In this putanga | issue of Reowatch - Mahuru Māori:

“Every time you pick up your favourite mug for a cuppa, remind yourself to choose te reo Māori as a habit too. We need to move past handshake language, towards saying regular, impactful, meaningful things in Māori. That’s the best way to curtail negativity and ignorance.”

I wrote that last month after a particularly tough month for the language. A month on though, I think Professor Rawinia Higgins, Toihau - Commissioner for te reo Māori, has rephrased this much better in her opening remarks at the Towards One Million Speakers event held in September: “Te reo Māori is a legacy crop. It thrives because we are committed to tending it – not as a rare species, but as a native one.”

I like this idea of thinking about the language as a garden, something we tend to over a period of time because if we do, we’ll see it thrive. If we care for it enough to allow it to thrive, we feast on the harvest and reseed for the next season. It also deals with a particularly annoying statement I’m hearing a lot at the moment among politicians that comes with various caveats - te reo is a taonga (but the kind I want in the museum); te reo is vital (but I want to clamp its respirator shut) and so on. It’s a delicate metaphor that also calls out a serious problem - just because one believes its a taonga, doesn’t mean they don’t also want to chop it down for, say, firewood.

I have loved celebrating te reo Māori as a functional language this month. My journeys have taken me into private business, government departments and into homes where I feel like I’ve managed to convince people they are valuable, necessary and important in the language movement. All the while, politicians and career public servants appear to b engaging in what Professor Higgins terms a ‘culture war.’

Maybe this is the rose-tint of Te Wiki o Te Reo Māori, but I think I can see people ready to take up the mantle not just to learn te reo Māori (everyone is doing that already) but to take steps to open up use of te reo Māori. After all, our tamariki are getting older. They need life to accommodate their language use - signs to read and directions to take. They can’t do that without good quality language access.

This month, we take a look at some highlights from Mahuru Māori. We learn about the findings of the State of Te Reo Māori Report, cover Te Hīkoi mō te reo Māori and also see what new Māori language books are hot off the press this month.

For the rest of Mahuru Māori, if you’re not in the space to take up language learning, it would still be a powerful thing to consider how you might be able to create a more accommodating nation that doesn’t confine people to English - not just for te reo Māori, but for NZSL too. New Zealand Sign Language was made official 20 years ago to the day this publication goes live, and it is just as old here as English. Why coerce ourselves into something so young, so confined, so… part of a culture war?

Kōrerotia, waiatatia.

Vincent Ieni Olsen-Reeder

Kaietita, Reowatch