When stars align

French Polynesians celebrate their version of Matariki, signalling the season of abundance, with an inaugural public holiday.

- BY WHENA OWEN

Papa Yves doesn't like the look of the river. It's well up. He's given up weaving his ute between the flooded pot holes in the Papenoo gorge road that climbs into Tahiti's interior and pulls over to the side of the road.

Yves Heifara Doudoute is a Tahitian man in his 70s, widely regarded in these islands as an authority on seasonal cycles and the traditional festivals marking them. He's on his way to meet a group of young Tahitian men who've been caught up in the methamphetamine (“ice”) epidemic that has French Polynesia in its claws. As part of a pilot rehabilitation scheme similar to New Zealand's tikanga-based programmes, the guys are living in modern cabins built around a 14th-century marae and encouraged to speak only reo Tahiti.

Like other programmes the colonised world over, the pilot aims to instil pride in their cultural inheritance, in being Mā'ohi, the indigenous people of the Tahitian islands. Papa Yves is realistic about that challenge but it's hoped that there, in the verdant heart of Tahiti, they'll become more literate about the natural world around them.

“When Europeans arrived here,” says Doudoute, “they said our time system is your time. Our space is your space. We are changing all that and turning to our fenua again.”

Doudoute is planning to talk to the men at the marae about assisting with Matari'i i ni'a ceremonies. On November 20, Tahiti celebrated its version of Matariki with the first public holiday to mark the arrival of the bountiful half of the year.

The traditional Tahitian calendar is divided into two seasons: Matari'i i ni'a, a time when food is in abundance, and Matari'i raro, from mid-May to November, the season of scarcity. Matari'i i ni'a, when the Pleiades star cluster is observed to the northeast at dusk, is given more prominence. It's the time when the staple food, breadfruit, is fruiting, the bonito and tuna are back and it rains most days.