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Māori complain because Starlink satellites disturb their rituals and may make celestial navigation of canoes harder
Well, I’ll treat you to one more item about indigenous knowledge in New Zealand, this time when it clashes with modern science! It turns out that the Māori are beefing about there being too many satellites in the sky, and beefing for two reasons. First, this raises the possibility that the night sky might be … Continue reading Māori complain because Starlink satellites disturb their rituals and may make celestial navigation of canoes harder
Well, I’ll treat you to one more item about indigenous knowledge in New Zealand, this time when it clashes with modern science! It turns out that the Māori are beefing about there being too many satellites in the sky, and beefing for two reasons. First, this raises the possibility that the night sky might be changed, making it lighter, and that might make celestial navigation more difficult. Not that the Māori rely on that any more (actually, their Polynesian and SE Asian ancestors developed it), but their historical practice from hundreds of years ago might be made more difficult.
Second, the satellites are somehow said to interfere with a Māori ritual in which the steam from cooked food is allowed to float up toward the stars. (The ritual arose to give thanks for a good harvest.) It is not clear to me how satellites would interfere with that, so you’ve have to ask the Māori.
Click below to read the excerpt from Stuff, a New Zealand news site:
Here’s the beefing about the ceremony (I’ve added translations):
A Māori scientist has warned our skies could become clogged with up to 100,000 satellites in the next five years – threatening thousands of years of Māori knowledge in the process.
The pollution could get so bad that stars seen by Māori ancestors would no longer be visible to the naked eye.
Elon Musk’s Starlink satellites have already interfered with a tuku wairua [food/steam] ceremony during Matariki, when whānau [members of a family group] who have died are released to the stars; while satellite proliferation threatens traditional waka hourua navigation [celestial navigation using double-hulled canoes].
Scientist, and Indigenous astronomy expert Te Kahuratai Moko-Painting is part of Sustainable Space – a group seeking to save Earth’s lower orbit, under 2000km, from uncontrolled development.
Moko-Painting often shows up in similar items, for he’s quite a vociferous activist.
Moko-Painting said about 15,000 satellites have been sent into space since the 1950s – about 7000 of those are still functional, and about 10,000 are still in space.
“Between 2022 when these estimates were made, and 2030, it’s estimated that we’ll have between 60,000 to 100,000 satellites in orbit.”
He said the about-3000 Starlink satellites in orbit were “already causing issues”.
. . . He got involved in the issue after the first Matariki public holiday in 2022, when he joined his wife’s whānau at Waahi Pā in Huntly for the hautapu (feeding the stars with an offering of kai [food].
“And just as we were doing our tuku wairua, just as we were sending on those who had passed on from that year, we had 21 Starlink satellites cutting through, right past the path of Matariki [the Pleiades star cluster.”
Apparently people thought that this was the stars’ response to the ceremony, and was propitious, but Moko-Painting—who admits that Starlink is important in communicating with rural commubnities—still has a beef:
“And those who knew would just say ‘no, that’s actually this man who loves the technology for launching satellites but makes them far too bright’ … and he does them in this line in an eye-catching kind of way, and that’s completely unregulated.”
I doubt that people will stop launching satellites because it somehow interferes with this ceremony. But wait! There’s more! As I said, there’s a possibility that too many satellites may interfere with celestial navigation, which only a few Māori still practice. But this is only a hypothesis, and hasn’t been shown, mainly because only a few stalwarts still use celestial navigation, and only as a way to keep alive that ancestral skill:
Even in the middle of the Pacific Ocean on a waka hourua, double-hulled waka used for voyaging, the night sky is 10% brighter than it used to be, Moko-Painting said. “So one could argue that 10% of what our tūpuna could see with their eyes while navigating is no longer visible to us.”
Master navigator Jack Thatcher has travelled tens of thousands of kilometres on waka hourua, as a guiding light that keeps his crews alive.
The Pacific covers a third of the planet. Thatcher’s journeys – using only stars, ocean swells and birds as guides – include a 3200km trip from Aotearoa to Rarotonga, which is only 67km wide.
. . . Having 100,000 satellites in orbit might be good for “pinpoint accuracy” all around the world, but those who rely on the stars for guidance won’t know which is a satellite and which isn’t.
“They’ll obliterate most of the patterns that we all depend on to help us find our way.”
He said the satellites were already being discussed in the voyaging community. Light pollution wasn’t the only problem – “eventually they’ll be rubbish”, Thatcher said.
“We’re entering that zone of global extinction, because we’ve polluted our planet, now we want to pollute our heavens.”
While the technology might be used instead to navigate the oceans, “that’s not the point”, he said.
“Indigenous knowledge is something that is a self-determination thing.”
It’s not clear to me, though, that if the night sky is 10% brighter than before, this would somehow efface or even impede celestial navigation. They give no evidence, but some want to kvetch about it anyway, because it apparently erases the achievements of the Māori’s ancestors (not the Māori themselves):
Māori know who they are because of their ancestors’ achievements. “And now you’re going to take that all away from us.”
The first waka [canoe] in this country used navigation knowledge that ancestors accrued over millennia, Thatcher said – travelling from Southeast Asia to Aotearoa almost 6000 years later.
Essentially, he said, if you can no longer navigate the oceans through the stars “it becomes book knowledge only”.
“Indigenous identity helps people to be who they are and enables them to be proud of who they are, because of their ancestral knowledge that they still hold on to.”
The whole idea of keeping indigenous knowledge alive was that “we’re not dependent on any technology”.
So Moko-Painting has joined a group of scientists calling for holding back on launching satellites. The article ends abruptly:
SpaceX, which operates Starlink, did not reply to queries at time of publication.
The problem with all this is that these two problems haven’t been demonstrated. The navigation impediment is a theoretical possibility and won’t be known until people like Thatcher try it. Since they can still do it successfully, even with all those satellites up there, I think this is not a serious concern. As for the satellites interfering with the smoke rising to the stars, that is pure superstition and doesn’t command concern from any rational person.
