Tame Iti's methods shock Maori and Pakeha alike. Picture / Alan Gibson

Tame Iti's methods shock Maori and Pakeha alike. Picture / Alan Gibson

Tame Iti sat in the classroom of his little rural school in the Ureweras as a 10-year-old and struggled to understand what the headmaster had just said. No one was allowed to speak Maori anywhere in the school.

It was the early 1960s. Iti was no rebel back then but deep inside rebellion stirred and rippled through the class. He and the other students looked at one another in disbelief.

Maori was their first language, spoken at home in Ruatoki, their Tuhoe birthplace nestled in the foothills of the wild and rugged Ureweras, where people got around on horseback.

The headmaster's edict was a defining moment for Iti. He says his activism was born that day. To make matters worse, the headmaster was Maori, from Waikato, a victim of colonisation, says Iti.

"If you can imagine yourself in a room and you are the blackbird and then the other blackbird decided that nobody is allowed to sing like a blackbird, it's all the seagull language.

"So you can imagine, there's going to be resistance. I think that's the first action that took place.

We kind of talked to one another and I think we all said things like f *** you, in our own language, in our own way."

And they carried on speaking Maori. The shy Iti was among the first pupils to be told to remain after school. His punishments were to write 100 lines of "I will not speak Maori" or to collect a wheelbarrow of horse and cow dung from the animals in the schoolyard. Iti received these punishments quite often.

Flash forward to this month. In a courtroom in Whakatane, the 53-year-old veteran protester is speaking te reo Tuhoe. He is conducting his own defence against firearms charges, and the hearing is in Maori.

A translator is present and Iti's comments pass through the translator and are relayed to whoever is on the stand and to the magistrates.

Anything asked of him in English travels back through the translator and is repeated in Maori. Occasionally, Iti becomes impatient with the translation and asks a question in English.

To have the hearing in Maori is the kind of ploy that annoys many Pakeha. They see him tying up court time, deliberately spinning out a process which would be faster if everyone spoke in English.

Iti admits he can speak and understand English just fine these days, although it was not always that way.

It is not a ploy, though, he says. He expresses himself better in Maori, and why shouldn't he speak the language of his birth, the one he was punished for speaking as a child? "It's a right to speak in your language."