Me and my contemporaries missed kōhanga reo and kura. The first kōhanga reo started in 1982. We had left school. My lot had to learn the language without the benefit of kōhanga, kura, podcasts, documentaries and programmes in Māori. Apps? Forget it. The internet hadn’t arrived in New Zealand. No one I knew had even seen a computer. Jesus, we grew up when telephones had dials and were attached to actual walls. There was no Te Wānanga o Aotearoa offering free lessons. Iwi radio had barely kicked in.
And there was the attitude.
Māori language was considered radical. Some white folk were horrified that things might go a step too far, that they might be forced to hear te reo or, heaven forbid, learn it. The more paranoid of them suspected that the darkies were plotting.
Fair enough. Some probably were. But most of us were just trying to retrain our brains with the few tools available to us.
Scotty Morrison hadn’t written all his stunning books. When I met him in Ōtaki at a wānanga, he was struggling like the rest of us. But it was those wānanga that were the gamechangers for my generation. We were the ones in between. Our parents were fluent speakers and our kids would become fluent speakers.
My generation occupied the linguistic wasteland.
- Moana Maniapoto
Tāmaki Makaurau | Auckland | Auckland | 2020-29 | Story is by tangata whenua
Comments