In the final column on her year of immersion in reclaiming te reo Māori, Shilo Kino writes of a life turned upside down, of tears and trauma, incomprehensible joy, love, gratitude, a super power and new, wild dreams.
You will begin the year with a sense of grandeur and naivety. You gas yourself up by channeling the mana of the pioneers who came before you. Ngā Tamatoa marched to the steps of Parliament and demanded te reo Māori to be taught in schools in 1972. You are a direct beneficiary from those who fought for the reo and so you march to the steps of Takiura and demand your language back.
On the first day of school you are like a little kid again. 'I am my ancestor’s wildest dreams,' you tell yourself as you work up the confidence to ask the person next to you for the fifth time ‘what’s the Māori word for brown again?’
You go to the bathroom and cry because you aren’t actually a little kid, you are a 31-year-old adult trying to grasp basic Māori words and it’s bringing up some weird trauma you didn’t realise was there. You think you are alone in how you feel but later you share on your podcast your feelings and it turns out other people are struggling too. It makes you feel better, like you’re all sharing in the trauma. But now every time you go to the bathroom someone will ask kei te pai koe? Are you okay? And then give you a sad look cause now everyone thinks you’re in the bathroom crying when really you just have poor bladder control.
There is nothing wrong with you, even though you think there is. The emptiness you have felt in your life comes from broken connection. Disconnection to yourself, to your tīpuna, to your whakapapa, to your whenua. Intergenerational trauma really is broken connection. You will get it back. Not the returning to an idealised past. You can’t get that back. But you will get the connection back that you have lost.
Get a therapist.
Not everyone has the same trauma as you. Not every Māori will cry when they talk about their reo journey and not every Māori will struggle with roadblocks and wrapping their tongue around our reo. Trauma isn’t a prerequisite for Māori learning the reo, even though you thought it was.
Oh yeah and 2021 will be a hugely traumatic year! The word trauma gets thrown around a lot. So does the word trigger. Everything is a trigger. This is traumatic and that is traumatic. But it will get really bad and that’s why you should stop delaying the therapy. You will learn it wasn’t really about the reo but more about what is coming to the surface as a result of reclaiming your reo.
You have a direct line to your tīpuna. Don’t be afraid to talk to them.
You will have moments of incomprehensible joy! They come sporadically but will remind you you’re on the right path and exactly where you are meant to be. You will sing along to ‘e minaka ana’ at the top of your lungs at the morning hui with a big smile on your face and you will feel grounded again.
You will fall in love with yourself. You will fall in love with being Māori! You will bask in the sun and love being brown and wonder why it took you so long to come to this state of being.
Your classmates will become your whānau. Be kind and learn how to bake so it’s not just whaea Barbs bringing in the muffins every day.
Each whakapuaki will address a different set of trauma that you have buried. Are you prepared for that? To go back to your marae and learn the whakapapa even though you are embarrassed calling up your whanaunga you have never met and asking them a million questions? By the way, your whānau don’t mind. You will feel more connected to them and it will be buzzy-as visiting your Aunty Polly in Tokoroa and speaking te reo with her. Stop being whakamā (ashamed).
You will grow to hate the word ‘whakamā’. Ban the word from your vocabulary. You’re not really whakamā, you’ve just been conditioned to be a suppressed version of yourself your whole life. There’s a whakataukī- Patua te taniwha o te whakama! Stick that on the wall somewhere where you can see it everyday.
Your mum will remind you that you were fluent in te reo once and that will annoy you because you don’t remember ever being able to speak one word. You went to kohanga reo but your memory is filled with blanks, empty spaces of disconnection. This will come up when you learn about kura kaupapa and kōhanga reo and you will feel anger.
You will touch the tip of your maunga for the first time and it will feel familiar, like you’ve been there before even though it’s your first time. You will splash water from your awa on your face and you will feel connected. Your pepeha is a life force within you, that’s why the floor rumbles when you say it. It feels like a superpower, like you just uncovered a secret power you've always had. This is when you realise that te reo Māori is rongoā. It is a medicine.
Your whakaaro will change about Pākehā learning te reo. Blame the humble and kind Pākehā in your class who cried with you and pulled you out of your darkness when you wanted to give up. Maybe it’s because they don’t have the same kind of trauma. It’s like your friend Mahia’s dad said, ‘when you’re drowning it doesn’t matter what colour the rope is’ and you feel this deeply in your bones.
Your friendships will change and this will happen quite naturally. You will be yearning to talk about te reo and you'll want to be around people who feel the same or at least understand you. You want a deep sense of connection; they don't even have to be Māori or on the same journey. They just have to get you. Otherwise, it feels exhausting.
You will fall in love, unexpectedly. You will question everything you once knew. Your faith, your upbringing. Everything. It will quite literally feel like someone came along and turned everything you once knew upside down.
You'll be so immersed in te ao Māori that you won't have the capacity for much else. You'll struggle to watch Pākehā movies, listen to the radio. You know that new Sally Rooney book you were excited to read? You will hate it because it is about white people and you keep waiting for the Māori character but, spoiler alert, there is none and so you will close the book and read Greta and Valdin for the fifth time and wonder why there aren’t more books with Urban Māori takatāpui living in Auckland.
Take notice of the little moments. Turning on Te Karere and being able to understand the reporter. Bumping into a reo-speaking friend and being able to kōrero. Learning a new karakia. Be proud of how far you have come. Write it all down so when the dark days come, you can look back and see how far you’ve come. I think people call that gratitude.
Doing a full immersion te reo Māori course doesn’t make you fluent. You know this but the world doesn’t. If you thought you were a dial-a-Māori before, it will only get worse.
You can now mihi and speak Māori when needed, karakia at the beginning and end of a meeting if asked, say your pepeha in a room full of people and even point on a map the location of my awa and my maunga. None of this makes you more Māori. You will realise the deep-seated approval you are searching for comes from within yourself.
It will end suddenly. In lockdown. Over zoom. Your kaiako will wave goodbye and you will close the laptop and feel like the safety rug has been pulled from underneath but then a part of you will feel relieved that you don’t have to worry about doing a whakapuaki ever again. You will celebrate and get excited about writing your next book but then the loneliness and spaces of emptiness will creep back into your life. You’ll rely on the foundation of what you learnt in a year- the reo, yes, but the waiata, the karakia, the tikanga, the whānau you made and you’ll learn how to fill up the spaces of emptiness from your own fountain of knowledge. And you’ll go searching for more.
In your last whakapuaki you will have stood proudly and the words flowed from your mouth and that superpower that I was talking about before, you feel it again. Then your kaiako messages you, “Girl your time is up,” and you realise that you have spoken for longer than an hour, in the language of your tīpuna, and you still have more to say. You never thought this day would come.
Your dreams are wild now and not just when you sleep. Your mind will expand and go places you never thought possible. You will whakaaro Māori. You want to spread the reo to the world and help your people. But your greatest dream is coming to life, that you can now finally exist as yourself. The authentic version of who your tipuna imagined you to be.
You are not a different person now. After a year of full immersion te reo Māori, you will think you have changed but you haven’t. You are just becoming the person who you were always meant to be. That's on growth. And the power of te reo Māori.
He toka tū moana he ākinga nā ngā tai. Your strength is like a rock that stands in raging waters.
