Temporal lies: A decolonial account of denatured seasonal celebrations in Aotearoa New Zealand

Abstract

Politics, society, order, nature, natural rhythms and the climate are changing so fast they are like quicksilver, too slippery to grasp, splintering into new shapes the moment they seem containable. This is the end state of processes begun with colonial expansion, and the lies used to excuse colonial desecration of Peoples, lands, waters, of all that abided by natural cycles and limits. The article casts a lens over one ‘insignificant’ set of lies that forced northern seasonal temporalities upon the southern hemisphere's natural and cultural rhythms. It claims this was/is one aspect of the desire of settlers to dominate the natural in Aotearoa New Zealand and reflects on the ongoing legacies of suppression of the natural. Using the introduction of a ‘new’ winter celebration and public holiday – Matariki – as the catalyst for reviewing an upside-down celebratory calendar imposed by the settler colonial regime atop the seasonal patterns of the islands, it suggests it is little surprise that in a culture built on such obvious mismatched mistruths, it is not hard to convince either oneself or others that climate change is not real, that pollution is a small price to pay for industrialisation and so forth. I argue that these temporal lies are the forebears of the polycrisis and global turbulence.

Hauhake tū, ka tō Matariki

The harvest ends when Matariki sets

In Aotearoa New Zealand, ¹ we have a ‘new’ public holiday. ‘Introduced’ in 2022, Matariki is a Māori mid-winter celebration, a time for reflecting on the year past, remembrance for those who have died, and a celebration of the start of a new year ahead. To those reading this article from the United Kingdom or the United States, for instance, such a mid-winter event seems normal – it is akin to the celebration of New Year when the days are short and cold seeps into your bones. So why all those scare quotes in the first two sentences? Each emphasised word is loaded with colonial logics of temporality: not only did British settlers come to these motu (islands) to stay, they imposed across the whenua (land), awa (rivers), roto (lakes) and moana (sea) and on ngā tāngata (the Peoples) a temporal regime that grew from the cosmos, soils, air, waters and natural cycles of the British Isles, cycles that responded to the natural rhythms of their home-place's seasonality and logics. That is, instead of responding to the rhythms of the southern hemisphere, they bent nature out of shape.

Aotearoa New Zealand's seasonal celebrations deny the patent truth that the seasons are the polar opposite to those being celebrated. Put differently, the seasonal celebrations were and are denatured to fit the settlers’ yearnings: They ‘ignore relational connections between humans [, …] more-than-human worlds [and the cosmos]’ (Anker, 2022: 18). And so it has been and is on these motu that New Year is celebrated in accord with the Gregorian calendar on the cusp between the thirty-first of December and the first of January, with a holiday, fireworks and resolutions: it is, however, a mid-summer event in Aotearoa New Zealand.

My purpose here is to examine those (illogical) colonial impositions and the disinformation and lies of colonialism, as the preconditions for denial of climate change science, toleration of terra(de)formation in pursuit of mineral extraction, acceptance of species extinctions and overconsumption that are the forebears of the turbulence faced by the planet, and the polycrisis. My argument is that the settlers of New Zealand, and the subsequent governments dominated by settlers and settler descendants, have always tolerated mistruths for the sake of maintaining familiar rhythms of life, even as physical evidence contradicts their position. My proposition is, therefore, that it is unsurprising that in face of the polycrisis and radically changed climate regimes the government is able to devise policy that will exacerbate environmental decline and climate change. This is not a political essay per se, I deal here with the temporal, but include this note as a directional prompt to the unfolding observations.

Keeping in mind its decolonial orientation, this article takes the following form: it starts with a discussion of the illogic of the ‘rational settler’, those who came to civilise ‘the native’; human, animal, plant, landform, waters and the seasons. It moves then to the significance of Matariki in the Māori calendar, and expands into the broader ramifications of settler (un)seasonal and temporal impositions as one example of the colonial imaginary of domination over the natural realm. After establishing those illogics it examines the incremental potential of orienting the country's seasonal celebrations to the natural cadences of the southern climes, suggesting the recognition of Matariki is a potential moment for the country to (re)locate itself authentically in southern timescape (Adam, 1998) and as a member of the family of motu (islands) in Te Moana nui a Kiwa (the Pacific Ocean) rather than as a distant subordinate of the British Isles. It concludes by reflecting on the ugliness of false narratives – whether of freedom or temporality – and their perpetuation through political inaction despite abundant evidence of changing climate regimes, biodiversity loss, inequality and inequity that are the features of the polycrisis. The thrust of my argument is that it is unsurprising that the lies of climate change denialism, obfuscation over ecosystemic collapse and a rigid adherence to ‘business as usual’ despite the evidence of the unravelling of natural and cultural systems embedded in the word polycrisis ² and roiling of turbulence (Dauvergne and Shipton, 2023) across the planet, are easily promulgated and accepted by and within a culture that blindly accepts temporal celebrations fit in and to their directly opposed seasons.

The illogic of the ‘rational’ settler

Out of step with nature, New Zealand's New Year celebrations occur when plants (whether native or settler-introduced) are in a phase of full growth, fledglings have left or are leaving nests, and lambs and calves (species introduced by the settlers that dot the landscape like punctuation marks of colonialism) have lost their irrational sproing. New Zealand celebrates New Year bang! in the middle of the solar and lunar year when nature is in full productive flight. I reflect in the following pages on settler illogic and repression of the long-time Māori astronomical science (Whaanga and Matamua, 2016), and cultural, economic, and temporal rhythms that march in time to nature's seasons and daily, monthly, and annual solar and lunar cycles. Holding decoloniality at the forefront, I consider, too, the potential of a seasonal and temporal coherence that responds to the rhythms of this antipodean place ³ – this-place-other-than-Britain. The denaturing of the seasons is integral to the pathology of universalism and the lies of anthropocentrism and human-outside-of-nature that rest at the heart of the polycrisis, which leaves communities across the globe in a constant state of turbulence (Dauvergne and Shipton, 2023). Faced with repeated one-in-one-hundred-year disasters in contracted time, so frequent that no Earth being (de la Cadena et al., 2015) is able to fully recover from one event before the next intervenes, is dis-ordering all semblance of normality.

The polycrisis and turbulence are, I argue, the culmination of colonial ⁴ wilful denial of what is, of the tangled interrelationships between all Earth beings, including elements and inanimate matter, earth, water, and cosmos. The imposition of the colonists’ seasonal temporalities on Aotearoa is an example of settler illogic and wilful ignorance that has, among other disturbances, precipitated the ‘great unraveling.’ ⁵ This article is about colonial imposition, and the disinformation and lies of colonialism rather than time-as-labour, clock time or capitalism per se. It is an attempt to explain aspects of the ease with which people allow themselves to be convinced of an otherwise in the very face of the opposite (be that in relation to climate change, water quality versus farm expansion, vaccine efficacy, bi-culturalism, etc.). ⁶ Let me explain.

Late June marks the moment of the deep southern winter – the winter solstice, the time when the air, earth, and waters cool and all (sensible) living things slow – to recuperate and revive from the exertion of the past year – in preparation for regrowth and flourishing when sunlight hours increase and the southern hemisphere rewarms. Māori, drawing on their ‘extensive knowledge of the night sky’ (Whaanga and Matamua, 2016: 60), mark the mid-winter with reference to Matariki, the name given to both a celestial constellation and the ancient mid-winter traditions shared across southern Pacific islands. ⁷ When Matariki re-emerges on the night horizon after a period of absence, it signals the deep winter mid-point of one southern lunar-year cycle and the slow emergence of the next. That is, it mirrors, 6 months before or after depending on your perspective, the seasonal logics of the British New Year where in mid-winter humans stop, rest from labours, contemplate the past and prepare for the coming seasons of activity, as does the rest of nature. However, New Zealand ⁸ also designates first January in the height of the southern summer but the date of the British deep winter, the start of each New Year and the gradual lengthening of daylight hours. All topsy turvy New Zealanders cease work in the zenith of the naturally productive season and head off for weeks of holiday. That is, this imported cultural framework of seasonality is adrift from the natural cycles to which, from earliest times, humans have adapted their ‘activities and rituals’ (Bremer and Schneider, 2024: 1).

The annual celebrations of the British colonist – Christmas, New Year, Easter – each part of the seasonal rhythm of those colonists’ home-place – are upside down and about face translocated to Aotearoa. They force themselves upon seasons where they do not belong: quintessentially colonial and out of place they subordinate that which is natural to Aotearoa to the seasonality of settler origins, for the sake of maintaining those settlers’ ‘common temporal reference points’ (Bremer and Schneider, 2024: 3). The Gregorian calendar, Christian feasts and British seasonal celebrations are an imposition that privileges colonial (il)logics and force an (unnatural) recalibration of southern temporal rhythms to global formations. At this point, I am sure you have gleaned the purpose of that earlier barrage of scare quotes: Matariki is an ancient practice (not new); rather than a ‘holiday’ it is a time to gather family together, of commemorating those who have died, and a time for delineating hopes and making plans for the coming year. It is the time when kainga mara (communal food gardens associated with the kainga – home/village/settlement) are left to recover and nature prepares to renew. Finally, the scare quotes question the validity of any claim that one might introduce an event that predates the earliest human occupation of the land, housed in the sinews of the Peoples, airs, lands and waters of this place. That is, it asks how does one introduce a celestial and seasonal event that is as old as the cosmos?

Now we shift focus from the British settler to Aotearoa from where my ancestors, my partner, my children and I come. My heritage is at times an uncomfortable mix: Māori (Ngāti Kahungunu ki te Wairoa) and settler, colonised and coloniser, oppressed and oppressor, and I note part of my privilege links back to the slave labour sugar plantations of British Guiana that Locke sought to legitimise and Elisabeth Anker (2022) critiques.

Matariki: A ‘new’ national celebration

Ka mahuta a Matariki i te pae, ka mahuta ō tatou tūmanako ki te tau

When Matariki rises above the horizon, our aspirations rise to the year ahead

In 2022, the Labour-Greens coalition government of Aotearoa New Zealand, a left leaning neo-liberal government, announced the introduction of a new statutory public holiday – one day off for all workers – to be held at the time when the Matariki constellation begins its rise above the horizon and into the night skies (Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment Hīkina Whakatutuki, 2022). It is a ‘feast’ that moves as nature moves, with celestial movements, so the date – and even month – will vary year to year as the earth and stars perform their elliptical dances. It is a mid-winter holiday – and in June/July it is one that is out of step with the northern hemisphere's calendar and celestial cycle, Holy days, and annual celebrations. This is a celebration in step with nature's rhythms born of Maori observation and knowledge-building of the cosmos and land (Whaanga and Matamua, 2016). Matariki, as the holiday is called, is sliding into the nation's Gregorian calendar and postcolonial imaginations as a permanent mid-winter event and for some as a moment to consider who Aotearoa New Zealand is in the world and to build on and enhance its distinct identity: a nation with a rich and distinctive Māori Pacific-based culture and heritage (Hardy, 2012;Whaanga and Matamua, 2016).

When announcing the Matariki holiday, the government stated that they were ‘committed to ensuring that mātauranga Māori ⁹ is at the heart of celebrations’ (Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment Hīkina Whakatutuki, 2022) and that it should be a solemn occasion for recognising those things that mid-winter represents in cultures across the world, although in a uniquely Māori way. The three named foci are: ‘Remembrance – Honouring those we have lost since the last rising of Matariki; Celebrating the present – Gathering together to give thanks for what we have; and Looking to the future – Looking forward to the promise of a new year’ (Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment Hīkina Whakatutuki, 2022). The principles of Matariki are those of cosmic interconnection, of community, kindness, generosity, sharing, and loves – lost, present and to come. It was/is ‘celebrated more extensively and religiously than any other natural occurrence’ by Māori (Matamua 2013 in Whaanga and Matamua, 2016: 65). ¹⁰ Matariki is then New Zealand's first and only national public holiday steeped in southern hemispheric cosmic rhythms and Māori Pacific cultural and spiritual roots. In Aotearoa, the rising of the Matariki constellation (also known as Pleiades) occurs while the sun is (or has recently been/will be) at its greatest distance from this place and signals the slow lengthening of the daylight hours. It is the first public holiday to deviate from the colonial universalising fantasy of forcing the world to Britain's image – always knowing, always reminding that that reflected, inverted image is never as good, never as pure, never as rich as the original. The Matariki holiday brings the nation kanohi ki te kanohi (eye to eye, face to face) with its own seasons and temporalities, its own histories and our thriving Māori culture. Neo-colonialism, Euro-philia, Brito-sycophancy and deep-running prejudice mean such a turn is uncomfortable for some. ¹¹ And it is a beginning, one might say, of a temporal turn from the distorted disciplining of all that is southern to the (unnatural) cadences of the British. It is more than simply an additional annual holiday. It turns towards truth-saying.

There is more to ancient Māori lunar rhythms than simply designating an annual time of rest and reflection (Whaanga and Matamua, 2016). There is a whakatauki, a saying, ‘hauhake tū, ka tō Matariki’ – the harvest ends when Matariki sets – which tells us our ancestors were both agriculturalists and astronomers, who found relationships between the cosmos, land, seasons, and labour, between the sky, earth and flourishing. It tells us, too, of the centrality of relationships to Māori epistemology or whakapapa. Literally to place in layers, whakapapa is the framework for knowledge. To know something is to know how it is ‘layered’ with Earth others, how it relates. The question knowledge seekers ask is not ‘what is this’, but rather ‘how/with what/to what does this relate?’ That is, whakapapa is a relational epistemology rooted in a relational ontology. The tūpuna – ancestors – arrived from the tropics. The memories of each sailing vessel and the voyagers who navigated Te Moana nui a Kiwa (the Pacific Ocean) are retained in the details of iwi, hapu and whanau whakapapa – a word that, in addition to epistemology, also denotes genealogical records.

Like the colonists' ships after them, these great ocean-going vessels that are embedded in Māori identity, brought not only people but also the essential plant stuffs of life of their more north eastern Pacific homeland: taro (Colocasia esculenta), uwhi (yam, Dioscorea species) and kūmara (Ipomoea batatas) are staple starches, tī pore (Pacific cabbage tree, Cordyline fruticosa) for food and weaving, aute (paper mulberry, Broussonetia papyrifera) for making cloth, and hue (gourds) for food and containers. ¹² On board too were kurī (dogs) and kiore (rats). The islands of Aotearoa are not tropical. Our tropical ancestors had to quickly adapt their agricultural practices to allow their plants to survive and grow in the southern cold. No longer able to rely on year-round food production, they learned to cultivate, harvest and store kūmera – a staple that survived the cold environment only with special care and agricultural sophistication. Taro and hue survived in the north alone. Secondly, they learned the nutritional and medicinal qualities of the plants, birds and fish of the land, waters and sea: they found a way to be of this place rather than forcing it to conform to a remembered home-place. This process was not without failures – that the great moa (order Dinornithiformes) was driven to extinction is well known, and with its demise that of the greatest eagle to fly the Earth – te pouākai (the Haast eagle, Hieraaetus moorei). Dependent on the moa for food, the eagle too died out once they were gone. Māori learned; they adapted – keeping the example of the moa extinction alive in whakatauki such as ‘kua ngaro i te ngaro o te moa’ – dead like the moa is dead – as a cautionary tale. Learning from their mistakes, our tūpuna built conservation into their new life on the motu of Aotearoa.

Māori maintained the Polynesian reverence for the cosmos; lands, waters and seas, forests and plains, air and sky, and the spiritual realm all tangled within a relational ontology – whakapapa – that centres connectivity and responsibilities in contrast to the individualist rights-based ontologies of the settlers and western politics (Henare, 2001; Marsden, 2003). While the European knowledge tradition is of separation and disciplinary silos, where humans are held aside from and above all other Earth beings, Māori organise knowledge around relationships (Roberts, 2012; Roberts et al., 2004). It is clear to Māori that humans are interrelated with the land, waters and elements and that there is no human thriving without a thriving environment. On this account, humans are part of the environment and not separate or above it. Māori survived by working with the waters, sea, land, the plants, fish and fowl and the seasonal patterns of the land.

One means of establishing sustainable practice, practices that benefit both human and ecosystem flourishing, came with the lunar cycle. Not only was/is ¹³ the year marked by the rise of Matariki, but each month's activities too were/are guided by the moon's phases. ¹⁴ Interest in the Māori lunar calendar has grown in recent decades, thanks largely to the recovery of family manuscripts and the scholarship of Professor Rangi Matamua (Tūhoe), who also led the movement for the revival of Matariki (Whaanga and Matamua, 2016). Early European colonists recorded the Māori calendar as a novelty and peculiar Māori/Pacific tradition. John White (1837-1891), recording a Māori lunar calendar in the mid to late 1800's, denotes with crosses in the margin the many days of the Māori calendar that were, for instance, designated as unsuited to fishing or gardening – the two primary labours required for food and survival.

How quaint his chart seems in the modern era when the phrase 24/7 denotes a capitalist efficiency of never pausing productivity and resource use, never sleeping production-lines of mindless labour and the feeling for many (non-production line workers) that internet interconnectivity means they cannot ‘delink’ from their workplace even in their non-work hours, and that ignores the rise and fall of the sun and moon, bending life to constant light and toil. That 17 days of the 29.5 days per lunar month were deemed, on White's chart, unsuitable for fishing is important: Māori were, and many still are, highly reliant on kai moana – seafood – as a primary source of protein. However, the calendar indicates a systemic approach to rest, recovery and sustainability. Working with the phases of the moon that are more or less likely to result in a successful catch (in a bright moon phase, for instance, some fish are more likely to be ‘hiding’ than when its light is less prominent), is an adaptive feature designed for the flourishing of humans and fish, built into monthly cycles of activity. The temporality of the settler, though, labelled such rhythms ‘lazy’ or ‘Māori time’, in part at least, because they do not conform to financialisation mantra ‘time is money’. ¹⁵ The temporality of the settler worked and works against that which is natural and promotes flourishing and wellbeing for humans and Earth others. New Zealand settlers’ temporality is an associate of ‘the histories of western time and western imperialism [which are] virtually inseparable; for the extension and structural permanence of western temporalities beyond western European borders [that] remain[] contingent on the interruption and reform of “other” cultures of time’ (Nanni, 2011: 6).

Settler (un)seasonality

Kia mau ki te tokanga nui a noho

There is no place like home.

Settlers’ starting point, as they arrived in the early nineteenth century, claiming Aotearoa's motu as their own, was that Māori (and other Indigenous peoples) were ‘out of time’; that is, outside the ‘natural’ trajectory of human development which was, conveniently, idealised as that of Europe. Or put another way ‘that indigenous (sic) peoples, Africans, Asians, and their descendants, [were and] are without history or forward movement in time’ (Freeman, 2022: 26). Locked out of time (or, not in lock-step with modernity), such people were then ‘other’: Other than modern, other than European, other than disciplined, other than rational, other than fully human. ‘Unworked’ lands, land upon which no time had been expended, were ripe for the taking; the ‘lazy’ and ‘uncivilised’ native shuffled to the edge of social hierarchies and deemed suited only to the most menial of tasks (without a note of irony, to work those very lands the settlers were claiming as their own and were unwilling to toil themselves (Anker, 2022); and Māori cultures, philosophies, cosmologies ¹⁶ supplanted by those imported from Europe.

The nineteenth century British settler project was to bring the southern lands of the Pacific Ocean ‘into history’, to synchronise them with modernity, to make them home. The settlers did not imagine themselves ‘out of time’ with modernity and so this project of modernisation necessitated in part a synchronisation (against all rational observation and experience of nature's southern rhythms) with their own seasonal knowledge and patterns, the Gregorian calendar and the demands of ticking clocks. Their view was/is that non-simultaneity relegates the socio-political realties of the antipodes to second or third world status and outside of the morality of Christianity and Christian work ethic. The immoral – whether natural or human (and note here that Indigenous Peoples – those out of step with modernity – are deemed in some way inferior to the European human and less morally worthy) then must be disciplined, re-educated and assimilated to attain the virtues necessary for admission into modern social, economic and political circles. Where whole continents and oceanic islands are inhabited by those who were understood to be something less than fully evolved human beings, removing those peoples from land, from culture, from their own history is of no more or less consequence than herding cattle from farm to market. To learn from their knowledge of the Land and Sea (rather than learn ‘of’ their ways as the anthropologists were want to do) was unnecessary: the settler knew not only what was ‘best’ but also what they wanted: to recreate the familiar, a home. ¹⁷

The great moral force of Christianisation required that the ‘native’ and ‘nature’ be denatured – from time and place, from time-space filled as it is with cosmos, spirits, ancestors, memories and stories, future generations (Winter, 2020, 2022), and the rhythms of moon and sun, winds and rains, heat and cold. While Christmas and Easter may be moveable feasts – moving them 6 months to fit the seasons of the south was/is a step too far. At Christmas, settlers celebrate(d) with roast meat, cooked vegetables and gravy, cook plum duffs and Christmas cake of dried fruits in the height of the summer season when ripe fruits drip from trees. ¹⁸ Christ's birth (the birth of new possibilities) is then commemorated as if the date were in the depths of winter. ¹⁹ In March–April, the season of northern planting and preparations for summer growth, when New Zealand's crops were/are harvested and stored for the coming winter when mara kainga and paddocks are/were ²⁰ left to rest, the nation stops work for 4 days to celebrate Easter – a Christian calendar event that centres on renewal and resurrection, and, in the United Kingdom itself is a Christian domination that deliberately erases (or re-natured) earlier pagan/Celtic seasonal rituals. ²¹ These imported Christian calendar events sit illogically atop nature (Bremer and Schneider, 2024). They blindly ignore the natural and set up a discourse that imposes the blatantly unnatural and out of step. While nature prepares to rest in Aotearoa, the nation celebrates with rituals heralding the start of the growing season. Like Anker's (2022) ugly freedoms and Charles Mills (1997, 2007, 2017) epistemological ignorance, ²² they impose an irrational and deliberately blind national narrative that contravenes fact, an untruth that Māori know and are bound by in the day-to-day, and an untruth the settler accepts as the natural order despite all evidence. Settlers did not and still do not ‘see’ from ‘nowhere’ (a positional paradox Kant thought of as a prerequisite for thinking world politics). Their view is tethered to the (romanticised) ‘homeland’ of the British Isles and subverts and undermines the knowledge of the indigenous, that which is native – people, lands, waters, plant and animal life.

Settlers settle. Having abandoned their home country, whether rejecting aspects of its cultural and religious confines, from desire to ‘make their fortune’ or at least improve their material conditions, or simply for change and adventure, settlers established themselves as permanent residents and the institutional force in New Zealand. But the land, landscape, the flora and fauna, language and culture were ‘foreign’ – to them. Although while the islands they now made their home did not feel, smell, look, sound, taste like ‘home’ ²³ some at least felt it legitimate to claim ‘Nature made New Zealand for the British: it is our duty to take it’. ²⁴ And so they set about imposing the temporalities of the north to make it more like ‘home’ and thus their home.

Melissa Lukashenko (2010) suggests ‘that human attunement to the chronotopic cycles of nature is necessary to find intimate belonging in place’ (p. 64). It is then unsurprising that out of time and place, the settlers simultaneously commenced a massive project of terra transformation to recreate the aesthetics of ‘home’. Clearing the natural bush and forests, reducing it to grasslands and/or replanting with non-native species, introducing animal, bird and fish life with which they were familiar and simultaneously killing off native species, plumbing the earth for minerals: in short, eliminating the native (Wolfe, 2006). The scale of change was enormous, one that did not and does not pay heed to any warning that ‘[n]o single ecological change – whether or not it is caused by humans – can be undone, can be changed back to its original condition’ (Hofeister, 1997: 310). Time cannot be unwound: the past is always in the present and future (ironically, in this context, a view that coincides with Māori conceptions of time (Burgess and Painting, 2020; Winter, 2020)). Nor was there a desire by the settlers to change back; this land was to become ‘like home’, to be brought into (British) time and aesthetics.

‘Like home’ meant for the British settler open pasture, deciduous trees, herbaceous borders (see Wright, 2012 for a parallel Australian story). To achieve that, the land had to be denuded of its thriving dense evergreen forests – which fortuitously contained tall straight-trunked trees perfectly suited for ships' masts, dense slow-grown richly coloured timbers ideal for housing and furniture, and so on. Other plants, food and medicine sources for Māori, homes and larder for birds, lizards and insects, were not valued and sacrificed in the quest for pasture and open habitat. The temporality of these lost landscapes was/is ignored: the long slow past, which cannot be repeated, was/is embedded in the fertility of soils, land formations, forests and timbers, aquafers and sweet clean waters.

The settlers brought with them knowledge forged in a different place with entirely opposite and upside-down patterns and rhythms that do not fit easily onto Aotearoa. Their vision of how land ‘should’ appear too was diametrically opposed to the dense moist dark forests that covered most of the land. Their knowledge – their ‘folk wisdom’ – did and does not fit this land. That is, rather than learn to live with what was and is, they denatured time and place.

Following the path of denudation and deforestation of the British (and broader European) landscape (which seemed by the nineteenth century to be its natural state), such de-naturalisation birthed the polycrisis and planet-wide turbulence (Dauvergne and Shipton, 2023). Blinded by simplistic, myth-like narratives of mastery over and exploitation of the ‘natural’, bending time out of place is just one more destructive fallacy disguised as truth.

Denatured temporality

Ka tū a Matariki ka rere te hinu

When Matariki rises, the fat (of the wood pigeon) is cooked

Denatured temporality, seasonal celebrations that bear no relevance to natural seasons, is conjoined with the suite of pathologies that, combined, have precipitated the polycrisis and have brought the planet to a state of perpetual turbulence (Dauvergne and Shipton, 2023). While the term polycrisis denotes the multiple overlapping ecological and social crises caused by excessive exploitation of natural resources and some people, ²⁵ turbulence denotes a state of never-quite-recovering before the next (un)natural disaster strikes. Neither humans or Earth others have the opportunity to establish equilibrium before the next disturbance – they/we remain locked into cycles of permanent dis/stress. And this has been predicted, not by soothsayers but well-informed, careful observation and scientific rigour. From Rachel Carson, to Gregory Bateson, Richard Attenborough to David Suzuki, Charles David Keeling to Michael Mann for well over five decades – half a century! – the warning bells have rung. But so willing are politicians, industry leaders, news editors and the global public to deny and ignore such warnings we – all Earth beings – face roiling planet-wide turbulence. Hubris is the patron of turbulence.

In a global context where a mythology of human domination of the natural is revered (Celermajer and Winter, 2022), New Zealand ignores the seasonal rhythms of rest, recreation, regrowth and regeneration. It has, too, proven easy for people to ignore the signs of environmental degradation, to delude themselves and others: Where the truth of nature's rhythms is defied, so too the truth of environmental degradation, extinctions and climate change is (relatively) easy to ignore, or worse, flatly deny. To repeat, the dishonesty of colonial era cultural, social, and nature's, domination are the heralds of mis-information, disinformation and ‘alternative facts’. ²⁶ Such is the illogic of colonial New Zealand's imposition of British seasonal celebrations: the bending of the natural to meet the greed of the global minority. ²⁷

It is this wilful neglect of the natural that has generated a denatured temporality where settlers have denied the realities of their own lives and experiences, and oppressed the realities of Indigenous lives. If the sheer force of saying so can toss the seasons up-side-down, insert the new year's beginnings into the height of summer, celebrate the reawakening of spring at autumn/fall, and replace Angelic choirs with cicadas’ cacophony, it is a short path to ignoring ecosystem collapse and climate change. Those celebratory time-shifts are of course minor upheavals, minor blurring of the truth; but they illustrate something much larger – the lies of settler time (Rivkin, 2017) and settler domination (Nanni, 2011). Not just because it places the Indigenous outside of time but because it places humans outside of Earth's time, of the moon's time, outside of nature, and instantiates (some) humans as supreme unaccountable arbiter. ²⁸

For those of you who are thinking now: but Christmas is the twenty-fifth of December, or how can there be more than one global NYE? ²⁹ I understand. But that ignores that the date of the British Christmas is based not only on northern seasonality but also on over-riding, subverting or ‘colonising’ existing pagan seasonal feasts and celebrations. The twenty-fifth of December is not the Christ child's birthdate. ‘Christmas’ as birthday is a subversion of fact. Christmas as mid-winter ritual is one of a variety of the world's ceremonies that mark the depths of winter and the gradual return of longer daylight hours. ³⁰ My point is to highlight that the polycrisis and turbulence are a curse born of a long pattern of cultural domination and a colonial attitude that has not waned. The constants are epistemological ignorance, epistemological violence (Dotson, 2011; Fricker, 2007) – wilful and harmful bending of truths, deliberate destruction of place, people and time: When cultures, politics, people ignore what the natural world is communicating the stronger power – nature – will prevail.

In asserting northern temporality over southern seasonality and knowledge, the settler pretends a superior knowledge of the land, waters, places, and time. The settler relegates the Indigenous to the past. The settler denies Indigenous cultures live in this time, the present (Nanni, 2011), or that they may live into the future, drawing from the past (Winter, 2020: 2022). The indigenous is cast outside of time. Nor does the settler accept the wisdom of Earth others. Hofmeister suggests that,

‘[a]s soon as we have appreciated that it is necessary, in the light of ecological problems, to synchronize culture and nature, we also need to recognize that nature obviously does not provide us with the idea of appropriate and correct temporalities. Nature has no concept of time. Rather, it entails its own complex temporalities and time-spans’. (Hofeister, 1997: 312)

Nature contains its own seasonal patterns that belong to place, that are not transferable. But here in Aotearoa in the southern hemisphere, the settler attempts to reshape the land, waters, places to become the northern they are not. The result is denuded ranges, polluted rivers, lakes and seas, and species extinctions, none of which can be reversed; which will linger into the future. While I started this paragraph saying that nature's seasons are non-transferable, it is interesting, or perhaps alarming, to note that seasonal rhythms are now less consistent with rising global and local average temperatures (Kenny, 2025). The seasons are (and I say this without a hint of irony) changing. ³¹ And as I have been arguing, it is in part at least the hubris of the colonially imposed temporality, human activities and the denial of the patterns and interdependencies of planetary existence that is the cause. A sustainable, safe future, and the ability of plants and animals to flourish, depends on nature's weaving of seasons and of the past, present and future. However, ‘[n]ature will only impart the secret of its productivity to someone who attempts to understand its temporality’ (Hofeister, 1997: 313).

Conclusion

Kia whakatōmuri te haere whakamua

I walk backwards into the future with my eyes fixed on my past

As noted earlier, this article is not about time-as-labour, clock time or capitalism per se. It is about colonial imposition, and disinformation and the lies of colonialism and modernity. In that sense, it attempts to explain the ease with which people allow themselves to be convinced of an otherwise in the very face of the opposite. Its suggestion is that planetary turbulence is born of the self-delusional lies of modernity which are hard-baked into the dominant and dominating cultures that originated in Europe and spread around the globe. It has used the example of imposing British seasonal celebrations on antipodean lands to illustrate how easily a people may delude themselves despite overwhelming evidence of the opposite: that Easter celebrations align with autumn/fall, etc., that black is white as it were, or that turbulence is just ‘natural’ climatic variation.

Exploring the colonial roots of seasonal celebrations in New Zealand, I heralded the introduction of the Māori mid-winter Matariki as a seasonal truth-telling. The second national public Matariki holiday in 2023 was a bitter sweet celebration for many on the eastern coastline as they gathered ‘slash’ from the beaches for their bonfires. Rains from Cyclone Gabrielle in early February that year swept 400,000 cubic metres of trimmed tree limbs and logging debris (commonly called slash) from exotic monocultural forest plantations that have replaced the native forests on the steep slopes of the North Island's eastern hills, down the river courses, across the low lying agricultural lands, through townships to the coastline (Solomon, 2024). The build-up of debris in rivers increased the likelihood of flooding, magnified the destruction of property – buildings, bridges, roads and plantings – and littered the coastline and inland waters with logs (Solomon, 2024). The cyclone, fuelled by unusually hot sea and atmospheric temperatures, pummelled the north of the North Island. It shattered lives: 11 people lost theirs, at least 2000 were injured, 330,000 people lost power supply, and mobile telephones rendered useless as towers went offline (Solomon, 2024). Kilometres of state highway were closed, and sewage spilled into the waterways. And 700 to 1000 houses were left uninhabitable and farmlands covered in metres-high silt (Solomon, 2024). The national cost is estimated at NZ$14.5 billion (Public Health Communications Centre Aotearoa, 2024). The number of Earth others killed remains untallied. These statistics tell the story of the deliberate denial of greenhouse gas emissions’ impact on climate, of short-term profits and the convenience to be had from burning ancient coal, oil and gas deposits. Of agricultural and silver culture practices ill-suited to the soils, the slopes, land and waterscapes of these southern motu. The bonfires burning to herald Matariki 2023, ³² tell the story of colonialism, capitalism, hubris and the resulting state of turbulence (Dauvergne and Shipton, 2023): of a new state-of-the-world. They are the story of an unnatural temporality, of nature bent out of place in the southern Pacific.

However, the bonfires of Matariki 2023 tell too of the decolonial potential of seasonal and temporal coherence. Of listening to the earth and cosmos, of living, resting, playing and working to the cadences of place. Of a hunger in the settler to settle with the whenua and Peoples of the motu (Hardy and Whaanga, 2019) because ‘for a community to coordinate across diversity, it is necessary to have common temporal reference points’ (Bremer and Schneider, 2024) and reference points that adhere to the rhythms of the cosmos. Matariki's bonfires bring the people of Aotearoa into the time of the south – into the simultaneous past, present and future of the natural realm – and begin the long process of shedding the shackles of universalism and the lies of anthropocentrism.

Matariki is a time for logical honesty, of shedding illogical settler myths of domination and dominion, of a nation celebrating who it is in the southern hemisphere, a time of cultures meeting in synchronisation with the stars and the waning sun. Matariki has the power to connect the people with whenua and moana, ngahere (forest) and manu (birds), ika (fish) and mokomoko (lizards), to celebrate what is uniquely us – not just a faint replica of Britishness. Matariki is finally bringing a sliver of seasonal logic to the temporal rhythms here in the south, a logic that may then assist the population trace the ‘disruption and clashes in […] seasonal timings, and drivers of these changes’ (Bremer and Schneider, 2024: 1) and to release itself from the untruths of an unnatural temporality.