Photo: Mike McRoberts
Award winning broadcaster Mike McRoberts has been open about his struggles to reclaim his ancestral language.
In his recently released book, Speaking My Language Te Kōrero i Tōku Reo, he details his path towards full immersion in Te Reo Maori in 2023. Before then he writes "I felt the intense whakamā of not being able to speak te reo" and "an emptiness born of a disconnect from my Māoritanga".
McRoberts' whakapapa goes back to Ngāti Kahungunu o te Wairoa and to Pūtahi marae near Frasertown. He told Māpuna host Julian Wilcox his whānau would go back to Wairoa every couple years for Christmas.
"If it hadn't been for those trips I could have gone through my whole childhood and adolesence in Ōtautahi/Christchurch without ever having heard a word of Māori spoken."
McRoberts' father was one of several Māori from Wairoa who moved to Christchurch for trades training and eventually stayed and settled down to raise a whānau.
"Whenever they'd go back they actually looked different you know, they ironed their jeans for a start. You go to Wairoa who the hell irons their jeans?"
McRoberts said he had a beautiful upbringing among the Māori community in Christchurch, but felt a sense that he was missing out on something when he went back to Wairoa.
"If the opportunity had been there for me to do kapa haka or to learn te reo Māori I know I would have done it, and it's hard not to carry that bitterness forever you know at some point you've just got to say 'ok well it wasn't there', get off your ass and do something now and that's what I did a few years ago."
It's easy now to get stuck in the reeds and think progress on te reo is really slow-going but he feels that we don't look back enough and think of how far we've come, he said.
"Having come to my language so late in life and having felt that anxiety around the language and all things te ao Māori for so much of my life I kind of understand where a lot of our population is coming from, that sort of slightly reserved 'were's this going' 'am I going to be exposed, am I going to be humiliated or am I going to be left behind' all of those things for our non-Māori citizens of our country, but once you get into it it's always given with aroha."
McRoberts started taking language classes at Whakaata Māori several years ago. It was empowering and he loved the structure of the akomanga (classroom) but when the course finished he didn't continue.
"I could have gone on, I had enough confidence then to have gone to Te Wānanga o Aotearoa and done night classes or whatever, but I didn't. But I say in the book it's still something that, it actually tears me up a bit that I wasted seven years.
"I wasted seven years of my life not being on that journey."
So in 2023 McRoberts returned to te reo and embarked on a rūmaki or full immersion course at Te Wānanga Takiura, all while he was still reading the 6pm news, although at reduced hours.
There were many times throughout that year he thought he should have just taken the year off the news, he said.
"In the end it wasn't a hard decision, when, you know, I think I'd just got to a point where I had to do it."
Learning any language is hard, but if you're Māori learning te reo Māori as a second language it's even harder, he said.
"Why is it so hard? Why am I so useless? And if I am useless what does that mean about my identity, you go through massive anxiety," he said.
"This is going to sound arrogant but I was used to winning. I was used to doing things and being successful at them... well Dancing With the Stars was ok.
"Everything I'd done in life I'd been really successful at and then all of a sudden I was at the bottom of my class and hanging on. Rūmaki reo it literally means 'to drown' and I was drowning alright."
McRoberts said he is much more confident now with whaikōrero at a pōwhiri or a mihi whakatau but it's the conversing in te reo that takes time and patience.
"It's ok because I'm in no rush, I know I'm going to be learning this for the rest of my life."
