What does te reo Māori mean to you?

Manaia: My connection to te reo is through my dad’s whāna, so it’s half of me! Te reo is important to me, my te reo is pretty good and I use it every day. It wasn’t until I worked in the US I realized how much I used it - I'd used the odd word in a sentence and people had no idea what I was saying! 

Erin: For me, te reo is the language of Māori, it’s important to Aotearoa, NZ and I think that we should all learn at least the basics. It’s important to embrace and celebrate te reo. I know sometimes it’s hard and we have difficulties with pronunciation, but I think it's more important to try than not. One of the things I love about te reo is there are a lot of words that don’t directly translate into English, which I feel illustrates the uniqueness of the language. 

Pascale:  To me, there is no excuse not to be interested in te reo these days, it is accessible and open and it allows you to get a deeper understanding of the wider Te Ao Māori (Māori worldview). In my work life, I use it everyday, and I’m learning new words every day too - which  increases my level of confidence in using it. Being a French person in Aotearoa, I'm not always confident with my pronunciation and I want to honor and be mindful of this when using te reo throughout my mahi. Having been a French teacher, I also understand you cannot separate language and culture. 

Where and how have you learnt te reo Maori?

Manaia: I just grew up with it, my dad used it a bit when we were young and learning words. He’s not fluent, and nor are his parents as they were brought up in an era where you were punished for speaking te reo. I also studied te reo at high school. 

Erin: Growing up in Aotearoa, te reo is something that was around us. 
A few years ago I made a conscious decision to greet everyone at work in te reo. 
Last year I enrolled on a te reo course run at Basestation - it was great, we learned how to do a pepeha, some Māori tikanga and some basic te reo language skills. 

Pascale: The starting point for me was when I moved to Aoteraroa to be a teacher, this was all part of the new experience of moving to a new country. Over the years, through my mahi I've worked closer with Māori, especially young people, I’ve been curious to seek out and understand more. When we started the te reo classes, I surprised myself when I realised I knew over 100 Māori words.

Last year Pascale organised some te reo classes at Basestation. Eleven residents and friends of Basestation signed up, the class was a mixture of learning te reo and tikanga, classes were two hours long and ran once a week for ten weeks. 

What changes have you seen in Aotearoa regarding acknowledgement and attitude to te reo? 

Manaia: When I look back at what my dad and his parents, my grandparents, experienced with their te reo it wasn’t good, they were punished for speaking their own language. 
There’s been a bit of a revival for my generation, especially with it being taught at schools. But, lately, with the current political climate, I think it’s in danger of losing momentum. 

Erin: Back in my grandparents and parents day, Māori weren’t allowed to speak their language. There have been recent TV documentaries showing the discrimination against Māori. For my generation - we didn’t realise the inherent and ingrained racism that had gone on back then, but today people are more educated. I see kiwi’s embracing te reo more, for example, I feel people make more of an effort to correctly pronounce place names, Tauranga is no longer pronounced ‘towel-Wronger’! It’s been great to see business and government departments embracing te reo, seeing government departments changing their names, although some have changed them back sadly. I believe we’ve come a long way from trying to eliminate the language to now, it’s a normal part of our language. Māori words are commonly spoken; we talk about doing the “mahi”, we say “kia ora” - it’s a beautiful thing! 

Pascale: In the twenty five years I've been in Aotearoa, there has been a big change in the acknowledgement and attitudes towards te reo. When I first came to NZ and Tauranga, I had very little understanding of the relationship between the indigenous population here and the rest of the people in NZ. Today I have a much better understanding of Māori tikanga, te reo and Te Ao Māori. There are many more people around me today who use te reo on a daily basis. We are also having more conversations around the weight of colonisation and the trauma it causes, this is something that was not discussed when I first arrived in New Zealand. In my view, my increased awareness of Aotearoa’s history has created generational change. The language, te reo, is a big part of this, and it has a very special and specific story for its indigenous people in Aotearoa.