What does Te Reo Plus mean to me in Te Wiki Māori, 2023?
TR+ is far more than a fortnightly meeting on a Tuesday. It has become a way of thinking .. it's in the background all the time. And I think of others in the network as my allies. This is a safe place to stutter and be ignorant, and tentative.
I think warmly about each of you on this mailing list. We are allies who care about Te Tiriti, and Te Ao Māori .. we appreciate the special place of Māori in Aotearoa NZ.
And we work together to help each other to figure stuff out, to improve our confidence as we gradually grow within our network.
Ahakoa he iti, he pounamu: this is the whakatauaki we have adopted as we all do our little bit.
Looking back over the past year I realise how much I, personally, have gained from this network. It has deepened friendships, it has strengthened links with my whanau in the South, the idea that this network is protected by the kakahu (cloak) of our whanau Māori, the various expeditions we have shared, and the ideas we can talked about with more confidence with people outside this network.
Even if we cannot show up on a Tuesday, we are still allies.
So what about today, 12 September? We already have a couple of apologies from some regulars. So it might be just one or two of us. No worries. Ahakoa he iti, he pounamu. I'm keen to think about what Te Wiki Māori means for me this year. And looking forward to 7pm when I'll be focusing on that.
Just checking .. I think this will appear as a comment in the blog and that you two are also able to comment from an email???
ReplyDeleteElaine, I can see your comment. And I can add my own as either "anonymous" or myself. Did you want me to test by replying to your email? I would expect that merely to send you an email, not add it to the blog.
ReplyDeleteAlso, today I was chatting with my neighbour who asked about the meaning of "ngā mihi". We found it hard to join the dots between a mihi as a speech of introducing oneself at a mihi whakatau, and the use of mihi in the common email sign off. we want definitive translations, but the language is more complex than that! We also talked about the meaning of "ko", and about au/ahau as "I".