I was waiting for my daughter to wash her hands in a public toilet when we were in Te Tairāwhiti during the recent school holidays. She saw a sign above the sink and asked me, “Māmā, why does the sign say ‘Kaua e inu wai’?” Without thinking about the reason for her question, I replied, “Nā te mea, kāore te wai i te pai hei inu (Because the water isn’t good to drink).’’ She responded straight away with, “Yeah, but why doesn’t it say ‘Kaua e inu i te wai’?” There is a fundamental difference between “Kaua e inu wai — Don’t drink water” and what she was proposing instead, “Kaua e inu i te wai — Don’t drink the water.” She wasn’t asking me to clarify why the sign was there, or the intention of that sign to warn people not to drink the water from the taps because the toilets were supplied by tank water. She was asking me to explain why there was a grammatical error on the sign. And she was absolutely right. We shouldn’t be encouraging others “not to drink water”. My cousin said to me “She is your karma.” At 7 years old, she most definitely is. It’s not the first time my reo has been corrected by her. She’s picked up on my pronunciation errors (most significantly the dropping of the “g” when I say “ng” — thanks Tūhoe!) and singular versus plural (“I think you mean ōku ringaringa, Māmā, not tōku”). She is the embodiment of the hopes and dreams of her te reo Māori speaking tūpuna. Her father and I have been speaking te reo Māori to her since birth. Thank goodness it’s starting to pay off! Her awareness of grammatical accuracy at such a young age is what our te reo Māori experts have longed for. Ko te reo kia tika, ko te reo kia rere, ko te reo kia Māori — the language needs to be correct, the language needs to be heard far and wide, the language needs to be Māori in ethos. I teach te reo Māori at the University of Otago. I have been doing so for more than 25 years. This semester I am teaching an introduction to conversational Māori language course to more than 950 tauira. Nine hundred and fifty!! The number of students enrolling to learn te reo Māori in our school has been steadily increasing over the past five years. Many on social media at the beginning of this upward trend touted this as the result of the increasing “Māorification” agenda of the previous Labour government. The current coalition government has clearly shown their disdain for te reo Māori. Cutting funding to support te reo Māori professional development for teachers, removing te reo Māori from early readers, the “English first” directive that requires public service departments to have their primary names in English and communicate primarily in English, and refusing to allow the restoration of bastardised Māori place names back to their original name. This in turn has given certain sectors of society “permission” to also devalue the indigenous language of this land as unnecessary and a waste of space. Why bother with te reo Māori when everyone speaks English (except it’s not the first language for most of the world’s population), when only a minority of people can speak it (I wonder why that is?!?), it’s only spoken in Aotearoa (not true!), and because it can’t keep up with modernity without borrowing from English (what even is English about the English language?). And yet despite this, the number of students in our papers continues to rise. In this semester alone, 950 tauira learning introductory te reo Māori — over the whole year that total is closer to 1500 tauira across all levels. The class demographic is made up of eager future medical professionals, inspirational trainee teachers, aspiring social workers, budding scientists, up and coming lawyers … and international students! It is their choice to pursue those courses of study, therefore it is their choice to be in my classroom. What an honour it is to teach them! But my job is not only to teach them for them. My job is to teach them for their tamariki and mokopuna. My job is to teach them to fall in love with te reo Māori. Te reo Māori is not just a subject of study. For Māori, the stakes are much higher than that. My children’s futures are at stake. We are careful with what they see, with what they read (yes, my daughter can read English — she taught herself), and with whom we surround them. But one day they will encounter people with attitudes whose sole purpose will be to tear them and their world down. They will not succeed in doing so! I have 950 tauira who are going to make sure that their future is a safer place than the society we are currently living in. Kei te ako au, kei te ako koutou, kei te ako tātou i te reo Māori!
