50 Years of Te Reo: It’s a gift not a purity test

Te Wiki o te Reo Māori celebrates 50 years

Sunday marked the start of Te Wiki o te Reo Māori and, this year, the kaupapa celebrates its 50th anniversary.

Aotearoa celebrated its first Māori Language Day in 1972, following a petition signed by more than 30,000 people calling for te reo Māori to be taught in schools.

By 1975, the day had grown into a week-long event, and since then Te Wiki o te reo Māori has become one of the most recognised public celebrations and nationwide movements in the country.

When I was 18 I had a car accident that left me with a serious head injury that damaged the part of my brain where I formulate speech and language.

Sometimes, without realising it, I mangle my pronunciation horribly.

I’ve always been a tad self-conscious about it and that’s why I don’t try to pronounce Te Reo because I fear some pronunciation policing woke fascist will jump on my mispronunciation and scream I’m being racist for mispronouncing the language and lead some new crusade to get my cancelled – and I just don’t have the energy for any of that!

I get cancelled monthly as it is by the Wellington Woke, I don’t need another bloody target on my back!

My repertoire of Te Reo is pure pidgin Māori –  Kia ora, Kai pai and Kia Kaha, but I do use those many times a day as my basic go to for greeting anyone.

My tongue is simply too leaden for the beauty of a cultural treasure like Te Reo, and while I can’t speak it, I certainly believed it was my daughters birth right to enjoy this gift, so she has been in a bilingual class all her life (currently she is the only pakeha in her class which is a tragedy in of itself) and I have to tell you that when she speaks Te Reo it melts my black cynical heart and makes me feel more connected as a New Zealander than any other single thing.

To me, Te Reo is a cultural treasure that is a gift, and I think the recent friction over Te Reo is because it isn’t being given as gift, and instead has become a virtue signalling cudgel used by the Professional Managerial Class akin to their aggressive pronoun peacocking that is being used as an elitism rather than a cultural gift.

You see this brown washing happen at State Agency level, it’s outrageous that Oranga Tamariki have that name when they damage so many Māori children!

Comedian Kajun Brooking touched on this Te Reo elitism with this joke…

…he was surprised by the popularity of it…

Comedian Kajun Brooking shocked by reaction to his Te Reo meme

A comedian has been shocked by the mixed response to a Te Reo meme he posted on social media.

Comedian Kajun Brooking posted the meme on Twitter at the beginning of July, which said: “How Te Reo speaking Maori look at the rest of us Hori’s”.

Brooking said the idea for the meme came after an interaction with a woman who asked him for help in Māori. When he told the woman he couldn’t speak the language, “she actually looked quite disappointed in me”.

…we shouldn’t allow woke identity politics elitism to shame us or bully us, that’s misusing the gift that is Te Reo.

If you don’t speak Māori and you don’t want to, that’s ok, you aren’t a bad person!

But equally, just because you don’t understand what is being said, your slight inconvenience doesn’t justify the cross burning racism that gets voimited up the nanosecond you don’t understand what is being communicated!

Sometimes inconveniencing the majority is good for that majority.

As you wait for the caption to explain what is being said, you might also think this is how hard of hearing and the deal feel all the time, which is why captioning should be funded for all media!

That moment where you don’t understand can be a learning and teaching moment of empathy.

That’s a good thing.

Honestly, if you are such a cracker honky that hearing te reo spins you out, you need a large cannabis cigarette to chill out.

Equally we shouldn’t allow the Professional Managerial Class’s use of Te Reo as a virtue signal to masquerade their failures when 20 000 are on emergency housing wait lists, when 200 000 kids are in poverty and when there are more children living in cars than when Labour began in 2017!

Speaking Māori fluently doesn’t solve any of those problems!

 

 

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