realize, don’t you, that they are trying to organize occurrences in ANTARCTICA to hep them devise a system for subsistence in NEW ZEALAND? (And how many Māori live subsistence lives now? Hardly any. The whole endeavor makes no sense.
Re the imminent resignation of U. Aukland VC Freshwater: we obviously need to
consult the tohu to find out what has happened to her mauri. Of course, it might be a problem with the whakapapa. In that case, treating her (or possibly the entire university) with whale oil might be in order.
Obviously.
HAHAHA! Killin’ me Jon. Their mauri is totally out of whack! Hate it when that happens to me. I lost my mauri last week crossing 8th ave and my whakapapa was shot also. A bad day.
The welcome departure of Ms. Freshwater won’t help a lot, I fear. When an institution is captured utterly the figurehead’s identity doesn’t matter much, they’ll just select a more rabid idiot. I’ve thought about it a lot – I’m not sure how a situation like this can change.
EXCEPT perhaps a grander, larger change of tone and expectations – like the (unfortunate) election of Trump here (by most metrics). One upside was that his election provided some “cover” for those opposed to grow spines and say: “No, no more of this. Call me a racist if you like, but this isn’t 2020 and times have changed.”
Tinkering with the individual Freshwater widgets in the system won’t help.
Watch that Mauri, Jon, it holds the earth together like Rangi and Papa’s alliance.
(hold my beer….)
D.A.
NYC
“The welcome departure of Ms. Freshwater won’t help a lot, I fear. When an institution is captured utterly the figurehead’s identity doesn’t matter much”
Agreed. I think of my NZ colleague who works on 16th and 17th English literature being asked to send a report to the Associate Dean of Research explaining how her research centres Maori ways of knowing.
Lovely double entendre there which many Kiwis will appreciate.
There used to be a rather notorious, conservative blog in NZ called Whale Oil.
Boiling, maybe.
“Shoot me now!”
I laughed out loud.
“Shoot me now!”
I had a different reaction, not of laughter, though I get what Lady M (#13) was about. We will have to live through this madness. Though I may take issue with some items here or there, I appreciate the thought and energy.
It’s been a long day — I certainly can see why how, with this stuff in fresh in mind, you mislabeled Iceland (as N.Z.) this morning. Just, heaven forbid, don’t misgender it. (off topic, hey, how about NHS Fife tribunal this week?)
As a New Zealander, and Victoria University graduate, this is just embarrassing! I thought the whale oil on kauri trees was a low point, but it seems it just gets worse.
The depths of the mystical Dionysian abyss have not been reached.
We ought not to blame Maori en masse for this because it seems to me that their culture has been misappropriated by Woke middle-class university-educated European Marxist captured women on the whole. It is a disgraceful use of another’s culture as a tool in the cult of the “School of Resentment.”
Of course, in NZ we have prominent feminist geographers rising through the ranks to earn $200k to study uterine geographies. Loads of goofiness in academia…maybe feminist geographers think they are scientists, too. Fundamentally, the problem is that most academics don’t have any real ideas. Novel ideas that drive important arguments are extremely rare in academia.
I note that one of the authors is funded by the Rutherford Discovery Fellowship. That certainly wouldn’t be the case if he were around today. The great man wasn’t known for suffering fools too readily.
However, on the plus side, he would probably take the opportunity to update his famous aphorism to a 2025 version:
All science is either physics or Mātauranga Māori!
Once the Conversation stopped having comments on many (perhaps now most?) of its contributions, it was clearly ceasing to be, well, a conversation.
As someone who comes from a sciences background but is part Māori, though only speaking a little Māori, it didn’t take me long to figure out that the terms for snow were made up words. These words patterns just don’t seem to flow for me and a quick google search confirms that terms such as hukarangaranga are only associated with the researchers’ article. I have noticed this trend in some medical and psychiatric terms and can’t help but cringe.
I’m another Maori, not a scientist but of a sceptical disposition, and I raised my eyebrows at the improbability of our tupuna (ancestors) having such specific words for different types of snow. Where would be the utility for them?
(My username means ‘cold’, which was probably most of what ancient Maori needed to know about snow.)
Rereading this I now get the feeling they’re just adding this mumbo jumbo to gain funding.
To me that is worse than accepting it as fact. The worst thing a scientist can do is sell out for their own gain.
I would think there would be made-up words, but a response would be “dynamic, evolving” language, etc. Oral histories/traditions also would include made-up remembrances, as what researchers call “feedback” infiltrates the remembered past. Example, the “Roots” legacy (Kunte Kinte) in Gambian oral traditions.
The Conversation is very left-wing and publishes a lot of trash.
It’s academia, Jake!
(A variation on “Forget it, Jake. It’s Chinatown.”, from the neo-noir Roman Polanski movie Chinatown (1974) – it took me quite a while to figure out why Jerry every so often uses this expression, “It’s …, Jake.”)
I always wonder where PCC(E) gets that one. I knew it was from a movie I’d seen from that era but I could never put my finger which one – thx.
Love it.
D.A.
NYC
I thought it was from “Three and a Half Men”. I suppose that program could have taken it from “Chinatown”
I took it from “Chinatown.”
Thanks for the clarification!
Agreed. My university promotes The Conversation as an outlet for faculty members to do community engagement, but only progressive views or topics are encouraged.
In a related story, Tractor Supply Company has a great price on a blue/green manure shovel:
https://www.tractorsupply.com/tsc/product/groundwork-plastic-scoop-with-hardwood-handle-4410833
There must be a lot of pressure on NZ scientists to toe the line and produce horse**** like this. Tough times.
There’s tremendous pressure on young academics in NZ to toe the line. Some are told explicitly ‘You’re no use to our people if you’re not doing this. Our people don’t need more ‘Western’ academics. Our people need activists who can disrupt and dismantle the system.’ Of course, when the fashion shifts, these same academics will step back and say ‘yes, it was wrong, it was silly, but I was young.’
Scholarly integrity is still very much out of fashion.
I unsubscribed from The Conversation a couple of years ago.
The naïveté of the article reminds me of the popular meme about the curious penguin who encounters a bunch of Antarctic researchers. Y’all know this one:
https://www.pinterest.com/pin/best-of-9gag–224265256422464849/
The use of Maori words/concepts in this article and similar ones ensures that the article(s) will not receive serious consideration by anyone not conversant with those words simply because no one knows what the authors are talking about unless the latter provide a lot of links to these concepts. And what reader in his/her right mind will go to the trouble to figure out what the authors are actually trying to demonstrate?
Crazy stuff.
I look forward to reading Mr. Lillis’ take tonight.
The M.M. calendar stuff reminds me of the Aboriginal Periodic Table of Elements last year (reported here I believe) from my homeland…. which is an absolute gem.
There are few areas of science that can’t be culturally enriched by indigenous science it seems.
Let’s also remember a few years ago the (former, Olympic level woke Jacinda Ardern gvt) financed “Maori psychiatry” to the tune (I did the math myself) of twenty dollars (US) for every NZ citizen.
And then there’s the whale oil rubbing kauri tree scandal. We should follow up on that, see how the trees and whales are doin’.
And The Listener scandal with Univ of AKL (British) Susan Freshwater’s response still …. unforthcoming apparently. We’re not holding our breath.
PCC(E) seems miffed that it appeared in The Conversation.
I respectfully dissent.
The Conversation is well known to publish some REALLY off the wall stuff, some of which has me yelling at my screen (a low bar, I admit, prob about Palestine), so this comes as no surprise.
And I want them to – like I’m very happy when WEIT reports on this nonsense and it gets amplified via Dawkins or Pinker’s twitter/x accounts. And my account since I joined twitter/x.
Without free speech we won’t ever know how horrible and terrible our intellectual enemies are!
“Haeri Ra” (farewell in Maori – my primary school memories!)
D.A.
NYC
(formerly of Remuera, Auckland, circa 1970s and 80s)
Auckland V-C Freshwater resigning as of 2026. Somebody from U Auckland might have inside information.
I’m surprised that the current NZ government coalition, which appears to range from bland Right to ideological nutbar Right, goes along with such obvious nonsense. Anyone know why they have left such an easy target alone?
Fear.
Maybe they have the same attitude many gender criticals have to trans activist palaver: Hey, by all means, #LetThemSpeak! (So the world can see how full of guano they are.)
The current government cut Marsden funding from humanities/social science a few months. I suspect this stuff was from previously approved grants (and explains why funding cuts were made)
Small point of clarification: As many people in the Humanities and Social Sciences (your truly included) pointed out, it was a bit unfair to target HSS for cuts when much of the research that as cited as shoddy or objectionable was funded in STEM and Business.
I bet it was little more than camouflage while they did real work behind the show.
Then, that is even more pathetic.
I’m guessing that this is right. Looking at Dr Winton’s record, she seems to be a serious scientist with a track record of sensible publications. This particular trip seems to have taken place over a year ago, and was mainly for proper scientific worklike taking ice core samples. It looks as if the bogus maramataka junk and the presence of the design person and “maramataka practitioner” was most likely to secure funding. Also “Hoeta, a Maramataka practitioner of the traditional Māori lunar calendar, sought to trace the lands her ancestors had traveled through more than 1,300 years ago.”
https://www.linkedin.com/posts/victoria-university-of-wellington_dr-holly-winton-and-the-university-of-auckland-activity-7178061102885298178-wrE4/
https://statemag.state.gov/2024/09/0924ib03/
While I respect deception and subterfuge, I consider it professionally unethical.
I’d sooner get it done, then say what I did and leave that institution for overseas.
Two points: 1) Many years ago (the 1970s) I would do editing for some of my college friends. A lot of them just couldn’t write well. They would look over their term paper and know it had problems, but they didn’t know how to fix it. Nothing formal; we would meet for beer and I would take it home and clean it up and we would meet for beer again and I’d hand it back, ready to turn in. They would get a better grade and I would get beer. Fair enough. I eventually helped with a few masters theses and a handful of publications, most of them involving anthropology and archaeology. There was one anthropology paper in particular I had real trouble with. I corrected grammar and reorganized part of the presentation for clarity, but I just couldn’t get a handle on it. The author didn’t distinguish between what he had expected to see and what he actually observed. The conclusions were more speculative than I would have expected and it was unclear which conclusions were his own and which were those of previous, uncited researchers. When I gave it back to him, I explained that it had problems I really couldn’t fix and asked him to clarify things. His explanation was a lot clearer than the paper. He had gotten a grant and was expected to produce a publication. The grant proposal was apparently pretty vague; not testing a particular hypothesis or measuring a specific value, but rather a general exploration of a topic. He had really expected to find something interesting and worked hard on it, but nothing came of it. Everything was amorphous and contradicted by something else. He compared it to trying to track down that really amazing story that your roommate’s brother’s cousin’s neighbor swears is true. It sounds so cool, but you just can’t find it. In the end, he had to publish something and this is what he came up with. I know that was a long story, but it’s EXACTLY the impression I get from this paper. For whatever reason, they really expected to find something. Why they thought the Antarctic would line up with material from New Zealand mystifies me, but that might entail “mission creep.” They changed questions and perspectives as they went, but ultimately had to come up with SOMETHING and this is what we got.
2) I have some sympathy with the indigenous folks here. Subsistence living is challenging and you really have to be observant and have a good memory. I am sure that observations involving the correspondences among all kinds of natural phenomena were useful and important. Knowing that the migration of a particular beast meant that the roots of a particular plant were ready to harvest would be important. Organizing all the useful information into a system that made sense or was easy to remember would also be helpful. It could involve the gods or the ebb and flow of unseen forces or whatever. If it meant finding what they needed to keep their families above ground, great. They believed it. Some of them still do. I can’t help but believe that a lot of the desire to shoehorn these beliefs into a state of harmony with modern science comes from people of European ancestry who just think that it OUGHT to be that way out of a simple sense of fairness. They either believe it or are vulnerable to being talked into it. Regardless, it’s anathema to science and they ought to know better.
You do realize, don’t you, that they are trying to organize occurrences in ANTARCTICA to hep them devise a system for subsistence in NEW ZEALAND? (And how many Māori live subsistence lives now? Hardly any. The whole endeavor makes no sense.
Re the imminent resignation of U. Aukland VC Freshwater: we obviously need to
consult the tohu to find out what has happened to her mauri. Of course, it might be a problem with the whakapapa. In that case, treating her (or possibly the entire university) with whale oil might be in order.
Obviously.
HAHAHA! Killin’ me Jon. Their mauri is totally out of whack! Hate it when that happens to me. I lost my mauri last week crossing 8th ave and my whakapapa was shot also. A bad day.
The welcome departure of Ms. Freshwater won’t help a lot, I fear. When an institution is captured utterly the figurehead’s identity doesn’t matter much, they’ll just select a more rabid idiot. I’ve thought about it a lot – I’m not sure how a situation like this can change.
EXCEPT perhaps a grander, larger change of tone and expectations – like the (unfortunate) election of Trump here (by most metrics). One upside was that his election provided some “cover” for those opposed to grow spines and say: “No, no more of this. Call me a racist if you like, but this isn’t 2020 and times have changed.”
Tinkering with the individual Freshwater widgets in the system won’t help.
Watch that Mauri, Jon, it holds the earth together like Rangi and Papa’s alliance.
(hold my beer….)
D.A.
NYC
“The welcome departure of Ms. Freshwater won’t help a lot, I fear. When an institution is captured utterly the figurehead’s identity doesn’t matter much”
Agreed. I think of my NZ colleague who works on 16th and 17th English literature being asked to send a report to the Associate Dean of Research explaining how her research centres Maori ways of knowing.
Lovely double entendre there which many Kiwis will appreciate.
There used to be a rather notorious, conservative blog in NZ called Whale Oil.
Boiling, maybe.
“Shoot me now!”
I laughed out loud.
“Shoot me now!”
I had a different reaction, not of laughter, though I get what Lady M (#13) was about. We will have to live through this madness. Though I may take issue with some items here or there, I appreciate the thought and energy.
It’s been a long day — I certainly can see why how, with this stuff in fresh in mind, you mislabeled Iceland (as N.Z.) this morning. Just, heaven forbid, don’t misgender it. (off topic, hey, how about NHS Fife tribunal this week?)
As a New Zealander, and Victoria University graduate, this is just embarrassing! I thought the whale oil on kauri trees was a low point, but it seems it just gets worse.
The depths of the mystical Dionysian abyss have not been reached.
We ought not to blame Maori en masse for this because it seems to me that their culture has been misappropriated by Woke middle-class university-educated European Marxist captured women on the whole. It is a disgraceful use of another’s culture as a tool in the cult of the “School of Resentment.”
Of course, in NZ we have prominent feminist geographers rising through the ranks to earn $200k to study uterine geographies. Loads of goofiness in academia…maybe feminist geographers think they are scientists, too. Fundamentally, the problem is that most academics don’t have any real ideas. Novel ideas that drive important arguments are extremely rare in academia.
I note that one of the authors is funded by the Rutherford Discovery Fellowship. That certainly wouldn’t be the case if he were around today. The great man wasn’t known for suffering fools too readily.
However, on the plus side, he would probably take the opportunity to update his famous aphorism to a 2025 version:
All science is either physics or Mātauranga Māori!
Once the Conversation stopped having comments on many (perhaps now most?) of its contributions, it was clearly ceasing to be, well, a conversation.
One should also read John McLean’s article on Substack and his look at the Department of Conservation: https://substack.com/home/post/p-168996598?source=queue
As someone who comes from a sciences background but is part Māori, though only speaking a little Māori, it didn’t take me long to figure out that the terms for snow were made up words. These words patterns just don’t seem to flow for me and a quick google search confirms that terms such as hukarangaranga are only associated with the researchers’ article. I have noticed this trend in some medical and psychiatric terms and can’t help but cringe.
I’m another Maori, not a scientist but of a sceptical disposition, and I raised my eyebrows at the improbability of our tupuna (ancestors) having such specific words for different types of snow. Where would be the utility for them?
(My username means ‘cold’, which was probably most of what ancient Maori needed to know about snow.)
Rereading this I now get the feeling they’re just adding this mumbo jumbo to gain funding.
To me that is worse than accepting it as fact. The worst thing a scientist can do is sell out for their own gain.
I would think there would be made-up words, but a response would be “dynamic, evolving” language, etc. Oral histories/traditions also would include made-up remembrances, as what researchers call “feedback” infiltrates the remembered past. Example, the “Roots” legacy (Kunte Kinte) in Gambian oral traditions.