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We feature each week Nicholas Reid's reviews and comments on new and recent books.
We feature each week Nicholas Reid's reviews and comments on new and recent books.
“KA NGARO TE REO – Maori Language Under
Siege in the Nineteenth Century” by Paul Moon (Otago University Press,
$NZ39:95)
It sets out some
of its main theses in the Introduction.
With Pakeha as a
small minority until the 1840s, Moon writes:
“…Surely no one in the 1830s could have
anticipated either the rapidity or the extent of the decline of te reo as the
country’s main language over the rest of the century. Yes, there remained
stubborn pockets of resistance – linguistic outcrops of te reo where isolation
gave the impression of being impregnable. These increasingly became the
exception that proved the rule of the power of English to assert its dominance
and to advance into what were sometimes former strongholds of te reo with
impunity. And as the tide of colonisation rose, Maori found themselves fleeing
ever deeper into the cultural hinterland in often desperate efforts to maintain
a cultural, linguistic and social space that they could claim as their own.”
(Introduction p.8)
“….it was the introduction of text to Maori
society that was to lead to the biggest revolution in te reo. Writing was the
medium of the coloniser, and it initially filtered and then reconfigured
elements of the Maori language and culture in ways that had momentous effects
on the retention and transmission of te reo, especially once it started to
appear widely in written form. There was also the trend towards the greater
standardisation of te reo in text, and although the process never reached the
point of absolute uniformity, some of the more pronounced dialectical variants
across the country were eventually narrowed down – in written form at least –
in the process.” (Introduction, p.12)
Chapter by
chapter, Ka Ngaro Te Reo takes a
chronological approach to this topic.
Moon begins
(Chapter 1) by attempting to reconstruct what the language of the Maori would
have been like in 1800, when there had as yet been virtually no external impact
upon it. His emphasis is upon the nuance and degrees of meaning that were
embedded in a purely oral form of communication. With a degree of unverifiable
speculation (and perhaps idealisation), he argues that the spoken language of a
wholly oral culture would have been more formalised than the spoken language of
a literate culture, and he expands at length upon the roles of tohunga,
kaumatua and rangatira; and the importance of formal oratory and the recital of
whakapapa:
“… all these forms of whakapapa…. were the
framework on which Maori society was built. Without them, the society would not
have existed or survived in the form that it did. With them, Maori culture was
imbued with a sophisticated system of politics, history, diplomacy, religion,
economics and ecology that was a stabilising influence on the society yet
allowed social and cultural evolution and innovation to occur.” (Chapter 1,
p.30)
He is aware,
however, that a language which had developed in isolation for hundreds of years
was particularly vulnerable to change once outside influences reached it:
“….te reo’s evolution in complete isolation
from the rest of the world had left it ill equipped to handle the approaching
encounter with the English language and its colonising protagonists.” (Chapter
1, p.34)
Moon then moves
on (Chapter 2) to the period up to 1815, when Maori were making their very
first contacts with very small groups of whalers, traders, runaway convicts and
the like. Despite a tiny handful of Pakeha engaging with the Maori world, Moon
depicts Pakeha as being largely contemptuous of Maori “barbarism” and prone to
describing Maori in demeaning terms. When the two languages met, it was mainly
Maori who took the trouble to learn some English, rather than the other way
about. Maori understood the advantages of trade with some of the newcomers,
whereas the newcomers were inclined to learn only the most rudimentary of Maori
terms as they grabbed local resources and ran. At this stage, the great
majority of Maori had not yet encountered the English language and te reo
seemed secure in its dominance of the land.
A real shift in
the relationship of the languages began with the arrival of Protestant
missionaries in 1815. With only very small groups of Pakeha in the land, Maori
remained the dominant language. Even so, from 1815 to the 1830s (Chapter 3) te
reo underwent a metamorphosis mainly under the impact of the missionaries. Most
notably, thanks to the labours of Thomas Kendall, Professor Samuel Lee and
others, it ceased to be an oral language only, and became also a written and
printed language as missionaries sought to evangelise Maori. The first
widely-distributed printed texts in Maori were all passages of Scripture,
catechisms and religious tracts. In the process of their production, however,
the Pakeha who first committed Maori to print smoothed out the very many
dialectical variants of Maori and in effect created the standardised language
that is regarded as the Maori language today. There were some anomalies in this
Pakeha creation, as it seems clear that in transcribing te reo, British
linguists and lexicographers suppressed or ignored certain sounds. (Moon dwells
at some length on the apparent disappearance of the “sh” sound from the Maori
language, which had been noted by early British listeners.) However, it was the
fact of standardisation that was most important:
“Printed texts…. could mass-produce
information without changing the form of that information in the slightest.
This was also the commencement of a new notion about the vocabulary, idiom,
pronunciation and grammar of te reo: that all the shades of variety in these
areas of language could be boiled down to a single, standardised and supposedly
‘correct’ version. It was an approach to te reo that was fortified by the fact
that representatives of the colonising power, with all its implicit authority,
were behind this drive to uniformity.” (Chapter 3, p.74)
As very many
historians before Moon have noted, literacy had a huge impact upon Maori who,
in this early missionary period, took eagerly to reading and writing.
Mission-printed books were spread through the land by Maori themselves, so that
religious publications were having an impact upon Maori belief systems often
without any Pakeha having visited a given area.
Between the
1830s and 1850 (Chapter 4) formal British colonisation occurred and for the
first time there was now a clear and present threat to te reo as the country’s
dominant language. At first, te reo was almost the only printed language that
Maori saw as literacy among Maori continued to advance. Maori themselves often
controlled the spread of the printed form of their language, and literacy was
so highly prized that Maori were occasionally surprised to find that there were
some illiterate Pakeha (sailors etc.). Even those Pakeha who sought to exploit
and/or despoil Maori understood that they had to make at lest some concessions
to te reo when they were bargaining. Moon depicts the Wakefield Company
(pp.117-119) as land sharks who merely mimicked the humanitarian impulse of the
missionaries when they framed deeds of title in both Maori and English. (Moon
adds further that the Maori text of deeds drawn up by the Wakefield people was
an execrable form of Maori, clearly put together by English-speakers who hardly
knew the language.)
Moon gives only
a perfunctory account (pp. 123-124) of the exact moment of formal colonisation
– the Treaty of Waitangi in 1840 – about which he has written extensively
elsewhere. His contention is that, even as literacy among Maori was advancing,
Maori culture was still primarily an oral culture, and for the chiefs who
signed the treaty, the spoken bargaining that surrounded the document was as
binding as the document itself.
Be this as it
may, the very fact of formal colonisation now put more pressure upon te reo. In
1847 – at which time Pakeha were still a minority in an overwhelmingly Maori
country – Governor George Grey’s Education Ordinance said that English had
henceforth to be part of all formal instruction for Maori. (Hitherto, mission
schools had conducted instruction in Maori). Paul Moon thus fingers the late 1840s
as the time that Maori began to lose its linguistic dominance in Niu Tirani.
Assimilationist education was beginning even though te reo was still the
everyday form of communication amongst Maori. Immigration was beginning to
swamp the indigenous race. At the beginning of the 1840s there had been only
2,000 or so Pakeha in New Zealand. By the end of the decade there were over
20,000. There were now appearing, in the Maori language, some newspapers owned
and controlled by Pakeha and very much reflecting the colonial interest – in
other words, there were sites in which the language was preserved but was made
to speak in alien strains; and it was naturally te reo as it had been
standardised by Pakeha. Such newspapers were very much opposed by the
Wakefieldians, who now preached that Maori could be “civilised” only if they
abandoned te reo and learnt English. Moon quotes an opinion piece from an 1845
Wellington publication:
“One of the first measures indispensible to
any successful attempt to bring the natives within the pale of civilisation, is
to teach them our language, and so far as we can, to cause them to forget their
own.” (quoted p.142)
Now for the first
time, prematurely assuming that Maori would lose out in a grand cultural
struggle, Pakeha began to sentimentalise the Maori past. Theories were devised,
many of them laughably fallacious (see pp.134 ff.), about the “Aryan” origins
of Maori. This permitted the assumption that English was a more “advanced” form
of an “Aryan” language and that therefore it should inevitably supersede the inferior
specimen. There was a nascent Social Darwinism in this assumption.
By the late
1850s (Chapter 5), there was for the first time a Pakeha majority in New
Zealand. Dealing with these years, Moon very much casts George Grey as a
villain in at once collecting (and often distorting) Maori mythology AND
discouraging the use of te reo as a medium of formal instruction. Government-controlled
“native” schools were to conduct instruction in English. However, as the
conditions grew that would produce the wars of the 1860s, the Kingitanga
movement showed the resilience of te reo as the Kingites resisted the secular
(non-missionary) schools and produced their own Maori-language publications
which were able to argue their own case cogently in opposition to government
newspapers. After the wars, however, and as part of the new secularisation of
education, there was a renewed initiative to fully secularise schools for Maori
and totally eliminate the remaining missionary influence. Moon sums up the
period thus:
“The cumulative effects of declining
missionary involvement in offering schooling to Maori in te reo; legislation
that discriminated heavily in favour of English in most areas of the
government’s operation; and a steadily congealing attitude towards te reo among
settlers all connived to expel the language from the country’s social
landscape. And if te reo held on in a number of remote rural outposts then,
like its ageing and declining numbers of speakers, it would remain as little
more than a cultural relic….” (p.175)
There were now a
handful of Maori members of parliament, but they quickly understood that if
they were to be listened to, they had to speak in English.
So (Chapter 6)
to the final phase with which this book deals. Between the 1870s and the 1890s,
with the drastic decline in Maori population, there was the growing conviction
among Pakeha that the Maori were a dying race, that “native” schools should now
educate exclusively in English, and that Maori culture was basically just a
picturesque decoration from a past age, which could add a little colour to New
Zealand (“Maoriland”) for tourist and publicity purposes. Maori political
movements (Kingitanga, Te Kotahitanga) were given short shrift in parliamentary
legislation, and by 1900 Maori MPs spoke exclusively in English in the House.
Te reo remained the sacred language in church liturgy for Maori. But when a new
generation of Maori leadership was being nurtured at Te Aute College, they were
taught that they would advance politically and socially only if they made the
English language their own.
And it is at
this juncture that Paul Moon concludes his melancholy history, with a brief
summary (Chapter 7) of the situation at the end of the nineteenth century. Te
reo had effectively been beaten down by colonialism, the Pakeha majority and
legislation. But Moon indicates that this situation was not as permanent as it
seemed and there would be some revival of the language in the twentieth
century. Even so, Maori is now the first language of only a small minority in
New Zealand.
I make no
apologies for presenting this review largely in the form of a long summary. My
aim has been to convey accurately what Ka
Ngaro Te Reo says. It is an interesting story and it is well-documented.
But I do have some criticisms to make.
In terms of
style, Paul Moon does have the habit of saying the same thing more than once,
and some of the rhetoric of this book comes close to padding. Twice the author
uses “denouncement” (p.79 and p.175) when he clearly means “denunciation”, and he
does have the habit of using “reverend” as a noun rather than as the honorific
it is. These are not major criticisms, but I do find some of the rhetoric to be
extreme. Take this quotation [with my emphases added] from a point where Moon
is narrating the first inroads of English into te reo:
“It was
as though English possessed a viral quality that allowed it to infect
other languages, almost imperceptibly at first, as a precursor to inflicting
much wider damage…” (Chapter 2, p.43) His metaphors are intended to
present the English language as a nasty disease. Shortly thereafter, noting
that missionaries could find no Maori word for “orphan”, and further noting
that parentless children always found carers in a Maori tribe, Moon remarks:
“As English – the most nomadic of the world’s
languages – migrated to New Zealand, it brought with it the means for the
coloniser to encode and then reproduce the sorts of unequal relationships
that were embedded in English and that had previously been used to coerce
other populations.” (Chapter 2, p.44) Here, the intention is to suggest
that the English language itself presents a distorted view of human
relationships, which the Maori language does not. Both these statements are
demeaning and generalised. It is ironical that Moon deploys them at the very
point where he has just been deploring demeaning Pakeha attitudes to Maori.
I note too that
Moon fails to make one very obvious comparison, especially when he is writing
of the 1840s at one point in his narrative. Remarking on how Pakeha began to
sentimentalise Maori culture and language as “quaint” once they perceived them
to be “dying” and no longer a threat, he comments:
“…. The language was well on its way to being
seen as a dusty artefact of a primeval and fading culture. The Druids of
England had undergone a similar sort of treatment, and now it was the turn of
the Maori to have their culture rendered archaic and nostalgic in a picturesque
and poetic sense….. The portrayal of te reo was shifting from being the
language of the savages and barbarians to something exotic, antique, Arcadian –
and tamed.” (p.144) What I find strange here is that Moon does not make the
more obvious comparison with the decline and near death of the indigenous Irish
language which (at the time of the 1840s famine) was then occurring. It is well
documented that at least some English opinion-makers rejoiced that the speakers
of Irish were dying out and being replaced by those who spoke English. And
then, in a few short years, the Irish would become the standard figures of
comic relief or sentimental tales in the English repertoire, just as Maori
would in the Pakeha repertoire.
Or perhaps Paul
Moon has no particular sympathy for the Irish and prefers not to mention them?
For whatever
reason I know not, but Paul Moon apparently has a bee in his bonnet about
Catholicism. On those occasions when the subject of Catholics comes up in his
books, he tends to make a demeaning or negative remark. Emphatically at the end
of Chapter 3, [p.104], when he is discussing demeaning statements and
assumptions which Pakeha made about Maori, he takes a relatively innocuous (for
its day and age) comment made by the Catholic Bishop Pompallier about a
discussion which the bishop had had with Maori. Moon trumpets this as if it
were the epitome of “contemptuous” attitudes towards Maori. I am sure that
Catholic missionaries at various times said things about Maori that were as
insensitive as things said by other missionaries. Oddly, Moon’s own book proves
how mild the bishop’s statement was when one compares it with the real
vituperation against Maori that is later shown (p.122) by an Anglican
missionary.
It seems odd
that this sectarian card is played in a book which otherwise, apart from some
of its excessive rhetoric, is an interesting and informative guide to the
stresses that were placed upon te reo.