pn783. The Good News from Ōtaki, a town on the Kāpiti Coast

Tainui

I was fascinated by Tainui Stephens' description of Ōtaki published in e Tangata.  How different things are now from the Ōtaki I remember in the late 1960s when I taught at  Ōtaki College. 

Tainui writes,   

 "The most recent statistics show that 50 percent of the town’s Māori population and 13 percent of the total Ōtaki population of around 6,000 people are able to use the language. Nationally, 20 percent of the Māori population, and 3 percent of the general population speak Māori."  

 He mentions the work of Prof. Whata Winiata and the beginnings of Te Wānanga o Raukawa, the Māori tertiary education institution that started it all.   I knew Whata then and before this when he was friends with author-actress Barbara Ewing whose father, a senior education official, actively discouraged their Māori-Pākehā relationship. Such was the tolerance of an educated man. I think Barbara later married a Māori.

I sat in the meeting house and listened to Whata's ideas on starting an institute of Māōri education.  

At about the same time my then-wife, Margaret Te Ruihi née Broughton of Ngāti Raukawa and Ngārauru descent, and I, a pommie kiwi, helped to start a kindergarten for Māori and Pākehā pre-schoolers. We felt the existing play centre was too unstructured to help Māori children. 

At the college, I persuaded two parents, Willie Taratoa and Kahu Waitoa, to start a  Māori Club which grew from strength to strength.

The school had four houses named after NZ trees. On one swimming sports day, I relieved the PhyEd teacher for a short break and took the opportunity to correct his Ree/mugh and Tot/a/rer.  Several staff thought me funny.  

I remember also seeking to correct a junior colleague when he spoke to his Form III class —whose Māori students were descendants of Te Rauparaha and Rangihaeta—  about the "Wairau Massacre." This was when Te Rauparaha supposedly ambushed and killed Arthur Wakefield and others whom the  NZ Company had sent to arrest him for occupying what Te Rauparaha said was his land. We now call the incident the "Wairau Affair" and acknowledge the Pākeha provocation. Many things have changed for the better over the past 50 years.

Tainui writes:

"Education is a powerful dynamic in the town. Only a single generation after making that Koha programme, I hear the language everywhere in the Ōtaki streets. Apart from the busy wānanga, there are four kōhanga reo and two kura Māori, as well as bilingual and immersion units at the state and Catholic primary schools. There are waiting lists everywhere.  To have halted the language loss and generated its revival in such a short time remains an astonishing feat."

-- ACW