The Hawaiian experience a sobering one for Waikato lecturer

Tu Tangata, Issue 14, 1 October 1983, Page 42

The Hawaiian experience a sobering one for Waikato lecturer

by Charlton Clark

FNew Zealanders don’t pull their socks up, the Maori language will soon be where Hawaiian is now practically extinct according to Waikato University Maori studies head Sam Karetu.

Mr Karetu recently returned from a year’s sabbatical leave, part of which he spent looking at the state of Hawaiian music and dance and the language.

He discovered there are now fewer than 2000 speakers of Hawaiian, a Polynesian language closely related to Maori, and only a small minority of those are native speakers. The rest have learnt Hawaiian as a second language to English, or the Hawaiian pidgin version of English, which most Hawaiian-born people speak.

There are approximately 115,000 ethnic Hawaiian or 175,000, depending on what statistics you use, according to Mr Karetu out of a population of 900,000 of varying racial backgrounds.

By contrast, there are something like quarter of a million Maori people in New Zealand, whom 70,000 claim to be able to speak Maori, and another 30,000 or 40,000 understand it.

That may sound like the Maori language is in a fairly healthy state compared with Hawaiian, but Mr Karetu warns that Maori cannot afford to rest on its laurels.

He points out that most of the 70,000 Maori speakers are over 40 years old, and the old people are dying out faster than they can produce fluent younger speakers.

In Hawaii, there is only one small island, Ni’hau, where children still grow up with Hawaiian as their native language. This has been ensured by the fact that the island is privately owned, and few outside influences have interfered with the way of life there.

But of the 250 Ni’hauans, 200 have left to work on Kaua’i Island, where the children go to a school which provides an interpreter for them.

But Mr Karetu said the danger was that the children, by fraternising with English-speaking children outside the classrooms, would have relegated Hawaiian to their second language by the time they are teenagers.

In a sense, there are parallels in New Zealand. Most of the Maori children here who speak Maori as their first language now are those in small, isolated communities, like the villages in the Urewera and others in Northland and around East Cape.

But the heavyweight influence of the English language at school on television, radio and anywhere else outside their homes and marae tends to ensure that English becomes their preferred language as they get older, especially if they move away to work. Fortunately, there are signs that the swamping tide of English monolingualism may be slowing with the advent of kohanga reo, bi-lingual schools, Maori language programmes in schools, and less formal Maori language activities. And in fact Mr Karetu says the core of dedicated Hawaiians are green with

envy at the facilities and support the Maori language enjoys. They almost “flip” when they hear, for example, that Television New Zealand allocates four minutes a day, five days a week for a Maori language news broadcast, as well as a weekly Maorioriented current affairs programme which sometimes uses the language. And the daily news broadcasts in Maori on the radio leave the Hawaiian language contribution to Hawaii’s airwaves in the shade. Mr Karetu says there is a radio station which broadcasts only Hawaiian music, but announcing and advertising are all in Eng-

lish. There is only one hour a week of Hawaiian language used on the programme and the programmers find it hard to fill it, so few are the Hawaiian speakers available. Mr Karetu himself was interviewed two or three times.

The Hawaiian language enthusiasts, too, marvel at New Zealand’s kohanga reo, and are keen to set up something similar there.

But Mr Karetu said they would have a problem finding suitably qualified people to staff them, which sets in motion a vicious cycle towards extinction.

Mr Karetu says New Zealand is only a matter of years away from the Hawaiian situation in that, there, the universities have become the arbitors of what is good Hawaiian and what is bad, rather than the old native speakers there are hardly any of them left. And it won’t be long before there are very few of the older generation of native Maori speakers left either.

Another disturbing aspect Mr Karetu found has a parallel in New Zealand although interest in Hawaiian song and dance is alive and well, it is not helping to save the language. Hawaiians, like the Maori, have many cultural groups which sing in Hawaiian, but few of the performers understand what they’re singing.

Even among their instructors, Mr Karetu found a lack of knowledge and understanding of the language they were using.

The message was clear to him the Maori cannot afford to believe that cultural activities will keep the language alive.

“The most overt manifestations of the culture are song, dance, carving etc., but already many haka and songs are being mutilated because people do not really know what the words say.

“As a consequence of that you can sing in any language and people will applaud because you make a nice sound.

“If we accept that the language is the essence of the culture, it follows that we should be making an effort to use it and retain it,” he said.

“It’s up to us Maoris to do something about it.”

The message was clear to him the Maori cannot afford to believe that cultural activities will keep the language alive.

Mr Karetu, however, points to one or two advantages which Maori still has over Hawaiian. The Hawaiians now have no equivalent of the marae where frequent gatherings of the people help to keep the language alive and meaningful.

And the Maori language still enjoys a relatively large reserve of old people from whom younger people can learn, and who can pass on the knowledge of what is good and what is bad Maori. Hawaiian has almost none of these people left.

And “I think on a comparative basis New Zealand is making more effort than at least the Hawaiians. We are getting more support from the Government and the public than they are. They are getting very little,” he said. “But I admire them for their resilience. They have not said dead yet, whereas we can afford to fight much more strongly, but we are not.” Mr Karetu also visited a Navajo-lan-guage school in Arizona, where, because of the size of the tribe and its isolation in the desert, the Navajo Indians have been able to keep their language alive. The Navajo children board at the school and are taught in the Navajo language until they are 12 or 13 years old. Because there are no Navajo-speaking secondary teachers available, the school switches to English at that level. Mr Karetu’s visit there came about as a result of a six-month visit by one of the Navajo school teachers and his wife to Ruatoki, near Whakatane. Sam’s school was the first bi-lingual one in New Zealand. The experience inspired them to redouble their efforts to inculcate the Navajo language into the children before they had a chance to drop it in favour of English.

Mr Karetu also attended classes at the Navajo Community College in Tsaile, Arizona. This college used to be a completely Navajo language college, but Indians from other tribes wanted to attend it too, and as they spoke neither their own languages nor Navajo, most of the college’s classes switched to the English medium. Another of his duties while away was to represent the Maori and South Pacific Arts Council at an Indigenous People’s Theatre Association conference in Toronto, Canada. It was the first time there had been a Maori representative at the conference. “It was interesting to see that not only the Maori is suffering a language and cultural loss, but in fact, many people from many countries around the world. While the problems are similar, the solutions that each country is trying to find, vary greatly.” He described his “complete involvement in the Hawaiian situation” as the highlight of his year’s leave. “To me their plight could well be ours if definite measures are not taken to avert this possibility. “Admittedly there are more overt signs here in New Zealand that things are happening, which certainly cannot be said for the Hawaiian situation.”