Maori recognised,
"I'm very proud of those nonMa¯ ori who use the reo and are proud to use the reo.''
Naida Glavish
More than 30 years after she won the right to say ‘‘kia ora’’ at the New Zealand Post Office, Rangamarie Naida Glavish will be made a dame.
In 1984 Glavish was a toll operator at the Post Office who dared to answer the phone using a Ma¯ ori greeting.
Her supervisor wasn’t pleased with the ‘‘nonstandard expression‘‘, and threatened her with dismissal. As she was renting a Post Office house, losing her job would have meant eviction as well.
But Glavish said she received a spiritual message from her grandmother that inspired her not to change her ways: ‘‘This is far greater than just you.’’
She told her supervisor: ‘‘Whatever you decide to do with me and this issue as my supervisor, I will respect you for that.
‘‘However, I will do what I need to do as the mokopuna of my grandmother.’’
She went back to the toll board, answered the phone and said, ‘‘kia ora, tolls here’’.
Glavish sparked a national debate. Airline pilots started greeting passengers with ‘‘kia ora’’. People flooded the Post Office switchboards, insisting they only wanted to talk to the ‘‘kia ora lady’’. Overseas toll operators used their indigenous greetings when calling New Zealand.
National Cabinet minister and Postmaster-General Rob Talbot backed Glavish’s supervisor, arguing a large number of people did not understand the meaning of the phrase.
But prime minister Robert Muldoon came home from an overseas trip amid the furore and declared Glavish could answer the phone however she pleased, as long as she didn’t use the Australian greeting ‘‘G’day, blue’’.
Ma¯ ori was made an official language three years later.
‘‘I fought the battle, but it was the country that won the war,’’ reflected Glavish.
She was quick to defend the contemporary use of te reo Ma¯ori on the airwaves, after ex-National and ACT leader Don Brash this month criticised RNZ presenter Guyon Espiner’s use of Ma¯ ori greetings.
‘‘I’m very proud of those non-Ma¯ori who use the reo and are proud to use the reo, and they use it appropriately in terms of pronunciation,’’ she said.
‘‘And as far as I’m concerned Brash is just one person, and that’s one person of four-point-something million people.
‘‘We’ve come a long way as a country.’’
Now the West Auckland woman has been made a Dame Companion of the New Zealand Order of Merit in the New Year Honours list, for her services to Ma¯ ori and the community.
‘‘I’ve accepted it because it may be beneficial to my hapu, to my iwi.
‘‘In particular it’s the first damehood for my hapu of Nga¯ ti te Rino, for my hapu of Nga¯ ti Hine and for my iwi of Nga¯ti Wha¯tua, so hopefully it’s beneficial to all of them.’’
Glavish also has Croatian heritage, which is where her surname comes from.
She became a teacher of te reo Ma¯ori after finishing at the Post Office, turning her classroom at Henderson High School into a marae with mattresses rather than desks.
After that she spent more than 20 years in the health sector as a Ma¯ ori adviser.
She is currently employed as the Chief Advisor Tikanga Ma¯ori with the He Ka¯maka Waiora, Ma¯ ori Health, for the Waitemata and Auckland district health boards.
She said where Ma¯ ori were once distrustful of allowing their relatives to die in hospitals, she created safe pathways for wha¯nau to accompany a tupapaku (body) from the hospital bed to the mortuary, in special elevators that prohibit food and dirty linen, which neutralise tapu.
Glavish was president of the Ma¯ori Party from 2013 until 2016.
She was made an Officer of the New Zealand Order of Merit in 2011, has five children, 19 grandchildren, and 27 great grandchildren. She has also been a Justice of the Peace since 1980.
Among the others who received acknowledgement for their services to Ma¯ ori in this year’s honours was Ma¯ori heritage champion John Clarke, appointed a Knight Companion of the New Zealand Order of Merit. He has played a role in almost 30 completed Treaty settlements around the country.
Meanwhile, former National MP and current chair of Ma¯ori Television, Georgina te Heuheu, has been appointed a Dame Companion of the New Zealand Order of Merit.
Contemporary Ma¯ori art pioneer, Fred Graham, archdeacon and kauma¯ tua Wiremu Kaua, and international kapa haka exponent Wetini Mitai-Ngatai have been appointed Officers of the New Zealand Order of Merit.