Te Moana Meridian

How the prime meridian shapes our world, 

and a case for relocating it.

Draft four: August 2023

Author

Sam Tam Ham / Sam Hamilton

Editorial support: 

John Niekrasz, Lana Lopesi, Patricia Gómez Vázquez, Janet McAllister, 

Ben Evans James, & FBA, FRSE, FAcSS, FRSGS Charles W. J. Withers, Lauren Waude.

Te reo Māori translation: 

Rhonda Tibble (Ngati Porou, Te Whanau a Apanui, and Ngati Kahungunu)

Commissioned cover art:

Vaimaila Urale

Funding & Support

CNZ New Zealand Arts Council, Transmediale Art & Digital Culture Berlin, Drain Magazine.

Contents

The purpose of this project is to develop and advance a proposal to the United Nations to formally relocate the international prime meridian from its current location in Greenwich, London, to its antipodean coordinates in Te Moana-nui-ā-Kiwa/the South Pacific Ocean. Although incubated as an art project, this living document is designed to continue as a bonafide real-world, peer-reviewed, and practically-applicable geopolitical policy proposal.

But why move the prime meridian?

To quote Dina Gilio-Whitaker, “Climate change is not just a problem of technology or economics; it’s a problem of philosophy.” The fact that we’re currently failing to arrest climate change, despite having the technical resources to do so, supports Gilio-Whitaker’s  statement. It also shows us that the crises humanity faces today are essentially the result of our actions driven by particular modes of thinking. Many of our contemporary ideologies were thrust upon us during the Industrial Revolution and set the scene for today’s technologically advanced—yet socially and ecologically deteriorating—world. Technology alone won’t fix our problems, for technology is useless without a robust critical, social, and political framework to implement it. We are in dire need of visionary interventions to create this framework.

As an instrument that fundamentally regulates how we perceive space and time—two core dimensions of physical reality—the prime meridian wields exceptional power over how we understand the world. Relocating it away from a historical center of hegemonic power has the potential to radically change our perception and, by extension, how we act.

What actually is the prime meridian?

It is an imaginary line drawn vertically on Earth’s surface between the North and South Poles from which longitude (east-west distance) is measured. Paired with the equator, which serves as a horizontal line for measuring latitude (north-south distance), these two axes constitute the basis of the Global Positioning System (GPS), the most common system used to define and navigate geographic space. The prime meridian also serves as a line for measuring and regulating Coordinated Universal Time (UTC, the international system for telling time) as well as determining the zero-point for all global time zones. As far as these two systems go, the prime meridian is effectively the “center” of time and space on Earth.

Unlike latitude, which is determined by Earth’s geophysical rotation in space, no such natural phenomena exist for determining longitude. As time and longitudinal space are experienced on Earth, these dimensions behave almost like Möbius strips—dimensions without beginning or end. Unlike when traveling north or south, there is no limit to how far one can travel east or west. Global time and longitude can technically be measured from anywhere. Thus, the prime meridian’s functionality relies not on where it is, but simply on our tacit agreement to use it. Since it depends upon human consensus, it is not a matter of nature or of science, but one of politics. 

Enter the International Meridian Conference of 1884, held in Washington D.C. by the US State Department, where twenty-six nations gathered to determine where to locate a single prime meridian for international use. 

Prime meridians have, in one form or another, existed since the dawn of recorded human history and, before 1884, there were as many meridians as there were cultures. But, as humanity became increasingly globally networked at the end of the nineteenth century, the absence of a standard “universal” reference for time and space became increasingly problematic.

For many of the scholars working on this problem, it was widely anticipated that the establishment of an international prime meridian would not only resolve technical issues but would also usher in a new era of global modernity. They asserted this new era would be defined by the values of cosmopolitanism and humanitarian universalism. We’ll return to this assertion later but, for now, it’s true to say that the “universal” prime meridian of today is a critical technical keystone for many of the global systems that humanity now (for better or worse) existentially relies on. 

Many of the scholars at the International Meridian Conference knew the placement of the meridian was innately political and asserted that its location must be determined by the highest degree of political neutrality. Among the locations considered during and prior to the 1884 conference were Jerusalem, The Great Pyramids of Egypt, the Canary Islands, and several major astronomical observatories. One proposal that received wide and prolonged attention—put forth by Canadian scholar Sandford Flemming (widely considered a principal forebearer of the prime meridian)—was to locate it in the Pacific Ocean/Te Moana-nui-ā-Kiwa, thus avoiding land and nationalistic territories altogether.

However, for the nation-states that sent delegates to that final 1884 conference, commercial, industrial, militaristic, and political interests came to surreptitiously dominate the proceedings. Despite decades of scholarly debate that centered the importance of political neutrality, all but three of the conference delegates voted to place the prime meridian in England—the world’s dominant colonial state in the 1880s—at the Airy Transit Circle telescope at the Royal Observatory of Greenwich in London. 

The stated rationale for this placement was that the Greenwich Observatory possessed the greatest degree of accuracy in observing and measuring longitude. The conference had bought into a colonialist and capitalist logic based on the faulty patriarchal notion that having the power to impose control over something begets a moral authority and obligation to do so, a perverse “squaring the circle” kind of thinking that implies nature is subservient to the will of “Man.” Rather than delivering a prime meridian that serves all humanity, the conference delivered a prime meridian that instead fulfilled Pierre Bourdieu’s maxim, “unification profits the dominant” by effectively serving the British Empire’s ambitions for global colonial hegemony. 

A simple contextual analysis of the conference’s delegation exposes further colonial machinations. Without even resorting to critiques of nation-states as inherently flawed means of determining democratic consensus, the fact that only twenty-six out of 128 nations actually participated in the conference is metric enough to dismiss its claims of representing international consensus. What the conference delivered was an elite minority ruling, and a distinctly imperialist one at that. Despite the slim degree of geographic and cultural diversity suggested by those twenty-six nations, all of them were either major European colonial powers or direct progenies of them. Though Switzerland wasn’t technically a colonial power, it did substantially finance and profit off the European colonial project at large. Likewise, the Japanese and Ottoman empires, while not European, were prolific imperial colonizers. Broken down as such, it is evident that the conference was contextually destined to deliver a result that would reflect a colonial, Eurocentric, and white supremacist worldview.

This worldview, in contrast to its “post-enlightenment” posturing, is largely associated with the extensive, unilateral, genocidal, and ecocidal extraction of human and environmental resources for capital gain. This worldview is largely responsible for creating or rapidly accelerating many of the crises humanity now faces. Anchoring the prime meridian to Greenwich, London—the epicenter of the most powerful colonial and capitalist empire to ever exist—only bolsters the perceived validity of this worldview.

Now, it is true that the prime meridian has provided great benefit to humanity, but we can’t ignore the way its placement has functioned as a tool of Western dominance. Situating the prime meridian in Greenwich, London, has allowed it to serve as an instrument for extending and legitimizing colonial rule over not only vast swaths of the physical planet, but also over humanity’s collective metaphysical relationship to time and space. This paradigm is maintained by severing and homogenizing the plethora of culturally endemic (and equally valid and valuable) spatiotemporal modalities that existed before it. This paradigm positions London as the center of the world. For just as all the roads once led to, and concentrated Rome’s power, all GPS and UTC coordinates today point to and concentrate London’s power.

This paradigm has been so successfully embedded into the public psyche that the prime meridian today is practically considered an unalterable law of nature. Other than this proposal, there seems to have been only one other citable critique of the prime meridian since 1884: Rasheedah Philip’s 2022 Black Quantum Futurism project Time Zone Protocols.

The prime meridian is long overdue a substantive critique. By today’s standards, the existing prime meridian feels like an imperial relic. A monument to the British Empire’s brute manhandling of international affairs. An imperialist modus operandi that appears to remain intact. 

After being invited to participate in this project, The Royal Observatory of Greenwich (a premier institute of the British Empire) sought to undermine Te Moana Meridian’s critical legitimacy, and went as far as to have a legally-obtained Greenwich Park film permit revoked (a permit that allowed the filming of a mother and daughter performing a short choreography with sea shells outside the observatory). These actions on the part of the Observatory exhibit an unwillingness to address their own complicity within Britain’s imperialist history and an intent to protect their colonial legacy. 

Clearly, the prime meridian isn’t just overdue critique, it needs to be redressed. 

But how?

To quote Māori Studies scholar Dr. Daniel Hikuroa, “The difference between legal personhood for a river and a corporation is in intention and purpose.” The problem is not the prime meridian itself, but its context, its location. For just as context can determine whether something is medicine or poison, the location of the prime meridian is what hijacks its otherwise utilitarian benefit and unjustifiably weaponizes it into an instrument for maintaining imperial power.

Relocating the prime meridian won’t solve the world’s problems. It won’t even fix the problem of adjunctly privileging one place over everywhere else. It is—like all human inventions and conventions—innately politically complicated. But it can (depending on where we put it) provide us with a common and familiar means for orienting time and space that defers to the authority of nature (a thing should be done on every physical, metaphysical, political, and cultural front right now to ensure our survival) rather than lofty imperialist ambitions. For just as the prime meridian of 1884 helped to usher in global modernity (as an historical period) and the industrial global framework that birthed the climate crisis (among many such atrocities), relocating it today can—in conjunction with a network of many other necessary actions—help usher us out of it. A new prime meridian can be a modal beacon to guide us through the turbulent present toward a future that is no longer beholden to the trappings of our past.

But we must do more than just neutralize the prime meridian’s innately political discriminatory agency; we must weaponize it against itself to promote decentralized multilateralism. We must use it to privilege the global commons and to strengthen what binds us, not what divides us. The prime meridian must be a monument that belongs to nobody but itself—a place of intangible value to all humanity. 

If such a place exists, we need not abolish the prime meridian altogether in order to mitigate its associated risks. Although there are plenty of human conventions and inventions that should be outright abolished, abolishing everything in the world that has the capacity to be misused for harm will not stop such harm from being inflicted. It is the conditions that incentivize their misuse that need addressing. And in the case of the prime meridian, abolishing it without accounting for the very real and likely perilous consequences that would almost certainly ensue is not only rash but reckless.

But how can we constructively mitigate its misuse, while maintaining its benefit? This proposal suggests two changes: 1) relocate the prime meridian, and 2) do so through robust and multilateral international diplomacy and consensus. For such processes are the only way of equitably identifying, tackling, and negotiating all the sociopolitical questions and implications that technically and metaphysically intersect through the prime meridian. 

Today, GPS and USC are technically determined by the IERS Reference Meridian, a technical successor of the Greenwich prime meridian managed by the International Earth Rotation and Reference Systems Service (IERS). This is the technical distinction that the Royal Observatory of Greenwich claims absolves them from—and thus invalidates—this critique. But the fact that 1) the locations of the reference meridian and the prime meridian are so physically close that one can throw a stone between them; 2) the prime meridian’s metaphysical and geopolitical privileging of Western power interests remains wholly unaffected by this distinction; and 3) the Royal Observatory of Greenwich continues to brand itself as the “Home of the Prime Meridian”, sufficiently undermine such claims. Thus, their spaghetti did not stick, and this critique stands.

The Royal Observatory also claims no complicity in British imperialism and colonization, a claim most brazenly contradicted by the observatory’s iconic Time Ball. Sitting atop a pole on the Royal Observatory’s roof is a giant red ball that drops every day at 1 pm, the historical purpose of which was to sync the clocks of all the Royal British Navy vessels docked in the Thames. So, the Royal Observatory served as the defacto timekeeper for the most powerful seafaring empire in history. This militaristic relationship is echoed by IERS, whose primary facility is the US Naval Observatory in Washington, D.C., a military facility. 

Technically speaking, relocating the prime meridian does introduce some risk; namely, the need to update certain global computation systems. But, in reality, this risk is no greater than when the IERS introduces “leap seconds” into UTC; something they’ve successfully done 27 times since 1972, and which computing industries have successfully weathered each time by developing and implementing mitigation strategies. We are more than capable of meeting the technological needs of a relocated prime meridian, so arguments against this proposal based on technical concerns are largely invalid. 

The 1884 Greenwich prime meridian was never formally adopted by most of the world. Its ubiquity today is a result of convention and the hegemonic activities of Western imperialism that function as its vectors. If we had also chosen to fulfill the elementary assertion that the prime meridian be positioned through the highest degree of political neutrality possible, there is only one territory that makes political, legal, and conceptual sense: the “high seas”. This title is given to all oceanic territories beyond national territories. The high seas cover 50% of the planet and the United Nations calls them a “common heritage of mankind”. These territories have recently and auspiciously been included in a profoundly unique piece of international legislation that defines and protects them: the so-called “High Seas Treaty”. 

And, unlike in 1884, we today possess a far more equitable (albeit far from perfect) diplomatic device for rendering multilateral international consensus: the United Nations. The UN has the power to ratify a General Assembly Draft Resolution with resolutions to the effect of:

1. Relocate the Prime Meridian as soon as diplomatically possible, but no later than October 2034 , to 

2. a location as politically neutral as possible, that

3. avoids all national territories, and thus belongs to, and is a legal territory of the global commons, and

4. is as physically and metaphysically antithetical to Greenwich, London, as possible, and where

5. its agency to politically privilege one place is either rendered politically moot, or is repurposed to privilege things unanimously considered of equal meaning, value, and benefit to all humanity, which

6. can in no way be used to harm, diminish, invalidate, or hierarchically define any other regionally or culturally endemic spatiotemporal modalities; a 

7. prime meridian located where a 50-kilometer radius area around it can be designated an international marine sanctuary and, in tandem with the prime meridian itself, be designated a Unesco World Heritage Site, with

8. full legal personhood status, and all the legal benefits, rights, and protections that afforded it as such, all of which can receive

9. executive and administrative oversight by a new Unesco agency developed in meaningful and equal-staked partnership between Unesco, the UN Pacific Island Forum, the UN BBNJ High Ambition Coalition, a consortium of non-military civil astronomical observatories, and, as tangata whenua and kaitiaki of the newly proposed prime meridian location, Te Kaunihera Maori o Aotearoa/The New Zealand Māori Council, whilst

11. its technical function can continue to be operated by the IERS to ensure practical continuity, with 

12. funding and financial administration supplied solely by the United Nations, with the proposed exception of funds contributed by The United Kingdom as reparations for its historical misuse of the prime meridian.

A prime meridian anchored in Te Moana-nui-ā-Kiwa/the South Pacific Ocean. The womb of the world. The belly of its hydrosphere.

A prime meridian that affirms the primacy of nature and promotes more oceanic ways of knowing and being. A decentralizing “center of the world” that nurtures “and, and”, rather than “either/or” modes of global relationality. Modes as advanced as the Sāmoan philosophical concept and praxis of ‘teu le vā’ (Dr. Melani Anae).

A Prime Meridian liberated of its imperialist baggage, and from terrestrial austerity altogether. Yet still acknowledges its predecessor as its “antimeridian”, its antipode, its antithesis, its past.

A prime meridian that reflects the empirical reality that time is not absolute, but dilates fluidly in relation to mass and energy. To paraphrase NOAA climate physicist Nadir Jeevanjee, “a multitude of temporalities exist between the various depths of the world”s oceans”. 

Oceans that are simultaneously singular and plural; local and global; transient and omnipresent; past and future. Conditions that may seem paradoxical for framing such a distinctly singular and exacted device as the prime meridian, but which provide the necessary means for constructively metabolizing its discriminatory tendencies. A paradigm corporeally expressed by the fact that no monument can be erected there. 

For the ocean is the monument.

One that can, has, and will crush our civilizations like sandcastles on a beach. A prime meridian that reminds us that our survival depends on what connects us, not what divides us.

To avoid drowning, become the ocean.

Te Poutūmarotanga o Te Moana

Ko te pūnaha mātai matawhenua taunga ahuroa he pūnaha o te ao ka tautuhia, ka

inea, ka whakaputatia I ngā matawhenua taunga ahuroa ki te whakaahua, ki te ine, ki

te whakakōrero I ngā matawhenua taungaroa mā ngā ahopae, me ngā ahopou, hei

ine I te ātea o te ahu whakateraki ki te tonga o te weheruatanga o te ao ahu

whakaterāwhiti ki te uru o te Poutumaro tuatahi.

Tō te mea kāre kē he aroaro whenua hei whakakitekite i a ia, ko te taunga o te

Poutūmaro Tuatahi o te ao he mea hanga noa, pēnei ana ko hea, ko hea I runga I te

mata o Papatūānuku, ko te mea nui kia whakaaengia te katoa ki te whakamahia. Ko

tana wāhi nohanga ehara I te mea  nō te ao tūroa, engari he mea tōrangapū.

Mua mai i te tau kotahi mano waru rau waru tekau mā whā he nui tonu ngā pou tūmaro horapa te ao. Heoi, nā te pikitanga o ngā tūhonohono mā runga i te haerere-ā-whenua me te ohanga-ā-ao, me te korenga o tētahi rautaki hei whakakite i te ahoroa i puta mai te raruraru nui, I hua mai te tini o ngā wananga huri noa te ao mā runga tēnei kaupapa. I te tau kotahi mano waru rau waru tekau mā whā I rūmene mai ngā iwi rua tekau mā ono ki Washington DC ki te whakatau I te nohonga o tētahi pou tūmaro motuhake I te ao.

Mo te nuinga o ngā tāngata matatau nā rātou I ākina I te kaupapa o te pou tūmaro kotahi o te ao, ko te whakaaro kei muri I tana whakatū koia ko te pōhiri mai I tetahi ngaru hou he whakahouhia I te ao hou, nā rātou anō I whakatenatena, me whakaahuahia e te mana ōrite, e te mana tangata tohatoha ratonga tā ngā matea. Ko te iho matua o tēnei whakapae me whakatūria ma te kore whai hereherenga ki tētahi tangata, tē tahi whenua, kia tōrangpū kore te noho. 

Ko te Pou Tūmaro ka noho hei ratonga mā ngā iwi o te ao hei kaupapa manaaki I te ira tangata o te ao anō hoki. Ma te whai atu I enei whainga pono, he nui tonu ngā wāhi I whakatauhia pēnei I ngā Toka Tūkoraha o Ihipa, Hiruharama, āmoutere o Canary, me ētahi atu whare matai whetu rarahi.

Ko tētahi tono I whakawhiwhia I te tirohanga roa, tirohanga whānui, I whakatakotoria e Sanford Fleming te kaipūtaiao rongonui, mangai nui, kia whakanohia I te Pou Tūmaro ki te Moana-nui-ā-Kiwa hei kaupare atu I te whenua me aua rohenga whenua ā- motu katoa. 

Ahakoa rā, ko ngā aronganui o aua whenua rua tekau mā ono nāna I tautoko, I tonoa a rātou taraketi pōti ki te hui nui whakamutunga I te tau kotahi mano waru rau waru tekau mā whā ko te ohanga, te ahumahi, te tūngārahu me te tōrangapu te takenga. Ko ēnei take I tahuritia, I hunaia I te rakau a Tū hei ariā pūtaiao herenga kore hei huanga mā rātou anō.

Hāunga, te nui o ngā tau tītohea I te kaupapa, ka mahue kia toru anake nga māngai tarakete kāre I pōtitia me whakapiri atu te Pou Tūmaro hou o te ao ki te Whare Matai Whetu a Te Whare Ariki ki Greenwich, Rānana, I te mea “ I a ia te tiketiketanga o te ōrau totika ka kitea ka inengia I te ahoroa” 

I kōnei e takarongia ana ko te whakahīhī, matatika werewere, ngako koroni ki a whakatuānui pēnā mā te kaha o te mana ki te pēhi I te whakahaere o tētahi mea ka whanau mai ko te mōtika tangata me whakatutukingia. Pēnei ana ko te taima me te wā he marau nō te ira tangata kauaka ko te taiao.

Kāti,“takiritia te porowhita” hei whainga mā te noho ira tangata-taiao nei te whakawhanaungatanga atu koia rā te ariā whakaaro I para te huarahi o naianei me tōna horopaki: he mōrearea ira tangata taiāwhio mā reira I toko ake he ingoa hou mō te whakapapa o te wā e ai ngā tamariki o Papatūānuku kia kite atu I te whakakikokikotanga o tona āheitanga; ko te Ira Tangatatanga.

Me hoki atu ki te hui nui nei, me ui atu tāua, I pēwhea te whakatūtukihanga o te whakaaetanga a ngā iwi o te ao I kokorahotia e te kaupapa nei? Kia timataria, I te kotahi rau rua tekau mā waru iwi o te Ao, ko te rua tekau mā ono noa iho I whakakanohitia I te hui nui rā, ko ētahi I pakari ake te tū I ētahi atu (koia pū ko Piritania rāua ko Amerika). 

Hatia, he paku noa te rerekētanga o a rātou noho matawhenua  rātou I whakakanohi mai, tērā pea pai kē atu ko te tino kaiwhakaatu o te pono o te korero o aua iwi rua tekau mā ono, kotahi anake ka tareka te kokorahotia ehara rātou I te iwi whakatūānui pēnei I te mana koronitanga nui tonu, ko te whenua o Switzerland tērā,  nāna I utungia te hui nui rā, me te kaupapa whakatūānui koronitanga o Uropi rahi rawa. 

Mā kōnei ake e mārama kehokeho ana, ko Kirimā,  ko Uropi noa, ko te whakatinanatanga o ngā taraketi o tāua hui nui rā I matua āheia mai ki te whakatenatena I te huanga mariu kia rewaina te mana potaea a te Kiri mā me tōna kaupapa Koronitanga a Uropi. Hāunga, ngā kokoraho hangahanga ā – ao me te whanake whakamia o te tātari kōrero, ko te  “mana ngohengohe” me ōna nukarautanga o te whakatuanui a te Uru I nui ai te whiu.

Ahakoa he tino taunaki tēnei kawenga whakatahe I te whakahangahanga o nga iwi o te ao, ko te āta wetewete I te tuhinga o te Pou Tūmaro o Greenwhich kāore kē I matū ai. Hei ahakoa te kore manaaki I te ira tangata o te ao, ko te Pou Tūmaro o Greenwhich rokohanga ka whakamanangia I a Ingarangi motuhake rawa, pēnei ka whakanohia i te pito o te ao mai I reira ka inengia e tangata kē ake o rātou turanga. 

Ko tēnei āheinga tūturu I whakamanangia I te whakaturenga kia aupēhia, kia autāmia e Piritania  mo te kotahi rau toru tekau mā waru tau, kauaka ko runga I te nuinga o te ao tūroa engari ki runga ōhoki I te wairua o te ao hangai pū ki te wā, te 1wāhi me te ātea. Tō te mea he rite ngā ara katoa ka anga atu ki Roma me tona whakawhaititinga ki te mana o Roma, ko te GPS me te UTC (ara te tētēkura hou o GMT) ka hangai te tohu atu ki Rananga me te pūngaia o te mana whakatuanui a te karauna o Piritania.

Mahue ake te tohu o te whakakotahitanga, ko te Pou Tūmaro o tēnei rangi he aheinga kē o te noho hei āwhai maumaharatanga ki tō te mana whakatuanui a te karauna o Piritania ki runga I ngā whakahangahanga huri rauna I te ao me te  uruhi torangapu a whenua I ngā take Aorere o te Ao. He kawanga nana rā, e ai te tirohanga o te Whare Matai Whetu a te Kuini ki Greenwhich kua roa e whakaauaaungia kia tokatū tēnei tū kaupapa, me te tangohia I ana pepa whakaae kia kiriata whakahopungia, me te mea nei kāore ōna pānonitanga.

I te mea nā te Pou Tūmaro o te tau kotahi mano, waru rau, waru tekau mā whā I tomo mai te ao hou ki te ao whānui, ā, I tahuna kinongia tōna huarahi ki roto I ngā rautau o te tekau mā iwa me te rua tekau, ko tōna taumanu anō ka whakaara ake I tētahi wā hou rerekē hoki, tētahi ka maunu I te haepapa, I te whakahou, I te mana ōrite hei tirohanga a Ao hei tino taonga mō ngā uri whakatipu o anamata.

Otia, he rongo mānukanuka tēnei, engari ko te āta whakanohia I te Pou Tūmaro he mea mataku māmā nei. Ko te wāhi uaua ko te whiringa kia mahia. He whiringa, kīhai I rite ki tā te kotahi mano waru rau waru tekau mā whā, I tēnei rangi I a mātou te puritanga whakahangahanga o te kakau takawaenga māna e whakamana I te kokiri whakaaetanga nāna i whakakotahi I ngā iwi o te ao kia koi ngā niho, kia tōkeke e te whakaminenga nui o United Nations, ki a rātou māku e whakatakotoria I tēnei tauāki kia whakamanangia ēnei whakataunga e whai ake nei:

Nukuhia te Pou Tūmaro

Ki tētahi wāhi mamao rawa a kikokiko, a wairua I te amionga o tana mana whakatuanui a te karauna o Piritania, I te koroni, I tana whānautanga ake hei take horo rawa.

Ki tētahi wāhi kauaka e tarea te whakatau I tētahi nui atu, I tētahi atu e ai te tatanga ā  matawhenua, a tōrangapū rānei.

Kia kotahi rau kiromita pūrua te wāhi rāhui ā- moana, ā- ahurea o te ao e tarea ana te whakatū I tōna kaitiakitanga I raro I āna hoa ā rohe, ā iwi o te ao anō hoki.

Ko te Pou Tūmaro ka āta nuku atu kia kotahi rau waru tekau tākiri ki ngā taunga tukutuku o Aotearoa me Ahitereiria I roto I te Moana-nui-ā- Kiwa. Ka pūngaia kaua ki te whenua, engari ki ngā wai o Papatūānuku. Ko ngā wai ēnei e whakatinanatia ai, e hereherengia ai tāua. 

He Pou Tūmaro ka whakahoki ake I te mana o te wā, o te wāhi ki te Taiao. Kia turakina te whakatauāki  a Pierre Bourdieu” He whakakotahitanga mā te monihua o te ahurea awenui”, nā, ahakoa te whānuitanga o te moana he mana tāiāhio tāna ka tohetohengia te whiringa nei tō te mea ko te Pou Tūmaro he takitahi, koia ko tana koarotanga he mea whakatūtū ai I tōna mana aupehi. 

Hei tā te moana he whakaata mai I te whakatatarengia ko te taima ehara kau I te motuhake engari he kūtorotoro, he kōtētē kia nui ake ki tā te papatipu, e taunakitia ana e te marama me tōna awenga I runga I ngā tai o te moana.

He poitu whakarewa hei ārahi I te whakaterenga o te wā tukituki onaianei ahu atu ki te wā kāore anō kia tutaki e herengia ana ki te onamata. Ko te Pou Tūmaro he mihi whakatau ki tona tuakana – ko te Pou Koaro Tūmaro he hoa kanikani I te ia rā, I te ia rā – heoi he whakakore I āna hiahia whakatuanui I tētahi atu.

He reo tipu whenua kāore I aupehingia a tātou rautīni hononga ki te wā, ki te ātea, engari kē ia ka whakamanawa mai  I ngā kupu ōhaki a te Pou Tūmaro hei ara pō kāore anō kia kitea I tōna whānaungatanga ki te pito o Papatūānuku te marae ātea mō ngā iwi katoa o te ao.

Kia kaua e toromia, me moana te hanga.

Te Poutūmaro o Te Moana.

—

Te reo Māori translation: Rhonda Tibble

Contact

Sam Hamilton

https://samhamilton.org/

samukun@gmail.com

US# 1 503 929 5801 (PST)

Aotearoa# 022-642-1655 (UTC +13)

For te reo Māori translation services contact:

 Rhonda Tibble

ohinewaioranui@gmail.com