At a family gathering a few years ago I was having a beer with my cousins and aunties and asked a question: “How did we lose the language?”
I was adopted out at birth and didn’t grow up with them so I had missed out on a lot of whānau history. The family have different versions based on where among 10 children their parent was born. There was general consensus our grandmother, a native speaker, had been hit at school for speaking the reo. Our great-grandparents didn’t speak English, although my great-grandfather apparently liked to learn big English words to show off at the pub in Tokomaru Bay. After downing a pint on one occasion, he slammed his beer handle on the bar with a flourish and loudly declared it was “excruciating!”
But piecing together the different accounts, it seems when the older ones started at the native school in Kennedy Bay on Coromandel Peninsula they would get whacked for speaking Māori. At this point it seems likely our grandmother simply stopped speaking her first language to her own children in an effort to protect them from the violence they were experiencing at school.
One cousin said his mother would start to panic as an adult if she heard fluent speakers, and when she left home she went to the trouble of getting her Māori name legally removed. Her experience at the native school made her ashamed to be Māori.
While there has been growing awareness and knowledge of New Zealand history, the damage done by the native schools is still relatively overlooked.
A cluster of legislation was passed in the 1860s that included the Native Schools Act. In 1863 the New Zealand Settlements Act and Suppression of Rebellion Act led to armed attacks on Māori by the crown that was followed by land confiscation. (The settlements act is almost identical in wording and outcomes to similar legislation in Ireland.)
The Native Lands Act 1865 led to the crown extinguishing Māori land tenure and replacing it with an individualised system that was the basis for massive crown purchases that were often confiscations in all but name. As you’re reading this, it’s likely the land you’re sitting on went through one of these processes of political violence.
The Native Schools Act led to an education system imposed on Māori that ran for nearly 100 years. While it had some positive aspects – it became a platform for health campaigns by Māori leaders that halted population decline – its overall legacy was hugely damaging. One member of Parliament regarded the schools as a binary choice – the government would either need to civilise the natives or exterminate them. Many newspaper editors of the day preferred the latter option.
But what was meant by civilisation was to bring Māori under control by force and to establish them at the bottom of the social and economic order. It was not about equality of citizenship.
Something similar happened in North America after the Plains Wars, when residential schools were set up as a cheaper alternative to war in controlling indigenous peoples. The intent was the same – break down the language and culture of the children, educate them for the lower rungs of the economic ladder and make sure they were stripped of any historical memory or notions of political independence. If you can’t exterminate a people, the next option is to erase who they are. By violence if necessary.
One of my aunties couldn’t recall our grandmother speaking Māori but she did have a friend whose mother had also been through a native school. Her mother had become frail and was taken in by her daughter. When bathing her mother this woman was horrified to see huge scars across her back. When asked her mother replied she had never wanted her kids to see them. The scars were from being thrashed with a horse whip for speaking Māori as a child.
The physical damage is one thing but the psychological damage is another. One education expert told me kids would get hit for speaking Māori but then would get hit for speaking in faltering English, so they would shut down.
But the shame our grandparents and parents were made to feel was then mirrored in succeeding generations by an embarrassment and shame at not being able to speak Māori. We were alienated from our own inheritance and identity. Some of my cousins and their kids and grandkids have worked hard to overturn that shame by recovering what was lost.
The word “Māori” in its original usage means normal. It became a self-designation for tangata whenua as a way to distinguish between themselves and the strange newcomers. They referred to themselves as tangata Māori – normal people – which then just became Māori.
Māori were once regarded by Pākehā as a dying race and the language was to be the first casualty. That was a false prophecy. I now see kids and adults in our whānau and others where being and speaking Māori is perfectly normal again.
Māori Language Week(Te Wiki o te Reo Māori) runs from today Sunday, September 14 to Saturday, September 20. The 2025 theme is “Ake ake ake - A forever language,” marking the 50th anniversary of the original petition to Parliament that led to the establishment of the week.
