Matariki marks the Maori new year, timed to the first pre-dawn rising of the Matariki star cluster, the Pleiades, in the lunar month of Pipiri, typically late June or early July in the Southern Hemisphere winter. The name is a contraction of Nga mata o te ariki o Tawhirimatea, the eyes of the god Tawhirimatea, tying the star cluster directly into Maori cosmology as the god of weather and storms, whose eyes are said to watch over the year that follows their rising.
Traditional observance involved viewing the individual stars of the cluster for omens forecasting the coming year's fortunes, mourning those who had died since the cluster's last rising, and making offerings of food to the stars themselves, practices recorded in nineteenth and early twentieth century ethnographic and oral history sources before observance declined significantly through the twentieth century as Maori communities faced sustained pressure toward assimilation into settler colonial New Zealand society.
A sustained revival of Matariki observance began in the early 1990s, driven by Maori cultural and language revitalization efforts more broadly, and the New Zealand government made Matariki a nationwide public holiday in 2022, the date calculated each year astronomically from the cluster's rising rather than fixed on the civil calendar, making Aotearoa New Zealand among the first countries anywhere to establish an indigenous astronomical observance as a state holiday rather than a folk custom tolerated alongside the official calendar.