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Two white ballons that say We heart te reo and arohatia te reo
Aroha arohatia love te reo Māori language

OPINIONĀteaFebruary 17, 2021

Some thoughts about Pākehā learning and speaking te reo Māori

Two white ballons that say We heart te reo and arohatia te reo
Aroha arohatia love te reo Māori language

A recent Twitter thread, which asked Pākehā who are learning te reo to be gentle with Māori who don’t know the language, sparked a lot of conversation. Ātea editor Leonie Hayden reflects on her own experience, and offers some advice.

It was a Pākehā friend who first told me that it wasn’t appropriate for her to go to any free te reo Māori night classes because she might be taking the place of a Māori learner. Two Māori friends have since agreed, and about four or five were, like me, unsure.

My experiences of night classes have been mostly at mainstream tertiary institutions, where there were also international students taking the paper as part of their course. Many of them came from countries where it’s downright weird to only know one language, so why wouldn’t they add a language from the country they’re studying in? For the most part they seemed very engaged, equally happy to learn about our history and tikanga, and share theirs, while absorbing the reo. Learning in the way that multilingual people who have experienced multiple cultures do – with openness and curiosity.

Māori and Pākehā New Zealanders are a different kind of te reo Māori student. For us, there is a lot of unlearning to do.

For many of us it’s washing those battered diphthongs out of our brains, whose mangled pronunciation has been so thoroughly embedded in the cerebellum the tongue is completely incapable of recreating them correctly. Synapses misfiring all over the place: “I can’t make that T sound. I can’t roll my Rs. If I try to pronounce Rangitoto and Rotorua correctly, I’ll sound like a try hard. I’ve always said it this way, I can’t change it now.” If it seems like I’ve been eavesdropping on your inner thoughts, I assure you – those demons intruded on the quiet moments of many hundreds of people before they got to you.

For Māori, however, it’s also about a different kind of cleansing. Pronunciation is a tall barrier to overcome. Shame is a whole damn mountain range.

At one of my intermediate level kura there was a Pākehā woman who was much more advanced than the rest of the class. She had done full-time full immersion a few years back, and decided night classes were a good environment to practise a bit. She was always the first to raise her hand and answer, presented oral assignments that put ours to shame, and bantered easily with the kaiako before and after class. She was very friendly, and quite loud. She made me feel like absolute shit. I wasn’t as shy as some of my classmates, but around her I was mute. It wasn’t until I shared that with my study group that I realised she made all the Māori students feel that way. Not only did it make us feel shame, but the fact it made us feel shame made us feel shame – that we weren’t staunch enough to put our chins up and let it slide off our backs. After all, we were the ones with whakapapa Māori. In fact, I was pretty sure she was showing off in an attempt to impress us, to be more like us. But for some deep down, unnameable reason we just didn’t feel flattered.

There’s another te reo Māori-speaking Pākehā in my life who always asks me how my te reo journey is going. “Pēhea tō haerenga reo?” they ask kindly. “None of your fucking business!” the petulant, embarrassed child in my head yells back. Mumbled excuses about how busy I am with work. Wanting to explain I don’t have family to speak it with, but not wanting to throw my family under the bus because it isn’t their fault. “There’s no excuse,” I admonish myself. “You used to make time after work and in the weekends, you should still do it. If they can do it, you can do it.” The dialogue in my head always goes on long after our conversation ends.

I do think tauiwi should be welcome in te reo Māori classes. Do I think kura and universities should prioritise Māori applicants? Absolutely. I think the application process should explicitly prepare tauiwi for the fact that their acceptance is only final once the applications have closed and preference has been given to Māori. I would like to think that the sort of Pākehā person who has a desire to learn our reo would also implicitly understand that we should have priority. But I’m not sure you can assume anything of white privilege. Even in the kindest people, it’s there as a blindness rather than anything malicious. The responses to the tweet that prompted this conversation are full of Pākehā admitting that they have been guilty of taking up too much oxygen in wānanga spaces.

There are some Māori who only want te reo for Māori, and I totally get it. It is our taonga, protected by the few from the many who sought to destroy it. Beaten and humiliated out of us. “A useless language,” I was told as a child, “that won’t get you a job”. An acquaintance repeated that very line not two months ago.

But I think I want to live in an Aotearoa where all tauiwi understand te reo Māori, and therefore understand us better. Some of my friends who I kōrero Māori with are tauiwi, such as The Spinoff’s wonderful deputy editor, Alice Neville – a total language nerd who helps me with my grammar. And I guess the difference between them and the people that make me feel small is consent. We’ve given each other permission to struggle through this funny old journey together. So I would say that if you are a reo-speaking Pākehā, wait for an indication that the other person wants to korero Māori with you, or even talk about it in English. Don’t assume that kuia and kaumātua have the language, even if you’ve just heard them deliver a beautiful tauparapara. In your excitement to practise, you may unwittingly bring shame on them.

Remember that time is a privilege. Taking time from whānau once or twice a week, plus assignments, plus weekend noho is something many people can’t even dream of. Taking a year off to learn full time – impossible. If you’re lucky enough to have had that opportunity as a Pākehā, please think long and hard about the gifts you have been given and to whom they’ve been denied.

My former AUT kaiako Hēmi Kelly recommends talking to your teacher if there is someone in your class that makes you feel iti. “Chances are it annoys them as much as it bothers you,” he said.

And if you miss out on a spot in class, there are so many ways of normalising te reo Māori in your life. “Learn te reo Māori” doesn’t work as a New Year’s resolution anyway, because there’s no end point to learning a language.

I told someone recently my te reo is like a six-year-old’s. They replied: “Oh! I thought you were more advanced than [name of a friend who did one year of night school].”

Guess how long it takes a six-year-old to learn English? Six years. A 10-year-old? 10 years. While having it spoken to them all day, every day. I know it’s not totally analogous to an adult learner, but six-year-olds can tell you what they did at school, who they’re friends with, what they like to eat and all about their favourite hobbies. They speak the language well. But they can’t, for example, write an essay on the complexities of language acquisition. Fluency is a process, not an endpoint. As a monolingual country, I think we’re blind to what that truly means and as a result, blind to exactly how much Māori have lost.

Kia mau tō tātou reo Māori, hei taonga a te arero.

Some te reo Māori resources

Buy Māori Made Easy by Scotty Morrison
Find free and low cost te reo Māori classes near you (not updated for 2021)
Listen to Te Wānanga o Aotearoa’s Taringa podcast
Watch Tōku Reo on Māori Television

Keep going!

ĀteaFebruary 14, 2021

Ana Scotney in high definition

Ana Scotney (Ngāti Tāwhaki, Ngāi Tūhoe) released her first single as Kōtiro last year, and now she’s dropped the full-length EP, Hi-Def Multinational. She chats to producer Thomas Arbor about concept albums, asymmetry and the smallness of long-distance walking. 

Ana Scotney is a rising star of the stage and screen, a creator of theatre, art and zines, and an experimental musician who has just released an EP as her alter-ego, Kōtiro.

You’ll have seen her as the hilarious and scene-stealing Sepa in The Breaker Upperers, or perhaps in the critically acclaimed shows Mr Burns and The Contours of Heaven. Soon she’ll be hitting the big screen again as Mata in the feature film Cousins, adapted from the novel by Patricia Grace.

It’s not a reach to say that Scotney’s bag of tricks is larger than most. She has the range, and she’s not afraid to use it.

Over Waitangi weekend, Scotney released the EP on Coco Solid’s imprint Kuini Qontrol and on independent artist platform Sonorous Circle. Thomas Arbor of Sonorous Circle collaborated and produced the EP with Scotney. Here they chat about the two-year journey that lead to Hi-Def Multinational.

Thomas Arbor: Hi Ana! You’ve been on a big adventure recently! 

Ana Scotney: Yeah just been cranking through Te Wai Pounamu on Te Araroa. Am writing this from Wānaka, having walked here from the top of the island in Tōtaranui (Queen Charlotte Sound). I have been keen to do this hīkoi for four years or so, so it’s feeling really good to be out here.

How does it feel being on the other side of such a journey and now launching into another year?

I feel good. Clear and a lot more peaceful. It’s nice to be releasing the EP. I don’t know if I’d describe the experience as “launching”. The cool thing about durational walking is that it mellows out the rigid notion of time. Days are simple and slow and broken into phases of crossing mountain passes, or walking in riverbeds, going to sleep and waking up with the sun, for weeks. You start the hīkoi and end the hīkoi with a real… smallness, if that makes sense. Like, one day, you just set off and take a step and start walking, and then six-and-a-bit weeks later, you’ve walked 750km or something. Then you might think, “OK, that’s enough.” And walk to the pub to have a celebratory beer. Or you might think, “No, I’ll keep going,” and walk another 1,300km. Then you look at the sea, and just as quietly as you started, you finish. And that’s it.

It’s a colossal thing, but also a real small thing too. So I feel that I am somewhere inside that psychic drumroll right now. Just rolling gently with the walk, with the EP release, with the roll into a new year on the back of such a wily one in 2020. 

Ana Scotney in Waiau Pass, December 2020 (Photo: Supplied)

Congrats on finishing the EP! Can you talk a bit about the process for you, starting from when you first began writing the songs? 

Congrats right back to you ! It feels nice to be at this point of release. I have loved working on this body of music sporadically for such a long duration of time. I think we first began chipping away at stuff in the winter of 2018.

And then prior to my bringing you the scraps of songs as they were, in voice memos on my phone, or like, little small loops and samples on Garage Band, and way-finding our path to arrive here, figuring out in real time, without any premeditated agenda or process, has been so cool.

Your lyrics conjure up some really striking imagery. How important is the idea of painting a picture or telling a story in your music?

High-Def Multinational is a concept album. The concept is linked to the complexities of place and belonging in Aotearoa today. What does it mean to be tangata whenua, growing up in the city, and to also be Pākehā, and proud of all your whakapapa? Not wanting to choose to value one more than the other. To be of the indigenous diaspora. How do we uplift and represent ourselves and our culture when we’re constantly in an environment that shuns and fails to reflect that back to us? How do we wield the artforms, the platforms that we have access to, to speak to this experience?

I suppose the lyrics and then the samples embedded in the sound are the outcomes of both of our research into these themes.

Also, I wanted to craft waiata that uplift the mana of the whenua and that musically convey the tension between different narratives and experiences of what it means to be from Aotearoa that I’ve heard, experienced and lived through. All of the references in the music and in the lyrics are to people, to birds, to places that are important and specific to me, or to a politic that I feel strongly about like the direct correlation between the dishonouring of the kawa laid out in Te Tiriti o Waitangi, the commodification of whenua as a means of creating capital for specific people whilst neglecting the imbalance in the inheritance of wealth off the back of the corruption of honouring this doctrine. The asymmetry of cultural representation, and the ongoing exclusion of indigenous and tauiwi values, narratives and places in the ongoing design of this country/project called New Zealand.

I find it difficult to be outspoken in my day-to-day life about politics, and my position in relation to these things, but they’re things I think about all the time. Creating this EP has been a really good way to get some of that off my chest, so thanks for working with me on it Thomas and bless up lol.

Thomas Arbor on a break from the studio. (Photo: Ana Scotney)

Some people might know you as an actor, theatre-maker, film-maker. How long has music been part of your practice and how do the artforms relate to each other in your work?

Since forever. It all comes from the same source. I just reckon it comes from having surplus energy that if I don’t burn up turns into my being messy, neurotic and annoying AF to anyone in close proximity to me, so better do something with it all!

How did you team up with Kuini Qontrol?

I met Coco on K Road one evening when she was heading home from the nail salon. I fully just jumped her like a true Aquarius psycho and was like, “Hey! I’m Ana! Heaps of people told me we’d get along, thanks for co-creating Sepa (who I played in The Breaker Upperers) and Sheena the Shewolf (who I played in Wellington Paranormal).” I interviewed Coco for my zine GULFS, we became friends through designing backgrounds as one of the animators working on Coco and Simon Ward’s show Aroha Bridge. I also made friends with Toki who forms the other half of the mentoring team at Kuini Qontrol and is also the musician and artist Big Fat Raro.

FORCE FIELD from Kōtiro on Vimeo.

Basically, we talk and hui around how we can share our work and feel safe doing so, how to navigate some of the more challenging parts of the process of putting music out into the world, without compromising our values, and yeah just keeping it real, cute, and making sure that there’s room to share kai celebrating the work that others put out. Like Samara Alofa’s album Earth Punk! and Brown Boy Magik’s Trans Pacific Time, both of which make me cry when I listen because they are beautiful, potent and just really fuckin’ good.

What next? Any plans to make more music or play live?

I have started the early, early iterations of some new songs for a second EP, currently called Midyouth, leaning on folk influences. Maybe I’ll finally be able to play guitar live without fucking up, haha. And figuring out how we can play what we’ve found in the studio together, live – that will be cool. Gotta move to Australia for a long minute to shoot a TV show, but will keep making waiata in the down time.