Ka mua ka muri: walking backwards into the future

Ka mua, ka muri (also written without the comma, ka mua ka muri) is a whakataukī, a Māori saying, that RNZ describes as one “many will know means ‘walking backwards into the future’”: the idea that we should look to the past to inform the future. It works because of two words. In Te Aka Māori Dictionary mua means the front and also the past, and muri means the back and also the future. So a person facing forward is facing what has already happened, and the future is at their back. Below: the two words sense by sense, what scholars have said about this Māori concept of time, the longer form Kia whakatōmuri te haere whakamua and its translations, the everyday time phrases built on mua and muri, and how the saying is used today.

Updated 23 October 2026 · 8 min read

Tap 🔊 to hear an example. Māori examples play Papa Reo, the te reo Māori voice made by Te Hiku Media from recordings of native speakers.

Ka mua, ka muri, word by word

The saying is four words, and two of them carry all the meaning. Each has two senses in Te Aka, one about place and one about time:

The sense that makes the proverb is the second one. In English the past is behind us and the future ahead; in these two Māori words it is the other way round. The place sense, as in Kei mua i te toa. ‘In front of the shop.’, is covered in directions in Māori; this page is about time.

The other word, ka, appears twice, and the sources translate the saying as a whole rather than word by word: none of those consulted for this guide parses it. What all of them agree on is the picture.

Facing the past: the Māori concept of time

The image has also been studied by scholars. The anthropologist Toon van Meijl, writing on Māori meeting houses in 2006, reports Anne Salmond’s 1978 study of the vocabulary of the traditional Māori cosmos. Salmond, he writes, found a set of meanings that go together, “front, past time, sacred place, seniority of birth”, set against another, “hind part, rear, future time, noa (unrestricted, profane) place and cooked food, junior birth, north and death”. Van Meijl adds, citing Joan Metge (1976), that the past was described as ngā rā o mua, “the days in front”, while the future was “behind”, and sums it up: Māori people moved “into the future with their back to the front while facing the past.”

He also follows Salmond in reading the same order into a carved meeting house: the house stands for the eponymous ancestor, the carved panels along its walls for the ancestor’s descendants, and the portraits of recently deceased relatives come later still, so that walking through the house runs from the remote past towards the more recent. The parts of the house itself are explained in parts of a marae.

Writers who use the saying in their own work draw on it in their own terms. Lesley Rameka of the University of Waikato, in a 2016 article on early childhood education, says the proverb “speaks to Māori perspectives of time, where the past, the present and the future are viewed as intertwined”, and that from this perspective “the individual carries their past into the future.” Byron Rangiwai, proposing a model of leadership based on a prophecy of Te Kooti Arikirangi Te Tūruki, writes that for Māori time is cyclical, so looking back to the ancestors is imperative: “ka mua, ka muri - we walk backwards into the future.” Those are their readings, given as theirs.

The longer form: Kia whakatōmuri te haere whakamua

A longer saying makes the same point with a verb. Rameka’s article takes it as its title, Kia whakatōmuri te haere whakamua, and renders it “I walk backwards into the future with my eyes fixed on my past”. Word by word, from Te Aka:

Te Aka gives only to hold back, delay for whakatōmuri. The published translations of the saying read it as moving with one’s back to the way one is going, which is closer to Te Aka’s whakamuri ‘backwards, behind’. The dictionary and the translations are both reported here as they stand. What is not in doubt is the other half: te haere whakamua is the journey forward.

Where the accounts differ

The saying is printed in several wordings, and translated several ways. These are the ones in the sources for this page:

None of these sources says who first said either form, or when, and this page does not guess.

Mua and muri as time words

The proverb is not a special use. Ordinary Māori uses mua and muri for time every day, and Te Aka lists the phrases. A few, with its examples:

One phrase breaks the pattern, and it is worth knowing so that the rule is not pushed too far: Te Aka also lists ā mua ‘the time to come, the future’. With ā in front, the word for the front points to what is still to come. The proverb uses the senses in which mua is the past.

Two of Te Aka’s proverbs use the pair for first and last: E mua kaikai e muri kai hūware ‘In front eats food, behind eats spittle’, which it explains as first in, first served, and E mua āta haere e muri whatiwhati waewae ‘Start early and go at your leisure, start late and break your leg’, advice not to leave something to the last minute.

Other Māori time words

The everyday words for yesterday, now and tomorrow do not use mua or muri. Each is in Te Aka with these meanings:

Te Aka notes that ināianei is normally written as one word, and also gives i nāianei written apart. Ā tōna wā is also the start of a farewell for when you do not know when you will meet again: Ā tōna wā ki tōna wāhi ‘I’ll see you again, at some point in time and place’.

A time word does not set the tense of a sentence on its own: the small marker at the front of the verb does, as Māori sentence structure explains. The names of the days and months are in Māori numbers, days and months, the seasons in seasons in Māori, and the older reckoning of time by the nights of the moon in the maramataka.

How ka mua, ka muri is used today

In the sources for this page the saying serves as a title, a short way of saying that a piece of work starts from what came before. It heads:

• Radio. An RNZ Morning Report segment in Te Wiki o te Reo Māori, Māori Language Week, 2018, which spoke with students of a kura kaupapa Māori, young people RNZ said “will carry te reo into the future”.
• Archives. The Alexander Turnbull Library’s 2018 account of how the National Library preserves its oral history recordings.
• Science. A 2019 editorial in the New Zealand Journal of Ecology by Priscilla Wehi, Jacqueline Beggs and Tara McAllister on the place of mātauranga Māori in New Zealand ecology.
• Social work and health. A 2023 study of a community organisation working with child protection services, and, in the long form, a 2020 study of health and social care in rural Māori communities.
• Law and leadership. A 2021 law review article on tikanga and overlapping claims disputes, in the long form, and a 2018 theory of leadership.

How a proverb is worked into a speech or an email is covered in whakataukī: Māori proverbs and what they mean, and another idea that no single English word covers is explained in what tikanga means.

Going further

Words whose meaning does not map neatly onto English, as mua and muri do not, are collected in Māori words with no English equivalent. Mua, muri, inanahi and āpōpō are everyday vocabulary, and Verbavia’s free te reo Māori course teaches them, with the markers that put a sentence in the past or the future, one lesson a day.

Sources

1. RNZ Morning Report (14 September 2018): Ka mua, ka muri - walking backwards into the future
2. Toon van Meijl (2006). Maori meeting-houses in and over time. In J. J. Fox (ed.), Inside Austronesian Houses, ANU Press (reporting A. Salmond, Te Ao Tawhito, Journal of the Polynesian Society 87, 1978, and J. Metge, The Maoris of New Zealand, 1976)
3. Lesley Rameka (2016). Kia whakatōmuri te haere whakamua: ‘I walk backwards into the future with my eyes fixed on my past’. Contemporary Issues in Early Childhood 17(4), 387–398
4. Byron Rangiwai (2018). Ka Mua, Ka Muri: A new transformative leadership theory based on a prophecy by Te Kooti Arikirangi Te Turuki. Te Kaharoa 11
5. Valerie Love (2018). Ka Mua, Ka Muri—Looking back to look forward: digital preservation and oral history workflows at the Alexander Turnbull Library. IASA Journal 48
6. Violet Aydon-Pou (2022). Ka muri, ka mua – Walking backwards into the future. He Rourou 2(1), 126–131
7. Priscilla M. Wehi, Jacqueline R. Beggs and Tara G. McAllister (2019). Ka mua, ka muri: the inclusion of mātauranga Māori in New Zealand ecology. New Zealand Journal of Ecology 43(3)
8. Lashana Lewis, Shayne Walker, Paula Toko King and others (2023). Ka mua, ka muri—Walking backwards into the future. Aotearoa New Zealand Social Work 35(1), 5–20
9. Mclachlan, Pitama and Adamson (2020). Kia whakatōmuri te haere whakamua: engaging Māori rural communities in health and social service care. AlterNative 16(3), 202–210
10. Rhianna Morar (2021). Kia Whakatōmuri Haere Whakamua: implementing tikanga Māori as the jurisdictional framework for overlapping claims disputes. Victoria University of Wellington Law Review 52(1), 197–220
11. Te Aka Māori Dictionary: mua — the front; the past, former; i mua, i mua atu, wā o mua, kōrero o mua, ākonga o mua, ā mua (the time to come, the future); the proverbs E mua kaikai and E mua āta haere
12. Te Aka Māori Dictionary: muri — the rear, behind; the future, after; i muri, i muri mai, ā muri atu, o muri nei
13. Te Aka Māori Dictionary: ā muri ake nei — later; hereafter, in future
14. Te Aka Māori Dictionary: whakamua — forward, ahead, towards the front
15. Te Aka Māori Dictionary: whakamuri — backwards, behind, towards the rear
16. Te Aka Māori Dictionary: whakatōmuri — to hold back, delay
17. Te Aka Māori Dictionary: tōmuri — to be late, behind time
18. Te Aka Māori Dictionary: haere — to go; journey, trip, travel
19. Te Aka Māori Dictionary: kia
20. Te Aka Māori Dictionary: inanahi — yesterday
21. Te Aka Māori Dictionary: āpōpō — tomorrow, at some time in the future, soon
22. Te Aka Māori Dictionary: ināianei — now (normally one word); i nāianei
23. Te Aka Māori Dictionary: ā tōna wā — in due course; ā tōna wā ki tōna wāhi