One of my tūpuna pākehā was James Henry Pope. In January 1880 he was appointed to the position of Inspector of Native Schools. Later that year he wrote the Native Schools Code, a follow on from the Native Schools Act, which set standards for education in Native Schools. One of those "standards" was that te reo Māori was not to be spoken in the senior school and that te reo Māori was only to be used in the junior school to explain words in English and that "the aim of the teacher however should be to dispense with the use of Maori as soon as possible". Further to this, if Māori wanted a school in their area they had to hand over the title to at least 2 acres of land. So, in order to fit into this new world our tūpuna Māori had to give up their reo and their whenua.
The letter above is a letter to James Henry Pope, also known as Te Pōpi. This letter hung in my Grandmothers hallway for the majority of my childhood. One day she mentioned that as I was her only Māori grandchild I could have it when she died. She then asked me to translate it and was horrified when I explained that I couldn't speak te reo. She said "You're Māori aren't you? Why can't you speak your own language? I'll never understand why Māori can't speak their own language". Her comments really upset me. Now I just think it's so ironic that she said that while we were standing by a letter to the person that took our reo from us.
As an adult and speaker of te reo Māori I can now understand the letter and see that James Henry Pope was held in high esteem by some. I can understand at the time, when te reo me ōna tikanga wasn't under an obvious threat, some of tūpuna would have embraced a European education. Unfortunately though, the work of James Henry Pope (among many others) resulted in generations of language loss for our people.
Te Whanganui-a-Tara | Wellington | Wellington City | 1860-69 | Native Schools Act (1860-69) | Story is by tangata whenua
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