Whetuu Do Not Arrive, They Return ☆

Written by Piremina Ngapera (she/her) | @piremina | Contributing Writer

Illustration by Maia Staples-Fletcher (she/her) | @maia_sfletch | Contributing Artist

Long before calendars were fixed on walls and screens, my tiipuna looked to the eastern horizon before dawn, where Matariki returned with the midwinter sky. Its rising marks the close of one year and the beginning of another. Yet to call it simply "the Maaori New Year" feels incomplete. 

Across Aotearoa, not every iwi watches for Matariki. Some look instead to Puaka, shaped by how they see the whetuu from Te Waipounamu. Heoi ano Matariki or Puaka is a conversation between the heavens and the earth, where whetuu, tides, forests, birds and people belong to one another. 

Ngaa tuahine tokoiwa (The nine sisters) 

Tupuaanuku is the body of return. The soil that takes everything back. What is buried becomes life. Food, bone, memory, root. All of it softened into the whenua.

Tupuaarangi is the breath above the body. Birds, wind, haa. Things that pass through the sky.

Waitii sits in fresh water. Rivers and streams that have carried fish, ash, tears, grief, and love. 

Waitaa is the ocean, tides pulling us back to the hands of our making. 

Waipunarangi is rain. What rises finds another way to return.

Ururangi is the space between things. What is unseen to the eye still exists. 

Hiwa-i-te-rangi is Wanting. Waiting. Wishing. The dreams we entrust to the darkness before dawn.

Poohutukawa holds the mate. She is where we continue when our tinana no longer remains in the physical realm. 

Matariki are the irises of Taawhirimatea. 

Astronomy was never separate from agriculture. Weather was never separate from spirituality. One could not exist without the other. The whetuu, nine star sisters, were companions of everyday life, leading decisions about cultivation, food-gathering, community and death. The environment does not move through time–it cycles through us. Through everything that lives and no longer does. 

With the rising of Matariki came the names of those who had passed since the previous rising. Their names were gently spoken into the morning and carried skyward in karakia before dawn. To honour those who had returned to the whenua we also give thanks for the kai that had risen from it. Grief and love do not end; they continue through the same relationship between land and living. In a world that often rushes us toward what comes next, we begin by looking back. 

Only then could hopes for the coming year be shared. 

In recent years, Matariki has entered public life, becoming Aotearoa’s first public holiday grounded in te ao Maaori. Engari me maumahara, the whetuu were always here. They were here before the fences. Before the roads. Before the names we gave months. Before we counted years on phones instead of in frost & rebirth & soil. 

Remember that life is not a straight line stretching away from us, but something that circles. The season. The harvest. The grief. The love. The generations. We are not separate from it, we are made from it. 

The sisters do not appear, they return and are quietly watching us do the same. ⋆⭒˚｡⋆