Since its signing 50 years ago, the spirit of this objective is living through the work of some of te ao Māori's most esteemed educators.
Current King's College Reo Māori professor and ex-lecturer at Auckland University, Raniera Harrison, is one of them.
According to Harrison the language is a sustainable gift that transfers the "key to the world of knowing who we are" from the past to the present and, beyond the linguistics of it, he has watched it foster connections of spiritual and emotional identity.
"We're celebrating the reclamation of our own conscious minds. We're thinking Māori, we're speaking Māori, we're behaving Māori and that's been the true potency of this petition over the last 50 years," Harrison said.
Harrison has witnessed the desire of pupils, of many backgrounds, to study the language throughout his career.
"I'm teaching a way of thinking, I'm teaching a way of behaving to ensure that if we're serious about having this harmonious multicultural New Zealand then nobody should be left behind."
"In this space of collaboration I do have moments where I see that it's really getting through. That it's not just a textbook in their bag or an assignment on their laptop but that this is a language that is permeating their minds, souls and hearts."
Harrison says that the petition has re-focused the spotlight on the Māori language.
"And for us, that's where our language and tikanga deserves to be, front and centre."
However, there was a point in time where the language was sitting in the shadows.
New Zealand surveys in the 1970s showed that there were just 64,000 fluent speakers of te reo Māori remaining, out of a population then of 400,000 Māori. Of these, only 170 children were fluent.
McCaffery says if they had not actioned the petition when they did, the language would most likely have vanished.
They collected over 30,000 signatures before it was presented to Parliament on September 14, 1972 and it took more than door-to-door persuasion to achieve what they did.
"We the undermined, do humbly pray that courses in Māori language and aspects of Māori culture be offered in all those schools with large Māori rolls and that these same courses be offered, as a gift to the Pākehā from Māori."
In 1971, before the academic term had started, McCaffery was involved in a field trip led by Burnie Kernot and Pine Taiapa.
They travelled down Aotearoa's East Cape, where te reo as a spoken language was still prevalent, stopping at several marae along the way. From Turanga nui-ā-Kiwa to Te Whānau-ā-Apanui, they sought support from iwi and hapū, while also realising the "richness" of what was there.
"Te Reo Māori had the view that because we were surrounded by elders and old people, the only way the language would be revived meant speaking Māori, doing whaikōrero, singing waiata and particularly mōteatea. Because if you wanted to go to a marae and present a case or ask for support or signatures, you had to do it in a Māori way." McCaffery says.
"It was challenging for everybody because there were only two people who spoke Māori that I remember in that era. One was Robert Pouwhare and the other was Tame Iti. Everybody else spoke English except the lecturers."
For those kids whose language had lain dormant until secondary school, class enrolments and participation had been the catalyst in reawakening their mother tongue. It came back to them rapidly, according to McCaffery.
"Then we decided we needed a place to practice and keep them confident. We didn't have a marae so we used the University tennis club."
TRM met every week in Victoria University Wellington Tennis Pavilion on Kelburn Rd while campaigning for a university marae.
"Within a year, we didn't have the capacity to hold any more events here because of how many people were showing up."
Opportunities appeared quickly as students were offered roles to work as part-time research assistants. As a result, teachers like Tawini Rangihau treated it as an emergency to train and upgrade the students' reo skills.
"The problem with it though, is that many of them were Pākehā learning Māori, because there just weren't that many Māori at uni," Rangihau says.
By agreement, only Māori could hold leadership positions and regardless of the numbers present in decision-making, Māori always held the tuakana decision-making power and / or veto.
"People didn't just want to learn the language, they wanted to make sure that being Māori didn't disappear."
Today, more than one in six Māori can understand and speak at least at a basic level. This reflects the emergence of Māori immersion teaching and learning environments over the past few decades, but according to Harrison there is still work to be done in order to future proof our language.
"I know we have the capacity to do it within whānau, hapū and iwi. We're under the leadership of some hugely influential Māori thinkers right now. Let's collaborate that effort and remove the silos that we were working under, so we can truly understand the place that Te Reo Māori can take us," Harrison says.
He adds that without acknowledging what happened on the dawn of that rainy-Wellington-day half a century ago, Māoridom could've drowned before getting the chance to celebrate its prosperity's.
"My house is paid for by te reo Māori, my kids are fed and clothed through my reo Māori and I know I'm not alone. There is a generation of disruptors out there operating under the same systems. This is what sustains us."
