Te Wiki o te Reo Māori: How Māoridom healed my Sāmoan identity

For a long time, I despised being Sāmoan.

I grew up with an abusive, narcissistic father who was my only access to fa’asāmoa (the Sāmoan way), meaning this relationship negatively impacted my views on what a Sāmoan is, especially a Sāmoan man.

My Māori roots through my mother didn’t do me any better. Although Mum is a wonderful, loving, and kind person underneath all the trauma, I wrote about how I used to think most Māori lived like the characters in the film Once Were Warriors.

I grew up seeing addiction and violence littered across my Māori side, and although I never judged them thanks to Mum, who’d always provide contextual empathy, I didn’t feel pride in being Māori either.

So my relationship with being Sāmoan and Māori had always been fragmented. Because everyone comes from two people, or parents, which means we subconsciously comprehend that those two people make one half each of us.

Parents are also our first gateway to our whakapapa, meaning we develop our identity of culture from those people. Therefore, holding shame towards our parents, and by extension extended family members, eventually leads us to rejecting ourselves.

For me, this wound went so deep that I misrepresented my entire lineage and tūpuna (ancestors). Today I know fa’asāmoa and te ao Māori are beautiful, but before my realisation, I identified my people with the destructive and traumatic debris of colonialism, capitalism and westernised Christianity.

Who they choose to see is not who we are

Where my Māori side bared their flaws and skeletons openly, my Sāmoan side, out of people pleasing endeavours, swept it all under the carpet. There will be Sāmoans reading this that understand what I’m getting at.

I’m getting at the married men of God who preach gospel, raise children, then proceed to groom a teenager. I’m getting at the multiple children being born, under “shameful” circumstances, and then those children being treated like they never existed by their birth parents.

I’m getting at household physical abuse disguised as “discipline”, where that evil has become so normalised that we circulate the same, tired old joke about how pālagi never hit their kids but we do.

Up to 81 per cent of children in the Pacific experience violent discipline, according to a Save the Children report. Photo/Unsplash

I’m getting at our babies, growing up with said physical discipline, until their skin, heart and soul is hardened to the point it suffocates whatever empathy they have left.

I’m getting at God, who is an all-encompassing entity of love, being manipulated into power dynamics to justify punitive measures and serve harmful vices, also known as the seven deadly sins in Christianity.

I quietly equated all this trauma and pain to what a Sāmoan is. But then I started my te reo Māori journey in 2020. I was inspired by my tuakana (older brother), Tuilagi Jeremy Richard Leatinu’u, who began his journey nearly a decade ago.

Tōku tuakana, Tuilagi Jeremy Richard Leatinu’u. Photo/Raymond Sagapolutele

Te reo Māori journey

Throughout my studies, I found connections between Māori and Sāmoa. I learned of the similarities between our languages, customs, and stories of direct interactions between ancestors prior to the great migration to Aotearoa.

I learned before colonisation that there was a dominant system which prioritised people over personal gain or profits, a stark contrast to today’s western imperialism and capitalism.

Māori and Sāmoans were never perfect, but we weren’t the monsters colonialism turned some of us into. And how we treated our own people was far better than how Pākehā continue to treat theirs.

Moreover, learning te reo got me through the imposter syndrome of not being Māori enough that many others have experienced. This in turn, helped me feel confident to dive in and openly make mistakes in learning gagana Sāmoa (the Sāmoan language).

I took that attitude to learning vagahau Niue (the Niuean language) with my ex at the time, being open to imperfection. Learning te reo Māori also made me a better English learner, because second language learners study their first to reinforce the second.

Learning te reo Māori also helped me embrace learning the Niuean language in 2022. Photo/File

‘Thank God for Māori’

As I continued to learn, with te ao Māori in my right hand and fa’asāmoa in my left, I became increasingly whole as a person.

So thank God for Māori, from the efforts of our tūpuna, the beauty of our tikanga (customs) to the idyllic sound of our reo. I love who we are wholeheartedly, because it all literally completes me.

Te Wiki o te Reo Māori ends on Saturday, and marks the 50th anniversary of the annual celebration. The theme of "ake ake ake - a forever language" continues into this year.

The weeklong event also commemorates the 1972 Māori Language Petition, which helped spark the movement to revitalise the Māori language.