Te Wiki o te Reo Māori — Kaimahi stories: Tania

They say it takes “one generation to lose a language, and three generations to restore” and as I sat at my son’s kapa haka festival, it dawned on me that this was what we had achieved as a whānau.

My father was of the generation where speaking Te Reo Māori was a punishable offense. It was not allowed in schools and was excluded from all facets of life in New Zealand except at the Marae. The first impact of colonisation is the loss of language, and as a whānau we experienced that directly.

One of my first memories of mourning the loss of Te Reo in our whānau was when I heard stories about my Father’s Taua (Grandmother). According to reports she was an expert poi maker and practiced mirimiri. In fact, when my father was born, he was paralysed down one side and as you can imagine there was a lot of medicalised talk about how they would put him in a brace, and he could not be helped. His Taua did not stand for this and took him from the hospital and spent days practicing mirimiri (traditional massage) with oils that she had made, and it worked.

As I reflected on that story, I realised that as a whānau this knowledge was lost due to racism and colonisation. As with many whānau, the only time that tikanga was observed was at tangihanga. So, I grew up in a world where I experienced some things Māori but not all things Māori. We always took off our shoes before we entered a whare, this was a non-negotiable, and we were well versed in the tikanga of tangihanga. But between my Taua’s generation and my father’s generation we lost Te Reo.

I was the first person in my whānau to go to university, and when I got there, I ended up in the Māori department. It was here that I slowly started to rediscover what was lost. Fast forward and it cannot be understated the importance of Te Reo in Hauora. It’s crucial as health professionals that we understand that how we pronounce names, how clients/patients explain symptoms, how we build whanaungatanga can all hang on the simple use of “kia ora”. Perhaps if that had been the case for my Taua, she would not have had to take my father from the hospital. The first release of Census 2023 highlighted that one in three New Zealanders under the age of 25 identify as Māori, and for us in health it is important to understand that they are the Te Reo generation.

So last night when I sat at the Christchurch Town Hall and was surrounded by hundreds of tamariki chanting the Ngāi Tahu haka “Tēnei Te Ruru” I was overcome with pride that I had witnessed the third generation of our whānau regaining what was lost.

Ake Ake Ake Te Reo Māori.