The Leap of Faith To Save a Language

Forty years ago the Māori language was on the brink of dying out. Only 5% of Māori spoke it fluently. A massive push to save it was underway and at the heart of that movement was a little school at the foothills of the Urewera Ranges...

In 1978, a little district school at the foothills of Te Urewera in the Bay of Plenty became an anchor for the Māori language, one that caught deep and held strong.

Ruatoki School was founded in 1896, a small school for the children of Tūhoe to learn the mainstream curriculum.

Nearly a century later, as the language spoken in the homes and marae of these students was decimated, it became a place of refuge for te reo Māori

Listen to the story of Te Wharekura o Ruatoki: The Leap of Faith To Save a Language

By the 1970s, the first generation of Māori born after the urban migration began arriving at University. Their parents and grandparents had come to the city and abandoned their language.

John Rangihau, 1984

And now this generation was feeling the loss.

They became the catalyst for change and we began to see a concerted push to have more te reo everywhere, but especially in schools.

In Ruatoki, the lobbying began to have tamariki taught in their language.

In this 2018 interview with John Campbell for RNZ's Checkpoint, Turuhira Hare described the many, many meetings held through 1977 as the Tūhoe people fought to make their school bilingual.

Dr Richard Benton worked for the New Zealand Council of Educational Research at the time. In 1973 he had written a booking raising the idea of having bilingual schools. But he said the Department of Education would only agree to "consider without commitment".

Benton said the breakthrough came when the outgoing Education Minister Les Gandar asked John Rangihau what he could do for Māori.

Rangihau asked for a bilingual school at Ruatoki and the decree went out. The Department had to comply. The school got the go-ahead to become bilingual. A new principal, Tawhirimatea Williams, was brought in.

Tawhirimatea Williams spent 19 years as principal of New Zealand's first bilingual school. His wife Kaa, worked as a teacher alongside him.

"I was jumping into the unknown," said Williams, "What the heck was bilingual education? What's Māori medium education? Even the (Education) Department didn't know what it meant really at that time."

Tawhiri Williams describes some of the challenges he faced in this interview with RNZ.

He was always very aware of his responsibilities to the Tūhoe people and the trust they had put in him to teach their tamariki…

Go to this episode on rnz.co.nz for more details