Editorial: Fight to keep te reo alive

Monet-Mei Clarke with supporters on the streets. Photo / Michael Cunningham

It's painful to see a thing of beauty die.

The Irish language is one of those dead things and gets an anniversary each year.

St Patrick's Day, sadly, is less about culture now and more about binge drinking, so even the anniversary for the dead thing has died.

In New Zealand, te reo Maori is still breathing, despite efforts from the linguistically challenged, lazy nationals and straight-up bigots. It inhales its shared heritage with Europeans, with all its pain. It exhales forgiveness and mana.

Te reo Maori is the lungs of culture in New Zealand. Surely most Kiwis should korero; even a basic greeting.

The Race Relations Commissioner and the Maori Language Commission are backing young Monet-Mei Clarke, 17, from Whangarei who quit her job and joined a mass protest after she was told not to greet customers with a traditional "kia ora".

Clarke had been inducted with a six-step greeting policy for KiwiYo customers. She alleges her boss later told her to say "hello" first, not "kia ora".

Her boss confirmed this and said New Zealand was "an English-speaking country".

Inequality is not seen in grand gestures by oppressors. It's the everyday, subtle intolerance to difference in society.

Stories about the issue had over 433 comments on the web and were shared online 2095 times. People care about the future of the language.

Like New Zealand, Ireland was occupied by the Crown. Sports, language and customs all forced underground under Crown law. The language resurfaced through school curriculum, not culture, and the efforts to revive it failed.

If Kiwis don't fight for te reo Maori, the language will suffer the same fate of Gaeilge. It will become just a bureaucratic necessity for teachers and civil servants to appease iwi, an evening course for immigrants and a quirky hobby for hipsters.

It will be too late when academics start chasing kaumatua and kuia with Dictaphones for the last traces of te reo Maori.

Christine Allen is a journalist at the Northern Advocate newspaper.