Māori Resource Investigation
Te whakatere waka — Māori approaches to navigation

E kore au e ngaro, he kākano i ruia mai i Rangiātea.

I will never be lost, for I am a seed sown from Rangiātea.

Te whakatere waka, the ocean navigation of the ancestors who settled Te Moana-nui-a-Kiwa, is the topic of this resource pack. English speakers usually call it wayfinding: crossing thousands of kilometres of open ocean without instruments. I have built the pack for Years 9 and 10 students across my two teaching areas, Digital Technologies and Social Studies, because the topic sits at the exact intersection I want my teaching to occupy. It is deep cultural inheritance and rigorous applied knowledge at once, and it rewards the historian's questions and the programmer's equally.

The kāpehu whetū, the star compass, sits at the centre of the topic. A kaiurungi learns the horizon as a circle of whare, houses that each hold the rising or setting point of particular stars (Taonui, 2006). Steering means keeping the waka in the right relationship to whichever star is low in its whare, then handing over to the next star as the first climbs too high to be useful. The whole compass lives in the navigator's memory, built up over years of watching the sky until the whare and their stars are simply known. Other layers of knowledge work alongside it. Back-sighting lines the waka up against landmarks at departure. When cloud closes the sky, the navigator holds the hull at a constant angle to swell trains pushed by distant trade winds. Tohu run through the whole voyage: the dawn and dusk flightlines of land-roosting birds, cloud stacked over islands still below the horizon, changes in the water itself. None of this was written down. It travelled through waiata, whakapapa and pūrākau (Taonui, 2006).

The mātauranga Māori associated with whakatere waka is a complete knowledge system: disciplined observation accumulated across generations, trained memory to carry it, and relationship with Tangaroa, with Ranginui, and with the tūpuna who sailed first, which gives the knowledge its meaning and its authority. It is not a "pre-scientific" curiosity, and I will not teach it as one. Just as important for my learners is that this knowledge was very nearly lost, and came back on purpose. By the mid-twentieth century long-distance voyaging had all but disappeared from Aotearoa. Its return runs through Mau Piailug of Satawal, who agreed to teach what his own community could no longer sustain alone; through Hōkūle'a's 1976 voyage from Hawai'i to Tahiti; and, here, through Sir Hekenukumai Busby, who left a career building bridges to build waka hourua, and whose Te Aurere sailed to Rarotonga in 1992 (Evans, 2021; Mills & O'Sullivan, 2021). For Years 9 and 10 students the revival matters as much as the technique. It shows them mātauranga that is alive, that can be lost, and that people chose to fight for.

The reo Māori I will teach my learners is the working vocabulary of the system, taught in the context of its use rather than as a list: kāpehu whetū and its whare; waka hourua; kaiurungi; tohu; Te Moana-nui-a-Kiwa; and whare o ngā hau, the houses of the winds. Star names such as Tautoru, Matariki, Takurua and Atutahi are kupu too, but they teach best alongside the astronomy itself, so students will meet them while placing each star into the compass they build and while learning what each one tells a navigator about season and direction. The reo then carries meaning the students have handled themselves.

The five resources in this pack were selected to serve that teaching and evaluated against the Rauru Whakarare Evaluation Framework. Te Ara's "Canoe navigation" entry (Taonui, 2006) provides the authoritative foundation and the compass diagram my Digital Technologies students will re-create; Evans (2021) gives the revival its first-person voices, including three navigators from Aotearoa; Whetū Mārama — Bright Star (Mills & O'Sullivan, 2021) makes Busby's story an anchor text any student can stream free through a public library card; and the National Library's Tuia Mātauranga story (2019) opens the primary-source record to student inquiry. Together they let me teach whakatere waka the way it deserves: as knowledge with whakapapa, carried by people, and still under sail.

Te reo Māori to teach:

• te whakatere waka wayfinding, canoe navigation
• kāpehu whetū star compass
• waka hourua double-hulled voyaging canoe
• kaiurungi navigator / steerer
• tohu signs (swells, birds, clouds)
• Te Moana-nui-a-Kiwa the Pacific Ocean
• whare o ngā hau houses of the winds
• Tautoru Orion's Belt
• Matariki Pleiades
• Takurua Sirius
• Atutahi Canopus

Summary 1 — Reawakened: Traditional Navigators of Te Moana-nui-a-Kiwa (Evans, 2021)

Reawakened is a work of oral history in book form. Jeff Evans interviewed the ten master navigators trained by Mau Piailug, the Micronesian navigator who chose to share his knowledge when it was close to vanishing, and let them tell the story of the Pacific wayfinding revival in their own words. Three of the ten are from Aotearoa: Sir Hekenukumai Busby, Piripi Evans and Jack Thatcher. Their accounts move between technique and biography, so a reader learns how a star compass is held in memory in the same breath as learning what it cost, personally, to go and get that knowledge back.

Its relevance to my topic is exact: this is the revival, documented by the people who did the reviving. For my Years 9–10 context, the book works as a set of curated excerpts rather than a class text. The first-person voice is what earns its place. When Jack Thatcher describes reading the ocean, students are not being told about mātauranga; they are listening to a practitioner of it. The three Aotearoa navigators localise a pan-Pacific story and give my Social Studies learners figures whose whakapapa runs through this country. In the Revival inquiry (Part 4), excerpts from this book sit alongside the documentary as primary voices, and stronger readers can follow the Hawaiian and Cook Islands chapters outward into the wider Pacific network. Available through public libraries, so no cost barrier.

Summary 2 — Whetū Mārama — Bright Star (Mills & O'Sullivan, 2021)

Whetū Mārama — Bright Star is a 94-minute documentary about the life of Sir Hekenukumai Busby, made over many years by directors Toby Mills and Aileen O'Sullivan, with cinematography by Alun Bollinger. It follows Busby from his first career, in which he built more than two hundred bridges across Te Tai Tokerau, into the work that made him a national taonga: building waka hourua and carrying traditional star navigation home, including Te Aurere's 1992 voyage to Rarotonga. The film moves between archival footage, voyaging sequences and interviews, with te reo Māori spoken naturally throughout.

As the anchor visual text of this pack, its relevance is that it embodies the whole topic in one person. Students meet the kāpehu whetū not as a diagram but as something a man in his fifties chose to learn, master and pass on; the mātauranga arrives with a face, a voice and a stubborn, practical mana. For Years 9 and 10 it carries the central question of the Revival inquiry, what does it take to bring knowledge back, better than any written source could. Access matters too: the film streams free on Beamafilm with any public library card, which means every student in my class can watch it at home regardless of household income. That equity of access is part of why it earns anchor-text status.

Summary 3 — Navigation: Tuia Mātauranga digital story (National Library, 2019) — digital learning resource

This is a curated digital story assembled by the National Library's Services to Schools team on the DigitalNZ platform. It gathers images, audio recordings and historical documents about Pacific navigation from the collections of partner institutions, and frames them for classroom inquiry. Highlights include material on the Ātea a Rangi star compass at Waitangi Regional Park in Te Matau-a-Māui Hawke's Bay, a full-scale physical kāpehu whetū that students can compare with the compass they build. The story opens with the whakataukī "Before you set forth on a journey, be sure you know the stars."

Its relevance to my teaching context is twofold. First, it is the student-facing inquiry starter for the topic: each item links back to its source institution, so students can follow their own line of questioning outward through real collections rather than a search engine's guesses. Second, and just as valuable in my Digital Technologies context, the resource models exactly the information practices I want Years 9 and 10 students to build: reading a primary source, asking who made it and why, and evaluating what it can and cannot tell you. It pairs naturally with the Rauru Whakarare Evaluation Framework I applied to this pack, letting students practise the same evaluation I performed as their teacher. Free, no login, works on school devices.

My integration principle for this topic is simple: students should not just study whakatere waka, they should do things with it. Each of the three learning experiences below puts a piece of the mātauranga into students' hands and requires them to work with it until they understand it from the inside. All three are designed for Years 9–10, matching my teaching contexts in Digital Technologies and Social Studies, and each teaches its reo Māori in use, where the kupu name something the student is actually holding, building or arguing about.

All three experiences will be published on Te Kete Ako (tekete.co.nz), the teaching-resource platform I build and maintain, so that the resource pack this assignment describes exists not as a document but as live, linkable classroom material any teacher can use.