The best thing about Victoria, and particularly Te Herenga Waka marae, my tūrangawaewae at that time, was that I was in a place that valued te reo Māori — a place that valued Mātauranga Māori. And they said to me: “You’re lucky. You grew up with the language. You can speak Māori.”
At St Stephen’s, I’d gone to considerable effort to dodge having to do whaikōrero and even at times pretending I couldn’t speak Māori. For me, as a teenager, I believed that was something the old people did. But, at Vic, I’m suddenly in a place where, if you can speak Māori, you were very lucky and special. So I came to value the fact that I had an upbringing that featured te reo Māori. And I began to value the fact I had a head-start on these ones that were learning Māori for the first time.
But I also got to understand that not everybody grew up like I did with te reo Māori. There were lots of people who, if cutting off their arms would allow them to speak Māori, they would have done so. This was an eye-opener for me. I was with highly intelligent and motivated people who, through no fault of their own, had been deprived of the right to their culture and identity and who were so hungry for it. For instance, when I first heard Joe Williams speak Māori, I just assumed that either he’d been learning the Māori language for a long time or was a native speaker. When he told me he’d been learning Māori for about two or three years, I nearly fell off my seat.
So Vic was a place that empowered and set me free. Here I was, this little dark fulla from the East Coast and I’m hearing: “You can be a leader. You can do anything.”
Te Whanganui-a-Tara | Wellington | Wellington City | 1980-89 | Story is by tangata whenua
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