I have lost much of my childhood fluency in te reo Māori – we must fight for its survival

I can already feel my heart begin to race when I know I am expected to speak te reo Māori, the Indigenous tongue of Aotearoa, New Zealand. Where I am from, people know me as this confident, fluent speaker of the Māori language. But here I am today, sweaty-palmed at the mere thought of saying a simple greeting and introduction in my mother tongue.

It is a far cry from the old me, who would win back-to-back Māori language speech competitions at a school where we learned everything in total immersion te reo Māori.

Back then, almost no one in my family spoke te reo. My grandmother was like so many Māori of that generation who were led to believe that our language would be of no use to their children. That English was the only way to succeed. And so my mother’s generation missed out.

Related: Wikipedia urged to add accents to Māori placenames amid resurgence in te reo

But I was lucky. By the time I was born, my grandmother had had a change of heart and she decided to open a kohanga reo, an early learning centre immersed in the Māori language and culture. Better yet, she opened it at our marae, a traditional Māori meeting house, up the isolated Whanganui River road. It was the absolute best. As well as learning our native language, we learned who we were.

I continued through Māori medium education until I reached mainstream high school, in what would be the beginning of the end of my precious mother tongue. When I attended mainstream high school, I took every Māori class available, but it was still not enough to sustain my language. Not only that, at times I was ridiculed for being Māori. I felt like in order to succeed, I had to reject my culture.

This week, New Zealand is marking Te Wiki o te Reo Māori, a nationwide initiative to boost support for the Māori language which became an official language in New Zealand 1987. The most recent national data shows only 148,000 people can hold a conversation in te reo, or a mere 3.7% of the total population at the time. There are very real concerns about the survival of the language.

Māori language week has grown in popularity across the country in recent years, with an unprecedented more than one million people reported taking part in a “Māori Language Moment” on Monday, where they either sang or spoke Māori – even just a phrase – around the country at noon. That is an impressive level of support and is something our nation should be proud of.

The week usually kicks off with a major parade through our capital city, Wellington, but Covid-19 has stopped that. And while it might sound progressive, the week itself can have little to no impact on swathes of Kiwis.

For most New Zealanders, Te Wiki o te Reo Māori means their morning newspaper may have a Māori name this week. It means a few more Māori words heard in the media. Maybe they come across promotional posters at the shops. But it is nowhere near the level of impact we need to protect this national treasure.

The government has set an ambitious target to grow the number of speakers to one million people by 2040, but it refuses to make the language a compulsory subject at schools. Māori language schools and kōhanga reo are underfunded, and strangers still get off telling Māori to “speak English” or roll their eyes hearing te reo – rigid in their colonial entitlement. It is strange given how common it is for other countries to embrace many languages and it shows how monocultural Kiwis are.

In New Zealand, people continue to happily butcher te reo, even some of our most well-known broadcasters, who are supposed to hold language in the highest regard. Māori children are told not to speak their language on the netball court. Last week, McDonald’s refused to serve a woman in Rotorua because she was ordering in Māori. The language is not valued enough, and there are not enough safe spaces inviting us to speak, see and hear our language and culture in New Zealand.

I used to lug around a lot of personal responsibility and regret for losing my reo. Why didn’t I try harder? Why didn’t I realise the taonga, treasure, I had? But I have come to realise that I am not to blame. I wonder how many New Zealanders must actively try to keep up their English language, or risk losing it?

Like many Māori, my relationship with te reo has been a complicated one. This is why I send my children to kōhanga reo and kura kaupapa. I do my best to support my boys to speak Māori anywhere and everywhere we go, creating safe spaces for them, even if others won’t.

Leigh-Marama McLachlan is a former Māori News Correspondent based in New Zealand. She leads communications for her Māori tribe and Te Awa Tupua, the first river in the world to gain legal personhood status.