Words and Signs

Recently, I was privileged enough to be invited to a Citizenship Ceremony by a dear Portuguese friend of mine, who wanted to share the moment he became a Kiwi. Working in IT, we depend on additional resources coming in from offshore to work with us - we have struggled to keep up with the demand.

I had never been to one of these ceremonies before and would encourage you to go along, if you ever get the chance. It could have been awkward and boring, but it was lively, genuine and fun.

This ceremony took place at the Town Hall in Tāmaki Makaurau and was opened with a karakia and welcome from representatives of Ngāti Whātua ōrākei. This was followed by a performance by a local primary school kapa haka group.

We were sitting near the stage and these kids were giving their all. The front row were girls and the back row were boys. Sometimes they all sang in unison and other times the two rows had different words to sing or say. The children came in all shapes, sizes and colours, bringing together their shared effort for us all to enjoy. There was a lot going on and I was so impressed with their energy, coordination and focus.

There was a special moment for me when I caught sight of the speaker who had welcomed us and was now sitting at the back of the stage watching the kapa haka performance. He was mouthing the words along with the children and smiling broadly as they were nailing it. He was willing them to succeed. He was willing the words to be spoken. In those moments, his world was their world and their world was our world.

The words that come out of our children's mouths can be hopeful or disturbing, not because they are saying them, but because they are a reflection of the adults around them. Their words tell an unfiltered story about grown-ups.

Many years ago, I took some children to a swimming pool in Manukau. It was school holidays and the pool was heaving with kids from across South Auckland. Here too, I saw children of all shapes, sizes and colours. The air was thick with noise - whoops, shouts, dares and laughs. Just in front of me, a young Pacific Island girl was smiling, talking and walking backwards. She accidentally bumped into a young Pākehā boy. He too was smiling and laughing, but when he turned around, his face dropped into the depths of disgust and he said, “Don’t touch me you f*ing n*r.”

Needless to say, the young girl stopped smiling and went back to be closer to her friends.

I was shocked. Instead of inclusion, partnership, a shared will and enjoyment, this was exclusion, lashing out, standing high on the righteous soap-box of ‘other’. My mind went straight to the community that this young boy was growing up in. These were not his words, they were the words of adults around him, setting out a path of division and hatred.

Our children will boldly put on display the parts of us that are our shame or the parts that bring us mana and hope.

Back in the Town Hall, when it came time for the new citizens to declare their allegiance, they did so first in English and then in Te Reo Māori. The local board member leading the recitation did not find the latter easy, but she stood up and gave it her best, which is all that was asked of her. To hear five hundred people from all over the world speaking Te Reo was spine-tingling. I couldn’t help but wonder whether, in the end, we would live up to the bi-cultural promise the ceremony implied.

It is not so long ago that an evening course in Te Reo Māori in ōtautahi Christchurch expected thirty people and had hundreds turn up. Yet in recent weeks we have heard an MP suggest that their party was against bi-lingual signs - Te Reo Māori and English. When asked to speak to the precise concerns, we were treated to an intellectual lightening strike that went something like, “Well, we need to make sure that these signs include English.” So, a key concern about signs in Te Reo Māori and English was that they needed to include English. Nonsensical garbage playing to a pasty audience that sees a “Māori problem”.

I started my working life with Dunedin City Council, working in the community development team. ōtepoti Dunedin is a beautiful city and I lived out on the ōtākou peninsula in Portobello, then later at the head of the Waitati Valley, overlooking the gorgeous coastline. The highlight of my time with Council was a trip to ōtākou marae. Never in my life have I been made to feel more welcome. We sang, we ate, we talked, we listened. When it came time to discuss Te Tiriti o Waitangi and the years either side of it, our hosts stepped aside and let a local lawyer walk us through it. The aim was not to make us feel uncomfortable, but to ensure that we were given the facts. Most of us knew that the road we had driven along to get to the marae had been built by Māori men taken from their homes in the North and kept in cages in the cliffs, so there was plenty of pertinent local history to consider.

That experience has stayed with me ever since. There was such openness, aroha, fun and kindness - an opportunity to be with, to be alongside. And who was I to Te Rūnaka o ōtākou? A total stranger. As manuhiri, a guest, I was drawn in and embraced. I believe in modelling the behaviour I want to see and what an exemplary model of a way of being this is.

I love my country and particularly have hope of genuine partnership with tangata whenua. In this, there is a belief that we can do better and that we each have our part to play. My Te Reo is still pretty limited, but I use it every day. I want it to be part of my daily life and to make it part of other’s lives. I love the business I work for right now and our growth as a team has come from the same place, a belief that we can do better together, respecting, challenging and supporting the people here with us. “With” is one of those words pinned to my internal vision board.

So, the dog whistling we are seeing today, the insipid anti co-governance movement that is drifting into the mainstream is hard to take. I know that there will always be a percentage of the population that will hold deeply bigoted views, racism, homophobia, misogyny, transphobia…often in the name of some distorted righteous belief. The rise of Trump and the MAGA movement has emboldened the far-right around the world and we have seen those views seep towards the supposed centre. It’s as if standing atop of Mauao in Mount Maunganui we look offshore to see a giant, many miles-wide iceberg drifting towards the beach. We know that such a thing exists, but don’t expect to see it on such a scale in this place.

In welcoming someone I love as a citizen of this country and seeing the hundreds of others joining him, each with their own story to tell, I want this to be the best country it can be, one we can proudly sing of. I want us to live up to the promise. We can do better. A thriving Māori culture makes us all stronger and more vital. Putting the waka in reverse is not how we move forward - the kids are in the driveway.

#aotearoa #tereo #welcome #bebetter #bethechange #with #ourwords #signs #tamariki #tetiriti?#leadership

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