Annual shame and anxiety of a monolingual dinosaur

Another September rolls around and my anxiety as a non-reo-speaking Ma¯ori is in over-drive. Pride and excitement at the increasing profile of Mahuru Ma¯ori and Te Wiki o Te Reo Ma¯ori clash head-on with the whakama, shame and frustration of being a monolingual dinosaur.

I’m in that in-between generation – two generations removed from first-language speakers, with vague memories of my grandmother speaking the reo to her relations when we ventured north for school holidays. Kohanga reo and kura kaupapa schools were a few years behind my time.

In the mainstream schools I attended in the 1970s and 80s, the reo was not taught, other than by correspondence for the one tenaciousMa¯ori girl inmy year at high school. I think of her often and kick myself for not joining her, while I ploughed away in my inexplicable journey to learn French. I’ve often imagined she’s now a fluent speaker, with children who’ve been bilingual since birth.

At the end of high school I won the Nga¯rimu VC 28th Ma¯ori Battalion scholarship, which paid my way through university. In the 1980s most recipients of the Nga¯rimu did not have the reo, a fact commented on by the principals of their schools in a report of the Nga¯rimu Board published in 1987.

Several principals remarked that they had ‘‘no idea’’ of the language competence of the winners, with some claiming they were not even aware that the student was Ma¯ori, as my own principal declared on my receiving the award in 1990.

I recall the conversation I had with him about this – inwhich I said that without the opportunity to learn the reo, and the lack of kapa haka (due to the absence of a reo teacher), there were few ways in which Ma¯ori identity could be openly expressed or celebrated in the school.

This highlights the place the teaching of reo Ma¯ori and the presence of our own teachers to lead that teaching has in centring

Ma¯ori identity and culture in mainstream education.

By the time I got to university fear had set in – inmymind Iwas now ‘‘too old’’ to learn the reo. I told myself I didn’t want to learn the language in a university setting – I’d wait till I could spend a year in Hokianga. Like many, I dabbled in a few night classes and day-long courses, but nothing sustained.

Over the years the excuses have dwindled, as it became obvious that fear and anxiety were and are the core barriers.

I’ve read recently that the commonly held perception that adult language acquisition is exponentially more difficult than it is for children is amyth, and that the challenges are more psychosocial than cognitive.

Learning a language is humbling, and when you’re an educated professional who is used to being competent at everything you do, stumbling over pre-schoollevel language activities in front of a group is a challenge.

While this is likely an issue in relation to learning the reo, in my heart I know the real issue is quite simply that it matters so much, not because it is a language, but because it is the language.

Reo experts such as Scotty and Stacey Morrison articulate the ‘‘language trauma’’ felt by people in my position – the very real gutwrenching sense of loss, embarrassment and inadequacy at being unable to tap intowhat we view as our rightful inheritance.

This frustration is doubled down when you see non-Ma¯ori students flying through classes, a phenomenon my fellow embittered Ma¯ori adult learners have also shared. I’m embarrassed that I resent the lovely Pa¯keha¯ and tauiwi who value our language enough to learn it and who are successful at it. I shouldn’t, but I do. They do not carry that same wairua/spirit injury that is language dispossession sourced in the harms of colonisation.

The task is compounded when that language is seen as the magic key to cultural enlightenment and the secrets of the wisdom and insights of our ancestors. Frankly I’d be happy to be able to tell the kids to unload the dishwasher in Ma¯ori – seeing as the instruction has little effect in English.

I certainly felt differently about learning French – sure, I connected the culture to the language, in the sense that I liked to watch Gerard Depardieumovies and eat good pastries, but I never felt bad about stumbling overmy conjugation of verbs or misgendering nouns.

I’m now the mother of three teenagers, all of whom are on their own reo journeys at the same mainstream high school their father and I attended, and where the reo has been a real subject taught by a real teacher for 30 years.

Within months my kids exposed the limits ofmy reo, and were perplexed as to how I could have any standing in, or understanding of, the Ma¯ori worldwithout it. This has been a reckoning for us all.

My son is now a pretty accomplished self-taught speaker, the first in our large extended wha¯nau to have any competence in the reo for three generations. More than that, as the saying goes, his acquisition of the reo has been the awakening of hisMa¯ori soul.

Three years ago, at 15, my boy undertook his first whaiko¯rero in front of an audience of hundreds. I was a sobbing mess watching him stand tall, powerful and clear, channelling the reo of his Nga¯puhi ancestors. That taskwas tough, but his next may be the toughest he ever faces – to teach his mama all he knows.

When you’re an educated professional . . . stumbling over pre-school-level language activities in front of a group is a challenge.