In a dawn ceremony at Te Kura Kaupapa Māori o Ngāti Rangi in Ohakune, the iwi (tribe) this week unveiled a traditional Māori star compass built to teach the next generation of astronomers, navigators and gardeners how to read the night sky the way their ancestors did.
The structure, known as whana tongitongi Te Tatau o Rongonui, is an open-air star compass built mostly of rock and stone and modelled on ancient compasses found in Tahiti and Hawai’i. The stones are arranged so that the rising and setting points of significant stars, the sun and the moon line up with the markers at meaningful times of year. Standing inside it, a student can effectively read the seasons by walking from stone to stone.
The compass was officially opened on Thursday morning, 30 May 2026. According to a Local Democracy Reporting story published by RNZ, the project was first proposed in 2022 by Ngāti Rangi celestial researcher Riwaru Tihema, with construction beginning the following year. It has taken four years to bring it from a sketch to a permanent, working teaching tool sitting in the grounds of the school.
Co-lead Rauroha Brown, also a celestial researcher with the iwi, told the same outlet that the compass is a deliberate piece of intergenerational technology. “We built this kāpehu whetū, this whana tongitongi, at the kura, so we could teach the next generation of astronomers,” she said. She likened the compass to “a GPS, a phone or a USB”, calling it a memory holder for knowledge that needs to live somewhere outside of any single person.
That memory bank covers a much wider range than just navigation. The compass is also used to read the seasons for planting kūmara (sweet potato) and other crops, to identify the right windows for hunting and fishing, to mark Puanga (the rising of the star that signals the Māori new year in the central North Island), and to set the calendar for community ceremonies and funerals. In a sense it is a single stone instrument that combines a calendar, an almanac, a planting guide and a meeting schedule for a whole community.
Helen Leahy, chief executive of the iwi’s post-settlement governance entity Ngā Waihua o Paerangi, told RNZ the long-term intention was for whānau (families) to learn and live by the stars. That ambition is bigger than a school project. It assumes the compass will become part of daily life in the area, not a curiosity to be visited on a school trip.
The school’s principal, Pikimai Ouknider, called the opening “succession in the making”. His comment captures what makes this unveiling more than a feel-good moment. New Zealand has lost a great deal of practical traditional knowledge over the last two centuries, and much of what remains lives in the heads of a small number of elders. A compass cut into the land at a primary school is one of the most durable forms in which that knowledge can be passed on. Children can walk the stones every term, every year, for decades.
The research behind the compass has been a collective effort. Tihema and Brown are part of a wider group of researchers from Taranaki, Whanganui and Rangitīkei who have been cross-referencing nineteenth-century manuscripts with the spoken accounts of Ngāti Rangi elders. Their working theory is that the central North Island was home to a network of formal observatories long before European arrival, including astronomical sites in the Waimarino and Waiouru districts.
One nearby site, the RNZ report notes, features stone alignments next to a water mirror, a stone basin holding still water that was used as a reflecting telescope. Looking down into the water doubles the effective focal length and dims the brightest stars enough that smaller ones become visible. It is the same principle that lets modern observatories use liquid mirror telescopes today.
That technological lineage matters. Sophisticated astronomy is not the property of any one culture. The pyramids at Giza, the temples at Machu Picchu, the stone circles at Stonehenge, and the star compass in the central plateau all show that human beings, when given a clear night sky and a long enough memory, build the same kinds of instruments out of the materials they have. The Ngāti Rangi compass simply makes that tradition visible again on its own ground.
There is also a practical, modern reason a school might want a working star compass. Light pollution along New Zealand’s main population corridors has made naked-eye astronomy harder in many parts of the country. Ohakune, sitting in the lee of the central volcanoes, is one of the darker places in the North Island. A child who learns to find Puanga at sunrise at the school is far more likely to find it again from their own backyard than a child who has only seen the night sky from under a streetlight.
Te Kura Kaupapa Māori o Ngāti Rangi has not announced whether the compass will be open to visitors outside school hours. For now, the focus is on the children who walk past it every morning, the elders who consulted on the alignments, and the next group of celestial researchers it is designed to grow.
Have you visited a traditional Māori observatory site, or do you have stories from your own family about reading the stars in New Zealand? Leave a comment below. We would love to hear them.
This article was written by AI, briefed to report the facts, hopefully without some of the bias people bring to the job 🙂
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