Learning te reo Māori is a lifetime’s work, but sometimes the light comes on, Megan Ellison writes.

 

Learning te reo Māori, for me, has been a life-long journey really. I think people who know anything about learning te reo Māori would have heard that comment before and understand it implicitly.

I grew up on my marae and around my people, my whānau, hapū and iwi but because te reo Māori wasn’t a conversational language in the home and it had stopped being the mother tongue in our whānau for three to four generations, I wasn’t a speaker at all. I guess I knew some waiata, a few words maybe, and that’s about it. When I was about 10 years old (I think?), our next door neighbour, Mere Montgomery (who was Tongan and Ngāpuhi) starting teaching te reo Māori at nights at our marae, with a green textbook called   Modern Māori. I think Dad and I would rock up and do the classes. I don’t remember much, but what I do recall is that when I had to read a karakia or excerpt, I recognised that others struggled and I found it much easier. I think about that now and again and realise that my ear must  have tuned in to te reo when I was very little, with Aunty Bella Neha teaching kapa haka to us, or Aunt Mori teaching me some waiata and karanga, having to say my cousins’ Māori names and placenames (my pōua was not happy about the butchering of placenames) . . . all of those formative experiences  and interactions with te reo Māori, albeit limited, made a small difference to my journey.

I have been learning te reo in different ways and on various kaupapa for years. I don’t call myself fluent. I always say I have a degree of fluency, it’s kind of the Megan self-deprecating bit and also, it’s true . . . it’s a constant drive to gaining a fluency.

So, I think about my boy, who is in an immersion course at his university. No English, te reo Māori only and what a privilege — when you consider my dad, who has done some smatterings of formal learning but has basically taught himself because access to that type of learning was limited for him. What a legend.

My boy had a lot of exposure to te reo when he was little. My husband and I spoke Māori to him and his older sister. He didn’t go to an immersion early childhood centre, he was in mainstream schooling, so it wasn’t as if his whole world spoke Māori. But he did speak Māori and understood it. He was an interesting kid who had some existential experiences when he was about 5 and challenged anything and everything that made no sense to him. He got obstructive with te reo and asked why the shopkeeper didn’t speak Māori and started to question its convention and domain. My son and I talk about this a bit now in hindsight, as he is 18. However, when he was 6 his dad became terminally ill and the various experiences of trauma my boy experienced were deeply impactful. His dad died when he was 11, so it was a hard road full of grief. In this time, Timo didn’t really speak a word of Māori, any words spoken to him would put the fear of death into him. He felt shame and sorrow. I heard him say, in various gatherings, that his pāpā was going to teach him te reo, as if it was only his father that could do that and unlock that for him. Everything hinged on his dad being there for him.

I actually don’t even know if this is a psychological response to grief, but I refer to my son’s journey with the language as “language trauma”. At the start of the year when he started in immersion, I said to him, “Now listen here, it’s going to be hard and there are some things you have to remember”.

“One, whakamā (shame or embarrassment) is a taniwha that sits in you and wells up to get the better of you. You need to strike that taniwha and you have to find it in yourself to talk, even if it’s just one word here or there.

“Two, the light bulb won’t come on like some osmosis moment, it won’t happen. You learn te reo Māori on a journey, it’s hard work and it doesn’t just come to you, it’s a grind.”

About three or four months into the course he rang me and said, “Māmā, kei te hē koe, kua kā te rama” (Mum, you are wrong, the lightbulb came on). He was speaking Māori, yes, very basic Māori, but it was happening, he was speaking and understanding.

We unpacked this a bit and I think that’s what made me more sure  that it was language trauma that had really locked him in a holding pen, where he just couldn’t access te reo Māori at all.

He is in the beginning phases of a very long te reo Māori learning journey but the light is on and he can now see the road ahead, and I am simply happy for him that he has been able to unlock it. I think that might be somewhere between accepting pain and grief and taking some accountability in adulthood.