It felt like there, on that stage, in front of that magnificent flamingo curtain, was everything that was good about us. Photo / File
Each week Megan Nicol Reed talks through what’s on all of our minds.
You will have to forgive me, Jess, if I appear to have missed the boat on this slightly. You had timed your letter on people's attitudes towards pronouncing te reo right so perfectly, what with it being Maori Language Week and everything, but in between, life, other columns, well things
kind of got in the way. Last Thursday, however, under the marvellous night sky at Auckland's Civic Theatre, I was reminded that we spurn te reo at our peril. Its mangling is our loss.
I was fortunate to be at the Civic for the opening night of Poi E: The Story of Our Song. It is a film that filled me with gladness to be from and of this place. And when the Patea Maori Club got up to perform their famous song, and alongside the kuia and koro in their best suits and feather fascinators, there was Stan Walker, and there was Grant, the Pakeha butcher who gave Dalvanius $100 to record the song, not because he knew anything much about music, but because he loved his community. It felt like there, on that stage, in front of that magnificent flamingo curtain, was everything that was good about us.
It made me mad, too, though, because while we have come such a very long way since Maori children were strapped for speaking their mother tongue at school, or the Patea Maori Club were turned down for public funding to travel to Britain and perform for the Queen, I still hear people, parents at my children's school, say that they don't mind their children being taught "a bit of Maori", but that they don't really want them "wasting too much time on it". I am floored by their shortsightedness. I imagine they are the same people who baulk at adding an "h" to Wanganui. That's the way I've always said it, they protest. Yeah, and women used to be burnt at the stake, too. Tradition is not the infallible defence we sometimes assume.
Jess was driving along in the school holidays listening to the radio with her young children when her daughter asked why anyone would say "Hauraki" as "How-rackee". "I love my children's reaction to hearing mispronounced Maori words," she writes. "It's a kind of dumbfounded, 'Why wouldn't you say it, or at least try to say it properly?' reaction. I think it's that lack of effort that gets me. The lack of importance placed upon it. Lots of Maori words are tricky to pronounce correctly. I get that. But you can tell when someone's trying. Hopefully my children's attitude to it is typical of their generation."
