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Lack of protection sees 'sacred' pōhutukawa tree

Northland iwi and community members are upset a culturally significant pōhutakawa has been half cut down, saying the 200-year-old tree should’ve had more protection. The pōhutukawa, on Ahipara’s Wharo Lane, was the site of Te Rarawa’s original marae, as well as a former court, Catholic Church and post office, said iwi representative Rueben Taipari. “It’s one of the most scared areas for our history – more so than the marae – it goes back nearly to the wak...

Kāinga Ora to build thousands of prefabricated homes

Kāinga Ora plans to purchase thousands of prefabricated homes to address the country’s growing need for transitional housing, many of which will be built offshore and shipped over.Kāinga Ora general manager of construction Patrick Dougherty said a main goal of the project was to boost New Zealand’s domestic off-site manufactured (OSM) capacity and capability.However, in order to meet demand, many would be constructed abroad and shipped over as ready-built, weathertight one and two-bed...

Health provider falls out with iwi

A member of Destiny Church whose low-cost GP practices have been evicted from two Christchurch buildings says he will build his own medical centre at the city’s national marae.George Ngatai, who stood as a candidate for Vision New Zealand party in the 2020 general election, runs 12 medical centres, six Covid-19 testing centres and three vaccination clinics in Auckland, Northland, Lower Hutt and Christchurch.He has been given notice on his two health centres in Aranui and Wainoni.Link to articl...

The Only Native American ‘In America’

Korina Emmerich, the Puyallup and Nisqually designer behind the garment, didn’t know until attending the exhibition that she would be its sole representative of Indigenous fashion. And she didn’t fully understand why she was chosen. Maybe it was because one of her dresses was recently worn by Deb Haaland, America’s first Indigenous Cabinet member, on the cover of InStyle, or perhaps had something to do with the popularity of her Split Shot face mask, which has been in high d...

Plea for help from social housing agency

Central Hawke's Bay is fighting the scourge of homelessness as it faces a relatively new problem for the district - not having enough accommodation.In the hills behind the state highway, leaving Hastings heading south, Zack Makoare is building his dream - eight houses for his whānau.To get there he was living on site, roughing it."So I came from a house in Hastings, in Flaxmere, to where we lived in a beautiful home to now where we're living in a caravan with an awning and a few cabins and no r...

Workers left fearing for future and struggling to pay rent

Akhilesh Patti received a phone call on Friday afternoon saying he was losing his job – and was given just 10 minutes’ notice before being laid off.The Christchurch shop manager, who has a three-year-old daughter and a second child due in the next fortnight, is one of 20 people who lost their jobs when Nekita Enterprises was stripped of five off-licences after it was caught underpaying workers.None of the staff received redundancy pay and many are now worried about how they will pa...

Health NZ and Māori Health Authority:

The team leading the establishment of the new Health New Zealand and Māori Health Authority has been announced.It is part of reforms that will disestablish the country's 20 district health boards, to be replaced by one new body, Health New Zealand.The Māori Health Authority will work alongside Health NZ, commissioning for primary, community and kaupapa Māori services.Health NZ will be chaired by Rob Campbell who has extensive union, public and private sector governance experience.Link to arti...

Rawinia Higgins:

Rawinia Higgins was lucky enough to be born into a family with no shortage of proficient te reo speakers, so even though English was her first language, she had more than her fair share of whānau to help her become fluent in Māori. Not that it’s been a breeze. Here she tells Dale how she went from being in a remedial reo class at Rūātoki, to the Māori Language Commissioner leading the work of revitalising the reo.Kia ora, Rawinia. For some years now, you’ve been influential in reo Māor...

Māori dominating

Some health experts are saying Tāmaki Makaurau is on a knife-edge, and that the government's decision to move Auckland to Alert Level 3 despite 22 new cases, including three in the Waikato, is a calculated risk.Health researcher Dr Rawiri Taonui says while Pasifika numbers dominated the opening of this outbreak, Māori are dominating the tail.Taonui says the Waikato outbreak on Sunday raised concern among the Māori community, and the news of the 20 clusters on Monday reinforced ...

Naresha Waa encouraged by the connectedness

From being the only Pākehā in a Māori medium course to encouraging others to learn about te reo and te ao through her business Naresha Waa has immersed herself in the language.Waa, who runs South Canterbury’s Kia Tika te Ara (Correcting the Pathway), said she learnt te reo at a young age.“I was lucky to have an uncle that was adopted into my mother’s family, who was Māori,’’ Waa said.“At the time he was learning of his own culture, and from a young age every school holiday w...

Learning te Reo

Universal College of Learning [UCOL] te reo teacher Mike Kawana said Te Wiki o te Reo Māori helped to normalise usage of the language.“Te Wiki o te Reo Māori helps people to know that there is nothing scary about this language, and it’s a language that is ours – that belongs to Aotearoa,” Kawana said.He said there had been encouraging progress in the past few years, with newsreaders and TV presenters making Māori greetings commonplace.Link to article: Learning te Reo is a persona...

Pēpi steps:

Celebrating a new series of the beloved Reo Pēpi bilingual board books, we have essays from Kitty Brown (Ngāi Tahu) who creates the books with her cousin Kirsten Parkinson, and Helen Steemson, a Pākehā mum determined to share te reo with her Māori son. Kitty Brown Recently, my two-year-old spoke her first words in te reo Māori. I was elated. However, not long afterward her cognitive development surpassed my reo skills. My struggle to keep up with her need for language means she now de...

Demand jumps for job applicants

There has been a big increase in demand for job applicants who speak te reo Māori, showing the language has an economic as well as cultural value, says a researcher.The number of job listings that identified te reo Māori as a requested skill has more than doubled across the country, to 791 for the year to July, up from 324 the year earlier.It’s reassuring for our whānau, because obviously many Māori will go and learn te reo as part of their cultural journey,” said Hinerangi Cur...

My complicated relationship

When I was around five years old, my Māori father asked if I would like to learn to speak his language. I declined.When he asked me why, since I seemed happy enough to speak my Pākehā mother’s tongue, I said that it was because it “sounded funny”.There’s a part of me that knows that it is pointless to feel guilty about something that you said when you were five. But there’s another part of me that wonders how things might have been different for me if I’d been less spooked by the ...

Waikato should join Auckland in level 4

Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern is set to announce this afternoon whether Auckland will move to level 3 from midnight tomorrow, as Cabinet signalled would happen last week.Te Rōpū Whakakaupapa Urutā co-leader Dr Sue Crengle said the group believed Auckland should stay in level 4 beyond tomorrow and Waikato should join it after three cases were confirmed in the Waikato region last night.Ministry of Health said in a statement the new cases are household contacts of a remand prisoner, who was...

Police create te reo app

Sergeant Aroha Morehu is keeping Te Wiki o te reo Māori simple for her fellow people in blue – encouraging them to give the language a go.Morehu kicked Te Wiki o te reo Māori off in Wellington with a Kahoot! quiz on te reo Māori along with a Māori crossword and a waiata.She also encouraged staff to use the police’s own app, Eke Tangaroa, which gives them tips on te reo Māori.Link to article and video: Police create te reo app to make Māori language just a click away...

Getting to grips with the passive voice

Column: In the previous column, on “Basic Grammar Differences”, it was stated that in only transitive verbs take passive suffixes.This is quite true – and with most verbs in te reo, the passive voice is created simply by the addition of a suffix to the active form.But it would probably be better to say “only transitive verbs have passive forms”, because in some cases other slight changes are also made.If the active form of the verb has a doubled first syllable, as in titiro (“to...

How Māori women have reshaped

Early this week, Māni Dunlop, presenter of RNZ’s Midday Report Te Pūrongo o te Poutūtanga, sent out an astonished tweet: “It’s a record whānau (family) – no racist messages or texts on the show … is this what progress looks like!?”It was at once both a gratifying and troubling announcement, which Dunlop said was premature. The very next day, the racists were back. “I did get some pretty horrible messages, but not as bad as usual,” she laughs – a surprising reaction, in...

Auckland woman denied tangi exemption

Aimee Sinclair's calling out the Government for allowing athletes, including four Silver Ferns, to travel around the country while turning down applications from grieving families. "We can't have a rematch on a tangihanga, we can't redo a funeral - you can redo a game," she said. She's "overwhelmed" with the response she's had after posting about her situation on social media from hundreds of Kiwis who've experienced the same pain.Link to video and article: Auckland woman denied tangi exemp...

Te reo Māori and Welsh:

Beaten for speaking the language; shame around speaking it; suppressed and ridiculed by the British. Sound familiar?Welsh is a dead language.This is what I’ve been hearing my entire life.I’ve always been aware of the comparison between my language and te reo Māori. Both, I knew, shared the precarious position of being endangered languages.I was surprised, then, to read this article looking to Wales with admiration for its handling of the language.Growing up, I would never have con...

Paraparaumu College cultural centre

A cultural centre is being built at Paraparaumu College.The idea of a cultural centre had been in the pipeline for at least 10 years before gaining traction recently.Construction of the $1.7 million centre got under way in term two after getting the financial nod from the Ministry of Education.Architecture firm Re-Design created the design, with Crowe Construction undertaking the build.Link to article: Paraparaumu College cultural centre will have strong Māori focus - NZ Herald...

Judge questions value of Mob-led rehab programme

A judge has questioned the value of a controversial Mongrel Mob-led meth rehab programme, when the gang is responsible for most local meth offending, and it’s not approved by Corrections.Judge Russell Collins made the remarks when sentencing Mob member Damian Tipu, 28, in Napier District Court on Thursday.Tipu had sought a discount to his sentence for meth dealing and other offences because he had attended the Kahukura programme run by Mongrel Mob life member Harry Tam’s company H2R Res...

A look back at the history of te reo as Māori language week begins

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Māori significantly more likely to

A new study, published today in the New Zealand Medical Journal, found that no matter the type of surgery, a significant disparity existed.The study, led by Otago University's Jason Gurney (Ngāpuhi, Ngāti Hine), looked at the 3.9 million surgical procedures carried out in New Zealand between 2005 and 2017.Looking at instances where someone died within 30 days of an operation, Dr Gurney said they found one common observation: "No matter where we look, Māori are more likely to die within 3...

Human Rights Commission will stop

The Human Rights Commission (HRC) will stop taking complaints about the use of te reo Māori or the word Pākehā, saying using the official language is not discriminatory.The move comes during Te Wiki o Te Reo Māori 2021, and just a few months after the Broadcasting Standards Authority made the same call.Chief executive Rebecca Elvy said instead, individuals would get a form response to their complaint.Link to article and videos: Human Rights Commission will stop taking complaints ab...