Mātauranga Māori by Hirini Moko Mead

At 98 years young, Distinguished Professor Hirini Moko Mead has gifted Aotearoa with Mātauranga Māori, a profound and expansive reflection on the knowledge systems that have long guided te ao Māori. Published as a companion piece to his acclaimed Tikanga Māori, this work is a distillation of decades of scholarship and lived wisdom, shaped by Mead’s own journey, from learning by hand to composing this defiant volume on a computer, affirmed: “not AI.”

Mātauranga Māori is, therefore, not abstract. It unfolds as a living testament of thought, language, practice, and belief. Mead clarifies that mātauranga Māori transcends compartmentalisation: it is the union of language, art, ceremony, values, science, time, place, spirituality, environment, and belonging. Examining how knowledge is carried in te reo Māori and enacted through daily life including ritual, formal ceremony, and collective activity, he honours the seamless fusion of the sacred and the practical in Māori ways of knowing.

The book is meticulously structured yet reads with the intimacy of a kōrero. Mead’s probing is generous, animated by moments of warm humour and unwavering clarity. He engages with the implicit tensions around the inclusion of mātauranga Māori in modern education, acknowledging criticisms while inviting readers to witness its coherence and validity. He frames this as knowledge grounded in centuries of experiential interaction with land, cosmos, and kin.

At the launch of the text, fittingly at Te Mānuka Tūtahi Marae in Whakatāne, where Mead’s mana and life journey were celebrated by whānau, kuia, iwi leaders, and academic colleagues, Professor Rawinia Higgins likened Mead to Morpheus guiding readers through a matrix of knowledge and reality. Such tributes underscore the depth of his influence.

In each chapter, Mead strides into the lived practice of knowledge. He unpacks how Māori understandings of phenomena - the rhythms of Papatūānuku, the patterns of ritual, the decoding of ancestral narratives - are embedded in the everyday. He situates these within contemporary questions, urging educators, policymakers, and all readers to recognise mātauranga Māori not as relic but as active, relevant, and resilient.

This volume is especially resonant for teachers, students, researchers, iwi leaders, and those invested in decolonising knowledge structures. In the face of claims that mātauranga Māori is not “science,” Mead offers patience, precision, and pedagogy instead of polemic. His voices insist that all knowledge systems deserve respect and that cultural context profoundly shapes epistemic integrity.

Mātauranga Māori is, in equal measure, intellectual history and cultural hymn - the recording of lived scholarship. It affirms that knowledge is never neutral; it is carried in language, embedded in kai, born through ritual, and passed through the lips and hearts of countless learners over centuries.

For anyone seeking to understand the complexity and coherence of Māori worldviews, this is essential reading. It is not merely a book: it is a lighthouse.

Reviewer: Chris Reed

Huia Publishers