Mme and sisters are the first generation of almost 50 generations of our family who did not grow up speaking te reo maori as a first language. At first, this fact seems surprising: a dramatic rupture of our past and the language that shapes it. We are only three generations away from the ancestors who were Maori-speaking monoglots, ordering their lives and their world in a language almost foreign to their 21st century descendants.
But this break between the language spoken by our ancestors and the language we speak – English – is the typical experience of Maori: only one in five Maori can hold a conversation in their ancestral language and in the last three surveys. nationals, this number has fallen. This makes English speakers a firm majority of our indigenous population.
This is not surprising. From the moment Cook’s Endeavor saw the earth in 1769, Captain and Botanical Knight Joseph Banks devoted himself to conferring English names on the milestones and features they “found.” My own ancestral mountain, Pūtauaki, became “Mt. Edgecumbe,” possibly in honor of John Edgecombe, a Marine sergeant from the Endeavor, and my ancestors would take about a hundred years to discover that its ancient mountain, so like their sacred rivers, they bore other names.However, stories of colonization tend to focus on invasion and conquest (British red coats are installed and sooner or later the country falls), which omits perfectly how almost all conquests begin with a new English name.
From this name change, the English language and the settlers who spoke it spread throughout New Zealand. A century after Cook’s 18th-century landing, Pākehā (white New Zealanders) were the new ethnic majority and their language quickly became the lingua franca of government, commerce and the media.
By the turn of the 20th century, my grandparents and great-grandparents were erased by the value of Maori as the first language of their grandchildren. Particularly passionate scholars understand language as a simple means of encoding information, but I know that my grandparents understood it more than that: language is the relationship between speakers, it encodes their shared culture, and for Maori, the incorporates in a common whakapapa (ancestry). This is what all grandparents would like to convey. But when the future speaks English, do you choose te reo?
For a good number of Maori, sometimes by choice, but mostly by circumstances, the answer was no. Even in my life the proportion of fluent Maori speakers and conversationalists continues to decline. After moving home to Kawerau in 2019, I was surprised that the language was barely spoken outside of the Marae and formal settings (council events, wānanga graduations, etc.). When I was a child in the 90s and 2000s, the Maori language was all around me: at school, in the shops, to some extent at home, and certainly in the wider whānau (family). Where did he go?
During the decade I went English, I cut huge tracks in my small Maori community. It does so wherever it goes, a juggernaut that absorbs other languages (the “juggernaut” is a loan from the Indian subcontinent) to what we know today as modern standard English. As a language of expression, as a means of describing the universe and our knowledge, English probably has no equal. But it’s not my language: it was embedded in this earth at the end of a musket. Like any other Maori person without their ancestral language, I long for te reo rangatira (the Maori language). I want the past to which I grant access and the form it confers on my future and the future of my partner and the future of our son.
Where I leave many of these same Maori without the language is that I think it is vital that Pākehā speaks it alongside us. For this reason alone, Lorde’s five songs, the Maori accompaniment to his new album, Solar Power, is a benchmark of pop culture that we should receive. And yet on social media the reaction, at least from many Maori, is caustic. Twitter and Instagram users wrote about the album triggering the language loss trauma they carry. The strange psychoanalytic tone of this separate charge is certainly happening. Listening to the language, especially in the mouth of a Pākāha person, is a reminder of their absence. This type of cognitive load is punishing.
The more persuasive critics take a slightly different view (not focusing on individual feelings), arguing, as did a well-respected tōhunga (expert) in Maori dance, that the album equates to “tokenism.” This argument and discussions about trauma can be appreciated, but the implications are worrying for the future of the Maori language. If we have to wait for the perfect circumstances to speak or sing te reo rangatira (no one’s trauma is triggered, no tokenism is detected), we can also sign the language death certificate. In the struggle for Maori radio, Maori television, the Maori language school and more, Maori language activists in the 1970s and 1980s knew that in order to survive, the language must act as a functional language. deployed between both Maori and non-Maori institutions, media and communities.
The great rangatira (leaders) who gave life to Lorde’s Maori-language album – Dame Hinewehi Mohi, Sir Tīmoti Kāretu, Hana Mereraiha and Hēmi Kelly – probably adopt the same view.
English is the first global language. For reasons of empire, obviously, but also for reasons of culture: English is the language of Hollywood, the main language of popular music, increasingly the language of science, and the preferred language of commerce and diplomacy. If the Maori language is to survive and the predictions are painful, we must allow non-Maori to speak and sing it. Kids need a pop culture and a Maori-speaking social network. Lorde contributed to it, and under the direction and supervision of some of our best defenders of the language. As a second language speaker, I recognize it as a public good.