Speaking Of Change
Times have changed for Rena Tamati. Growing up in post war New Zealand she was alienated from her own language and having been made to feel embarrassed about being Māori, she never spoke te reo. Now her tamariki and mokopuna have redressed the balance and, as fluent Māori speakers, they are surrounding her with the one thing she missed out on.
Rather than feeling left out at whānau gatherings, Rena has embraced the change. She has a strong sense of pride when she hears her mokopuna speaking te reo Māori. She feels contentment and a feeling of comfort, knowing that the future of te reo Māori is being looked after for generations to come.
It’s a far cry from her own childhood.
“Kids today are lucky because they can make the choice to speak te reo Māori. That wasn’t the case when I was growing up. We were discouraged from speaking te reo,” she says.
Rena, 61 and her sister, Maringi (Mingi) Osborne, 64 (Kāi Tahu, Kāti Māmoe, Waitaha, Ngāti Mutunga, Te Atiawa ki Taranaki) are busy making afternoon tea in Rena’s Christchurch kitchen, reflecting on four generations of their family and the different experiences of te reo Māori they all had.
“Mingi and I were brought up in a whāngai relationship by our grandmother, Ruakirikiri Tamati in Taranaki at Manukōrihi Marae (now Owae) at Waitara. She spoke fluent te reo but never with us. We asked her once why we didn’t speak te reo at home and she said she would never wish us to experience the discrimination she had endured. She told us we needed to learn English to ‘get on’. That was in the fifties and sixties.
“She had been born at Ōtākou near Dunedin and was a founding pupil at Te Waipounamu Māori Girls’ College in the early 1900s, when pupils there were only allowed to speak te reo Māori on Sundays. Most didn’t understand English well then, so that was what they had to focus on and they were punished if they were caught speaking te reo outside a Sunday. And up in the Taranaki, they laughed at her te reo because she spoke with a South Island twang.”
Rena and Mingi may not have spoken te reo Māori as children but they consider themselves blessed to have had a rich cultural upbringing steeped in tikanga.
“We grew up with a deep understanding of tikanga, religion and kapa haka,” says Mingi.
“As kids we toured all over the North Island with kapa haka and we went to Tūrangawaewae Marae at Ngāruawāhia several times.”
Although she says she “knew something was missing,” Rena never made a conscious effort to learn te reo Māori in her teens or early adulthood. She and her cousins formed kapa haka groups at high school but the language was not available to them then in school.
“Despite that, we understand, read and speak Māori without really knowing what it means. We grew up hearing our grandmother and uncles and aunties speaking withtheir friends, so we know the right pronunciation. But we never spoke it as children and we both married Pākehā men so we didn’t teach our children either – at least nothing beyond the common words. I suppose I’m a bit of a one-word Māori,” laughs Rena.
“I know single words but I don’t have the sentences. I think that’s probably quite common among our generation.”
Today, Rena has six children – among them Paulette, 36, Jeanine, 33 and Brett, 31, who speak te reo Māori – and thirteen mokopuna, eight of whom are fluent te reo Māori speakers. For them, in the home environment, te reo Māori is their first language.
“Paulette was nine when she told me she wanted to go to a Māori school. She was the blondest of the kids but she had the strongest bond to her Māori ancestry. We had returned to Dunedin as a family and she was in the 4th form and Jeanine in the 3rd when they started learning te reo Māori. It had come into Queens High School as part of a pilot scheme. They both became very involved. They were in kapa hakagroups in their teens too and Paulette did the first stage of a degree in te reo Māori at Otago University before life intervened.”
Rena says Brett and the girls were determined to get back in touch with their Māori culture and she’s always been supportive of that.
“They’re excited about being able to be Māori and to be proud of who they are, and they shine with it as families.
“I learned te reo at Christchurch Polytechfor about six months a few years ago but work intervened and I was always too tired at night. It’s a big commitment and it’s not always easy. I don’t have te reo but I feel I made that choice as an adult. You have to point the finger at yourself in the end and I’ve decided it’s not for me, it’s for my tamariki and my mokopuna and they’re making me proud. I’m happy with that,” says Rena.
She’s right behind them all she says and whānau gatherings have a richness she enjoys.
“They all come here and kōrero Māori the whole time and the mokopuna tell us off if we don’t say things right,” she laughs.
“It’s wonderful to see them fluent in both languages. When they stay with me, they kōrero Māori together all the time but they usually talk to me in English. That feels fine to me. I love hearing the language around me and we’re all quite comfortable. The mokopuna know Mingi and I don’t speak much te reo but they know we understand quite a lot.”
For Rena’s daughter, Paulette Tamati-Elliffe, her husband Komene Cassidy (Ngāpuhi) and their four children, Taikawa, 15, Tumai, 8, Kiringaua, 6, and Te Atarau, 3, te reo Māori sits at the core of whānau life. As parents, she and Komene have taken care to explain to the children the reasons why their nannies and others from the older generations did not have the same opportunities to learn te reo as they have.
“They’re very understanding and extremely encouraging and generally switch with ease between languages – from te reo Māori when speaking with us (their parents, uncles and aunties), to English splattered with te reo that their nannies understand when speaking with them,” Paulette says.
“They often serve as translators and will tell their nanny exactly what their papa has told them to do, for example. They love it when nanny uses te reo that she knows, throwing in the odd kupu or phrase, and they have a lot of fun responding back in the same fashion.”
Paulette says her mother and Auntie Mingi havealways been positive about the choice she and Komene made to use te reo as a whānau.
“Their efforts to use te reo they know when the whānau is together go a long way in showing our tamariki that te reo is valued. I often hear them praising our tamariki for being so clever.”
Paulette says everyone in the wider whānauis totally supportive of their choice to raise their tamariki in te reo.
“Most of the aunties and uncles speak te reo also so it’s not a big issue; and the majority of their cousins have either been raised in te reo or are learning now. Even our Pākehā father makes a huge effort to use te reo he knows well.
“We don’t mind so much if the tamarikiswitch into English to accommodate any visitors or guests, but the challenge comes in ensuring that they maintain te reo as the vernacular among themselves, other te reo speakers and with us. It does take constant reminding, encouragement and absolute consistency but the rewards are invaluable.”
For Paulette and Komene, a lot of that comes back to the fact that they didn’t want their tamariki to ever feel the deep sense of loss experienced by themselves and their parents for not knowing te reo.
“We realised then that if we wanted te reo to be a language available to our mokopuna of the future, we had to take some responsibility; we had to take action.”
For Mingi, there is an element of the bittersweet about hearing the younger generations so fluent in te reo.
“The kids are lucky these days that they can learn te reo at school and university. They can make that choice to learn the language and they can grow up feeling confident about it. We didn’t have that and because I married a Pākehā, my children didn’t have that either.
“I’m sometimes a little envious when I hear Rena’s mokopuna doing so well and I do wish I could have taught my kids te reo. Their whānau in Taranaki bask in their te reo and their Māoriness and that’s lovely to see and my kids do enjoy listening to them.”
Mingi concedes though she has passed on her deep knowledge of tikanga and family history to her children; and as the taua figure at Christchurch Polytechnic’s bilingual Te Waka Huruhurumanu Pre-School, she is helping to find new ways to introduce more culture and language to the children there.
“I’m often stuck because I don’t have enough vocab of my own – at preschool or with the mokopuna – but since I’ve been working with the kids, I don’t feel so shy about speaking te reo I know,” she says.
Rena and Mingi have great admiration for Ngāi Tahu’s Kotahi Mano Kaika (KMK) programme too.
“It has tremendous value for families learning te reo and they offer a lot of support,” says Rena.
For Paulette, it has provided a vital support network.
“Being part of KMK for us is really about making a choice to support te reo survival into the future. KMK projects and hui have provided our whānau with invaluable opportunities to engage with other te reo speaking whānau and more importantly, for our tamariki to form friendships in te reo with other te reo-speaking tamariki, who they fondly refer to as ‘ō tātou whānauka’, which roughly translates as ‘our cuzzies’.
“For our whānau it is exciting to be part of a group of like-minded families, who have made that commitment to learning and using te reo and are simply ‘walking the talk’.”
