Māori ‘superpower’ brings movie magic to indigenous tongues
Hone Heke descendent Steve Renata tells Kevin Norquay how he’s using cutting-edge tech to help revitalise indigenous languages.
Hone Heke descendent Steve Renata is using Kiwi technology to help revitalise Native American and Aboriginal languages, at a time when te reo is being chopped down politically in his own land.
Renata, the managing director of Kiwa Digital, is at present visiting the Oklahoma-based Cherokee Nation in the US, where his firm has also worked with the Comanche and Lakota peoples.
He rode into Tulsa via client meetings in Los Angeles with “the Netflixes, the Disneys, the Apples, the Amazons”, then a media technology expo in Las Vegas.
In two weeks, the digital production house intends to launch the first app in the Ngalia language; it’s an interactive resource intended to connect youth from the West Australia-based First Nations tribe with its ancient ways.
Ngalia is spoken by the people in and around Leonora in the Eastern Goldfields region of Western Australia. Ngalia is said to have three speakers, the Muir brothers who are in their 40s.
Kiwa works to bring content to digital life across languages and cultures, using what is seen as cutting-edge technology.
Renata can see the irony in his helping rebuild Native American languages and Ngalia at a time when New Zealand’s coalition government is pushing back on the use of te reo Māori. Indigenous peoples have long-term problems and ambitions, while politics is cyclical, he says. Interest in language and culture is growing, and Kiwa is building on that.
“The world is doing what the world wants to do, and the trend is to localise all things media,” he says. “Japanese Gen Zs and Gen Ys want things in their language. If they're picking up foreign content, and sharing it in Japan, they'd like to have it subtitled or dubbed or preferably filmed in their language, and technology has enabled that. That doesn't mean that a person doesn't want to have another language … so the accessibility thing is huge.”
Language leads to understanding culture, Renata says.
People are travelling either vicariously through mobile devices or in person, so internationalisation is the future; it seems particularly so for his indigenous clients, who have historically had a tough time of it.
The Cherokee were forcibly removed to Oklahoma from their ancestral lands, two years before Te Tiriti o Waitangi was signed in 1840, and six years before an upset Heke chopped down the
Kororāreka flagpole.
Cherokee were taken thousands of kilometres from the forested southeastern US to the Midwest plains; so many died on the way it’s now known as the Trail of
Tears.
Now, like many Native American tribes, Cherokee are desperate to build a future, and preserve their culture, while those elders who survived Covid are still around to help out. Some tribes have casinos to drive revenue and other income streams.
“They're all working towards better education, better health, better housing… there's been a loss of their own language and/or dialect over many years of colonisation,” Renata says. “They're on a mission to say, ‘OK, how can we revitalise our language, particularly with our youth?’”
One ways Kiwa helps do that is to use digital technologies to capture the language with text, audio and video, to store and archive it, and to curate it into educational tools for the younger generations.
Cherokee are using Kiwa product Voice Q to do their own dubbing of different media. Kiwa also offers what Renata calls “cultural services”.
Voice Q was used to dub the last Aveng
ers movie into Lakota, with Australian actor Chris Hemsworth so passionate about the project he learned the language and redid his lines from the English version of the movie. The Lakota were victims of the Wounded Knee Massacre, the deadliest mass shooting in American history, in which about 300 Lakota people were shot and killed by US soldiers in 1890.
Thriller movie Prey was partly shot in the Comanche Nation, so it has been dubbed into their language “which is really beautiful, and we subtitled it in English”.
The theory is that movies can connect younger Native Americans with their own culture, and help them see it as a living entity. In that way language - and with it culture - can endure.
KIwa calls its apps “immersive, interactive, and instructive experiences”, offering interactivity such as Swipe-to-Read to highlight and play back the story; Touchto-Hear to have individual words spoken, and Touch-to-Spell to hear the letters that spell each word.
Renata has found the cultures he has worked with have a lot of similarities.
“The history of indigenous groups worldwide has usually been a pretty challenging one,” he says. “When we look at where everybody is in 2024, they are not where they were pre-colonisation, whenever that might have been.”
How well they are doing now depends on when they were colonised, and how they were treated by colonisers.
“When we're talking about Māori, right at the crux is that you have a treaty,” Renata says. “Aboriginal folks don't have that. Native Americans have different types of treaties signed at different times. So the lack of a treaty like Te Tiriti o Waitangi has had a massive effect on the differences in disparities between groups.
“If you sit everybody down and say, ‘Where would you like to go?’ Everybody wants the same thing. Health, education, housing, work … there'll be other aspects, but those big building blocks for life are the same no matter where you go.
“The holy grail of where we are heading is to be able to offer the clients - if they wish - to license our technology and develop their own tools. Everything's possible.”
Progress can be slower due to funding, capacity and capability, yet the object is for the digital tools help the tribes reach self-sustainability.
“Being part-Māori I'm aware at a very deep level of what it feels like to be on the minority side,” Renata says.
“Not that it hinders me at all, it has never - it's my superpower. It helps me understand why the Native American kid or the Aboriginal kids are suffering - often it's not the obvious thing ... often what it is, is the use of the language to make the child feel very respected.
“I grew up in Milton where there was very little te reo. If someone does say to me ‘kia ora’ straight off the bat, you've got my full attention. It’s ‘wow, OK, here we go’. So when we're talking about language … all you need is just a greeting, said authentically.
“It changes the whole dynamic of what happens next. But if you're not hearing that as the minority person, maybe you're not sharing everything or you're being a bit conflictory or a bit fight-or-flight.
“It’s not just making people bilingual or multilingual. It's just being able to pick up on little things to sort of show that sign of respect, and to create a space of safety and curiosity.”
KIwa Digital has about nine staff, but also uses contractors; Renata hopes to double or triple the numbers.
“We wants people to come into the industry from the different backgrounds, particularly Māori, Pasifika and wāhines and those that are LBGT.
“We want to be able to say ‘Hey, this is good for you, you can be here’ and then be able to employ them, that would be the icing on the cake.
“If we can do that, I'm really happy.”