Te reo rises again

At a family gathering a few years ago I was having a beer with my cousins and aunties and asked a question: “How did we lose the language?”

- By Aaron Smale

I was adopted out at birth and didn’t grow up with them so I had missed out on a lot of whānau history. The family have different versions based on where among 10 children their parent was born. There was general consensus our grandmother, a native speaker, had been hit at school for speaking the reo. Our great-grandparents didn’t speak English, although my great-grandfather apparently liked to learn big English words to show off at the pub in Tokomaru Bay. After downing a pint on one occasion, he slammed his beer handle on the bar with a flourish and loudly declared it was “excruciating!”

But piecing together the different accounts, it seems when the older ones started at the native school in Kennedy Bay on Coromandel Peninsula they would get whacked for speaking Māori. At this point it seems likely our grandmother simply stopped speaking her first language to her own children in an effort to protect them from the violence they were experiencing at school.

One cousin said his mother would start to panic as an adult if she heard fluent speakers, and when she left home she went to the trouble of getting her Māori name legally removed. Her experience at the native school made her ashamed to be Māori.

While there has been growing awareness and knowledge of New Zealand history, the damage done by the native schools is still relatively overlooked.