Time for the city to go bilingual?

PUSHING TE REO ENVELOPE: Te reo Maori is just one element when it comes to responding to iwi Maori, Gisborne District Council chief executive Nedine Thatcher Swann says. Picture by Liam Clayton

Bilingual signage, reo classes, karakia to start formal hui and weekly waiata practice. This is how the waka rolls at Te Kaunihera o Te Tairāwhiti and not just during Te Wiki o Te Reo Māori (Māori Language Week).

While Aotearoa this week celebrated the reo, the Ngāti Porou/Ngāi Tāmanuhiri wahine at the helm of Te Kaunihera o Te Tairāwhiti (Gisborne District Council) says it has been pushing the envelope on all things reo for years.

And the reo is just one element when it comes to responding to iwi Māori, council chief executive Nedine Thatcher Swann says.

As an organisation, each staff member is asked the question “what are you doing to build your capacity and respond appropriately to iwi Māori?”

“We should all have that expectation around being able to respond. If you work in Tairāwhiti, because we're more than 50 percent population Māori, we should have those competencies and abilities to be able to work with our iwi partners.

“With that comes the question of what tools do you need? What support do you need to enable you to do that?”

The council has supported staff to take reo classes, has an increasingly popular waiata group and has just launched an educational online resource for staff called Te Matapihi.

This includes a map where staff can click on a place and find out which iwi or hapu they need to engage with, settlements they need to be aware of and storytelling of that rohe.

In August last year, the council committed to an anti-racism strategy following a deputation from East Coast human and indigenous rights advocate Tina Ngata.

In the past 12 months, the council set up a Te Kahui Patu Kaikiri (anti racism group) and has been progressing multiple pieces of work in this space, Thatcher Swann says.

This include an independent audit of the council's policy documents to advise the council on future Treaty of Waitangi work.

The council is also working with the Department of Internal Affairs on a pilot project looking at engagement and partnership with iwi.

In 2014, Gisborne became the first council in Aotearoa to introduce a formal bilingual signage policy, meaning all of the council's future public-facing signage would be in te reo and English.

Bilingual traffic signs calling traffic to “e tu” (stop) and “ata haere” (slow) traffic were erected on the side on Tairāwhiti roads in a collaboration between the council and contractor Downer in 2017 and 2018.

But while other councils including Wairoa and Rotorua have committed to becoming “bilingual cities”, it raises the question — how far is Tairāwhiti from making that call?

With reportedly the highest number of reo speakers in the country, bilingual city status could be something the council supports moving forward, Ms Thatcher Swann says.

“We are well on the pathway in terms of the council as an organisation in supporting and enabling the cultural competency and bicultural capability and capacity.”

In the 2018 census, more than 6000 Tairāwhiti residents reported being able to hold a conversation in te reo Māori.

That was close to 16 percent of the district's population and four times the national percentage.