Tainui kaumatua go back to school

Dr Tui Adams wants tribal knowledge passed on. Photo / Sarah Ivey

His hair is grey and he speaks in the calm, measured tones of a storyteller, but 66-year-old Bunny Tumai still considers himself one of the "babies" of his class.

Mr Tumai, of Rangiriri, north of Huntly, is one of several dozen Tainui kaumatua ranging in age from their early 50s to their late 80s who have gone back to school at a Te Wananga o Aotearoa programme in Hamilton.

"We have several people here over 70 and a few over 80, so I guess I sneak in as one of the younger ones," said Mr Tumai.

Like everyone else in the class Mr Tumai attends three days a week, the former soldier - who served two tours of duty in Vietnam in the 1960s - is a fluent speaker of te reo Maori.

The entire class are part of a dwindling generation whose everyday language was punished severely, not only in the classroom but elsewhere.

"You could go to shops in Huntly in the 1950s and the shopkeepers would say to you, 'Don't you bloody speak like that in here.' Eventually we didn't.

"We were forced to comply with a new society and we had to learn English - at the expense of what? The expense of our tikanga [customs] and our Maoritanga."

Asked why a native speaker of te reo needed to go back to school to learn more about his heritage, Mr Tumai said it was a part of upholding the declining traditions at marae throughout the Tainui area.

"It became noticeable over time that our speakers within Tainui were not necessarily of the calibre that we would have liked and there were things being said on the paepae [the part of the marae where speeches are made from] that some of our speakers were completely ignorant of.

"Secondly, there was no comprehensive study of the Kingitanga [Maori King Movement] history. So something had to be done."

The result was Te Arataki Manu Korero o Tainui, instigated by Te Wananga o Aotearoa in 2003.

The programme, which can go to bachelors degree level in collaboration with Te Wananga o Raukawa, was set up to ensure the continuity of Tainui traditions and identity with a specific focus on kaumatua - the traditional repositories of Maori knowledge.

Its co-creator, Dr Tui Adams, said the programme became "critical" when orators started becoming repetitive and the tribe's learned elders died without passing their knowledge on to the next generations.