ko te reo te taikura ō te whakaaro mārama.

[labellementeuse]

It's both IBARW and Te Wiki o te Reo Māori (Māori Language Week) and I had big plans for the latter and it's Thursday and of course I have done none of it.

For those of you reading this who are not from New Zealand Aotearoa: te reo Māori is the language spoken by the indigenous population of my country, the Māori. After the trickle of European settlement became a flood in the middle of the 19th century, the Māori population underwent a decline both numerically and culturally, through sickness, the progress of the Land Wars (plenty of Pākehā died there too, but there was a very high replacement rate of settlers arriving from Britain) and ultimately in the 20th century assimilation movements (including the traditional settlement tool of white people everywhere, "Don't speak your language in my school.") Urbanisation, particularly around the world wars, led to estrangement of Māori from their iwi; and so on, and so forth. A cultural revival started in the 1960s gave rise to things like the Waitangi Tribunal, kōhanga reo (language nests - exclusively te reo-speaking preschools). However, only a small number of New Zealanders speak te reo (about 4%).

I am taking a te reo Māori course through te Wānanga o Aotearoa (literally "the University of New Zealand" but actually the Māori Tertiary Education Institute.) It's a one year course designed to let you "take te reo Māori beyond kia ora" - one three-hour class a week focused chiefly on basic conversational skills. It's part one of three courses which are designed to take you from no knowledge whatsoever to fluency or near fluency - I'd like to take all three but it's likely I'll only be able to take this one and perhaps the next one. Last class we did an exercise for te Wiki o te Reo Māori asking: why did we decide to take te reo? Here are some of the answers (a majority of the people in the class are Pākehā (subset European), with one or two foreigners.)

"When I first arrived in New Zealand I felt very disconnected from the country. Learning te reo and tikanga Māori (Māori cultural practices) helped me feel rooted here."

"When I was overseas I realised how important te reo was in our language. Hearing it spoken made me feel at home when I came back."

"I am part Māori and my family has never acknowledged that. I am just learning to understand and accept my cultural heritage and to 'feel' Māori and connected with my past." (Two different people said almost this same story - the only two students with Māori background.)

"My family stopped speaking te reo with my maternal grandmother who didn't teach it to her children. If I and my cousin hadn't learnt to speak te reo, there would be no-one in our line who would be able to speak for us, help us negotiate maraes (meeting houses)." (This was my teacher, who is now more or less fluent.)

"I never had a chance to learn when I was younger and I always wanted to. This is a treat for me."

"I work with a lot of Māori and I feel that to be respectful I should learn some of their language and culture." (There were variants of this in both drama and in office-ish/political activist roles.)

"I believe we should be a bilingual country and to get that everyone has to learn te reo."

"I am Pākehā but the number of Māori in my family is reaching critical mass - I need to learn te reo to demonstrate my respect and love for them."

This is what I said:

"I had a lot of opportunities to learn te reo and I never took advantage of them, I didn't care about it. When I was younger my best friend was a first-language Māori speaker. (VV unusual in the semi-urban environment where I grew up.) She went to kōhanga and kura kaupapa but it was still difficult for her to speak it regularly. She just had her first baby and I asked her if she spoke te reo to him and she said sometimes, but it was mostly hard because it wasn't spoken that much around her. And that's when I started caring, when I decided that it was my responsibility to make it easier for her to speak Māori to her child, so that he has the chance to be fluent in te reo, so the language can stay alive - because if New Zealanders don't speak Māori no-one's speaking Māori."

I don't know if that's a good reason or not. I guess I don't know if any of them are good reasons and I don't think I care, because I do think we have a responsibility to do this as New Zealanders. We have a responsibility to make sure this language survives; we have a responsibility to make sure this culture survives. We have this responsibility because it was here first and it's valuable and it needs taking care of, and most of the way to do this is for us not to interfere, for us to be respectful of their needs but not tell Māori what their needs are. But we can, we should, we must speak Māori, because fluency in a language is difficult to pass along.

And because ko te reo te taikura ō te whakaaro mārama - that's a Māori whakatauki (proverb), which means language is the key to understanding.

So this week - alright, there's hardly any of it left! But let's try anyway - try to answer the phone with "kia ora." Try to say tēnā koe and ka kite ano. Morena means good morning; pomarie means goodnight. I bet you can count to ten in te reo. Kia kaha means be strong. "Kei te pēhea koe?" means "how are you doing?" "Kei te pai ahau!" means "I'm doing fine."

Check out resources like this or this. Give it a go! Kia kaha!

Comments

[ethrosdemon.livejournal.com]

A movement towards bilingualism has to start somewhere, why not at the grassroots?

Your post is a hopeful one. Good luck, and I think that learning the native language of your country to speak to your best friend's child is the best kind of reason.

[labellementeuse.livejournal.com]

We're tremendously lucky in Aotearoa that we can be hopeful: there was an incredible Māori cultural revival movement through the 60s and 70s that means I have grown up in a profoundly different country than even my parents, for which I am so grateful. (And by "lucky", I mean "the result of very hard work from a very large number of talented Māori leaders.")

[eavanmoore.livejournal.com]

Interesting that a foreigner should find it was learning Maori that rooted them in New Zealand. Do you know/can you say where they were from? Or what their first language was?

I'm also curious why "drama" specifically.

Here in the US, if there's any analog, I guess it would be Spanish, newcomer that it is. It's spoken by a lot of indigenous people, anyway, and some of the reasons for Anglophones to learn it are similar to the reasons that your classmates stated for learning Maori. Funny that a colonial language would become a language of respect.

[eavanmoore.livejournal.com]

Of course, anywhere I've lived, there hasn't really been a strong linguistic community for the older languages. But in the American southwest, Navajo at least sounds pretty vibrant and there are resources available for native and non-native Anglophones to learn it. So maybe it would occur to a European American living in New Mexico to learn Navajo, but for most of us it's Spanish (if anything at all).

[labellementeuse.livejournal.com]

Yeah, that's understandable; the position of Māori in relation to Pākehā culture in NZ is totally different to the position of native Americans in the USA (or Canada.)

[labellementeuse.livejournal.com]

Australian, first language English. To me because English is such a lingua franca it bears no connotations of home except where it's specifically Kiwi English, so it makes sense to me that learning Māori and tīkanga Māori would make you feel more connected with the country; Māori are tangata whenua (the people of the land.)

Drama specifically because I happen to work at Te Whaea, the National School of Dance and Drama and the course is being run from there - not everyone taking the course is staff or a student there, but most people are. Also, Toi Whakaari, the Drama school, places a really heavy emphasis (relative to many other workplaces) on biculturalism.

[squaringkarma.livejournal.com]

I'm loving these types of posts from the Kiwis on my flist! (Okay, you're the second. But still, so cool :D)

[labellementeuse.livejournal.com]

Glad to educate - you'll be able to use some of this knowledge when you get here!

[shoeless-girl.livejournal.com]

I did a Te Wananga course up in Dannevirke, and was one of two pakeha in a class of about ten, which was fantastic. Many of the class responded that it was important for them to learn in order to acknowledge their tipuna/whakapapa. I started the second year course, but that was the year I went away for three months, so I didn't continue.

I've forgotten a disgraceful amount now, but would be extremely keen to practice what I can remember, if you are ever keen.

[labellementeuse.livejournal.com]

That must have been a fantastic environment. I feel so lucky to be able to take the course which is so good and FREE, it's ridiculous. I think everyone should know about it :P

Ae! I'm still not really even conversational - I can say He aha tera? and He $Englishwordmostofthetime tera, count and ask questions about numbers of objects and family, and we're just learning tenses. But I'm always willing to have a go!

[china_shop]

Oh, I didn't know about the Te Wānanga o Aotearoa courses. I should get onto that.

[labellementeuse.livejournal.com]

It's good, it's free, it's a fantastic learning environment - I recommend them.

[china_shop]

Are you going to the one in Lower Hutt, or is there one in town?

[labellementeuse.livejournal.com]

They run a satellite version of this course through Te Whaea (old winter showbuildings.) I'm not sure if they do other courses outside the campus.

[china_shop]

Oh awesome. Thanks!

[gillo]

the traditional settlement tool of white people everywhere, "Don't speak your language in my school."

To be fair it's more the traditional tool of dominant elites everywhere - the Chinese do it in some of their ethnic minority areas, and the Russians did i virtually everywhere. And my grandfather went to a school where you were beaten for not speaking English - he was as white as anyone I've ever known, but Welsh was considered inferior and official policy was to wipe it out. Humans of all hues get nasty when they are dominant and convinced they are right.

I'm glad to hear of your language studies, though - it is very much right and proper that New Zealanders should all have a grasp of te reo.

[labellementeuse.livejournal.com]

I actually was familiar with the Welsh example and ought to have included it!

Well, I'm a drop in the bucket but I try to be a *noisy* drop.

[gillo]

Well, I'm a drop in the bucket but I try to be a *noisy* drop.

More of a phase in the Chinese water torture, perhaps?

[karenhealey.livejournal.com]

I really regret not taking te reo at uni - it wasn't offered at my high school, and I went on to uni with Japanese, which I was frankly crap at and ended up failing in second year. Obvs. Japanese was quite useful to me in the end, but I spent most of my time writing Guardian hoping that I wasn't completely fucking up the language (I got lucky - my awesome cultural consultant caught some stuff, but nothing too horrific).

I nurture hopes of being able to learn when I eventually move back home.

via ibarw

[illariy.livejournal.com]

Thank you for this post. I'm German so it's not directly relevant to my own language to-do list *g* but the reasons are very interesting. Wish you best of luck in your language learning endeavours.

[smallcaps.livejournal.com]

"When I was overseas I realised how important te reo was in our language. Hearing it spoken made me feel at home when I came back."

This really resonates with me, even though it was a feeling I was aware of before I ever went overseas, because online friendships have been a part of my life for so long. If it is English I'm speaking, why must I keep self-censoring words that others won't understand, like mana and whānau and, most obvious of all, kia ora? I am not "a white person"; I'm a white New Zealander, I'm Ngāti Pākehā, and I love everything I grew up with. Learning te reo now is only right - and as you say, if New Zealanders don't speak it, who will?

Ko te reo te tāhuhu o tēnei whare - the language is the ridgepole of this house. And I want this house to be strong.