Q & A with Philip Steer

This is an excerpt from an interview with Philip Steer of Massey University in May 2022. In this Zoom discussion we explored the writing of The Burning River, what I learned from it, and aspects that I would approach differently today. Something I didn’t mention in the interview is that, where I went too far, that’s on me, not on the people who generously helped and advised me.

Because she is mentioned a number of times in the interview, Tina Makereti asked for the opportunity to provide a response, which appears at the end of the interview.

The original transcript was made by TranscribeMe. It has been edited to remove ‘inaudibles’, false starts, and typos etc, and to cut less relevant parts from the interview at the beginning and end.

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Philip Steer: In terms of this novel, then, tell us a bit about how this came to be. Has it been something that has been with you a long time? Or was it very much, you’d finished your previous book and then were thinking about the next one? Yeah, just tell us a little bit about the journey you went on, to bring it to being.

Lawrence Patchett: Sure. The question of how long is, kind of, the easiest question to answer. It took about six years, and there was a lot of redrafting in there; writing entire versions and then throwing them out and starting again, or—

PS: Can I ask, sorry, in terms of the six years, you were trying to write while doing other work?

LP: Yeah, some of the time. Sometimes, though, you’re able to carve off big chunks of time. I had a residency at one point, which was really helpful. At that time I was still working at Parliament, and there was a long break while there was an election happening. So I was able to write a bit more at that time. But mostly it’s always finding a way to squeeze it round other mahi.

In terms of how the book came about, my family background—my own personal background—is really central, because in the years leading up to the writing of this book I’d entered this new relationship, and this is important to what the book became. My new relationship was with the person who’s now my wife. She’s a Māori writer and a Māori scholar, Tina Makereti, who used to be a colleague of yours, Phillip.

PS: Amazing. I miss her almost every day, to be honest.

LP: So I was entering this new relationship and I was also becoming a father, a stepfather—Tina had two children—for the first time. And, for me, I was really entering a Māori family for the first time. And this made me think about two things really urgently, in a way that I hadn’t before. First of all, as a dad, I was really worried about climate change, climate breakdown, and the kind of legacy that someone like me was leaving for our kids and the safety of the world they would be inhabiting. And I was really concerned about the inaction I felt that I could see all around me at that time. I worked in Parliament at the time, and I was conscious of my own sense that there was too much inaction. So that was one issue. That was a real anxiety for me.

And the second anxiety, or the second preoccupation I was having at the time, was that as I was entering this family, negotiating these new relationships, I was becoming more aware—much more consciously aware—of my own Pākehā identity and my own Pākehā privilege as a beneficiary of colonisation. I’d grown up in a liberal background in a time when I think it was possible for someone like me, as a Pākehā person, to go through the education system and come out the other end only being dimly aware of those things.

PS: Sure.

LP: For someone of my age, particularly. For the first time I was really thinking about these things in a really urgent way. So I started learning te reo Māori. That was something my partner encouraged me to do, and I carried on with that mahi, on and off, for ten years probably.

And it’s important to say I’m not an expert in any way. Kāore au i te tino kaha ki te kōrero Māori. He akonga kē. He akonga Pākehā tēnei. Kei te ako tonu ahau i te reo Māori. So I’m still a student. I’m still learning, and that would be a long, long journey for me, which is still going on. But that’s another thing: when you’re learning te reo, you are constantly reminded of your Pākehā identity, in a way that was new for me.

And as that journey went on, I started on some new mahi too. I moved to working for the Waitangi Tribunal, as a worker. And when you’re constantly looking at the massive injustices of colonisation in this country, then that’s something you’re aware of too. Particularly for me, because those kind of processes involved taking a massive amount of resources like land and all those kind of things from people like my wife’s whānau, and giving them, essentially, to people like my ancestors, in a way that benefited me.

So these were the things that were really occupying me. I was thinking about them all the time. And my fiction grows out of these kinds of—these things I’m worried about. I think about it as like this borderland of anxiety, at the edge of your own life, or at the front of it, or something. And that’s where my fiction grows.

PS: So you’re going through these experiences and learning things about yourself and about, I guess, your culture and relationships and work, and so that’s the kind of environment that gives rise to this narrative?

LP: Yeah, definitely. And, you know, I love to write, and it’s always been a way that I’ve dealt with that stuff. Fiction is something that I do, and so the things I’m worried about, or preoccupied with, get into the fiction.

PS: So in terms of the fiction, then, because the things you’re describing were very present for you, by the sound of it, in the moment: climate change, and the question of your own identity and children and relationships. But the story that you produce is, in some ways, we can see, clearly connected, but also it’s quite distant in some ways. It’s set in a future, in a world that resembles our own but not quite the same. I’m quite interested in the fact that there’s this kind of distance, or gap, or transformation of those experiences into the narrative.

And could you talk to us a little bit, then, about what we could call, I guess, the world-building that you’ve gone through to produce this fictional world, and how you understand that fictional world to relate to our own moment or your own reality? Is it like a thought experiment? Is it like an allegory? Is there some other term that’s more helpful? Could you say a little bit about the way in which this narrative resembles some of these issues but is also quite distanced from them in some ways.

LP: Yes. I was talking about those experiences before, which you’ve just summarised really nicely. And the thing that I wanted to do—going through that process of moving from being dimly aware of my Pākehā identity and background, to being really consciously aware of them—I wanted to create a character who was acutely aware of those things: of his Pākehā identity, of his Pākehā understanding, and of the limitations of his understanding. That’s something I really wanted to do. And so, when I was thinking about the world of this novel, and I had these things I was concerned about and I wanted to explore, I thought, ‘Okay, let’s imagine these things exist in the world, not that my kids will live in, but that might be existing in a long time from now.’

As I was writing I thought of a time a thousand years from the time of writing. And I thought about this mostly in terms of environment, or firstly in terms of environment. I did lots of research on the kinds of landscapes I’ve lived in, which in Canterbury here has always tended to be in a drained swamp, or a used-to-be wetland, sometimes a coastal wetland. I did lots of research on what, in the future, those landscapes might look like. That’s why you find in the novel lots of those impacts of climate breakdown or volatility that I was reading about. You have things like increased rainfall and flood events. You have a volatile climate, with storms. You have contaminated groundwater, deaths of certain species, introduction of other ones, the move of mosquitoes further south, bringing new diseases that wreak all kinds of havoc, and yeah, these kinds of things. So that was from the environment point of view. So it’s, I guess, an extrapolation of a world that we might have now into something that might exist in a thousand years from now environmentally.

And then I was thinking in terms of demographics too, because, I can’t remember where, but at some stage in the writing of the book, I read that in a hundred years or a couple hundred years or something, Pākehā people, Pākehā communities in New Zealand will be outnumbered by non-Pākehā, and I thought, ‘That’s a really interesting situation, and an interesting opportunity in terms of my desire to create a character who’s acutely aware of his Pākehātanga.’ Because in that kind of surrounding, in that kind of world, it would be really difficult to be anything other than really consciously aware of your Pākehā identity. So that was another aspect.

And then I was thinking in terms of language. At that time there was, as I was going to te reo classes as a Pākehā person, there was kōrero in mainstream Pākehā media, and in places like that, where they were saying there’s more people wanting to learn te reo who previously might not have wanted to, and just a growth of sort of interest generally. So I thought, ‘Well, it seems natural that in a long time from now there’ll be much more of the language being spoken.’ And so I thought that was potentially another part in the book, although I changed that at a certain point.

But coming back to your point about my own personal experiences reflected in this world—that’s probably an unfair—

PS: That’s all right. We can run with that.

LP: —summary of your question. But, for me, I wanted to write my own personal circumstances really strongly onto that world, so that it’s really clear that I’m thinking about these issues of the limitations of my Pākehā understanding as I’m working on this world. And that’s why you see heaps of clues, I think, that point back towards me, and reflect me and the limitations of my understanding and all that kind of stuff, in the text, and in the world. I was trying to do that. The family situation that Van enters into is very much similar to my own, becoming a stepfather and trying to learn how to do that. Also, lots of the names link to people in my own life. The name of the protagonist is named after the van I was driving at the time, because every time I got in that van and drove it, burning up fossil fuels, I was thinking, ‘Jeez, this is going to be bad for my kids.’ So that kind of thing.

And on one side of my family we come from Shetland, and I put a Shetland saying into the text, again, just to try to sort of point to that Pākehā imprint – my own Pākehā imprint – on this world.

PS: What was that saying? I can’t bring it to mind.

LP: I think it’s in there. My understanding of the saying is ‘Lang may yer lum reek’, which means ‘Long may your chimney smoke’, and I think that one of the characters says that to Van at some point, and he does a double take. And I think he says something like, ‘That’s one of our own sayings’, and I was just trying to put those realities of my own personal Pākehā life into the world.

PS: That’s fascinating. Just before we move on, your description of, kind of, what you’re extrapolating is really interesting, because one of the striking things throughout the novel is there’s this sense in which there’s a history of colonisation repeating. The way these Burners are coming through, to once more burn down the forests, it feels like another story of – another repetition of – the story of colonisation and the damage it causes. Yet at the same time this is a world where it seems, at least in terms of Van’s experience, Māori are dominant, or are the kind of the centre around which he kind of orbits, I guess. So there’s an inversion there. So I’m interested in the way in which there’s a repetition of the past but also an extrapolation of changes into the future. It makes for quite a complex world, but that’s just a passing comment from me.

Could I just, before we move on, ask you about the landscape of the novel? You’ve talked about the influence of the kind of Canterbury landscapes that you grew up with, but we also have the Whaea, and as someone who has relatives in Wellington and travels down the Kāpiti Coast, I immediately think of the statue of Mary at Paraparaumu, and things like the scarp makes me think of the kind of steep cliffs down the Kāpiti Coast from Paekākariki south. So there’s parts of the geography that feel very familiar to me, but, at the same time, I can’t quite piece all the rest of the bits together with that. So could you say a little bit about how you sort of imagine this geography, and how based it is on a map, and how much it’s a kind of imagined place?

LP: Yeah. Yeah, totally. So, at the time, yeah, I was living close to Paraparaumu, and so it’s strongly influenced by that landscape. However, I was trying to, particularly in terms of the scarp that you mentioned, I wanted, though, to avoid naming any particular place, and so I wanted to have—you know, there’s a mainland and there’s an island, but I just wanted it to be an island, so not specifically located in any particular place. Yeah, that’s probably all I want to say about that.

PS: Oh, that’s fine. Because what I found, as I was preparing to teach it, was I was like, ‘Oh, I can recognise something that seems familiar from my world’—the statue—and so then I thought, ‘I’ll just map the journey.’ But I couldn’t actually figure out where they go. So it’s kind of reassuring to hear you say that it’s generalized, or that it’s an amalgam, or something. That’s all you need to say. But it’s kind of reassuring I haven’t completely misread what’s going on here. Yeah, that’s really interesting.
In terms of the world-building, picking up on your comment, then, about your learning te reo and, I guess, tikanga along with that, could you say a little bit more about the decisions you made in terms of representing Māori culture in this novel. Because, a little bit like, we’re talking about some of the other aspects of it, it’s quite recognisable, but also it’s quite different in some ways. So the presence of the Whaea, the language of waters, these are things that I guess are your creations, or maybe they’re extrapolations. Could you say a little bit about your kind of re-presentation of Māori culture in the novel?

LP: Yeah. I was not trying to provide a representation of Māori culture. And I wasn’t trying to reimagine it. There’s a background to this that I want to talk about. So I was really wary of appropriation—

PS: Yeah, sure.

LP: —so, taking elements of a culture that are not my own, or messing about in a culture that’s not my own. And in fact I worked really hard on a version of the novel where there’s no te reo Māori at all and there’s nothing related to it in the novel. And I shared that novel with Tina, who is my first reader and my most important reader. And she kind of hated it, or at least she said, ‘This isn’t working’. And the reason she said that—this is not to blame everything on Tina, you know, I’m just talking about the evolution of how this world-building happened. So she said, ‘You’re wanting to create this character who is acutely aware of his Pākehā understanding and the limitations of that, and to sort of de-centre’—as you were saying before—‘de-centre that Pākehā understanding and that Pākehā reality. But, in fact, what you’ve done is created this incredibly uniformly, blankly white world, where everything that is not Pākehā is completely absent and invisibilised. And it’s even worse than anything else you could have come up with.’ That was her view.

PS: Because of the language choice.

LP: Yeah, and because of the absence of anything that wasn’t Van’s world, Van’s outlook. Like, I’d come up with this really complicated, and what I thought was subtle—I probably even thought it was clever—way of letting the reader know that Van was Pākehā in a way that people around him weren’t. And it really didn’t work. I could see, as soon as Tina said that, that it just wasn’t working.

PS: Having spent months on this, or whatever.

LP: Exactly. That was okay, though. So I thought, ‘Okay. Well, what’s been my main way of becoming consciously aware of my own Pākehā understanding and identity and the limitations of that?’. And I thought, ‘Well, that’s actually been through learning te reo Māori—trying to learn te reo Māori—and so I’ll get Van to share in that experience.’ And so I positioned him as a learner, and tried to filter everything through his learner’s experience, controlling the point of view really closely. And that’s how te reo Māori came into the book, and how some of these aspects that you’re talking about came back into the book.

I tried to put a whole heap of controls on that and a whole heap of guards against appropriating, including that, with things like the waters, I really didn’t want to appropriate … whakapapa, but I wanted to gesture towards the importance of genealogy in the world that is around Van, and so I thought, ‘There’s a system of waters and fresh water and the importance of that in the book.’ So it connects with that, but it also connects back to my own Shetland identity, I was trying to suggest, because that’s very much a place where the sea is very important and where people made their living on the sea. So, I thought that’s a way that I can, again, point back to my own Pākehā understanding.

And perhaps later, I can talk about some of the controls I tried to put around the use of te reo. But I think that as soon as I did that, introducing te reo into the text, I think there is an appropriation that I wasn’t avoiding, and there was an element of messing about with a culture that’s not my own. And that’s the part of the book that troubles me the most, and I understand that that offended some people and I’m really sorry for that. I do feel like I went further than I meant to, and I regret that.

Since publishing the book I did try different techniques to talk about similar issues, and I felt like I got closer in a short story called ‘The Tenth Meet’. Again, like this book, it’s far from a perfect work. He hua o tāku mahi tuhituhi auaha. It’s the fruit of my creative work. But I felt like I got closer to what I was trying to achieve there. So, yeah, I just wanted to mention that.

PS: That’s really interesting. And thank you for being willing to talk to us about those questions. I think it’s really important for us, as readers, to not forget the labour and the costs and the emotion, and even the pain, that can go into creating these texts, and not to take that for granted.

And, I think, to just move to maybe the question of te reo in the novel, that seems, for all the changes in this world, te reo is recognisably—you know, it hasn’t changed or been altered in the kind of way that some of the other aspects of this future world have been. And I guess that maybe, picking up on that, it’s reflecting your decision there about what aspect of Māori culture you wanted Van to be engaging with, or most aware of, and through him the reader, I guess. So the language seems to be the line that continues most directly from our moment to his.

LP: Yeah, that’s right.

PS: Yeah. And certainly, just as a Pākehā reader who has incredibly limited Māori language, I have learned some words from it—most importantly ‘aroha mai’, one I’ve had to use quite often in various contexts—but it’s interesting as a reader with that limited understanding to, a little bit, be educated with him and to sort of follow that journey as well. It’s been quite an unusual experience for me as a reader as well. So just adding that into the conversation.

Clearly, these questions of appropriation, and integrity, and not wanting to ignore or silence or whiten out cultural difference, these are all really fraught and difficult questions. And in terms of, then, specifically the question of using te reo in the novel, you talk in the acknowledgements about working with Aaron Randall on the language, and you talk about Tina as a reader. Could you say a little bit just about the kind of ethical questions you’ve gone through in bringing the language into the novel, and in terms of doing the best you can to be ethical in the way you’ve represented that. What were some of the things that you thought about, or maybe wrestled with, as you produced the novel?

LP: Yeah. Such a great question. This aspect, as I’ve suggested before, is the aspect of the novel that I have the most discomfort about. I had the most discomfort about it at the time of writing, and right through to today. It’s true that, as a fiction writer, a fair amount of discomfort is pretty standard, particularly when you publish something. You know, that seems to go with the territory. But for me this was a whole different order of things, and I think that’s for good reasons.

So just to mention quickly Aaron’s involvement, Aaron was a very generous contributor to my mahi on the book. Aaron’s from Te Aitanga-a-Mahaki and Ngāti Kahungunu ki Wairoa, and a very creative guy, and a wonderful person to work with.

Just to go back though, when I was trying to evolve the book beyond that version that didn’t work, I was thinking, ‘Okay, I’ll give Van this experience of being a learner.’ And so I tried to use that as a really strong control and a really strong element that the reader was constantly aware of, so that they are really aware of his sense of the limitations of his understanding, and his inability to see, and his inability to hear, and all of those things.

PS: As opposed to someone who masters his environment?

LP: That’s right, yeah.

PS: Or it’s kind of easy for him?

LP: Yeah.

PS: Okay.

LP: That’s right. That’s what I was trying to do. So, yeah, my first thing was: ‘I want to position this guy very clearly as a learner.’ So, early in the book I tried to have quite a few moments where he’s conscious that he’s not hearing correctly, or he may be mishearing, or that he can’t understand things. And quite often he says, or the book sort of says, like ‘What he heard was.’ I tried to use that phrase a few times, to give the idea that our viewpoint on these people is really strongly filtered by the limitations of this guy’s understanding, and also that he’s probably misinterpreting. And then the people around him are always, or often, switching into English because they’re like, ‘This is going to be the way that it’s easiest for this guy to understand’, or they’re adjusting the way that they would speak, in order to communicate with him in a way that he can understand. So, using a version that [he] would understand. So I tried to set that up really early in the book, so that the reader is really, really aware of those things. And I wanted to foreground it and make it sort of a big part of the point of the book.

Then the second thing was to trap the reader inside that point of view so that constantly our view on this whole world, as I mentioned, is through his perspective. There’s no other way of getting outside that Pākehā understanding, that limited understanding.

Another control I tried to put in there was that Van’s use of the language of, say, Hana’s people is pretty tightly controlled by the people around him. They have control over that. With that I was trying to suggest some of my own experience and speak to the humility that is needed when you’re learning language.

And something that Aaron and I talked about was not aspiring to some sort of really flash version of te reo, because that’s not Van’s understanding. So that was one way.

And another way, yeah, was just sort of Aaron’s total involvement. He had a really creative involvement, including suggesting things, changing characters’ names, like asking questions, and just a really, really interesting sort of interaction that we had. Yeah.

However, I tried to put all those controls on how Van was using this language and accessing it, and I tried to have the reader share in his experience of being really conscious that, ‘Man, I don’t know this language. I am ill-equipped to deal with the situation’, and all that. But, yeah, again, I accept that it does involve a taking of some sort. It involves an appropriation. It involves the use of a language that’s not my own. And I accept that for some people, for some readers, that’s too far and that’s offensive and it’s not right. And I really regret that. And I’m sorry for it. I apologise for hurting people. Yeah. So that’s what I’d say about that. I’ll just leave it at that.

PS: Yeah. Wow. It’s such an interesting dilemma, I guess. Two things. One thing you’re saying is—as you were talking, sorry, I was thinking, as a fictional experience, being immersed in this world, it’s quite different than, say, my usual experience as a Pākehā male, which is that everything works well. And I’m not having to translate, and I’m not out of my depth kind of culturally, I guess, because the world’s kind of set up for people like me. And so to imagine, ‘We’ll kind of invert that’, it’s a very compelling experience to take a reader like me through. So that’s one comment.

But on the other hand, I can see there’s a dilemma there where you, as Pākehā writer, choosing to think through and kind of narrate these questions, you’re always going to have some kind of dilemma about how to do that. And is it worse to be silent, or to take a risk? And, yeah, I’m not trying to ask you to kind of say, ‘Was it worth it or not’, or whatever, but just for us to acknowledge the riskiness of a project like this, I think, is important maybe.

LP: That’s really interesting, Philip. And you put it better than I did, especially in terms of that dilemma. Because I did want to make this contribution—the contribution that the book tries to make is to create that character who’s acutely aware of his Pākehā understanding and the limitations of it, like I’ve talked about a lot. That’s the key thing I wanted to do for myself and to do for the reader. And, yeah, that’s what I was trying to do, but what came with that, as I’ve described, is some of the problems that you’re talking about. And I will say that, yeah, you’ve referred to the riskiness. As I mentioned, I tried different techniques after the writing of this book, but I don’t write on this kaupapa anymore. I just find it too difficult. Yeah.

PS: Just as we move on, just a question about perspective, because you’ve chosen a third-person limited, and you’ve talked about the way in which that constrains us to Van’s perspective. Did you ever consider a first-person narrative, which might have achieved some of those goals? Was it always a third-person kind of a project, or would there be an alternate version, or was there any thought about that kind of perspective?

LP: That’s really interesting. I don’t think that I did think about or entertain the idea of using a first-person perspective. I can’t really remember why. From a technical point of view, third-person works really well for me. And, yeah, there’s just that really tight control that I wanted, and the control that you’re exercising in first-person is different, and it brings in questions about reliability and all those kinds of things, which could be really fruitful. But for this particular project I do remember thinking, it’s third-person, really limited, we’re trapping the reader in that experience. And really, altering that, for me, would have been super counter to what the book is trying to do.

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Response from Tina Makereti

Kia ora e hoa mā

I loved the depth and richness of this kōrero, but also laughed at how it gives the reader a pretty clear idea of what it’s like to live with a boss bitch Māori writer when you’re a Pākehā writer trying to work through really difficult territory! This book is different from a lot of Pākehā written books for having a certain whakapapa (web of relationships) behind it, and since I’m heavily implicated in both this interview and the book itself, I asked my tāne if I could add a few thoughts.

First, tēnā koe, Philip, for your astute reading, and for your mihi. I miss working with you too! This interview tackles a number of difficult questions the book raised, but your experience of reading it demonstrates how it was successful: it took you outside of your entitlement and privilege as a Pākehā male reader, and repositioned you in relation to how you understand Aotearoa and your place within it. For me, that was the primary aim of the book, and why I was so passionate about supporting it. If the book had not made use of te reo or some other marker of cultural difference/Indigeneity, and if it had not had a Pākehā male as the protagonist (the hero, perhaps), then I don’t believe it would have done that job. That’s how narrative works: it gives you an avatar, in a way, through which you can experience a different world view. For me this was always a book about and for Pākehā.

So I read this other version of it, and Lawrence describes how much I opposed it. The wonderful thing about my spouse is he can take almost any criticism on a craft level, but I do worry I was a bit mean. I got immensely frustrated that he’d taken a lot of the beauty and a lot of the cultural / political comment out of the book by excising the reo. He might have relied on describing skin colour, but for obvious reasons that’s clunky and not really correct. It was about culture not skin colour. He also took his own personal risk out of the book when he took out the reo, and I told him that what we need is for Pākehā writers to take those risks. Decolonisation is the coloniser’s job, in my opinion, and we won’t get anywhere until Pākehā have more of these conversations. Lawrence was always concerned that he was stepping into territory he shouldn’t, so I have to take responsibility for encouraging him to do that. He is responsible for his own words, but I honestly don’t think he would have stepped into that territory without the support of his whānau and Māori readers/collaborators.

I think it’s a massive problem when we make it out of bounds for Pākehā to write on these kaupapa. We continue to celebrate and encourage Pākehā writers who make no mention of culture in their writing, thereby creating a fictional world which is, by default, white. That, to me, is as problematic, if not more, than Pākehā writers who write about different cultures. It isn’t enough to just bow out because the prevailing rhetoric is to stay in your lane. Fiction should reflect the multiplicity and plurality of the world we live in, and the questions at the heart of our modern age, like how to be quiet and listen and do what you’re asked if you’re a white person living with, or on the land of, Indigenous people. Another central thesis of the book.

But I definitely made mistakes in my reading of this work. I feel like I was immensely naive. For instance, I absolutely didn’t anticipate that people would read the cultures in the book as Māori. They speak te reo Māori, yes, but they don’t operate as Māori culturally – there are similarities but many differences, due to the way people have responded to rough environmental pressures. I always saw the Whaea, the Repo and the Burners as distinct people, descended from Māori, yes, but quite changed, and culturally different from each other. This is, after all, 1000 years in the future. What I didn’t allow for was that people might not be ready for te reo to be used in this kind of imaginative way yet (we wouldn’t blink if unchanged English was used as the language of a culture far in the future, even though the English would be quite different by that point). I should have been more aware that until things in Aotearoa are sorted out in the 21st century, we might need to be more careful around how te reo is used and by whom, and we never know what assumptions will be made.

From my point of view the use of te reo in this novel is cultural appreciation rather than cultural appropriation. The linked article, which admittedly is a fairly simple explainer, gives some ways of assessing what the difference is. A lot of it has to do with intention and self-reflection. The interview gives plenty of evidence that this wasn’t an appropriative grab, but a painstaking exploration that took many years of investment, cultural connection, cultural support and asking permission (or actually being told I guess). This book was written a number of years ago before te reo Māori really hit that peak of popularity and became less accessible due to so many Pākehā wanting to take classes, so that conversation wasn’t in the air. The teachers we have both had have always been generous with the reo and insisted that as a living language, it should be shared. However, I understand the current conversations around the mamae of having no access to the reo. I have that mamae myself. Yet I think we have to be careful – how will Pākehā come to know us, properly, except through our reo? What changes for us when they achieve a better understanding? Māori should come first in a list of who gets into a reo class, but making te reo off limits to non-Māori doesn’t help anything.

Heoi anō, ka nui te mihi ki a kōrua. Mauri ora!