Te reo learner Haider Khan

PartnersSeptember 30, 2020

‘I’m part of the movement’: Finding place and connection through te reo Māori

Contributing writer

Te reo learner Haider Khan

Two years ago, Haider Khan started his te reo Māori journey. Since then, he says, a new world has opened up for him, and he’s uncovered connections that he’d never noticed before.

Haider Khan was inspired to take up te reo Māori at precisely the wrong time. After hearing a coworker at Spark delivering a mihi to open a conference, he describes feeling as though the words, though he didn’t understand their meaning, were calling to him specifically.

“He spoke with such resonance and it was more than just a foreign language, it was as if he was presenting himself for a reason. I thought he was speaking to me.”

But being the early 2000s, te reo Māori learning resources were few, and Khan found it hard to find a place to start. Then he moved to Dubai and his language journey was stopped before it began. When he and his family moved back to New Zealand three years ago, it didn’t take long for Khan to once again decide to start learning the language. In the two years since his first conversational Māori class, he’s discovered more about the history of Aotearoa and formed his own connection to the land.

“Learning te reo opened up new facts for me. I never knew that it was only in ’87 that it became an official language. Talking to some of my fellow students who are Māori, there was another revelation about how their tipuna were told not to speak the language, and that whole sense of colonialism came directly at me.”

His childhood in Pakistan, in a military family dealing with the hangovers of imperialism, meant that the sense of cultural displacement many Māori in Aotearoa felt resonated with Khan. He immediately drew parallels between te reo Māori language suppression and the government’s attempts to suppress the Urdu language in Pakistan, which he had encountered as a child.

“I grew up in a family where English was our first language, but luckily the majority of people spoke the native language, Urdu, so it could never be stamped out. The colonists created classes of society in Pakistan so suddenly I was drawing parallels. There is no class that has been created here as such but there’s an evident divide between Pākehā and Māori.”

This content was created in paid partnership with Spark NZ to highlight their Kupu app – to learn more and to download Kupu, click here.

Māori cultural values were another place Khan saw huge overlaps with his upbringing in Pakistan. The Māori value of manaakitanga, the idea that it’s a blessing to have and care for guests, is one he recognised.

“In a strange way, rather than a guest saying thank you, it’s [the host’s] job to say thank you for bringing this prosperity into our lives. That filters through the culture. When I started learning about te reo Māori and seeing things from the Māori world view, all of these things started becoming clear.”

Part of learning a new language is the inevitable moment you’re asked to stand up and say something, and Khan says that’s an aspect that still scares him sometimes. When he first began learning he was intimidated by the prospect of getting something wrong and offending the culture he was trying to honour.

But he’s found the complete opposite when sharing his reo, with Māori people encouraging him to continue his learning journey as part of a wider effort to normalise and revitalise the language nationwide.

“What I got back in return was a sense of gratitude, that they felt proud that someone was learning their language and that’s amazing, because usually when you try to learn something new you feel awkward. The regeneration of the language and the tikanga – I am part of the movement, and I feel really privileged that I’m on this journey.”

Khan gives a lot of thanks to his workplace, Spark, for supporting his journey and for developing apps like Kupu, which helps people to learn Māori vocabulary using AI technology.

“Kupu for me has been the fun introduction that merges technology and the fascination of learning a new language. To say it’s magical comes pretty close, because by using AI, the app recognises my quest to expand my vocabulary,” explains Khan.

A lot has changed from the early 2000s when he first tried to learn te reo. Now a search for ‘Māori’ on the app store heralds dozens of hits for reo learning, from children’s games to apps for conversational reo Māori for business.

“All of these apps play a role, they’re tools and they’re a lot of fun and I think now te reo Māori is being looked at more deliberately. Previously I had a sense that it was an afterthought, now I think people are understanding their obligations under Te Tiriti o Waitangi.”

Khan’s found a greater sense of place in New Zealand through learning te reo, and he compares the feeling of discovering that connection with the land to walking through Manhattan.

“That’s a concrete jungle and it was all built by humans, but it tells a story because of all of the struggle that’s happened there. We don’t have that here but we have a different connection, it’s as if the land speaks to you. This sense is different here, at one end of the spectrum the sense is around injustice and on the other hand it’s about community, that we need to come together and identify ourselves with being people of the land. I’m finding my place, so to speak.”

He’s proud to be part of growing number of people taking up te reo Māori learning and encourages everyone who’s thought about giving it a go to have a look at the many ways the language can now be learnt, so we can stick it to the colonists who thought they could make te reo Māori disappear.

“We are in an awesome time in Aotearoa, with so many people at the political front as well talking about it – whoever thought te reo Māori would be dying a slow death will be turning in their grave, because it ain’t.”

Keep going!

(Photo: Getty Images)

PartnersSeptember 30, 2020

Misinformation isn’t new, so how can we control it?

The Spinoff

Staff writers

(Photo: Getty Images)

In episode three of Conversations that Count – Ngā Kōrero Whai Take, we take a very timely deep-dive into the complicated world of online misinformation and disinformation.

In some ways, the large-scale wave of disinformation which has swamped New Zealand’s streets and social feeds throughout 2020 comes without surprise. Faced with a catastrophic global pandemic and a commensurately wide-ranging response from our central government, it’s to a degree understandable that members of the public – particularly those predisposed to distrust either the parties in power or the system as a whole – would seek alternative explanations for the realities we’re facing. And for those who’ve been looking, such theories have been unfortunately easy to come by.

But although the modern media environment has made it undeniably far easier for bad actors to spread bad info, did this problem really start on our social feeds? And regardless of where it originated, how can we collectively address the issue now that it’s taken hold? These are just two of the vital questions posed in the third edition of Conversations that Count – Ngā Kōrero Whai Take, available now on your podcast platform of choice

Produced in partnership with Massey University and again hosted by experienced broadcaster Stacey Morrison, this episode sees Massey University Professor Richard Shaw joined by academic researcher and science communication specialist Dr Jess Berentson-Shaw, for a kōrero that spans everything from the surprising history of disinformation in Aotearoa to how we as individuals can act in stopping its spread – as well as what we should be asking of our elected officials to achieve the same.

Dr Berentson-Shaw is well versed in the causes and conditions that give rise to what she terms “false information”, and believes that it’s important to delineate between the various forms that it can take – as well as the motivations of those behind its creation and distribution.

“We know that what we call ‘disinformation’ tends to be made by people with malicious intent … people who create it in order to gain something from it – power, money, wealth, political influence. Misinformation tends to be false information that’s spread by people who don’t have malicious intent. In fact, often people might be spreading it because they’re concerned or they’re worried or there’s actually genuine care at the heart of it.”

L-R: Stacey Morrison, Professor Richard Shaw and Dr Jess Berentson-Shaw

That distinction, between those wilfully seeding malinformation as a means to disrupt and those who genuinely believe they’re doing the right thing, is one which has become only more meaningful this year. In a joint survey conducted by Stuff and Massey University earlier this year, respondents who consumed the bulk of their news either via social media or word of mouth (as opposed to mainstream media sources) were more than five times more likely to believe that the Covid-19 virus was an intentionally created bioweapon. Perhaps even more alarmingly, members of those groups were more than 10 times more likely to believe that the virus was “an invention of shadowy forces that want to control us”.

But while those numbers clearly reflect the essentially unchecked influence of social media, and the resultant potential for harm which it presents, to place the blame entirely at the feet of fringe groups and individuals on the internet is to grossly oversimplify the issue. In a piece about a Singaporean state action against “fake news”, produced last year for the Asia Media Centre, Massey dean’s chair Professor Mohan Dutta pointed out that in some international cases, “the impact of digital hate is more pronounced because it is sponsored by the state”.

By a similar token, Professor Shaw – director of Massey’s Bachelor of Arts programme and a professor in the university’s politics faculty – is quick to point out that the genesis of the false information phenomenon and its use by those in power comfortably predates the advent of contemporary communication tools.

“If anybody’s read anything about the events that led to the invasion of Parihaka on the 5th of November 1881, look at the activities of John Bryce who was the native minister at the time. The case, and the narrative that was constructed around the use of violence and the Pāhua up there, that’s a really beautiful case study – and I use the word ‘beautiful’ advisedly – in the construction of a deliberately disinformed story to justify a state action. This stuff has been with us for a considerably long time.”

Of course, with an issue as pressing and existential as this one, simply recognising that there’s an issue isn’t enough to solve it – and as both guests acknowledge, expecting everyday media consumers to be able to apply academic rigour to every news source they encounter probably isn’t realistic. As Morrison succinctly puts it, “We’re going to need our rangatahi to be able to critically analyse a 15-second TikTok, and to be able to have the dexterity of thought to ask ‘Is this true? Can I cross-check that?’”

For Berentson-Shaw, the first key step towards achieving that goal is to increase the population’s general information literacy, and to improve our collective ability to weigh up the validity and veracity of our sources.

“I do think there needs to be some sort of switch in the way that we think about teaching critical thinking, and that it needs to start earlier than it currently does. It has to be grounded in an understanding that there’s a huge amount of false information that’s currently created.”

Crucially, both our guests and Morrison agree it’s important to ensure efforts to correct the cycle of false information don’t unintentionally serve the opposite purpose: entrenching bad facts, habits and attitudes through an overly hostile approach. While Professor Shaw acknowledges there are some views and opinions which are in his opinion “so repugnant and so violent…that there is a case for deplatforming” those people responsible for their dissemination, in the vast majority of cases he believes a more gentle approach is generally a better one.

“What you don’t do is disparage them, you don’t call them names, you don’t dismiss them … because that’s a sure-fire way of driving them further into the rabbit hole. So maybe what you also do is you hold your peace and you listen, and you have conversations with others.”

What motivates misinformation? In the third episode of Conversations That Count – Ngā Kōrero Whai Take, we attempt to find out. Subscribe and listen now via iTunes, Spotify or your preferred podcast platform.