An Open Letter to Te Ara Encyclopedia of New Zealand

This article is very racist and we should use it to learn an open, judgement-free lesson about history, racist influences, and accidental bigotry.

Kia Ora,

I was reading about the history New Zealand Timekeeping and I think I may have identified a factual error on this page from 2006:

Page 1. Time past - Te Ara: The Encyclopedia of New Zealand

[The rest of the Te Ara article is included for substack readers]

In Europe other markers also evolved. The seven days of the week had been established for over 1,000 years, and Christianity recognised Sunday as a day of rest. From about 1600 onwards people accepted a 24-hour daily cycle, its passage told by sundials and water clocks.

In the 18th century, during the era of the Enlightenment, scientific observation began to replace traditional ideas, including ways of telling time. In 1752 Britain adopted the Gregorian calendar. This adjusted the number of days in the year by using leap days, so that the calendar corresponded with the natural (solar) year.

The 18th century also saw increasing numbers of the élite owning large pendulum clocks and pocket watches driven by springs. Eight years before James Cook reached New Zealand in 1769, English clockmaker John Harrison invented a working chronometer. This enabled navigators to tell their longitude by measuring the time difference between their local noon, and noontime at the Royal Observatory, Greenwich, England. Cook did not have a chronometer on his first voyage, but he had four on his second voyage (1772–75), partly in order to test them.

Social advances encouraged more exact timekeeping. City dwellers wanted to meet at fixed times to transact business or to attend events such as church services or concerts. As a complex industrial society emerged, the need for accurate time became greater. Factory workers had to conform to timetables, to ensure that everyone in the production line was present when the machinery was switched on. They were paid according to time, not task, and began to distinguish between home and work – ‘owner’s time and own time’.

When settlers came to New Zealand in numbers in the 1840s, some were already thinking in terms of agreed timetables. In February 1840, it is said, Samuel Parnell laid down the conditions under which he would work: ‘There are twenty-four hours per day given us; eight of these should be for work, eight for sleep, and the remaining eight for recreation’. ¹ Wellington workers followed his lead in campaigning for the eight-hour day; there were similar demands in Dunedin in early 1849, and in Christchurch.

My Complaint

The waxing and the waning of the moon is unlikely to have been used by Maori for timekeeping because a lunar cycle as we know it is 29.5 days, which gives a year 13 months. Maori, like us, had 12 months, which means they must have been observing a sidereal month, which measures the moon in relation to the location of the stars. Our calender, which comes from Rome, is nowhere near as scientific and basically exists because none of our maths lined up: at a best guess, it was probably based on an early tribal calendar based around the menstrual cycle or the moon phase cycle, and then this combined with religious and political interference in the astronomical arts gave us 1000 years of calendar development into the bizarre division of days we have now. (Check out the wikipedia page — if you fancy a headache)

Roman Calendar - Wikipedia [Excerpt]

The original Roman calendar is usually believed to have been an observational lunar calendar whose months ended and began from the new moon. Because a lunar cycle is about 29.5 days long, such months would have varied between 29 and 30 days. Twelve such months would have fallen 10 or 11 days short of the solar year and, without adjustment, such a year would have quickly rotated ...

Considering that, I think this article is quite inaccurate and frames Maori as incredibly primitive, when in reality their means of time measurement was natural and based on "natural rhythms" but in a way that was actually more "scientific" than their colonial occupiers, whose logic for the division of days was so old it had been lost to time. The issue was neither of these groups had written it down. (And if one did, we've since lost it).

Some of this knowledge I reference is recent and so likely was not available to the author at the time.

I realise this might just seem a justified simplification of a complex historical idea shortened for a non-historically-knowledgeable audience, but I think it's actually a bigger issue than that, and the fault is that this article is severely outdated and needs rewriting.

The inaccuracy of the perspective of this piece creates a really racist framing that has probably contributed to some of the misunderstanding over the past 20 years around what matauranga Maori is, which has led to the recent political pullback from the public embracing indigenous cultures that we see today -- for example, a lot of outrage was generated a few years ago around the idea of teaching matauranga Maori in science because maori are seen as primitive and unscientific, and this became a highly partisan issue born of ignorance. Claims like the this article makes feed into a narrative of white dominance and supremacy — where anything the colonising power does HAS to be inherently superior because WE were the ones discovering THEM, so how could it be the other way around?

When in actual fact, the assumptions about the 'unsophistication' of Maori that could be made safely back in 2006 perhaps can't be so boldly claimed 20 years later, and this arrogant assumption we've held for 200 years has caused us to lose valuable knowledge that should have been the birthright of our nation.

Hopefully you can help in this matter. This is an open letter that will be published on my substack, as I think it's a very informative lesson for all of us on how information is conveyed, and I would like others to be able to learn from it too.

Ngā mihi and thank you very much for your assistance,

[Sapphi]

[Minor edits made for clarity]