My first step was to join the Canterbury University Māori Club.
I still remember the shiver that ran up and down my spine when I stood to learn my first action song Haere Mai. I didn’t understand a single word of what we were singing. But it felt so good. I knew then, in the back row of the varsity kapa haka, that my life had changed forever.
At the end of that night’s practice, I talked with the club’s leader, the amiable Māori studies lecturer, Te Awaroa “Bill” Nepia. He was happy to support my sudden desire to learn te reo. I changed my course of study on the spot, to major in Māori. I went home feeling giddy and floating on a happy cloud of self-discovery. This was me!
The howling screams from my Pākehā mother brought me down to earth.
When I told her of my excitement at my new purpose in life, she hit the roof and then writhed on the floor in helpless anguish. She screamed as I’d never heard before, and wept torrents of tears, all the while stabbing me with commands and pleas to cease my course of action.
This surprised me — and scared the shit out of me. Mum had always said we should be proud of being Māori. She’d given me and my siblings Māori names. And she’d sing Māori songs with gusto at parties.
Our Māori dad knew nothing of the Māori world, and anyway, he wasn’t around. After the marriage collapsed, he’d shot through to Aussie a few years earlier. Our mother had schemed and worked hard to keep her kids fed and educated.
She felt I was condemning myself to a second-rate life, because she knew the lash of racism. As part of a bi-racial couple in 1950s Christchurch, she had suffered the snide ways and prejudice of the era.
When she and Dad went hunting for flats, the name “Stephens” always sounded good on the telephone. But then the landlord would see that one of the couple was brown.
Eventually, they encountered a kindly Pākehā landlady who’d never met a Māori before and didn’t give a hoot about race. It seems I was conceived in a fit of relief and celebration on the first night in their new home.
In time, my mother felt better about my pursuit of the language, because she saw that my interest in my Māori heritage had awakened something in me. To her eternal credit she never begrudged me the explorations that introduced me to a vast new family. She insisted only that I should never forget my Pākehā side. - Tainui Stephens
Kā Pākihi Whakatekateka o Waitaha | Canterbury | Christchurch City | 1970-79 | Story is by tangata whenua
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