te reo māori te reo hapai

It's te wiki o te reo māori, and it's the 50th anniversary of te wiki.

Ake Ake a forever language.

Te reo isn't just for a week, it's forever- always important.

I was lucky enough to go through primary school in a bilingual class so though I've never become fluent- still a goal - appreciation and pronunciation was instilled in me early.

There are many themes I could write about. Briefly i want to acknowledge the internationally renowned scholar Linda Tuhiwai Smith whose work Decolonising Methodologies has been so influential for me - and for generations of indigenous scholars across the world. Her work illustrates the concept of epistemic justice - that people own their own knowledge, have the right to define what is and isn't true and important; that scholarship isn't contained within the traditional western or otherwise gate kept institutions and identities of the world.

Language is fundamental to how we all navigate the world- how we understand and define our experiences, how we communicate and connect. One of the most significant parts of learning about my diagnoses and all it means for me in the world was learning of te reo hapai: the language of enrichment.

It gave me two new words to describe my experience:

takiwātanga - in my own time and space (autism)

aroreretini - mind goes to many things (adhd)

These relate more to my experience of the world rather than the language of deficits and disorders and the mental models that go with that.

Te reo Māori is an official language of Aotearoa and a taonga to be protected, treasured, and enhanced through use. While some in this country have an issue with using or promoting it and come up with all kinds of rhetoric to suppress it (colonisation continues), I see language as abundance. It's not zero sum - we don't lose anything by making space for it. Actually we all gain something through its vibrancy whether we are fluent or not. And we can view cognitive diversity in the same way. Ake ake