Columnist Shilo Kino finds what she has been looking for, a safe space to be and feel Māori
I’m six weeks into rumaki reo, a full immersion te reo Māori course and someone asked me the other day if I was still drowning. Lol. Is the Pope Catholic? Is the royal family racist? The answer is yes. Being at kura and learning te reo is opening wounds - deep wounds - but it’s also healing them. Healing not just for me but for my tupuna and whānau who have felt the severe repercussions that comes from the loss of language and identity.
When I walk through the doors of kura, I am reminded of how significant this is. To feel connected to te ao Māori, to be in a safe space, a spiritual space, a whānau space, where I can kōrero Māori and know it’s okay to make mistakes. No one is going to look at me with a disappointed look when I speak. No one is going to ask me to share a whakataukī or do the karakia because I’m the only brown face in the room. And maybe this is what I have been looking for all along. A safe space to be and feel Māori because I haven’t experienced that before. To be accepted for who I am, every broken colonised piece of me, and to know that despite this, despite not knowing all the language and all the tikanga yet, I am worthy and good enough to be Māori.
Every morning we start the day with a karakia, a mihi and a waiata to welcome us into the space of te ao Māori. Sometimes the multitude of voices singing is so loud, it feels like there are way more than a hundred of us in the room, and I think that is because all of our tūpuna are singing along with us.
There are some mornings when I am fighting an internal battle in my head but it melts away because the words of the waiata connect me to who I am. Ko wai au? Those are the words of my favourite waiata. Who are you? I close my eyes and sing loud, always thinking of my nana who was beaten for speaking the language and now here I am trying to learn for her.
Maybe all of this is why I feel sad to leave kura at the end of the day now because I know I am going back into the Pākehā world. It is confronting to spend a whole day immersed in Te ao Māori and then to walk out of the school gates and remember that I am a minority and it is not normal to hear or speak te reo because pākehā is the main language in this country and tikanga Māori doesn't mean anything except for when a box needs to be ticked at a staff meeting.
And then I think about how only this week some Kura students were racially taunted for speaking te reo Māori at a council meeting. A member of the public asked, “why do we need to listen to this monkey language?” It’s exhausting and traumatic and it feels like it’s never ending. And at the end of the day, who are the ones who have to call it out? Who are the ones who have to explain why this is not okay? Māori have to explain over and over again our reason for being. We shouldn’t have to. But it’s exactly what Toni Morrison means when she said the serious function of racism is distraction- and I've never felt that more than now.
All of this adds to the drowning, but there are beautiful moments too. Watching Cousins and understanding some of the reo without reading the subtitles was a milestone for me. Sharing a joke in te reo with my aunty and laughing so hard that people were looking at us funny. Teaching my dad new words and sentences when I come home and sometimes sitting down together to do homework. My dad never learnt reo and I know me being at Kura is healing his wounds too.
Sometimes I hear my nana growl me. Kaua e whakamā! Don’t be shy. She was a hard woman with 12 children. In comparison my life is pretty cruisy, mostly because I don't have 12 kids. I think of my nana often when the taniwha of whakamā and the taniwha of anxiety comes to the surface. Instead of running away, I am forced to confront my taniwha and that's probably why I spend so much time crying and why I feel mentally drained most days.
But being at kura, around other Māori on this journey of reclaiming has been inspiring and I feel proud we are all here doing our best. We all have a taniwha to confront and I have learnt that for each of us, the trauma manifests differently.
'Te piko o te māhuri, tērā te tupu o te rākau'
'The way in which the young sapling is nurtured (bent), determines how the tree will grow'
