Puanga to take starring role at this year's Matariki celebrations
Ngāti Rangi spokesperson and leading Puanga expert Che Wilson said it was an honour for the iwi to host the ceremony and to be a part of the work that has been done over the past few years by Professor Rangi Mātāmua and all the host iwi – from Te Āti Awa and Ngāti Toa to Te Arawa and last year Ngāi Tahu.
Traditional stories related to Puanga are shared across many iwi across Aotearoa but are prominent on the western side of Te Ika a Maui, including among the iwi of Taranaki, Whanganui and Rangitīkei.
The North Island's main divide of the Tararua, Ruahine and Kaimanawa ranges separates the island's weather systems so Puanga gives iwi on the western side a better read on how to prepare for the year ahead, Wilson said.
'The reason we look to Puanga isn't because we can't see Matariki, there are parts of the region where you can't, but actually the reason we look to Puanga is because Puanga gives us a better read for the weather on the west coast,' he said.
Wilson said traditionally iwi on the west coast would start to observe changes in the weather during autumn, while the months around Matariki were a time to wānanga, to meet and deliberate.
'The thing is that Puanga and Matariki aren't that different, a lot of it is nuance. We do have a separate ceremony done the month before called Te Maru o te Tau where we send all of our mate with the setting sun to the pō, and that's when we call out our names.'
Matariki and Puanga have always gone together in karakia, Wilson said. They also look to other celestial bodies such as the Southern Cross, Atutahi (Canopus) and Rehua (Antares).
'In our karakia we acknowledge Matariki during the mate, as we acknowledge those that have passed, because they become part of te huihui o Matariki. So that's our reference to Matariki but the remainder of the ceremony is actually focused in on looking at Puanga.'
Wilson said it was a beautiful thing that New Zealand was starting to recognise both Matariki and Puanga.
'It's a chance for everybody to go out and send intention to whoever you may call your atua and to make that connection to nature, to the environment.'
The ceremony
Wilson said this year's hautapu ceremony will differ slightly from those broadcast in previous years.
After the opening of the ceremony, the next step is te tākiritanga o ngā mate, invoking those people who have died in the last year, he said.
'We don't call out our mate but we then invoke them to transition to become stars.'
Next is the hautapu proper, the offering of food. But Wilson said instead of offering food to the stars, they are offered to four atua or deities, Tāne, Tangaroa, Rongo and Maru.
'So we give to atua rather than stars, though those atua are also shown in the sky at that time.'
The last part of the ceremony is the whakapūmautanga, where a pou or post is placed into the ground. Wilson said those reciting the karakia bind the pou with intention as they 'commit ourselves to our tūpuna, to our atua and to nature'.
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Scoop
28-05-2025
- Scoop
Kerbside Collections Remain The Same Over King's Birthday
Kerbside rubbish and recycling collections in Hamilton Kirikiriroa will go ahead as normal on King's Birthday (Monday 2 June). Residents should put their bins out on their normal collection day by 7am. Hamilton City Council's Head of Resource Recovery, Sarah Wilson said last month Hamiltonians saved 616,000kg of mixed recycling from landfill. 'If you're not sure an item should go in the recycling bin, head to and search the item – it will tell you which bin it belongs in', said Wilson. Council operates a traffic light system to help educate the community about whether or not they have recycled right. A bin inspector checks yellow recycling bins left on the kerbside for collection. Bins that have unrecyclable items are red or orange tagged to show the owner what items were not recyclable. Wilson said Council recently launched a new green sticker to reward those residents who are getting it right. 'We want to encourage conversations amongst our community about doing the right thing. It's easy to avoid getting a red or orange tag on your recycling bin if you take a few extra moments to check what should go where'. Contaminated recycling items are a common culprit in bins that get tagged. Residents can keep their recycling clean by: rinsing meat trays emptying food out of boxes/containers putting greasy fast-food boxes in the red bin (these cannot be recycled due to grease contamination). Not sure what bin to put out this week? Use the address finder on or download the Antenno app for a weekly reminder before your bin day. For those looking to reuse, recycle, or dispose on Monday 2 June, below are the facility operating hours: Lincoln Street Resource Recovery Centre: 9am – 4pm Habitat for Humanity ReUse store: 9am – 4pm
Newsroom
26-05-2025
- Newsroom
Destroying a Pākehā memorial on Ruapehu
'What pseudonym do you want in my book?' I yelled out. We were climbing up a short section of the Skyline Ridge on Ruapehu. 'Henry,' he called back immediately. Then turned and laughed. 'I dunno, call me whatever you want.' 'Henry' stuck. I didn't know any Henrys in real life, so that helped. The day I had first crossed paths with Henry up on Ruapehu we'd got talking, and he had quietly told me what he'd done. 'That plaque on Girdlestone, I went up and smashed it.' I only had a vague knowledge of the plaque, and the fact that it had been smashed, but Henry pointed me to a post about it on Facebook. Outdoors enthusiast and writer Dave Bamford, one of the authors of Skiing on the Volcano, a book I love, had gone up Girdlestone for the third time at Easter 2021. The climb was in memory of his grandfather Owen Campbell, a keen climber on Ruapehu who had been a member of the party that placed the plaque in 1922. Topping out on the summit of Girdlestone, Bamford found the plaque broken. 'It was initially a shock to discover the granite plaque to Girdlestone had been shattered fairly recently by the ravages of time and nature — frost and thaw,' he wrote in his Facebook post. 'Yes, man passes but the land endures.' Bamford and his party spent an hour or so in good conditions putting together a few of the pieces of the plaque. 'It was a reflective time,' he wrote. 'Memories, families, colonial times and their actions.' Henry had climbed Girdlestone with a mate the summer before Bamford discovered the plaque was broken. Henry had had no idea a plaque existed on the summit, and he was shocked when he found it. After thinking about it a bit, he went back up the next week with the specific intention of destroying the memorial. Grabbing a big rock, he pounded it repeatedly into the face of the plaque. It took many blows to smash the granite tablet, pinned as it was to the large, smooth face of the rock by its four thick copper pins. Finally freeing the tablet, he picked up the shattered pieces and cast them off the peak. Later, after seeing from Dave Bamford's post that the plaque had been partly jigsawed back together, Henry went back in my company to finish the job. * I sat on a rock, staying well clear of Henry as he attempted to remove the copper pins — valves from an old car engine. They were a pale shade of verdigris and protruded about 5 centimetres from the rock. Ugly. A scar on the landscape, on the mountain Ngāti Rangi call Koro — their grandfather, ancestor and the source of their identity. Henry used a hammer to bash at the valves sideways, pushing them around to weaken them on the neck. The sound of the blows echoed off the summit of Tahurangi nearby, creating tinny ding-ding-ding noises. 'The fulla who did this is as white as they come,' he said. 'Who the fuck are you to come up here and put this up here? Go and plant a fucking tree, a tōtara or a rātā or something that's going to be around for ages. Plant it in your backyard and go sit under it, for fuck's sake.' He picked up his ice axe and used the sharp adze, knocking the hammer on the shaft to create an indent in the neck of the valves. Then, once the indent was sizeable enough, he went back to knocking the head of the valve around with the hammer. Soon enough the first one popped off. I picked it up to examine it, surprised at its heft. The oxidised green had been sheared off by the hammer, revealing bright copper in the spots where it had been hit, and on the inside stem, after it had been protected from the elements for more than 100 years. 'From back in the day when they made things to last,' Henry observed as he handed me another one. Huge bugs were crawling over the summit, overly friendly in their approach, and whenever the breeze dropped, clouds of sandflies plagued us. A bug got in Henry's way. We were, after all, disturbing their home, crusading invaders in their peaceful environment. 'Look out, bug, you'll wear it,' Henry warned as he brandished the hammer. 'There are people on top of Tahurangi,' I said. My eyesight wasn't great, but I could see something in the distance. Clouds were beginning to form around us, lower down in the rugged and craggy Wahianoa catchment on the northeastern side, hiding the faraway terrain from view. 'Fucking white people and their sense of entitlement,' Henry said, referring possibly to the climbers on Tahurangi, the mountaineers who had placed the plaque a century ago, or humans in general. I didn't ask him to expand. The last valve popped off. Henry straightened up, released the hammer and picked up his water bottle. He gazed around, then bowed his head to the scarred rock face. 'Sorry, mate, couldn't get it all out this trip.' The valves had stuck fast and refused to come out cleanly, so the stems were still embedded inside the rock. Four round scars told the tale, each with a broken piece of copper stem shining brightly. Hopefully they'd fade over time. Henry had wanted to chuck the broken tablet off the peak again, but we decided to take it down, to remove it from the terrain and environment entirely; I felt that throwing it off the peak would change it from history into rubbish. We split up the pieces, Henry stronger and fitter, and carrying a lot more of the load than I did, while I stashed the weighty valves and springs in the top pocket of my pack. I'd found an old newspaper report that indicated the tablet weighed nearly 16 kilograms, and the valves would have been extra. We took a final look at the last of the scenery below that was still visible from the summit. 'Koro's let us up today,' Henry observed. A thin wisp of mist flicked through from the south, between me and Henry. Koro had let us up, but now it was time to go. * Much of the time I had spent watching Henry abuse the valves until they succumbed had been filled with anxiety about the descent. These things are always worse inside your head, though, and the way back down was achievable, a lot easier than I'd imagined. However, I did have to lower my pack down to Henry through the most difficult section of the gully. The rock that formerly bore the plaque, with the remnants of the valve stems. It helped that the terrain below us was hidden from view behind cloud, which had touched us on the way down from the peak. Reaching a tongue of snow, we donned crampons in the mist and descended a short, steep section to the gentler slopes of the Mangaehuehu Glacier. 'We'll need to boogie across this bit,' Henry said. Rocks were falling, creating brown streaks in the snow underneath a small bluff. Henry went first. Neither of us had brought helmets, but our heads stayed intact. I felt Koro's protection in the enveloping cloud — like a hug, but also a gentle push back to the bottom of the mountain. Despite the fog that now surrounded us, we managed to find our way back to our exact entry point onto the glacier. I dropped my pack and refilled my water bottle from a nearby stream, snow-fed and refreshing. We had a snack break and cycled through conversation topics, constantly returning to Girdlestone and the plaque. 'I'd be so embarrassed if someone put a plaque up for me because I fell off a mountain or something,' Henry said. 'I'd fucking haunt them.' Henry told me he has some Māori heritage somewhere in his family, but he's never really been engaged in te ao Māori. 'I don't say Pākehā or European or even New Zealand European when I have to tick the box on the forms,' he said. 'I just say I'm a New Zealander. I don't think you need to be Māori to want to see the backcountry kept clear of this shit. Why do we feel the need to mark wherever we've been?' A mildly abbreviated chapter extracted with kind permission from the newly published illustrated history Fire and Ice: Secrets, histories, treasures and mysteries of Tongariro National Park by Hazel Phillips (Massey University Press, $49.99), available in bookstores nationwide. It will be reviewed in ReadingRoom on Thursday.
NZ Herald
04-05-2025
- NZ Herald
Puanga to take starring role at this year's Matariki celebrations
Ngāti Rangi spokesperson and leading Puanga expert Che Wilson said it was an honour for the iwi to host the ceremony and to be a part of the work that has been done over the past few years by Professor Rangi Mātāmua and all the host iwi – from Te Āti Awa and Ngāti Toa to Te Arawa and last year Ngāi Tahu. Traditional stories related to Puanga are shared across many iwi across Aotearoa but are prominent on the western side of Te Ika a Maui, including among the iwi of Taranaki, Whanganui and Rangitīkei. The North Island's main divide of the Tararua, Ruahine and Kaimanawa ranges separates the island's weather systems so Puanga gives iwi on the western side a better read on how to prepare for the year ahead, Wilson said. 'The reason we look to Puanga isn't because we can't see Matariki, there are parts of the region where you can't, but actually the reason we look to Puanga is because Puanga gives us a better read for the weather on the west coast,' he said. Wilson said traditionally iwi on the west coast would start to observe changes in the weather during autumn, while the months around Matariki were a time to wānanga, to meet and deliberate. 'The thing is that Puanga and Matariki aren't that different, a lot of it is nuance. We do have a separate ceremony done the month before called Te Maru o te Tau where we send all of our mate with the setting sun to the pō, and that's when we call out our names.' Matariki and Puanga have always gone together in karakia, Wilson said. They also look to other celestial bodies such as the Southern Cross, Atutahi (Canopus) and Rehua (Antares). 'In our karakia we acknowledge Matariki during the mate, as we acknowledge those that have passed, because they become part of te huihui o Matariki. So that's our reference to Matariki but the remainder of the ceremony is actually focused in on looking at Puanga.' Wilson said it was a beautiful thing that New Zealand was starting to recognise both Matariki and Puanga. 'It's a chance for everybody to go out and send intention to whoever you may call your atua and to make that connection to nature, to the environment.' The ceremony Wilson said this year's hautapu ceremony will differ slightly from those broadcast in previous years. After the opening of the ceremony, the next step is te tākiritanga o ngā mate, invoking those people who have died in the last year, he said. 'We don't call out our mate but we then invoke them to transition to become stars.' Next is the hautapu proper, the offering of food. But Wilson said instead of offering food to the stars, they are offered to four atua or deities, Tāne, Tangaroa, Rongo and Maru. 'So we give to atua rather than stars, though those atua are also shown in the sky at that time.' The last part of the ceremony is the whakapūmautanga, where a pou or post is placed into the ground. Wilson said those reciting the karakia bind the pou with intention as they 'commit ourselves to our tūpuna, to our atua and to nature'.
