He Huia Kaimanawa / Sápmi
We are still finding our way back to our language.
That journey may never really be finished. We made a work about what that is actually like, and we would love to bring it to Riddu Riđđu.
It is a story of what was interrupted, what was nearly lost, and what we are choosing to reclaim.
Reclamation is not about arriving. It is about continuing to return.
02 / Ours was taken at school
In 1867 a law made English the language of our classrooms.
Children were strapped for speaking Māori in the playground.
Our grandparents decided not to pass it on. It must have felt sensible at the time.
We are the ones who came after that decision.
03 / Finding its way back
Now a whole generation is finding its way back.
At night, after work.
After the kids are fed.
After the day has already taken what it takes.
We sit in classrooms and begin again.
One word at a time.
Mistakes made out loud.
Sentences started, lost, tried again.
Learning with our children the language our grandparents were made to put down. Trying to be the generation it changes with.
There is no quick way back.
Only a generation choosing,
night after night,
to keep returning.
04 / Then we read about language nests here
We grew up with kōhanga reo, so the idea of a language nest was familiar to us.
What we didn’t know was how that same idea had taken shape here.
Then we read something about Sámi language nests that stopped us.
In many families, it is the grandparents who still speak the language. Their children — the parents of today — are the generation who missed out. And now the grandchildren are learning it again.
We recognised that immediately.
That is our story too.
Grandparents who still carry the language.
Parents trying to reclaim what did not reach them.
Children learning alongside them.
Three generations, each standing in a different place in the same journey back.
05 / What we recognise
Not the history books. The smaller losses. The ones that live inside families.
A grandmother carrying words her grandchild cannot answer.
An adult learning from a child what should have travelled easily between generations.
The pause after someone reaches for a word and cannot find it.
The embarrassment of trying.
The grief of not knowing.
The courage it takes to keep speaking anyway.
These things may have happened differently here. But we may recognise the feeling.
The distance language loss creates between generations, and the long, imperfect work of closing it again.
06 / Riddu Riđđu
We read how the festival started. Young people in Olmmáivággi, in 1991, deciding that what had gone was worth going back for.
That sounded like us.
07 / What we would love, if there is room
Time together.
Our learners with yours. People who know what it is to search for a word,
to make mistakes,
to keep going.
No audience.
No presentation.
Nothing to prove.
Time for our kaumātua to sit with the people she should be sitting with.
And enough space around all of it for the conversations that cannot be scheduled.
He Huia Kaimanawa
- Duration
- Sixty minutes, entirely in te reo Māori
- Cast
- Seven performers, three generations
- Made by
- Bianca Hyslop and Rowan Pierce
- Mātanga Mātauranga Māori
- Tūī Matira Ranapiri-Ransfield
Seven people on stage, living the language they are performing in.
We have only read about how any of this sits here, and reading isn’t the same thing.
If we have some of it wrong, we would rather know. Write back and tell us.