The Leap of Faith To Save a Language

In 1978, a little district school at the foothills of Te Urewera in the Bay of Plenty became an anchor for the Māori language, one that caught deep and held strong.

Ruatoki School was founded in 1896, a small school for the children of Tūhoe to learn the mainstream curriculum.

Nearly a century later, as the language spoken in the homes and marae of these students was decimated, it became a place of refuge for te reo Māori

By the 1970s, the first generation of Māori born after the urban migration began arriving at University. Their parents and grandparents had come to the city and abandoned their language.

And now this generation was feeling the loss.

They became the catalyst for change and we began to see a concerted push to have more te reo everywhere, but especially in schools.

In Ruatoki, the lobbying began to have tamariki taught in their language.

In this 2018 interview with John Campbell for RNZ’s Checkpoint, Turuhira Hare described the many, many meetings held through 1977 as the Tūhoe people fought to make their school bilingual.

Dr Richard Benton worked for the New Zealand Council of Educational Research at the time. In 1973 he had written a booking raising the idea of having bilingual schools. But he said the Department of Education would only agree to “consider without commitment”.

Benton said the breakthrough came when the outgoing Education Minister Les Gandar asked John Rangihau what he could do for Māori.

Rangihau asked for a bilingual school at Ruatoki and the decree went out. The Department had to comply. The school got the go-ahead to become bilingual. A new principal, Tawhirimatea Williams, was brought in.

“I was jumping into the unknown,” said Williams, “What the heck was bilingual education? What's Māori medium education? Even the (Education) Department didn't know what it meant really at that time.”

Tawhiri Williams describes some of the challenges he faced in this interview with RNZ.

He was always very aware of his responsibilities to the Tūhoe people and the trust they had put in him to teach their tamariki.

“It’s a test of you as a person and your belief in yourself as a person and your own identity too for that matter and your own strength, your own tenacity, your own knowledge of what you want to do and where you’re going. All of these things are constantly tested, all the time,” said Williams.

“I’m forever grateful for spending those 19 years with those Tūhoe people.”

For the students, the change in their school was barely noticeable.

“It wasn't sort of like the curtain had been opened and our big, bright new world is out there now,” said Williams, “It was just school as usual.”

Although in some ways they were starting from scratch. There were no books or learning materials written in Māori.

“What I did was take them down to the stream to collect watercress,” said Kaa Williams, “We made up a book about it, something simple and something that they knew about anyway.”

They’d collect grasshoppers and spiders.

“There’s maths in there and science in there and nature studies,” she said.

Tawhirimatea Williams says the school was something of an experiment and people came from all around the country and all over the world to see what they were up to.

“(It) was an important stepping stone for Kaa and I, in Te Ao Māori and how to have a care and appreciation that the kind of Māori language you teach is not just a linguistic skill, it is a human skill,” he said.

“I don't think the kids appreciated it or understood what was happening to them until they grew up to be adults and suddenly they looked back and thought ‘my god’.”

Hans Tiakiwai is principal of Te Wharekura O Ruatoki now. He was a seven year old student when it officially became bilingual.

“When I look back on it now our whole community was involved in this kaupapa. We didn’t realise what we had in terms of human resources that were available to us.”

Tiakiwai can see the benefit a bilingual education has had for him and his peers. 

“What it’s done for us is it’s made us look more broad at the world around us. It allows us to look at things, not from just one perspective but from two perspectives as we walk in both worlds and I think for us the world is a richer place in terms of we can understand, we can communicate better in both spaces,” he said.

Te Wharekura O Ruatoki goes all the way up to year 13 now. It has got a roll of more than 200 students and as of July this year, there were nearly 300 schools around the country with students enrolled in Māori medium education.