Matariki in New Zealand 2027

New Zealand's newest public holiday

Matariki is a national public holiday in New Zealand, created by Te Ture mō te Hararei Tūmatanui o Te Kāhui o Matariki, the Te Kāhui o Matariki Public Holiday Act 2022. It was only the fifth dual-language bill introduced in the New Zealand Parliament, and the holiday is the first in the country's calendar drawn from mātauranga Māori, the knowlege system of the Indigenous people of Aotearoa New Zealand. Every employee is entitled to the day: schools, banks and government offices close, and anyone who works receives at least time and a half plus an alternative holiday, the New Zealand term for a day in lieu. The first Matariki public holiday was Friday, June 24, 2022.

What Matariki is

Matariki is the star cluster Americans know as the Pleiades, in the constellation Taurus. The name is generally explained as a shortening of Ngā Mata o te Ariki Tāwhirimātea, the eyes of the god of winds, and in the account carried by the Tūhoe astroonmer Professor Rangi Matamua the cluster holds nine stars, each connected to part of the natural world: Matariki itself with wellbeing, Pōhutukawa with those who have died, Waitī with fresh water, Waitā with the ocean, Waipuna-ā-rangi with rain, Ururangi with the winds, Tupu-ā-nuku with food grown in the ground, Tupu-ā-rangi with food from the sky, and Hiwa-i-te-rangi with hopes for the year ahead - the cluster drops from the night sky in Haratua and reappears low on the northeastern horizon before dawn in the month of Pipiri, in midwinter. That reappearance marks Te Mātahi o te Tau, the start of the Māori year. Some iwi, particulary in Whanganui, Taranaki, the Far North and the South Island, mark the new year by the star Puanga, or Puaka, which Americans know as Rigel, because Matariki is harder to see clearly from those places.

How the date is set

The date is not calculated from a Western calendar rule. It is fixed by the Maramataka, the Māori lunar calendar: the holiday falls on the Friday closest to the Tangaroa phase of the moon during Pipiri, so it moves within late June and early July, a Matariki Advisory Group of Māori astronomers and knowledge holders, chaired by Professor Matamua and including Hoturoa Barclay-Kerr, Rereata Makiha, Victoria Campbell, Dr Pauline Harris, Dr Ruakere Hond and Jack Thatcher, worked out dates for three decades and those dates run through 2052 in the schedule to the Act. Because the holiday is always a Friday, it never needs to be Mondayised.

Observance and revival

Traditional practice centered on the whāngai i te hautapu ceremony, in which food is offerred to the stars at dawn, alongside remembrance of those who had died since the last rising, the harvest, and reading the cluster for the season ahead. Observance faded after colonization and was revived from 2000, when Te Rangi Huata organized a Ngāti Kahungunu celebration in Hastings that drew around five hundred people; research and broadcasting by Professor Matamua, and programming by Te Papa and the Māori Language Commission, carried it nationwide. The holiday is now framed around three ideas: remembering the dead, celebrating the present, and looking to the future. Dawn ceremonies, community festivals, light installations and family meals fill the long weekend, in the coldest part of the New Zealand winter.