Celebrating Te Wiki o te reo Māori – A Forever Language

This week, starting Monday 16 September, is Te Wiki o te Reo Māori 2024 and the theme is Ake Ake Ake – A Forever Language.

The arrival of settlers and a new British sovereignty saw the imposition of British practices. Only seven years after the signing of Te Tiriti o Waitangi the 1847 Education Ordinance Act directing schools to ensure the teaching of English, “instruction in the English language shall form a necessary part of the system”, – normalising it as the predominant language.

The subsequent 1867 Native Schools Act further embedded English. School grants were calculated based on “the number of the scholars and their proficiency in the English language” providing significant incentive for schools to impose English and supress te Reo Māori. These practices led to the decline the Māori language.

Move forward to the 1970s and groups such as the Te Reo Māori Society and Ngā Tamatoa began championing the use of te Reo. In 1971 Hana Te Hemara Jackson held a Māori Language Seminar, the first of its kind, at Tokomaru Bay on the East Coast. Then in 1972 Hana, along with a group of likeminded others, delivered a petition signed by 33,000 people to parliament.

“We the undersigned, do humbly pray that courses in Māori language and aspects of Māori culture be offered in all those schools with large Māori rolls and that these same courses be offered as a gift to the Pākehā from the Māori in all other New Zealand schools as a positive effort to promote a more meaningful concept of integration.”

Further actions, claims and petitions occurred in the 1980s and in 1985, Huirangi Waikerepuru lodged a claim with the Waitangi Tribunal. The eleventh claim to the Tribunal (Wai 11) it became known as the Te Reo Māori Claim. It took until 1987 (15 years after the first petition and two years after the Waitangi Tribunal claim), for the Māori Language Act to come into force – finally recognising te Reo Māori as an official language.

Today, a new generation of kohanga reo speakers are now adults, bringing te Reo Māori into normalcy. The new Māori Monarch, Ngā Wai hono i te pō, is one such example. I am hopeful that te Reo will continue to grow and flourish and that, if not my children, my mokopuna, will live to see a truly bilingual country.

I’ll let Hana have the last word “Māori language has a natural heritage in this country and through the language the New Zealander as a whole will get his identity”.

Published in the Hawke’s Bay Today newspaper on 14 September 2024 and written by Te Hira Henderson, Curator Taonga Maori at MTG Hawke’s Bay.

16 September 2024

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