A Critical Analysis of Maori Cosmologies and the Tyranny of Epistemic Western Centrism

In this article, I traverse Maori positionality informing Maori worldviews, alongside geohistorical navigational trajectories of knowledge. Drawing on ancestral travel which utilized sophisticated readings of stars, currents, winds, clouds, contexts and colours of the biodiversity to navigate, the concept of wayfinding as methodology and method is used to recentre matauranga Maori (Maori knowledge). Matauranga Maori accumulates in the continuum of time, past, present and future. There are many ways to capture knowledge. This article draws on 'wayfinding' through a critical analysis of matauranga Maori and its denigration through imperialism. It is argued that unless educationalists lead a collective challenge, the masculinist, materialist, secular, individualistic, extractive western colonial project will continue to inflict harmful discourses on Indigenous peoples and lands. Decolonizing western epistemologies and ontologies challenge both this ongoing damage as well as the histories of denigration by seeking to restore and re-centre Maori ways of being, knowing, doing and relating.