To Speak the Language of the Land | Hakai Magazine

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Nearly 200 of us cram into Tarāwhai, a traditional wooden Māori meeting house, under the gaze of the ancestors and deities carved into the posts and walls. We’re here in the home of the Ngāti Tarāwhai tribe, in the middle of the North Island of Aotearoa New Zealand, for the inaugural kura reo taiao gathering: five days of exploring our coasts, rivers, birds, and forests via the Māori language. Leaders and teachers sit up front, kids roam the floor. The people seated around me sport exquisite tattoos: living, breathing echoes of the carvings on all sides.

The day is hot and still, the front doors open to the lazy hum of a rural summer afternoon—the kihikihi of cicadas, the warbling of black-and-green honeyeaters called tūī, and a small plane droning above Lake Rotoiti. The buzz inside, though, sounds different from your usual Kiwi gathering. Everyone here is speaking te reo Māori, the language shared by all 120-odd Māori tribes. Even in a country where one in five people is Indigenous, hearing only te reo is rare.

Up front, the mood sharpens. People hush and lean in. Professor Rangi Mātāmua, from the Tūhoe people, holds a fist-sized volcanic stone taken from a nearby sacred mountain. He begins to chant: deep, rhythmical, fast, like water flowing from pool to pool. Herea Winitana (also Tūhoe) joins him. The two men lay their hands on the stone, infusing it with the mauri, the life force and essence of this gathering. We’re under a prohibition now: te reo only.

And so begins the world’s first kura reo taiao, which translates to ‘language school of the natural world.’ For the next five days, we’ll sleep side by side on the floor of the meeting house, rising before dawn to observe the stars or to explore oceanic navigation, fire, food gathering, spiritual lore, and more through te reo Māori. My fellow participants are conservation workers, native species recovery experts, educators, language specialists, trappers of invasive species. I spot a couple of TV personalities, a couple of YouTubers. Though we’re far from my home in Te Waipounamu, the South Island, it’s reassuring to see others from my own tribe, Ngāi Tahu. Almost everyone is Māori, and most are relatively young. This is the flourishing of decades of effort spent bringing te reo Māori out of the archives and remote villages and onto our tongues.

The language that evolved into te reo arrived in Aotearoa with the first humans in the 1200s. It’s a close cousin to the tongues of Tahiti and the Cook Islands, classified as part of the Austronesian language family. Classical Māori is especially rich in allusion, poetry, and metaphor that draw on the natural world. We explain people’s behaviors by likening them to the birds, the winds, the tides, the gods.

Starting in the 1840s, however, aggressive British colonization took aim at Māori language and culture. Disease, armed conflict, and land theft decimated Māori populations, while the 1867 Native Schools Act, designed to integrate Māori into white society, mandated schooling in English. Generations of teachers caned Māori children for slipping into their native tongue. Parents shielded their kids by choosing not to pass the language on; conversations stuttered, then ceased. By the 1970s, only five percent of Māori kids were fluent in te reo.

Native schools, like this one at Ruatoki, initially aimed to strip Māori of their language and culture. However, in 1977 the Ruatoki Native School became the first bilingual school in Aotearoa New Zealand, paving the way for Māori-language education. Photo by Archives New Zealand

Settlers likewise hammered the ecosystems and species that help give the language its life. Today, by the New Zealand government’s own measure, 75 percent of the country’s native birds, bats, reptiles, and freshwater fish are threatened with extinction or at risk of becoming threatened.

All of this explains why, despite being a Māori journalist and author, I’m here as a second-language learner. When it’s time to divide ourselves into groups based on language proficiency, I choose group two of five: conversational but not fluent.

It’s commonly said that it takes one generation to lose a language, and three to get it back. My great-grandmother was fluent; her son, my grandfather, was raised by his paternal European grandparents and didn’t speak a word, which meant that his daughter, my mother, grew up with scant knowledge of te reo. Now, we have three generations learning at once. After years of stop-start lessons, my parents and I are studying intensively to support my five-year-old son, who attends a bilingual school.

But even a spoken language can be technically dead if its expressions are narrow and formulaic. Modern Māori overwhelmingly live in urban centers, largely divorced from the natural world our language rests upon. That’s one reason why this gathering booked out in days. People are hungry to decolonize their conservation work, and to recover the nuance, the poetry, and the collective, kinship-based worldview contained in the old people’s speech. The immediate goal is to reconnect our language to the natural world through the proverbs and vocabularies of old. Long-term, the goal is more ambitious: to revolutionize how Indigenous languages are taught by unifying language reclamation and conservation work.

But first, kai. Food.

In Māori culture, a lot revolves around kai. When we go to the forest or coast, chances are it’s to harvest, hunt, or fish; almost everything we’ll eat at this gathering has been wild-caught. Feeding your guests is paramount, and every tribe has delicacies they’re famous for. As an icebreaker, language revitalization expert Paulette Tamati-Elliffe (of the Kāi Tahu people) asks for stories of favorite foods from each participant’s part of the country.

Paulette Tamati-Elliffe, of the Kāi Tahu people, did not grow up speaking te reo Māori but now leads her tribe’s language revitalization efforts.

For some, it’s kūmara, Polynesian sweet potato; kōura, known as crayfish or rock lobster; or pūhā, a peppery watercress. For me it’s tītī, the sooty shearwater—a rich, oily seabird harvested from a scatter of remote southern islands that remain under our tribe’s control. Kāi Tahu tītī ā kai, tītī ā manawa, we say: ‘tītī are our food, tītī are our hearts,’ linking our stamina to birds which make 64,000-kilometer migrations each year. One man, when it’s his turn to answer, says deadpan, “I te taha o tōku pāpā, ko te tino kai, he tāngata,” and the class explodes with laughter: ‘on my dad’s side, our favorite food is people.’ (Yes, our ancestors ceremonially ate human flesh. But that’s an aspect of the culture no one is looking to revive.)

Tūmai Cassidy is another teacher for this session. He talks about how our people would travel for days to gather tuaki, cockles, to make a substitute for breast milk. At 22, his grasp of traditional knowledge is already advanced; there’s something compelling about old knowledge coming from one so young. But Tūmai has been steeped in both language and the natural world from a young age.

Because food—or kai—is paramount to Māori culture, the dining hall played a significant role in the kura reo taiao.

His mother, Tamati-Elliffe, grew up in the 1980s on the east coast of Te Waipounamu. She spent weekends outside her home city of Dunedin, knee-deep in the Manuherekia River harvesting eels, collecting pūhā from creeks, or filling buckets with shellfish at the coast. Her childhood was strongly Māori—but with little of the language. In their traditional village at Ōtākou, “te reo Māori [hadn’t] been spoken in well over 100 years,” Tamati-Elliffe says.

The tide began to turn in the early 1970s. Young Māori activists, in part inspired by overseas movements like the Black Panthers, staged marches, wrote petitions, and held occupations. Nationwide debates about past and present injustices drove the government to create forums for redress. Te reo was central throughout; in 1972, Māori leaders presented the New Zealand parliament with a landmark petition “humbly” asking that te reo be taught in schools. Soon after, te reo gained status as a nationally recognized language and was offered as an elective in schools.

Activists also realized that for the language to flourish, it had to be taught from birth. The first kōhanga reo, or language nest, opened in 1982. This preschool immersed Māori kids in their language, culture, and values from ages three to six. It was so successful that in just a few years, 415 kōhanga opened nationwide, run by families and communities. As the kids grew older, Māori schools followed, then tertiary institutions, like building new tracks ahead of a speeding train. The model has been reproduced worldwide; there are 32 language nests in Canada alone, where violent church- and government-led suppression of Indigenous languages mirrored that of Aotearoa New Zealand.

When Tamati-Elliffe met her future husband, Komene Cassidy, in the late 1990s in the midst of this revival, both aspired to be te reo–speaking grandparents. Tamati-Elliffe was too old to catch the kōhanga reo wave herself, so she and Komene had to work hard to build their own language skills and to provide a support system so their kids could live by Māori values and think Māori thoughts. “I talk about mahika kai, mahika reo [hunting and gathering for language],” Tamati-Elliffe later tells me. The family found community through the tribe’s language revitalization strategy (which Tamati-Elliffe now leads), and traveled far and wide to expand their knowledge, making eight-hour round trips to attend language immersion weekends. Being in nature was key.

Komene Cassidy and Paulette Tamati-Elliffe aspired to be te reo–speaking grandparents.

Tamati-Elliffe’s traditional home settlement is a short drive from Dunedin, on the craggy Ōtākou Peninsula, surrounded by windswept ocean and beach. On their regular walks, a young Tūmai would point to things and ask in te reo, “Mum, what’s that?” At first, she could only reply: “he manu tērā [a bird].” She didn’t have the vocabulary—yet.

Once home, they would hunt for the missing language in dictionaries, old manuscripts and Māori newspapers, and legal documents and journals, or by asking native speakers from other tribes. Then they tried to use their discoveries the next time they went out. “I remember thinking, oh god, what was that kupu [word] again? And then he said it to me! ‘Māmā, titiro, he kapowai’ [Mum, look, a dragonfly!], and I was like, wow, this is cool, I’ve got my own traveling dictionary. Ka whāngai atu ki a rātou; then they feed it back to us.”

Beyond vocabulary, Tamati-Elliffe and other parents sought sayings that reflected Māori thought. Once, Tamati-Elliffe asked the late language expert Te Wharehuia Milroy how she would tell her kids not to “eat like a pig.”

“‘Kōtuku āta kai, pārera apu paru,’” Tamati-Elliffe recalls him replying. Literally, ‘white heron eating carefully, duck gorging on muck.’ “He started explaining the feeding behavior of those birds, and how it could be applied to encourage your child to eat like a chief.”

Tamati-Elliffe realized she knew little about the behavior of these birds, or indeed any of the creatures referred to in the language’s richest expressions. She and her family began building language and ecological knowledge in tandem. But places to build that knowledge were increasingly hard to find.

If people from other parts of the world know anything about Aotearoa New Zealand, it’s often that we are a pristine, ecologically conscious country. One-third of our land enjoys a degree of environmental protection. Our forests, peaks, and rivers regularly star in Instagram feeds and Hollywood films. But to produce those stunning images, most of the country has to be cropped out of the frame.

The day before the kura reo taiao began, I had gone for a run along the shores of nearby Te Rotorua-nui-ā-Kahumatamomoe, Lake Rotorua. The waters were mirror-calm, broken only by a dark, shifting scatter of birds. A couple of kilometers offshore, the sacred island of Mokoia lay reflected in the lake. Centuries ago, the high-born Māori woman Hinemoa famously swam out to Mokoia at night to visit her lover. Though I lacked that enticement, the day was hot, and it was tempting to swim. But instead of plunging in, I pulled out my phone to check the national water quality website. Hello, cyanobacteria. The bay was closed. A proverb from this lake is Ko Hinemoa, ko ahau, ‘I am just like Hinemoa,’ meaning that I would risk everything for love. Had Hinemoa made her romantic swim today, she would have risked greeting her lover with an asthma attack, rash, vomiting, headache, tingling mouth, or trouble seeing. I headed back to my motel for a cold shower instead.

The island of Mokoia rises from Te Rotorua-nui-ā-Kahumatamomoe, or Lake Rotorua, on New Zealand’s North Island. Photo by halpand/Alamy Stock Photo

Since the early 2000s, Aotearoa’s rivers have increasingly been mined of their water and polluted with runoff. Autonomous, insectile irrigators spray water over the land. Swaths of the naturally arid plains of Te Waipounamu are now an artificially green mosaic peppered with dairy cows. The economics have been spectacular; dairy is now Aotearoa’s biggest export. But low river flows, high nitrate levels, and rising temperatures have created an increasingly hostile aquatic environment. Just under half the total length of our rivers are too polluted to swim in, while more than half of our lakes are cloudy, polluted, or prey to algal blooms.

Tamati-Elliffe grew up fishing and preserving eels. “We would go freedom camping in the summer, harvesting tuna [eels] on the Manuherekia [River]. I don’t know if you’d do that today,” she says. The Manuherekia, in inland Otago, is in dire health. Unlike most Aotearoa rivers, there’s no legal limit to how much water can be extracted, and irrigators have given themselves permission to siphon three-quarters of its flow. In dry periods, the river barely moves, leaving parts of its stony bed exposed like a skeleton’s vertebrae.

These are modern examples of an older, deeper spiritual hurt for Māori. The country’s once-vast labyrinth of wetlands is almost gone, drained by farmers for pastureland. Forest clearing and non-native mammals, including predators like stoats and possums, add to the devastation. We’ve already lost many of the subjects of our sayings, like the huia, a type of wattlebird, and koreke, the New Zealand quail. With the exception of seafood, most native species are now so rare that they require protection: it is either unsafe or illegal for Māori to eat many of our traditional foods.

As the long summer days unfold, we sit (or walk, or dance) with one teacher after another, moving between this century and those past, from the meeting house to the mossy forests nearby. We’re not here to mourn historic losses; we’ve gathered to recover knowledge and celebrate what can be saved. Conversation and laughter roll around the whare kai, the dining hall, and you can hear the uproarious banter of the advanced language groups from kilometers off. Friendships and inside jokes form while puzzling out 19th-century texts. We learn about celestial navigation and oceangoing canoes, about styles of incantation used to invoke different gods, about ancient stories that explain modern scientific concepts like the water cycle. One day, in a light rain under an enormous rata tree, wildlife and ecology researcher Puke Timoti (Tūhoe) teaches us about timber and fire: How by day, eeling parties cached torches of slow-burning wood every five kilometers so they could travel long distances by night. How when a young woman was ready to find a husband, she’d gather the branches of different trees and light a small fire, then lie back and wait for eligible men to visit her house. Forget swiping right or left; she indicated her feelings by placing specific branches on the fire. Everyone in the village would be paying attention, sniffing the breeze. Acrid smoke? Rejected! The sweet aroma of swamp tōtara? Everybody knew she’d chosen her man.

Wildlife and ecology researcher Puke Timoti, of the Tūhoe people, leads a session about the traditional uses of timber and fire.

Our hoots of laughter fill the forest, but I’m also reflective. All this ritual around fire, links to esoteric knowledge and genealogy, the humor and innuendo—today these riches collapse into the stark efficiency of striking a match. I’ve spent years living off-grid, where bringing in firewood is a daily winter chore; I understand why our ancestors embraced new ways. The challenge now is reconciling the old world with the new.

Most sessions include discussing and translating whakataukī. These often-cryptic, koan-like sayings are key carriers of cultural values. Timoti recites one we all know. Te manu e kai ana i te miro, nōnā te ngāhere. Te manu e kai ana i te mātauranga, nōnā te ao. ‘The bird that eats the berries of the miro tree, theirs is the forest; the bird that eats knowledge, theirs is the world.’ This always seemed useful and straightforward to me. But, Timoti explains, it was likely coined in the 1950s—a time when assimilationist government policy, laws that further dispossessed Māori of their land, and the pull of work and education drew Māori into cities. Many urbanized Māori lost daily access to native speakers and the lived knowledge that comes from growing and gathering your own kai. Many came to believe that English was the only way to get ahead.

Today, people are seeking the reverse. “Hokia ki tō kāinga,” Timoti says. ‘Go back to your village.’ People are seeking the miro berries: the old, grounded, ancestral knowledge specific to one’s people. Yes, I think. That’s what motivated me to return home after spending my 20s and 30s living in Melbourne, Australia. I was driven by curiosity, but also by other, more complex emotions.

The next morning, sitting on the meeting house steps listening to a particularly swift native speaker discuss spiritual concepts, I feel like I’m trying to catch a waterfall in my hands. While some drink deeply, I’m scribbling down unfamiliar terms, furtively thumbing the dictionary app on my phone. Feelings familiar to many Māori flicker through me: shame that I’m not fluent, sadness and anger that this birthright didn’t come to me as a child, excitement about the riches I do grasp, determination to keep learning. I studied te reo in high school, and more sporadically since then. In 2014, I began walking old Māori trails through the mountains for my book Uprising, seeking to understand and share how our ancestors experienced belonging and place. Since my son was born, I’ve moved back to my tribe’s territory and am now in full-time te reo immersion school. Patua te whakamā, we say. ‘Kill the shame.’ One day our family will understand everything, I tell myself. We just have to do the work.

For many of the participants of the kura reo taiao, the Māori language and the natural world are already intertwined.

It’s not just the hardcore language nerds doing that work either. Almost one-third of New Zealand students are actively learning te reo, while another third learn at least simple words, greetings, and songs. The rest of New Zealand society is increasingly exposed to te reo as well. The national broadcasters, Radio New Zealand and TVNZ, use te reo for introductions and segues. In a nation of five million, Whakaata Māori, the Māori TV station, averages 1.1 million viewers per month, of which two-thirds are non-Māori. Such exposure slowly adds up. A 2023 study from the University of Canterbury found that the average New Zealander could define about 70 Māori words. Even Disney movies are now released in te reo.

There’s still a long way to go. Only four percent of the population is fluent nationwide, and the current coalition government is actively hostile to both te reo and environmental protection. Once again, we are marching in the streets. But governments come and go, while language revitalization is intergenerational. Another member of our group is Kiri Danielle (of the Ngāti Kahungunu ki Wairarapa​, and Ngāti Raukawa ki Te Tonga tribes, and of European descent), an environmental lawyer, TV and radio personality, and the public face of Be a Tidy Kiwi, perhaps New Zealand’s best-known environmental campaign. “When the next government comes along, well, we’ll be stronger,” she tells me. “It’s far too late for [te reo] to diminish now.”

Five decades after activists kick-started the language renaissance, the future of te reo seems increasingly assured. But what about the natural world on which it depends? To paraphrase the words of the late Tūhoe elder John Rangihau, there are more and more people speaking the Māori language, but fewer and fewer Māori things to speak about. Which is why restoring te taiao—the natural world—is essential. The long-term vision of the founder of the kura reo taiao, Tame Malcolm (Ngāti Tarāwhai), is to make language learning and environmental restoration inseparable. He wants the country’s planting and conservation programs all to involve learning te reo, and language programs nationwide to revolve around being in, and working for, the natural world. His tribe already employs a dozen of its members in conservation work, half of whom are fluent in the language, the other half learning.

For many of the participants at this first kura reo taiao, like Kiri Danielle, nature and language are already intertwined. Perhaps because of her experience as a TV host, Danielle has a quiet, enviable poise that she maintains even in gumboots, cleaning up other people’s trash. More than a decade ago, after divorcing her husband and leaving a strict religion, she ended up ostracized, frequently apart from her children, and ultimately homeless, sleeping in her car. In her darkest moments, beside bubbling mud pools where she would go to hide and cry, “I felt Papatūānuku [the earth mother], I felt her mauri [life force] comforting me, and I saw her beauty with fresh eyes,” she says. “Some people, from a Western point of view, they might say ‘kua pōrangi haere koe’ [you’re going crazy], but it was beautiful to me. I had fallen in love with Papatūānuku.” Since then, she’s “returned the healing,” hauling tons of old tires and couches and other rubbish from New Zealand’s environment alongside an army of volunteers. For years, she hosted a show where she returned people’s illegally dumped trash to their homes. Whenever she found herself confronting someone Māori, if she mentioned Papatūānuku, “they all hung their heads. Her name is very powerful. There’s still a reverence there.” As familiarity with the language grows, so does this reverence. The school kids she works with don’t find it crazy to talk about Papatūānuku at all.

Environmental lawyer and TV host Kiri Danielle (of the Ngāti Kahungunu ki Wairarapa, and Ngāti Raukawa ki Te Tonga tribes, and of European descent) says that a growing national familiarity with the Māori language has coincided with increasing reverence for Papatūānuku, the earth mother.

For Paulette Tamati-Elliffe, her efforts to raise Tūmai and his siblings in te reo gained a profound boost in 1998 when their hapū, or sub-tribe, received Te Nohoaka o Tukiauau, a significant wetland, back from the Crown to manage on behalf of the tribe. Suddenly they had an ancestral landscape teeming with life to restore in their own backyard. “It wasn’t the Department of Conservation’s or anybody else’s,” she says. “It was ours.”

Tamati-Elliffe was quitting smoking at the time, and walking among the maze of waterways fringed by raupō reeds and yellow-flowering kōwhai trees, “I remember feeling like, oh my god, this place is the lungs of our environment, and how important it is to filter and clean everything.” Today the hapū runs a nursery, planting operations, pest control, and research programs in partnership with the University of Otago. The work offers myriad opportunities to use te reo daily and to regain intimate knowledge of the seasons and the birds.

It’s not just Tamati-Elliffe’s hapū either. Other tribes are making similar efforts, with 32 percent of Māori actively engaged in environmental restoration. One of the key supporters of the kura reo taiao is Predator Free 2050, an ambitious national organization aiming to rid Aotearoa of non-native predators by the year 2050. Though environmental losses still outweigh the gains, these combined efforts may someday reverse the declines of native species like the takahē, a colorful rail once declared extinct. In 2023, Ngāi Tahu leaders released nine breeding pairs onto land also returned by the Crown to our people: an example of ecological and cultural restoration working hand in hand.

Takahē, a species of flightless rail once declared extinct, is now returning to some of its native habitat in Aotearoa New Zealand. Photo by Jonathan Ayres/Alamy Stock Photo

Conservation doesn’t just aid ecosystems and language. It’s also important because it may one day reconnect Māori to more of our traditional food. Around the age of 11, for example, Tūmai asked why his family ate chicken from the supermarket instead of chiefly birds like kererū or weka. The answer, of course, was that the birds had been decimated by introduced predators and habitat loss, and were now protected by introduced conservation laws.

As Tūmai grew up, he became more and more fascinated by traditional food gathering. He started mining old books and manuscripts, then testing what he’d found in the bush. “He’d mapped out this weekend where we were on a hunt to find these fruiting tōtara trees,” Tamati-Elliffe recalls. “We found a few, and next minute he’s scaling up the tree and got his T-shirt up and it’s full of these berries, and he’s scaled back down the tree and starts eating them, and he’s telling me to try them, and I’m like, ‘kaua e kai e tama, kāore e tātou te mohio mēnā ka mate ka aha rānei!’ [Don’t eat them, son! We don’t know if you’ll die or what!].” He reassured his mother that he’d read accounts of the old people gathering 60 basketfuls for a feast.

In one workshop, Tamati-Elliffe, Tūmai, and Komene show participants how to make traditional food bags from bull kelp, pack them full of tuaki, cockles, and cook them over the fire. When we file into the dining hall that night, there’s a delicious smoky smell in the air. People crowd around the serving tables, reaching into the scorched kelp envelopes and eating the tuaki where they stand. I pry one of the fat shellfish open and gulp the lot in a salty, smoky burst. Heaven. Normally, a traditional dining hall is a cacophony of excited voices. Right now, it’s largely quiet, just the warm murmur of a new generation enjoying a very old type of feast.

On the final day, thick clouds settle over the lake and hills. The sky darkens and pours with rain. We return to the meeting house for the poroporoaki, a closing forum for reflecting and giving thanks. Te Aorere Pēwhairangi (Ngāti Porou) gives a long, beautiful, hilarious speech praising Ngāti Tarāwhai for their renowned carving and hospitality—then closes with a tono, a request, to take the whatu mauri, the stone embodying the life force of this cause, to his people’s home in Tokomaru Bay. His tribe wants to host the next kura reo taiao.

His relations rise from the crowd to perform an electrifying haka, their bodies moving in unison, fists raised, eyes wide, a shouted dance expressing their unified determination and purpose. Though there’s a competing tono from another tribe, this show of strength wins the day. The next gathering will be held at Tokomaru Bay in just two months’ time.

Te Aorere Pēwhairangi, of the Ngāti Porou people, gives a speech on the final day of the language conference.

And so, after a long round of goodbyes, we emerge, huddled against the rain, into a world where people do not all speak te reo, and not every conversation is about how to cherish te taiao, and where the lakes and rivers are not the ancestral ones, full of life, but those like Lake Rotorua, on our right as we drive back to the airport, increasingly poisoned by runoff and algal blooms. Translated into English, te reo Māori often sounds romantic, like poetry. And I know it’s romantic to imagine that one day we will relearn how to speak the language of the rivers and lakes, and stand in the shallows, and once more be invited to swim, and to drink. But that doesn’t stop me from imagining it all the same.

On the outskirts of town, we pass a McDonald’s; we pass logging trucks. A crude handmade sign beside the road reads “Handman. Holes in walls. I fix.” When my plane takes off, I watch the lake disappear below me, swallowed by cloud. I think about how each teacher offered us glimpses of an older, deeper intimacy with the natural world—taking us beyond grammar and vocabulary to Māori thought. Key has been the web of whakapapa that places us in relationship with every living thing, all the way back to the gods. Whakapapa is often translated as ‘genealogy.’ But it is richer than that, a tangled web of connection and reciprocity: being reminded, once again, to see the world as kin.