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Illustrator Xoë Hall depicts the cycle from te ao Māori to colonisation and back again. She used a photo of Stacy Gregg’s Tūpuna, Irihapeti Te Paea Hahau, as a reference.
Illustrator Xoë Hall depicts the cycle from te ao Māori to colonisation and back again. She used a photo of Stacy Gregg’s Tūpuna, Irihapeti Te Paea Hahau, as a reference.

The Sunday EssaySeptember 18, 2022

The Sunday Essay: The Māoris from the town side of the river

Illustrator Xoë Hall depicts the cycle from te ao Māori to colonisation and back again. She used a photo of Stacy Gregg’s Tūpuna, Irihapeti Te Paea Hahau, as a reference.
Illustrator Xoë Hall depicts the cycle from te ao Māori to colonisation and back again. She used a photo of Stacy Gregg’s Tūpuna, Irihapeti Te Paea Hahau, as a reference.

For Stacy Gregg, it’s been a long and sometimes painful road back to te reo, the language her grandmother was beaten for speaking and which, she discovers, is still treated as worthless in certain schools of Aotearoa. 

The Sunday Essay is made possible thanks to the support of Creative New Zealand.

Illustrations by Xoë Hall

A few Christmases ago now, onboard a rather average charter yacht hired by a publishing house for an afternoon of cruising on the Waitematā Harbour, I got stuck in a conversation with the Mad Butcher. In this moment, as he buttonholed me, I learnt a valuable life lesson: never go to a party on a boat because there is no way out. As it turned out, this cruise was to be a rich repository of life lessons, most of them courtesy of The Mad Butcher. “I’m gonna give you some advice,” he told me as I clutched my glass of Deutz and considered swimming for shore. “Sure,” I said, “Shoot.” The Mad Butcher fixed me with a steely gaze and waggled a finger at me in an admonishing way, “Never forget where you come from,” he said.

I was about to tell him I knew exactly where I came from when the Mad Butcher suddenly stopped talking to me, reached into his pocket and took out a dictaphone.

“Phil, mate?” he bellowed into it. “Got another beaut thought for the book!” It turned out that the Mad Butcher was in the process of writing his autobiography and his preferred method of filling the pages was to send ad hoc voice messages to his ghostwriter Phil Gifford to knock into shape for posterity.

I’m not sure if the book ever got published but if it did I bet it’s full of gold. And to answer your question, Mad Butcher, I come from Ngāruawāhia. The place where the mighty Waikato and Waipā rivers meet, historic seat of the Kiingitanga movement, or as Heather Du Plessis-Allan refers to it, a “rotting” town where she’d refuse to even stop for a pee. I remember reading that quote and thinking fuck you Heather Du Plessis-Allan, that’s my town and if anyone is going to insult it, it will be me. Time moves painfully slow when you are growing up in an isolated Waikato town. I spent a lot of years in Ngāruawāhia making a list of its deficiencies and dreaming of being elsewhere. When I did leave town at the age of 16 after my mother died I could barely bring myself to look back. Ngāruawāhia by then had become an open wound for me, bordered by a freezing works at one end and the pā at the other. Yet it always remained where I came from.

Ko Taupiri tōku maunga, Ko Waikato tōku awa, Nō Ngāti Mahuta raua ko Ngāti Pukeko ahau, Nō Ngāruawāhia ahau.

Ngāruawāhia has been on my mind more than ever this past year. I went back home in July last year, on the cusp of what would turn out to be a two-month lockdown, set up camp at my cousin’s house overlooking the misty brown Waipā and started working on a book loosely based on my childhood. Back then, we lived on the other river, on Waikato Esplanade. Location is important in Ngāruawāhia because it speaks to who you are. We were the Māoris from the town side – the Pākehā side. The other side of the river where Tūrangawaewae stood, formidable and imposing, was where the real Māoris lived. They were the ones who knew tikanga, spoke the language and lived the culture.

The disconnect between urban Māori and the marae is often spoken of. What is less recognised is the separation that happens in a small town between those Māori who connect to their marae and those who do not. We were right there, right next to what should have been our place too, but we knew it wasn’t ours. There was quite literally a river dividing us.

I had paler skin than my cousins so they were Māori and I was “part-Māori”. We compared skin colours a lot. We calculated blood percentages. We discussed whether it was better to be Pākehā than to be Māori and how trying to hold onto who we had once been would only hold us back in the world. When I cycled to high school on a winter’s day with the frost biting my face I would look through the fence palings, peeking past the warrior faces that barricaded Tūrangawaewae, and wonder what went on inside. I am Ngāti Mahuta and Tūrangawaewae is my marae, but I feared it deeply. I had no grasp of what it would take for me to ever make it inside. For a long time I quietly blamed my family for the void that existed between me and my birthright. Then I blamed the marae for excluding me. And of course I blamed myself because colonisation is the ultimate gaslighter.

For me, the decision to learn te reo was the moment I woke up and realised that I wasn’t to blame for having my culture taken from me. Neither was my mum, who fulfilled the health statistics of what it is to be a Māori woman and died at age 42. Or my nan, who still felt the sting of being hit with the ruler for speaking Māori at school and thus encouraged her whānau to lose their old ways because that stuff wasn’t going to get you anywhere in a Pākehā world.

My experience is mine but it is equally, sadly, universal. In her book Hui, Dame Anne Salmond writes about te reo as “a language in retreat in modern life”. At the time of publication of Hui, 1975, she cites that less than 10% of Māori are able to speak their language. Te reo, she says, only continues to be unassailable in the ceremonies of the marae.

“Within this context [te reo] reigns supreme,” Salmond writes, “those who can’t speak Māori, even elders, rarely stand to express themselves on the marae unless they have to, and in that situation they apologise for speaking English and try to preface their speech with a few sentences in Māori. At one hui I attended, the minister of Māori and Island Affairs was the honoured guest. Two old men, both Māori speakers, thought to make things easier for him and delivered their orations in English. They were cried down and criticised and soon after left the marae,” she writes.

For Māori who could not speak the reo, then and now, the marae is a daunting environment where “even their own people criticise them”. “‘Look at this young boy,’ says an old man on a marae, ‘black as the ace of spades and can’t speak a word of Māori!’ Some of them join gangs, such as the ‘stormtroopers’, ‘Nigs’ or the ‘Mongrel Mob’ and find identity there, while others look to the marae.”

There is an argument here to be made (and I’m not saying Salmond is making it) that English could have been adopted long ago on the marae, spoken alongside Māori to give the young kids and bored-to-tears manuhiri a foothold in a world where the language was a barrier. If Māori had done this, I have no doubt that our language would have been lost completely. It is only because of the foresight and determination of those who kept Māori as the first and only language of marae protocol that we have our language now. Waikato Māori lost their land to colonists who forcibly took our means to self-determination. But we kept our language. And if you really, really want to destroy a race, the death blow is to take away their language. 

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“The government tried to kill te reo once. It’s only fair that they pay for you to sit here and get it back,” our kaiako Matua Bruce would tell us as we discussed the fees-free policy at the Te Wānanga ō Aotearoa. Matua Bruce taught us Māori, but he also gave us a degree in culture and politics at the same time. He would constantly remind us that the fault was not ours that we didn’t speak Māori. “This was done to you. They stole your language from you. But guess what? You can get it back.”

At te Wānanga our classes were full immersion. That’s three hours in the reo without a break. If we ever did speak English it was to engage in debate on the politics of what it meant to be learning te reo. The conversations were raw, confronting. We could not get through a noho marae without tears of guilt from the Pākehā students who felt heart-wrenching guilt for the colonisation wrought by their ancestors. “It’s not your fault,” Matua Bruce reminded them, “and you are welcome here.” Although not everyone agreed on that point. We had brutal conversations with each other about whether Pākehā whose ancestors almost destroyed the language should now be praised for trying to speak it. We talked about whakamā, and how Māori who’d lost possession of their language through no fault of their own could feel shamed if a Pākehā one-upped them by wielding the reo without sensitivity. If you are lording it over someone with your virtuoso grasp of the language you stole from them, are you not colonising them all over again?

Learning te reo is not like doing French at school where your worst fear is that you will get laughed at by a snobby waiter while having a go at ordering a croissant in Paris on your OE. This is an emotional high stakes activity. Te reo is more than language, it is everything. At times when you’re flailing with it, it feels like the deficits in your soul are exposed for the world to see. Once, on a noho marae in an attempt to step up and commit to giving a karakia, my nerves got the better of me and I faltered horribly and in that moment I made a whati, a break in the rhythm, and the dead air I had created was suddenly filled by the lilting notes of a waiata being sung by a kuia who had sensed the void and stepped in to sort it out. I didn’t feel grateful, instead I was mortified. The overwhelming sense of whakamā in that moment haunts me still. Mistakes have to be made so you can learn, but when you care so deeply you feel their sting. I think of Maui’s father, making the hapa, the mistake in his prayers when he blessed his son, and how that hapa in the end resulted in the death of Maui. Stepping up and speaking up, finding your voice in te reo, takes a kind of humility and deference and vulnerability that the Pākehā world neither values nor understands.

At the point when I felt I had mastered enough reo to attempt a passable mihi in public, I tried to incorporate it into my day job. I write children’s books and one of the key reasons I wanted to learn te reo was to normalise the language in schools, to make it heard. The first school I tried to speak at was Remuera Primary. I went in with high hopes and opened with my kōrero in front of a hundred or so pupils aged 6-10. I was a couple of lines in when the heckling started from the kids upfront. “Stop speaking Māori!” one of them shouted angrily. “Yeah!” another one yelled. “We’re not Māori! Don’t talk Māori at us!”. A rumble of dissent washed over the room. I looked to the half dozen teachers standing on the sideline watching me being shouted down by a bunch of junior schoolers. They didn’t step up. They stayed silent. And so I gave up on speaking Māori and I switched to English and I floundered with the worst presentation I had ever given in my life and I left the school in bits. When I went back a few weeks later to sit in the headmaster’s office and explain how upset I was, and to question the culture of a school where children aren’t expected to hear te reo on a regular basis so that they come to expect it as part of an introduction or to respect the treaty, well… let’s just say I felt colonised big time by his reply.

Tōku reo, tōku ohooho, tōku reo, tōku whakakai māhiri, tōku reo, tōku māpihi maurea

My language is my awakening, my special treasured possession, my adornment, the object of my affection.

This whakataukī, this proverb, crops up a lot during Māori language week. It’s a beautiful sentiment, lyrical in its expression like so many whakataukī. For me though, te reo is not a possession. I consider it in the same way that I consider my maunga or my awa. It is my responsibility to care for it. I feel the burden upon me to safeguard it, to nurture and protect it for future generations.

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Anna Rawhiti-Connell
— Senior writer

The word Māori translates as ‘normal’ – and that is what te reo should be. It should be normal for us to speak it. If that is challenging for the sort of people who can’t sit politely through a pōwhiri because they can’t cope with not understanding it, or those who feel threatened when a newsreader rattles off the names of our cities in Māori as well as English, for the people who have to make protest signs that this is New Zealand not Aotearoa, or for people who can’t buy a chocolate bar because they don’t comprehend that it’s chocolate if it has Māori words on it, I encourage you to sit with your discomfort and ask yourself why it is that you are such a fragile snowflake that you can’t allow another culture to express their identity without feeling like you will lose your own?

I mihi to those in te ao Māori who are doing the good mahi right now when it comes to bringing te reo back to life. To the brilliant teachers at institutions like Te Wānanga ō Aotearoa, to the podcasters like Hemi Kelly with his focus on conversational Māori that you can use every day, to Scotty and Stacey Morrison with their commitment to making Māori Easy, and to Paraone Gloyne, Erica, Te Puaheiri and Snowy for creating the progenitor to all podcasts, Tāringa, my constant companion in the car. And to Whakaata Māori, with amazing shows like Kōrero Mai – a special mihi to Nicole Hoey, producer and mastermind of Poni Poni, the show for tamariki that I wrote earlier this year, directed by Te Atamira Jennifer Ward Lealand, with reo translation by Herea Winitana, due to air very soon on the Whakaata Māori network. There is a te reo renaissance right here, right now in Aotearoa and the people making a fuss about a few words on a chocolate bar are fighting the tide because they feel it in their bones. Change is coming. Tihei Mauri Ora!


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Illustration: Jewelia Howard.
Illustration: Jewelia Howard.

The Sunday EssaySeptember 11, 2022

The Sunday Essay: My prognosis is good, thanks for asking

Illustration: Jewelia Howard.
Illustration: Jewelia Howard.

Despite being diagnosed with cancer, I was doing really well – until I stopped sleeping.

The Sunday Essay is made possible thanks to the support of Creative New Zealand.

Illustrations by Jewelia Howard.. 

In June I stopped sleeping and went a bit mad. For about six weeks I was averaging around two hours sleep a night. There were some nights where I didn’t sleep at all. Everything went sideways, real fast. I started stuttering. My body was jumpy and my eyes twitchy. I lost my appetite. I moved through the world like I was underwater and far away.

Funny things happen when you’re that sleep deprived. I had conversations with people that I simply don’t remember. I put a pencil in the fridge. Allegedly I went to Top Gun. The days and nights collapsed into each other. Perhaps most alarming of all was the online shopping. At some point during the haze, a parcel arrived with my name on it. When I opened it up I was assaulted by a spangle of sequins. Evidently, I had bought a black sequin dress and matching black sequin jacket, like some kind of unrealised (unconscious?) homage to Liza Minnelli. I have no recollection of ordering this, nor do I have any occasion to wear sequins.

I discovered that when you don’t sleep you wind up crying a lot. Loud noises and bright lights are too much. Anxiety sets in. My nerves felt quite literally frayed like exposed wires, my heart would pound so hard that it made my t-shirt tremble. My stomach churned and gurgled.

I tried all the sleeping pills; Zopiclone, Amitriptyline, Nortriptyline, Temazepam, Quetiapine (this one is an anti-psychotic but in low doses is supposed to help you sleep). One of them worked, the rest didn’t. I took magnesium, melatonin, sour cherry juice, sleep tea, CBD, CBD with THC (I spent one night accidentally and terrifically wasted imagining that the bed was swallowing me up every time I closed my eyes). I read everything I could get my hands on about sleep. I tried Epsom salts in the bath. I ate more protein at night, microwaving a cup of milk at 3am, trying to drink it but then retching. I hate milk. I ate dinner early, I avoided exercise at the end of the day, I limited screen time in the evening. I tried tapping, mindfulness, guided meditation and sleep stories. I can recommend ‘The Glassmaker of Murano’ if you like to be bored to death over and over again. It’s astonishing how dull someone can be. One of my darkest moments was the first time I reached the end of the sleep story. You’re not supposed to reach the end of those stories. At one point I googled: “Can you die from lack of sleep?”

It’s difficult to determine the precise reason I stopped sleeping, because it was undoubtedly a combination of factors. Cancer being the main one. Last year, I was diagnosed with aggressive breast cancer, just before Auckland’s interminable level four delta lockdown. I was fortunate in that it was discovered early – and lucky it was discovered at all, given it eluded detection in two mammograms and an ultrasound. I had surgery, three months of chemo, 19 rounds of radiation and I’m now on hormone therapy for the next five years.

There were silver linings to having cancer in lockdown. When the chemo wiped out my white blood cells compromising my immunity, I didn’t have to worry about catching bugs off others since we were all isolating. My kids weren’t bringing home colds from school, because they were already at home ALL THE TIME. I wasn’t missing out on any fun events either, because there were none happening. Very few people saw me really sick and bald, which meant I didn’t have to deal with well-meaning, awkward interactions.

And while we’re on this topic, here’s some things not to say to someone with cancer:

“What’s your prognosis?”

“Are you asking if and when I might die?”

“Yes”

“Yeah, maybe just don’t.”

“I knew someone who had cancer.”

“How are they now?”

“Er. Dead.”

These are things that are acceptable to say if you are an eight-year-old:

“Your head looks like it’s covered in nostril hair and it makes me feel weird. Can you grow it back?” 

“Please don’t die.”

Anyhow, it’s true what they say about how when something bad like this happens, you get to see the goodness in people. It’s in the outpouring of generosity and love from family and friends. And it’s in the kindness of strangers; the basket of woollen beanies in the oncology ward knitted by one of the doctors in her spare time. It’s in the hospital orderly’s quiet singing at 3am as he wheeled me in for scans, taking an extra blanket and tucking it all the way up to my chin so I wouldn’t be cold. It’s in the young barber who gently shaved off what little hair I had left and then refused to charge me. 

There’s a lot of humour in cancer if you want to look for it. Take wigs for example.

I ordered a wig at the beginning of my chemo treatment and was told it would take around a week. Three months later it arrived from Germany, a week after my final chemo session. In the meantime, I looked on Trade Me for wigs. There were all manner of wigs on there, but the standout was the one that looked like a black frazzled dead thing. It was an eletrocuted ebony cat. It was a large, dark tumbleweed. It was a dust ball the size of a bicycle helmet. It was five dollars and so spectacularly bad that it brought me great joy.

My husband wanted to help me find a wig so contacted a friend who is a drag queen. Yes, there was a wig I could borrow. He collected it and brought it home but hadn’t thought to ask about the colour, which resembled dirty dish water. Or, more formally (and generously) described as “ash blonde”. I put it on my head and my sister couldn’t talk for laughing. Bent over, wheezing in hysterics. Because the universe is a marvellous place, I happened to be wearing overalls that day. The resemblance to Worzel Gummidge was uncanny.

The thing about receiving bad health news at a reasonably young age – I’m 42 – is that you begin thinking about how you might be remembered when you die. The stories you leave behind, the tales people will tell, the good, the bad, the weird. Will they talk about the pets you once had? Bessie Bunter the pig, Aristotle the axolotl, Cecil the peacock who landed on the roof of your suburban Hamilton home one day and never left. Will they talk about how you could read by age three, but only got 51% in School C maths after six months of tutoring? Will they mention the time you decided in your infinite 11-year-old wisdom that what your intermediate school really needed was to experience your choreographed dance routine to Sir Mix-A-Lot’s ‘Baby Got Back’ during the school assembly? Will they talk about how you travelled the world, lived in different places, got married, had a couple of lovely kids and lived a good, ordinary life? Will they talk about the astonishing number of pot plants you have drowned because you loved them too much? Will they talk about that essay you once wrote about when you couldn’t sleep and you had the audacity and bombastic self-importance to ponder your legacy?

On the darker days you make deals with ghosts, pleading to have enough years to see your kids through to adulthood. Anything after that is a bonus. In the darkest moments you beg to get them through childhood. But you have nothing to offer in return. 

Up until I stopped sleeping I was doing really well. “I’m doing really well,” I said to anyone who asked. I had done everything the doctors had recommended and more. I was attending pilates twice a week and avoiding bacon. My hair grew back, albeit as a riot of curls reminiscent of Napoleon Dynamite (chemo curls – it’s a thing). My immunity returned; now I could catch Covid – and I did – and enjoy it just as much as a healthy person. I gained back some of the weight I had lost. I know this because a massage therapist patted me on my bottom as I lay in front of her on the bed and said approvingly: “Fatter, good.” Which I relished, because the last time I saw her she told me I was too skinny while she poked at my hipbones and told me to eat more ice-cream. 

Then the sleeping went haywire and the wheels fell off. I later learned that this is not uncommon around six months after treatment ends. Kill phase. That’s what they call the active part of cancer treatment when your body is being infused with toxic drugs designed to destroy cancer cells – and every other cell in the process. That’s followed by daily radiation sessions that leave your skin blistered and peeling. There’s a calm that descends during this time knowing that you are, in that moment, doing everything possible to ensure that any rogue cells are being destroyed and zapped. It’s a surrender to the process. But once the kill phase is over, the realisation dawns that cancer cells could be once again flourishing, in the way they did the first time around. Recurrence is a constant threat. You no longer trust your body the way you used to. Aches and pains and twinges could mean it’s back.

Last month, in an attempt to win back my sleep and sanity I left my family at home and went to Alaska. On a cruise ship called Quantum of the Seas, a gargantuan floating mall, with 15 floors, a surf simulator, bumper cars, a skydiving tunnel, and 6,000 other morons cruising up the coast of the American continent. It represented everything that’s wrong with capitalism and the west’s culture of excess and consumption. And by god, it was magnificent. I played bingo and trivia, joined a silent disco, attended an Elton John impersonator show and watched the absolute shitshow that is cruise ship karaoke. I drank pina coladas and missed the towel-folding seminar because I was at ‘The World’s Sexiest Man Competition’. The absolute cheek of it. As if the world’s sexiest man would be riding the Quantum of the Seas to Alaska. The gentleman who won enjoyed wearing loafers with no socks and executed an astonishing impression of a dolphin, squeaking and jerking around on the floor. I played ping pong, strode around the running track on the 15th floor in Birkenstocks with socks, photographed the cheese sculptures and considered striking up a conversation with a chubby, old white fella in Osh Kosh denim dungarees and a Make America Great Again cap. I had the goddamn time of my life.

Someone asked me the other day if I see life differently now, have I experienced some kind of profound shift in perspective because of cancer? Do I feel #blessed? The answer is no. There has been no come to Jesus moment. Sometimes life is just a dick.

Things are good now. Actually, they’re great. I’m back home, I’m sleeping again. I returned the sequins and got my money back.

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