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Māori, an indigenous person of Aotearoa/New Zealand, has long used computing technologies for cultural resilience, linguistic survival, social revitalisation and resistance, and economic sustainability. Individuals have used various technologies, hapū, subtribe, iwi, tribe, academic institutes, innovators, activists, communities, industry leaders, computer scientists, programmers, historians, geographers, translators, linguists and te reo Māori, the Māori language teachers as a mechanism to connect Māori to their language, whakapapa, genealogy, whānau, family, and mātauranga, knowledge, culture and identity (T.T. Keegan and Sciascia 2018; Whaanga, Keegan, and Apperley 2017; Whaanga, Mato, and Keegan 2021). In this paper, we highlight some of the ICT initiatives Māori have undertaken and highlighted some of the real successes that we have had over the past three decades, from Te Wahapū, translations of the Microsoft and Google, to the Niupepa, Māori Newspaper collection, to some of the work that is currently being done in the areas of xR which encompasses augmented reality (AR), virtual reality (VR), and mixed reality (MR), machine learning techniques, text-to-speech and speech-to-text conversion, and social media platforms.

Developments in information and communications technology (ICT), ubiquitous technologies, supercomputing, AI, robotics, machine and deep learning, big data, and other technologies have transformed how we practice, share, access, communicate, distribute, and view knowledge and information. This chapter describes how Indigenous communities, GLAMs (galleries, libraries, archives, museums) and institutions have developed and adopted etools, emedia, and elearning for cultural, social, linguistic, and economic sustainability.

Urban ecological restoration typically employs western science approaches to restore degraded ecosystems. As yet, few restoration groups acknowledge the history of these degraded urban sites, despite connections, past and present, that root Indigenous Peoples (and others) in these lands. Here, we promote partnership with Indigenous communities from project inception and present two successful case studies from Aotearoa New Zealand. We specifically note that partnering and building relationships with Indigenous communities in restoration efforts require recognition of power inequalities and injustices. We consider success to include both restoration of ecological function and biodiversity and reconnection of all communities to urban ecosystems.

Representative sampling of crayfish in streams is often impractical, especially in non-wadable habitats, or in areas with soft substrates. Whakaweku are artificial habitats made from bracke...

Whakataukī are part of a strongly developed Māori oral tradition that conveys critical information about aspects of life, society and tribal memory, including ecological knowledge. Such cod...

Human settlement into new regions is typically accompanied by waves of animal extinctions, yet we have limited understanding of how human communities perceived and responded to such ecological crises. The first megafaunal extinctions in New Zealand began just 700 years ago, in contrast to the deep time of continental extinctions. Consequently, indigenous Māori oral tradition includes ancestral sayings that explicitly refer to extinct species. Our linguistic analysis of these sayings shows a strong bias towards critical food species such as moa, and emphasizes that Māori closely observed the fauna and environment. Temporal changes in form and content demonstrate that Māori recognized the loss of important animal resources, and that this loss reverberated culturally centuries later. The data provide evidence that extinction of keystone fauna was important for shaping ecological and social thought in Māori society, and suggest a similar role in other early societies that lived through megafaunal extinction events.

As the rate of affiliation to Christian identity continues to decline in Aotearoa New Zealand (only 49 percent of the population said they were Christian in the last census), public space has become more receptive to other forms of religiosity. In particular, community rituals around the winter movements of the Matariki (Pleiades) constellation have gained support since the year 2000. For instance, the capital city, Wellington, has replaced a centuries&rsquo, old British fireworks festival, Guy Fawkes, with an enlarged version of its Matariki celebrations: an action seen as a tipping point in the incorporation of Māori spiritual values into public life. Interactions between European colonisers and Māori have been characterised for more than 250 years by tensions between the relational thinking of Māori who see human beings as both participating in and constrained by an environment resonant with divine energies, and the quantitative, hierarchical, &lsquo, Great Chain of Being&rsquo, model that had long been dominant among Europeans. Now, when the natural environment worldwide is under strain from population and economic pressures, it seems to some both appropriate and vital to look to epistemological and spiritual models that are intimately responsive to the specificities of location.

In the Māori worldview, humans are linked directly to flora and fauna through whakapapa (ancestry). As such, conservation can be expressed, not in terms of preserving ‘otherness’, but in terms of sustaining ‘us-ness’—our very selfhood, and our relationships and interactions with nature. We investigated the shifting discourse on the use of ‘rāhui’ (prohibition, restriction) and conservation-related words in nineteenth century New Zealand using material from the early Māori newspapers (niupepa). Our search revealed numerous uses of ‘rāhui’ but very few uses of ‘kaitiakitanga’ (guardianship, stewardship) or conservation in discussion of resources. The discourse included concerns around legislation, land alienation and land loss, that all impact rangatiratanga (authority, autonomy, chieftainship) and the kincentric relationship with nature.

New Zealand English is well-known for its heavy borrowing of words from Māori. This lexical component, unique to New Zealand English alone has been studied intensely over the last 50 years, particularly in newspaper media. Current research suggests the use is still increasing today, primarily in Māori-related contexts. Here, we analyse a surprising and unexpected use of Māori loanwords in science digital discourse (neither genre being previously investigated), where we discover a strong presence of Māori borrowings in National Science Challenge website and Twitter content. Using corpus linguistics methods, we argue that the use of Māori loanwords in this genre functions as a national identity building tool, used by various authors to signal that the ‘challenges’ the country faces are uniquely New Zealand’s ‘challenges’.

The digital era has transformed how people live their lives and interact with the world and knowledge systems around them. In Aotearoa/New Zealand a range of initiatives incorporating Indigenous knowledge have been implemented to collect, catalog, maintain, and organize digital objects. In this article, we report on the ethics, processes, and procedures associated with the digitization of the manuscripts, works, and collected taonga (treasures) of the late Dr. Pei Te Hurinui Jones—and describe how it was transformed into a digital library. It discusses the decision-making processes and the various roles and responsibilities of the researchers, family members, and institute in this process.

In the original publication, the Fig. 4 image and caption contain an error. The correct figure is presented in this correction article.

Recent conceptual shifts in ecology towards integration of humans into ecosystems requires all possible sources of ecological knowledge available (Berkes 2004, 2009 this issue). Māori traditional ecological knowledge of natural systems (TEK) can add valuable ecological data to more conventional scientific studies as the former tends to be diachronic, based on a cummulative system of understanding the environment founded on observations and experience (Gadgil et al. 1993; Berkes 2008), while the latter is frequently synchronic, with experiments that may explore causal effects in ecological patterns (Newman & Moller 2005; Moller et al. 2009a). However accessing TEK can be both difficult and time-consuming, as demonstrated by the 14-year research project Kia Mau Te Tītī Mo Ake Tonu Atu (the ‘Keep the Tītī Forever’ research project; Moller et al. 2009a). We argue that oral traditions offer a wealth of information that is frequently overlooked, in part because of a lack of knowledge of te reo Māori (the Māori language) and, further, a lack of recognition of the inextricable link between biological and cultural diversity (Maffi 2005). Māori rarely express concepts and ideas directly, rather tending to use imagery in order to understand and convey history (Tau & Anderson 2008). Thus, whakataukī (ancestral sayings), pūrākau and kōrero (myths and stories), karakia (prayer), and waiata (song) are enduring and relevant as “records of tribal memory” (Kawharu 2008). Such cultural knowledge is not always easily accessible, and may require extensive contextualisation to make sense. Many of the above vehicles for TEK are embedded in idiom, dialect, and tribal identity markers, and are dependent on the structure, meaning and function of their context. That is, they are rarely transparent at face value (Steiner 1998). Posey (1996) argues that taxonomic systems, emic perceptions, and codified knowledge of overt and covert categories depend on language as a major vehicle for cultural transmission. Māori structured taxonomies differ from Linnaean taxonomy, for example, as whakapapa (genealogy) expresses relationships between ecosystem components, human beings, and their relationship with the environment (Roberts et al. 2004). Additionally, each name has its own whakapapa, imbued with information about the process of naming. Thus, names may reference tribal markers, for instance, and in doing so create a knowledge system for future generations to follow. Unfortunately, traditional knowledge of names, classifications and taxonomies has been eroded over generations (Tipa & Nelson 2007). However, current work on  

The study of astronomy has shaped cultures, societies, science and religion and influenced the evolution of all peoples. For Māori, the results of thousands of years of living with, studying and talking about the stars were woven into the language, culture and environment. Traditionally, Māori held a vast knowledge of astronomy, and their studies of the night sky played an important role in everyday life. This knowledge has, unfortunately, become less visible in the glare of contemporary European culture. However, in the last 20 years, there has been a renaissance in Māori astronomy and astronomical knowledge and, in particular, the revitalisation of the Māori lunar calendar (maramataka), ocean navigation and the Matariki (Pleiades) celebration. We focus on the celebration of Matariki and explore how this traditional practice is returning to play a significant role in the modern cultural landscape of Aotearoa New Zealand.

The Linnaean system has a set of rules governing botanical nomenclature, zoological nomenclature and bacteriological nomenclature for the scientific naming of species. These set the principles, rules and standards with which authors should comply with when naming new species. In Aotearoa/New Zealand (ANZ), the knowledge and taxonomic systems of Māori (the indigenous people) have largely been the preserve of Western anthropologists, linguistics and ethnographers. As such, the Linnaean classification system has been superimposed over the pre-existing classifications of Māori since European settlement approximately 200 years ago. A range of strategies have been applied to the naming of new species within a scientific context when using the Māori language (an east-Polynesian language), which do not adhere to the Linnaean system including arbitrary practices, hybridisation, incorrect linguistic context, a lack of full understanding of the meanings of the words and names and questionable naming practices of taxonomists. This paper discusses these issues, including examples, to illustrate the breadth of issues that we encountered. Although no code of practice or set of rules can anticipate or resolve the problem, there is an advantage to developing a set of possible recommendations as to the use of Māori words in the names of new species.