The stars have stories to tell

It was cold and windy at the top, and there were no trees, so you could see for miles in every direction. Above, the sun had almost disappeared, and the world was a dome of purple sky. Below, the town of Tekapo was a crescent of amber lights along the lakeshore. Adrien led us up a small flight of stairs to a café where the lights were off and faux candles provided minimal illumination. As my eyes adjusted, mountains started appearing in shadowy outlines beyond the lake. With the horizon line well below us, it felt like we were swimming in the sky. It made me breathless.

A bridge to the past

We stood outside in a semi-circle while a guide named Heather introduced herself, then led the group through a Māori acknowledgement ceremony in which she named and thanked the ancestors and recognized them as the tangata whenua, or original inhabitants of Aotearoa.

Maori knowledge holders worked with the tour organizers to develop these tours and train the guides. Heather explained that the ancestors were the keepers of tātai arorangi – the Māori astronomical knowledge that informed everything from growing crops to navigation, fishing and the calendar.

“When Māori people look up into the night sky, they see more than just stars and planets,” she said. “They see a connection to their ancestors and all life. Māori people used the sky as a kind of life map, which marked places, time and seasons, helped to predict the weather, to know when certain fish were abundant and when to plant crops.”

She then recounted the story of how the stars were born: “There was a legendary warrior named Tamarereti, who was once sailing his waka, a type of canoe, far out on a lake, quite like the one below us now. He was very far from home and night began to fall. At that time, there were no stars in the sky, and the night was completely dark. Tamarereti felt he was in danger from a lake monster called the taniwha, so he made the decision to ascend from the lake and fly his waka home through the sky. As he sailed, he scattered glowing stones along the way, leaving a bright wake behind. Today, we call this glowing trail the Milky Way and those stones are the stars.”

Next, she asked us to close our eyes for a few moments. We stood quietly and then opened them all at once to reveal the sky utterly filled with stars.

“Can you see the Milky Way?”

A few people gasped and a lady next to me spoke up in a North American accent to say she’d never seen our galaxy before. Heather explained that, because of light pollution, most people can’t see the Milky Way any more. “That’s why the Dark Sky Reserve regulations are so important here – to protect the darkness and our access to the night sky.”

“So from now on,” she continued, “if you look up and see the Milky Way, you will think of Tamarereti and remember how the stars were scattered in the sky. And if you don’t see the Milky Way, you will remember what can be lost.”

Life among the stars

The Māori are among many Indigenous peoples, including Aboriginal Australians, Native Americans, Tibetans, Guaran. and Maya, who have maintained extensive knowledge of the night sky over millennia. They use the stars as cues for activities fundamental to existence, including planting and harvesting food, travelling, hunting and spiritual rituals.

As Earth slowly orbits the Sun over a year, what we see in the night sky changes. Indigenous peoples noticed that certain constellations would appear at certain times of the year, and so would use them as sky landmarks for the change of seasons. For example, ancient Egyptians noticed that the star Sirius – the brightest in the night sky – was first visible in the east just before sunrise in August. This would occur right before the annual flooding of the Nile, and so Sirius came to mark the start of their harvest season.

In the West, many of us take the well-known constellations, such as Orion – one of our most recognizable star patterns – as a given. But these are cultural constructs. Humans have been telling stories about the different patterns and pictures they see in the stars for millennia, and those pictures differ across cultures and time.

The Aboriginal peoples of Australia, who are now accepted as the world’s first astronomers, have a practice of ‘sky knowledge’ going back to 8000 BCE – several millennia before the Babylonians, who began practising astronomy around 2000 BCE. The ancient Egyptians also kept detailed records of the night sky some 4,000 or 5,000 years ago, enshrined as hieroglyphs in the painted tombs of the pharaohs in the Nile Valley. The Maya created extensive astronomical calendars, made spiritual predictions and built storied temples according to astronomical alignments. Some of the earliest Native American peoples also built great cities designed according to the movements of the sky, like the one at Chaco Canyon in what is now New Mexico, built around 900 CE by the Ancestral Puebloans. They recorded significant astronomical events in petroglyphs, including solar eclipses and what some archeoastronomers believe might be an eleventh-century supernova: an ancient painting of an exploding star. The Skidi Band of the Pawnee People, who live in what is now the US Midwest, saw a ‘council of chiefs’ in the stars, which represented their governing elders.

One of the stories told among the Diné (Navajo) Nation in the southwest US, the ‘Sparkling Seeds’, concerns the star cluster Dilyéhé, which is known in Western astronomy as the Pleiades – the tornado of sister-stars that I love. In the story, Dilyéhé takes the form of a group of boys, running over a hill beyond their parents’ view – this is when Dilyéhé sets, disappearing from the night sky. The boys symbolize ‘sparkling’ corn seeds, disappearing as they are planted. So corn planting should begin when the constellation Dilyéhé, or the Pleiades, sets in late April.

The Pleiades is present in many Indigenous astronomy traditions and known by many names in different cultures. The Māori people call it Matariki, and its reappearance around early July marks the start of the Māori new year. Traditional celebrations involve several nights of viewing the Pleiades, as well as mourning the deceased who have gone to live in the stars and offering food to the celestia, who have welcomed the ones who passed over. Like many elements of Māori culture, the observance of Matariki declined in the nineteenth century with the dominance of European settlers. But thanks to the work of Professor Mātāmua and other Māori activists, strides have been made in recent decades to revive and honor Māori traditions, and in 2022, Matariki was celebrated as a public holiday in New Zealand for the first time.

The darkness in between

Back on Mount John, Heather asked if there were any Australians in the group, and a couple of people raised their hands. Using a green laser pointer, she indicated a dark patch in the gleaming band of the Milky Way.

“This is the head of the Great Emu,” she explained, circling what looked like a large beak. “A constellation revered by many Aboriginal Australian societies.” Where later European astronomers told stories about their gods by connecting the outlines of stars, a number of Indigenous communities instead saw pictures in the dark patches between the stars. Heather explained that, for many Aboriginal peoples, the Emu is the single most recognizable image in the night sky – a constellation entirely defined by the dark.

While Indigenous peoples each held their own unique cosmological belief systems, there were some common themes. Namely, the interconnected relationships of all living things, from animals, birds and fish to water, plants, clouds, winds and thunder, and the invisible beings of dreams and the imagination – a holistic way of looking at life lost by Western civilizations.