The name Pākehā puts me in a unique category, a Kiwi, a partner in this bicultural (and now multicultural) experiment that we all belong to. Only people connected to our motu can use this name.
It's Māori Language Week soon, a time for us to celebrate the only thing that is truly unique about Aotearoa, our first people. Te reo was a dying language, beaten out of its native speakers, only whispered on decaying marae in the backblocks of our land.
But for a plethora of reasons, it is now gaining acceptance as the taonga it has always been. Some will argue we should be investing our resources into learning languages that will help us develop international relationships. They are right, this is the Chinese and Indian century, we should all be learning to connect to the most spoken first languages on this planet.
Yet it's more important as a nation that we connect to ourselves first, to know who we are so we can decide what we want to be. Learning te reo and by extension te ao Māori is a window into the challenges many iwi face, due to the deep cultural conflict between what flows through the DNA of tangata whenua compared with that of the people who have been running this country for almost 200 years. Only by showing manaakitanga and understanding to all Kiwis can we together achieve our potential as a land of peace and prosperity.
Sometimes I get asked why I don't use a translation when dropping te reo into this column, it's a fair question. One reason is I have only a limited word count available and te reo does not always translate word for word into English. But the more important one is, I feel it is the responsibility of all of us who live here to hungrily seek out the answers ourselves.
It may just be a few words, but we are slowly cleaning the glass of the window into our soul. Tīhei mauri ora!
Dave Mollard is a Palmerston North community worker and social commentator.
