A critical analysis of Māori cosmologies and the tyranny of epistemic western centrism

ABSTRACT

In this article, I traverse Māori positionality informing Māori worldviews, alongside geohistorical navigational trajectories of knowledge. Drawing on ancestral travel which utilized sophisticated readings of stars, currents, winds, clouds, contexts and colours of the biodiversity to navigate, the concept of wayfinding as methodology and method is used to recentre mātauranga Māori (Māori knowledge). Mātauranga Māori accumulates in the continuum of time, past, present and future. There are many ways to capture knowledge. This article draws on ‘wayfinding’ through a critical analysis of mātauranga Māori and its denigration through imperialism. It is argued that unless educationalists lead a collective challenge, the masculinist, materialist, secular, individualistic, extractive western colonial project will continue to inflict harmful discourses on Indigenous peoples and lands. Decolonizing western epistemologies and ontologies challenge both this ongoing damage as well as the histories of denigration by seeking to restore and re-centre Māori ways of being, knowing, doing and relating.

KEYWORDS:

• Wayfinding
• indigenous cosmologies
• Mātauranga Māori
• Mana Wahine
• patriarchal power
• colonialism
• indigeneity

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Marae are sacred lands including the complex of buildings around the marae.