Over the last year or so it’s become a feature of our university staff meetings for one or two people to do a pepeha, followed by a few minutes of explanation in English of the various points made. It’s both a way of building staff confidence in using te reo Māori and of understanding and appreciating our colleagues more.
Although I’m not Māori, on the face of it I should have a bit more confidence in te reo than many. As a young teacher in the Horowhenua I did Te Ataarangi night classes, learning to speak te reo through the use of coloured Cuisenaire rods, starting with a very humble, ‘Te rakau kowhai’.
It worked well for me, and I made progress with the patient support of my now-deceased teaching colleague and mentor Matt Mataira. Eventually I became capable of speaking when taking my social studies classes onto local marae. Subsequently I’ve sometimes been a speaker at powhiri, able to do some basics when someone more proficient was not available.
Still, that’s whaikōrero, and when it came to offering my pepeha at our staff-meeting I held back because I wasn’t quite sure what I should say.
There’s often been an expectation in the past of naming your landmarks like maunga and awa and the people you identify with. Some Pakeha might like doing this but for me it’s always felt a bit fake. I’ve lived in lots of places and don’t really have such commitments.
Luckily, it turns out that for those of us who are not Māori there’s no need to take such an approach to one’s pepeha and many Māori would prefer that we didn’t. As explained by Keri Opai in a recent online article in E-Tangata (Opai 2022a), for Māori the pepeha is about whakapapa affiliations which is why ‘the ancestral mountain, river, waka, iwi, hapū, marae and other kinship ties’ are so important.
In short, for those who are not Māori it is not just a matter of choosing a river or mountain that you feel an affinity with because you grew up near it, in the way many of us have probably learnt to do in the past.
Opai provides a very helpful alternative pepeha template for people who are not Māori. Instead of just repeating him here, let me do mine based on his template as I gave it in our recent staff meeting, with some interpretation and comments in English:
Tēnā tātou katoa
Greetings to us all.
Ko Ingarangi te whakapaparanga mai Engari
My forebears came from England.
But . . . (A chance to emphasise that much of my own life has been in Aotearoa)
**Ko Remutaka te whenua tupu
I grew up in the Upper Hutt area.**
Ko Kirikiriroa te kāinga
Kirikiriroa/Hamilton is my home.
Kei Kirikiriroa au e noho ana
Kirikiriroa/Hamilton is where I live now. (I expect this one would be especially helpful for anyone who wasn’t living in the place they call home).
He hoa pūmau ōku ki Ingarangi me Finirana
I have long-term friends in England and Finland. (This line is not from Opai but I got advice and added it in. I wanted some way to acknowledge the significance of six years living in England in my thirties and my more recent experience of working in Finland as well).
Ko Martin Thrupp taku ingoa
My name is Martin Thrupp
Tēnā tātou katoa
Greetings to us all.
As you can see, nothing at all here about rivers or mountains. It allows non-Māori to avoid using Māori ways of identifying. Imitation may be the sincerest form of flattery but not in this case.
As time goes on and te reo becomes more widespread it’s becoming more and more important for Pakeha to avoid appropriation of Māori terms and concepts where they are not suitable. To me it’s a sign of both respect and cultural confidence to know one’s limits and to realise that boundaries are shifting over time.
For further guidance on this it’s well worth reading another informative article by Keri Opai in E-Tangata (Opai 2022b). And while you are there, have a careful look at what my former Waikato colleague Carl Mika is saying (Mika 2022). Mika, now a professor at the University of Canterbury, has long been concerned about inappropriate, tokenistic uses of te reo Māori. He says ‘ . . . there may be times when the taonga status of the language can only be honoured when we decide not to use te reo in certain circumstances’.
I’m also reminded of concerns in Nelson recently where Ngāti Koata has been pursuing a housing development in the Kākā valley up the Maitai river. It was reported that Ngāti Koata kaumātua had found the cultural appropriation of te reo Māori words, songs, and practices by submitters opposed to the development ‘highly offensive’.
The only caution I would raise about the charge of cultural appropriation is that it may become weaponised during moments of political tension. It would be naïve not to recognise that drawing attention to someone’s apparent lack of cultural competence can sometimes be a convenient means of dismissing their arguments.
For instance, would the manner in which people in Nelson used te reo Māori as part of their submissions opposing the Kākā valley development have been so offensive to Ngāti Koata if its proposals were being supported? One suspects not: it’s only human to be less offended when things are going your way.
We have seen a related problem in politics recently where Māori ministers in the Labour Government have attacked Māori MPs in ACT for their supposed lack of Māori values. It would have been better to just focus on ACT’s right-wing arguments and agenda. It can be a great challenge in the heat of debate to stick to the issues: to play the ball and not the person.
In any case those of us who are not Māori remain obligated to do our best to understand and respond to genuine Māori concerns about inappropriate use of te reo. If we do that, then accusations of cultural appropriation will be less easily levelled in the first place.
References
Opai, K. (2022a, August 7) Pepeha for non-Māori. E-Tangata. https://e-tangata.co.nz/reflections/pepeha-for-non-maori/
Opai, K. (2022b, August 7) A respectfully curious approach. E-Tangata. https://e-tangata.co.nz/reflections/a-respectfully-curious-approach/
Mika, C. (2022, September 25) Tokenism and te reo Māori: Why some things just shouldn’t be translated. E-Tangata.