TE PAERANGI: DARKNESS AND LIGHT IN MĀORI ORAL TRADITION A Thesis in Partial Fulfilment of the Requirements for the Degree of Master of Arts in Māori and Indigenous Studies at the University of Canterbury Jessica Niurangi Mary Maclean Ngāti Kahu, Ngāti Hine, Clan O’Hara, Clan Maclean University of Canterbury 2021 Abstract Darkness and Light have come to have particular associations in Western thought. Light is associated with Goodness, Knowledge, and Reason, the dichotomising impulse of the West rendering Darkness as Evil, Ignorance, and Superstition. This valorisation, however, is not universal; what do Māori oral traditions say about Darkness and Light? How might we attend to these traditions in a manner that engages their epistemic potential, rather than treating them as products of culture? In order to respond to these questions, a methodology is developed in which thinking, as whaka aro, is rehabilitated as method in its own right. If certainty and clarity represent the desiderata of academic inquiry, with reason its sine qua non, whaka aro extends the notion of thought while refusing the epistemic demands of the academy. This thesis is an attempt to reinvigorate a Māori epistemology through sustained acts of whaka aro that treat oral traditions as capable of producing new knowledge in the epistemic-wilderness-as-freedom. ii Acknowledgements I gratefully acknowledge the generous support of Ngā Pae o te Maramatanga and New Horizons Trust for Women, and the Ngāi Tahu Research Centre. Constrained by economic imperatives, as many Māori women are, I could not have continued my postgraduate studies without the two scholarships I received. Words cannot sufficiently express my thanks. To my supervisors, Sacha McMeeking and Garrick Cooper, thank you for supporting, advising, and challenging me; your impact on me has been profound. To my wider Aotahi whānau, I will always be grateful to and for you. To Tupuranga and The Physics Room, thank you for believing in and publishing my work. I am also grateful for the efforts of Julian Vesty in proofreading the final draft of the thesis. Any errors contained within are my own. To my whānau and friends, here and in Te Pō, thank you for loving and believing in me. I am fortunate enough that you are too many to name here, but I hold your names in my heart. To my whānaunga, the eels and birds to whom I constantly (re)turned in the final stages of the research process. Thank you for reminding me of the beauty, the agency, and the mystery of the world. To Rachel, for the depth of your loyalty and the fierceness of your love. For everything, thank you. iii Table of Contents Abstract .................................................................................................................................... ii List of Figures ............................................................................................................................ vi Vanishing Point ......................................................................................................................... 1 Introduction ............................................................................................................................. 10 Chapter 1. He Ara Pāwhati: Towards a New Methodology .................................................. 13 Theory ...............................................................................................................................................18 Methodology.....................................................................................................................................26 Chapter 2. Surveying the Landscape ...................................................................................... 36 Chapter 3. Tiwhatiwha te Pō .................................................................................................. 50 Becoming in the Night ......................................................................................................................55 Whiro .................................................................................................................................................68 Whiro and Mercury ......................................................................................................................................76 Whiro and other astronomical phenomena ...............................................................................................83 Hine-Nui-Te-Pō ..................................................................................................................................89 Chapter 4. Ruku i Te Ao ......................................................................................................... 102 When Day Breaks ............................................................................................................................104 The Sun .......................................................................................................................................................107 Te Ao Marama ............................................................................................................................................113 When Light Strikes ..........................................................................................................................117 Hine-kohurangi ..........................................................................................................................................122 Chapter 5. He Taumata: A Place to Rest. ............................................................................. 135 iv Chapter 6. He Kōrero Tāwera ............................................................................................... 142 Ko te Titi o te Rua: Beyond the Event Horizon ..................................................................... 151 Bibliography .......................................................................................................................... 165 v List of Figures Figure 1. Mercury rising and setting against the sun. Astronomical Information. New Zealand Nautical Almanac 2019–20, 17……………………………………………………………..p.65 Figure 2. Venus rising and setting against the sun. Astronomical Information. New Zealand Nautical Almanac 2019–20, 17……………………………………………………………..p.76 vi Vanishing Point1 He kokonga whare e kitea, he kokonga ngākau e kore e kitea. A corner of a house may be seen and examined, not so the corners of the heart. An high look, and a proud heart, and the plowing of the wicked, is sin. Proverbs 21:4 Martin Jay describes Descartes’ metaphysical dualism as the point at which, “the radical opposition of viewing subject and viewed object supplant earlier ontological ways of being immersed in the world”.2 Such a metaphysics results in various “scopic regimes”, which privilege the eye as providing direct access to the world, and collapse seeing into knowing. Knowledge is yoked conceptually and linguistically to sight: I see what you mean; my perspective is such-and-such; you’ve lost sight of the bigger picture; seeing is believing. The viewed object is known, or at least, reduced to the knowable through the gaze of the viewing subject. The gaze mediates the supposed ontological distance between the two, but (from the viewer’s perspective, anyway) is strictly one-way; the abyss may gaze back, but does the painting? // sight mediates the distance between us but we touch that which we are a part of / 1 Jessica Maclean. “Vanishing Point”. Hamster Ono (2020). I thank and acknowledge The Physics Room for first publishing this piece. 2 Jay Martin, Essays from the Edge: Parerga and Paralipomena, (University of Virginia Press, 2011), 53. The opposition between subject and object underlies both the act of scientific observation and seeing more generally, all the while bearing a relation to knowing and understanding. It suggests the possibility of direct and objective access to an external and knowable reality, without the messy entanglements of subjectivity and the ever-present whiff of complicity.3 What illicitly escapes scrutiny in scopic regimes is a metaphysical hierarchy in which some physical sense coupled with rationality is taken as the basis for knowledge. According to this kind of Enlightenment thinking, we come to belief and understanding through observation and reason. God is dead. Beliefs may be either true or justified but must be both to qualify as knowledge. Let us not forget that the oppositional binary of subject / object is also the basis of the colonial project. As Lewis Gordon reminds us, racism is the fundamental denial of reality; the reality of the humanity of the Other.4 Much easier to cause harm to those who are seen as both wholly separate and in a lesser category of being; an attitude frequently taken against Nature. // i came, i saw , i conquered but o god i’m going to have to stop eating meat / 3 For example, the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle implies not only that the act of observation affects what is observed, but that reality may not exist until it is observed. 4 Gordon R. Lewis, “Bad faith and antiblack racism: A study in the philosophy of Jean-Paul Sartre”, (PhD dissertation, Yale University, 1994), 98. 2 The radical disjunct between subject and object lies in stark contrast to the relationality inherent in a Māori cosmogony. According to the taxonomies of whakapapa, there is no fundamental distinction between the human and so-called natural worlds, and more importantly, there is little distinction between the physical and spiritual