The Real Reason Maori Were Strapped At School For Speaking Te Reo

Graham Adams: Are Pakeha really the bad guys in the demise of te reo? To mark the beginning of Māori Language Week, veteran journalist Janet Wilson began a Listener magazine story: “It’s the language that refuses to die, despite efforts across generations to kill it.” There was no explanation in the succeeding six pages of what the writer meant by her opening statement — no doubt because, in the long-running and simplistic morality play staged everywhere in our media, the protagonists and antagonists need no introduction. It is, according to received wisdom, the malign machinations of Pakeha that suppressed te reo Maori “across generations”. On Newsroom this week, a senior lecturer in the University of Auckland’s School of Psychology, Dr Makarena Dudley, referred to some kaumātua having had their first language — te reo Māori — “suppressed in early childhood as a result of colonial practices”. In the Guardian, Charlotte Graham-McLay wrote that “some in the older generations of Māori were beaten at school for speaking the language”. The accusation that “Māori had their language beaten out of them at school” has become common shorthand for the widespread belief that it was Pakeha who were almost entirely to blame for the dwindling fortunes of te reo over the past 180 or more years. For that reason, many people are shocked or disbelieving when they are told that prominent Māori were among those pushing most energetically for English to be the only medium of instruction in Native Schools. These were set up in 1867 as a nationwide system of secular primary schools for Māori children, for which hapū provided the land while the government provided the buildings and teachers. It is an equally inconvenient fact that it was Pakeha missionaries who, from the early 19th century, were determined to teach Māori children in te reo — often against the wishes of Māori themselves, who saw proficiency in English as the key to success in trade and politics and as a gateway to the outside world.