Be Good and Be Kind

Carrie: Hi and welcome to the Vocal Fries podcast, the podcast about linguistic discrimination.

Megan: I'm Megan Figueroa.

Carrie: I'm Carrie Gillon. 

Megan: I feel like I sound really excited today. 

Carrie: Good. 

Megan: We just recorded a bonus and we're talking about Halloween, and I get so excited. I love Halloween. 

Carrie: Halloween is so fun.

Megan: It is fun.

Carrie: It's a nice time of year. 

Megan: Yes.

Carrie: Although it's still kind of hot here.

Megan: What? This morning, I almost put my heater on in my car. It was 59 degrees. 

Carrie: I would have too, if I'd been in my car. Not my heater, but my heated seat.

Megan: Yes.

Carrie: I have the oldest car, but it seems fancy for a brief second because it has heated seats.

Megan: The ultimate luxury. 

Carrie: Which is almost unnecessary here, but then in the winter mornings, fall morning sometimes, it's nice. 

Megan: Also, your body just has no sense of what is actually cold or hot anymore when you live here. 

 Carrie: I know. So, speaking of, I was in Boston a couple of weeks ago.

Megan: Boston.

Carrie: It was much colder than here. It was not that bad though. It was normal.

Megan: It was chilly.

Carrie: It was probably warmer than normal weather for Boston in October. 

Megan: Was it rainy? Isn't it a rainy season?

Carrie: It was kind of rainy. It was supposed to rain more than it did, and I was kind of grateful it didn't rain as much as it was supposed to. But it was gray the whole time. I don't think I saw the sun the entire time I was there. And I was like, I'm glad I'm only here for a short period of time, because eventually that would get to me.

Megan: You're in the right place.

Carrie: That's one of the reasons why I'm here. 

Megan: Why you remain.

Carrie: It's not the most important reason, but it's one of the reasons. Like, the weather in many other places is depressing.

Megan: It is. 

Carrie: Anyway. 

Megan: But you were at a conference. 

Carrie: I was at a conference. I was at sound education, which I've talked about before. But I thought we should talk about it. It was a really great experience and honestly, if somehow, we can get you there, if we can both go next year, it'd be really great. So, I had a lot of great experiences with a lot of great people. Basically, almost everyone I met was a genuinely interesting person and with all kinds of cool podcasts and I learned about a bunch of new podcasts. So, for example, one of the ones that I learned about is Yes or BS, which is one of the people runs Haggard Hawks. Which is, he likes to put up really weird esoteric words. And people think he's making them up. Those are real words.

Megan: It's kind of like that board game. Where it gives you the most esoteric word and you give two lies and a real definition. It's like those kinds of words. 

Carrie: It's kind of like that. It's those kinds of words. Except that he only gives you the real definition. 

Megan: Sure. Yeah.

Carrie: But the way that ties in, so Yes or BS, he and this other guy, tell each other stories and the other person has to decide whether they're telling the truth or not. It's so charming and so funny. I don't know. I think people should listen to it. 

Megan: That is almost like the game except with stories instead of word definitions. What game am I thinking of?

Carrie: I know what you're talking about. There's two, Balderdash and there's another one.

Megan: Yeah, Balderdash. 

Carrie: There's another one that's similar that I don't remember the name of, but anyway. It's like Balderdash. 

Megan: That's charming. 

Carrie: It's so fun. But anyway, they weren't even there, but just people there were telling me about that. But I met so many people doing all kinds of amazing things and the panel was really great. So, Gretchen McCulloch from Lingthusiasm, Ray Belli from Words for Granted, Helen Zaltzman from The Illusionist, and then Mark Sundaram was doing the, he was moderating from The Endless Knot. And it was really great to be around, A, so many Canadians. 

Megan: Ah. A? 

Carrie: Like Gretchen and Mark are both Canadian. Plus, Aven, Mark's wife is Canadian. Plus, a bunch of other people who were there were Canadian. It was great to be around so many linguists, and it was just great to be around so many people who really care about education and podcasts. That's the whole point of this podcast is to educate. I was just like, "These are my people."

Megan: That sounds really nice.

Carrie: How can they make this happen in Phoenix? How can I cultivate this kind of experience? I still haven't answered that question for myself, but it was really great. I met some people from PRX, I met people from NPR, I met people from the UK and like all over the place. It was just lovely. 

Megan: That is lovely. And it's nice when people actually care about education. There's a lot of conferences where you're just like around people who only care about that work, like literally the work that they did sitting in front of them and not the actual person or people it might affect. That's just a truth of life. They have different priorities than I do. 

Carrie: One of the talks that I went to is, I cannot remember his name. I apologize, but he's going to be putting out a podcast about the green book, the real green book, and it was so fascinating. 

Megan: Oh, cool.

Carrie: He had all these great pictures and apparently there's going to be even more pictures. So, it's going to be an audio and visual experience. I think there's going to be a book as well. Anyway, he had some really fascinating stories about being on the road and which places were safe and what kind of car you had to have so that you could outrun the cops. 

Megan: That's really cool.

Carrie: Oh, my God! Amazing! I feel like I want to talk about all the things that I learned.

Megan: That's why we listen to podcasts. One of the reasons why I listen to podcasts is to learn. 

Carrie: Yes, absolutely. There's some that are just fun, but mostly it's learning for me. 

Megan: Definitely. I think it's one of the things that makes me the nerdiest. The nerdiest thing about me is how much I like to learn from podcasts. I'm not one of the nerds, like the space episode. I was thinking about the space episode recently, for some reason. I was like, "Man, those three people are such nerds."

Carrie: We are. We really are. I had so many students who would say, "Wow, you're such a nerd," and I'm like, "Yeah, why do you think I'm doing this?" Last night Chris and I watched Castle Rock, the new season. We were watching it, and Chris was like, none of these people really have a Maine accent. I'm like, I don't even know what a Maine accent sounds like. So, then he made me listen to Stephen King, who doesn't really sound super Maine to me. Like, there's nothing really super, like, he sounds very standard American. Then we tried to find other examples, and then when I heard the real examples, I was like, "Oh, well, it's almost like Boston, but not quite." I, kind of was like, a soft Boston. I wasn't, I'm not really sure how to actually describe it. Lisa Davidson will hate me for saying that and say, "What does that mean?"

Megan: I know, I was like, "you can tell that we are not sound people." We are pigs.

Carrie: Honestly, I don't know how to describe it.

Megan: Sorry.

Carrie: It has R-lessness. The non-rotisserie like 'ka'.

Megan: Every time someone says non-rotisserie, I think about rotisserie chickens every time.

Carrie: I know. I don't, but I remember you said that before. But it's true.

Megan: It's how much I don't know about sound, honestly. It hasn't overridden it. It's still rotisserie chicken for me.

Carrie: But I can't remember all the other things. It's kind of Bostonian, but not quite as it just doesn't quite sound exactly the same. That's why I think when actors do try to put it on, they'd end up sounding Bostonian because that's the only target they have. It would certainly be the only target that I would have if I tried to put it on. Wicked Pista[?] is the closest that I can get to it. Not good. 

Megan: Right. I wanted to say that I am so sorry. In the interview that we do, I keep saying Cook's Island instead of Cook Islands, and it's not out of disrespect. It's totally one of those things where podcasting, adrenaline, or like it just was not registering in my mind. So, it happens. I'm sorry. It was also like an emotional episode for me. I had some feelings. It was a really good chat. But yes, so many apologies. 

Carrie: It happens. I know that people will take it the right way that you just, it happens. I don't think anyone would assume you were being an asshole because obviously, that's not the way it comes across. It's not.

Megan: Just a reminder that we weren't professional speakers on microphones before this. It's still getting easier to do interviews and all that. But it's still really an adrenaline rush doing these things. Maybe that's a good thing. It's because it's exciting to talk to new people, and they're teaching me things. A lot of processing is happening when we do [overlapping].

Carrie: Yeah. It is a lot of emotional processing. Because these topics are often, like they're not always, but they're often emotional. Speaking of the episode, there's a lot of mic noise, and I did my best to try and get rid of as much as I could but it's still there. So, I don't want to apologize exactly, because there's really nothing that I could have done about that. 

Megan: Just technology doing its thing, oddly.

Carrie: But I also want to fair warning in case it's like, this is something you just can't deal with. Like, if you have an auditory processing problem that you might not be able to listen, and I apologize in advance for that part. Because I want everyone to be able to listen to this episode.

Megan: I know. Me, too.

Carrie: But I will understand if you just can't. It's not that bad like I cut out a lot of it, but it's still, it could be a problem for some people. Anyway. 

Megan: Can I do a quick advertisement then? 

Carrie: Yes.

Megan: Right there if you would love, just want to show some love and support us on Patreon, we can get closer to our goal of $300 a month, so we can pay someone to do transcriptions. We will get to the transcript of this eventually, or Carrie will. Carrie is such a champion. But we would love to be able to have that resource for you, for classes, for everything just indie podcasts, which we're trying so hard. So, patreon.com/vocalfriespod, if you would like, and enjoy.

Carrie: Dr. Ake Nicholas is a lecturer at Massey University in New Zealand. She does a descriptive and documentary linguist, primarily working on Cook Island Māori. So welcome to the show!

Ake: Kilda!

Carrie: Hi! 

Ake: Hi! 

Carrie: Thank you so much for being here with us! 

Ake: No problem! It's an honor! 

Carrie: I think you're the furthest away so far, I believe, because it's not even the same day. It's like Sunday there, right?

Ake: The closest to the date line. 

Carrie: I didn't realize that. Okay, very cool. 

Ake: It's all imaginary, obviously, because days are pretend, and time is pretend, and et cetera.

Carrie: Exactly. 

Megan: Speaking of pretend, last night I was walking around. We have these first Fridays where there's a bunch of art and stuff and there was this big, huge display, like, so big about Flat Earth. 

Ake: Oh, no. I was like, where is this going? Oh. Yeah. 

Carrie: Yeah. It brings out those kinds of people. Anyway, let's get to it. So, remembering that many of our listeners might not know anything, can you tell us a little bit about Cook Island Māori, and Polynesian languages in general?

Ake: So, if you look at your map, the map of the world, and you look at it so that it's upside down from the northern hemisphere perspective, the part of the world in the very far south and very far east basically, like so the eastern most that you can get if you take that dateline as a real thing, which is mostly water and that's the southern part of the pacific ocean or the southern pacific, out there in the water is part of the world which is being called, partially for linguistic reasons, partially for sort of anthropological reasons, Polynesia.

And that is New Zealand or Aotearoa in the south, all the way up to the Hawaiian archipelago in the north. In the east it goes all the way to Rapa Nui or Easter Island, which is off the coast of Chile in South America. So, it's a very, very, very big part of the world, but it's mostly water. When you look at it from a zoomed-out perspective, all you see is sort of water.

You can sort of, people know about Hawaii, and they know about New Zealand sometimes, but everything that's in the middle, just when you zoom out, looks like water. But there's actually lots and lots and lots of interconnected islands full of people traveling on the water in that area. And that's the part of the world that's called Polynesia.

But the place people are mostly familiar with from the northern hemisphere perspective is Hawaii, of course, which is part of the United States. I'm air quoting that. Tahiti or French Polynesia, which is part of France, and maybe you know about New Zealand or Aotearoa, which is occupied in a little settler government from Britain, just like the United States.

Carrie: Yes. 

Ake: And Canada and Australia and everywhere else. And so, that's the geographical area which is Polynesia. And one of the reasons why that's considered a thing, one of the pieces of evidence for the existence of that is that that matches a language family. So, there's a language family called the Polynesian language family and, there are 30-ish languages inside that family, which are all quite clearly related to each other.

And so that would include Hawaiian, that language, or Māori, the language of New Zealand, and Samoan and Tongan, and then 30 or so other ones, and one of those other ones is Cook Islands Māori, which is from the very, very middle of that triangle. The very, very middle of that empty piece of ocean is the Cook Islands.

Carrie: And are all those languages actively being spoken? Are there any that are endangered?

Ake: That's a little bit complicated. So, most of them that we talk about are still spoken by some people. All of them, you would probably realistically consider to be endangered. There are ones that are no longer spoken, including a couple from, well, one in particular from New Zealand, which is the Moriori language from some islands off the east of New Zealand, which doesn't have any speakers anymore, but we know about it and there are people still who know whose language that is. And there's a few other such, but there's probably,  roughly depending on the whole dialect language problem, 30-ish languages still spoken, but most of them are very menaced by English or French or Spanish in the case of Rapa Nui.

Carrie: It might be confusing to people. Why there's Māori and then Cook Island's Māori. Are they the same, like, are they closer, more closely related than other Polynesian languages? Or is it just kind of an accident that they're named similarly? 

Ake: Yes, to both. 

Carrie: Okay. 

Ake: If you zoom in, into the Polynesian language family, there's, what we call a Subgroup called East Polynesian, which includes, well, actually, it still includes all the ones you probably know about.

So, it still includes Hawaiian, and it includes Rapa Nui, and it includes Māori Aotearoa, New Zealand Māori and the Māori Kūki 'Āirani, the Cook Islands Māori. And in all of those languages, there's a word that's cognate throughout that language family, which in New Zealand and in the Cook Islands both comes out as Māori, which means normal, right?

Carrie: Oh! Fun. Okay.

Ake: When the indigenous people first encountered Europeans, it was the first time they needed to sort of label themselves in any way. And so, they labeled themselves and their language as normal, normal language, you know. So, Reo Māori is ordinary language. 

Carrie: I love that.

Ake: And then the various, whatever English got called or French got called or whatever was called was the other one. Right? 

Megan:  Right. 

Ake: So, that's the similarity for the name. But also, as it happens, Māori Aotearoa, New Zealand Māori, the one usually just called Māori, is the closest relative is probably Cook Islands Māori and the other languages of the southern Society Islands like Tahitian and so on, that they're each other's closest relative. 

So, there's a certain amount of mutual intelligibility between the two of them, meaning the speaker of Cook Islands Māori can understand a bit of what a speaker of New Zealand Māori is saying and vice versa. But as I like to say, it's greatly exaggerated and is enhanced. The more time you've been at the pub talking to each other, like, it's not actually as mutually intelligible as people like to say. There's a lot of shared vocabulary, but that's not enough, as we know. 

Carrie: That's not enough. Yes. 

Ake: There's lots of shared vocabulary between English and German, and that doesn't mean you can understand German if you speak English. 

Megan: Certainly cannot.

Carrie: Yep.

Megan: Don't understand German. 

Carrie: Sometimes I know what they're talking about, but yeah, that's about it.

Megan: Yeah.

Ake: Yeah. So it's a bit like that. Like, usually I say it's a bit more like maybe Spanish/Portuguese. 

Carrie: Okay. 

Ake: Where it's a bit higher than German to English, but it's still not actually mutually intelligible. And it's crooked the way it is with Spanish and Portuguese too. So, a Cook Island Māori speaker will understand New Zealand Māori better than a New Zealand Māori speaker will understand Cook Island Māori.

Carrie: Right, okay. 

Ake: For similar reasons. 

Carrie: Yeah. Which is power. That kind of thing. 

Ake: And a little bit exposure. So, there's some, as is often the case in multilingual context, right, people will claim, "Oh, I can understand language X. I can understand language Y. I can just understand it." when actually what they're describing is their own multilingualism, right?

Carrie: Yeah.

Ake: So, a lot of Cook Islands people have good competence in New Zealand Māori for various historical reasons. So, it's not that they can understand it. It's that they know it, they've learnt it. Yeah. 

Carrie: Yeah, absolutely. And so, what did you grow up speaking? 

Ake: My language background's a bit complicated. So, the dominant home language when I was very, very young was English. At the same time, when I was a very young kid my family moved back to the Cook Islands, and I lived in the Cook Islands and started school there and as a young child. So, I acquired the Rarotongan variety of Cook Islands Māori as an effectively native fashion. 

And then when I was six, the family moved back to New Zealand where I spent the rest of my education in Māori medium education New Zealand Māori. So, I sort of transitioned directly from being at school speaking Cook Islands Māori to at school partially speaking New Zealand Māori and my parents were very involved in the Kōhanga Reo movement that was happening at that time in the sort of mid-eighties. And so, I ended up sort of just having both of those languages in my childhood to level that I'm fairly competent in both of them, which is very lucky.

Carrie: Yeah. So, it's not common, right? It wouldn't be common for someone to have that experience, to have both of those languages. 

Ake: No, not really. And especially not someone of my age because I'm slightly too old to have had my proper education in Māori in the New Zealand context, because the first Kōhanga Reo started in1984. Our local one where we were, was 1985, and I'm a bit older than that, I was already at school by that stage. 

And so, people who are my age are unlikely to have that good luck. The only reason I can speak New Zealand Māori as well as I can is because I had that earlier time in the Cook Islands learning a closely related language and then being at that right age to find that straightforward to learn. So, I'm very fortunate. It was the good choices of my parents that made that happen. 

Megan: Yeah. That's such a good point that you say it that way because it really is just like a flip of the coin or where you are when you learn X language or it's just those choices that really define our [overlapping]

Ake: Yeah, that's exactly right. It's a big message that I try and, you know, I bang on about a lot when I'm talking to young people to get across the message that, it is not your fault that you can't speak your language. It is not because of any choice that you made or anything you could have done that you've grown up in an English dominant context and are more proficient in English than your language. That is nothing that you did that made that happen. You are not responsible for it.

Carrie: Right. Absolutely. So, does that mean then that young people these days, what does their education look like in New Zealand? 

Ake: Which young people? 

Carrie: So, like, elementary, I don't know if that's what you'd call it, like the first time you're going off to school, the youngest young people.

Ake: Yeah, most children go to primary school, your equivalent of elementary school, when they're five years old, and for the majority of children, that's 100 percent English medium instruction. So, the majority of children of all ethnicities in New Zealand are educated in English only with learning language X as a subject.

Most, I actually don't know if it's most, but a lot of New Zealand children who go to school in New Zealand will learn some Māori as a language, as a subject. Yeah, as a language that you learn as a subject. I mean, it's a bit more integrated. The New Zealand education system is pretty good, actually.

Like, it's a bit more integrated than that, but like mostly it's English as the medium of instruction, but there is a parallel education system, which is the Māori medium education system, where you can, there's Preschool, which is the Kōhanga Reo thing which is before you go to school, and then there's kura kaupapa, which is the primary school, elementary school, which is Māori as the medium of instruction. 

And there are a number of secondary schools, high schools which are also Māori mediums. So, there's a possibility to do all of your compulsory CTE education entirely in Māori. And there's also bilingual set ups as well. So, there are schools or parts within schools which are bilingual. So, they have English and Māori in theory 50/50. So, there's those three different options.

I can't off the top of my head know, I think there is some bilingual in Samoan that you can do in New Zealand, and I'm not sure what other languages there are actually happening at the moment. It goes a bit up and down, I think, but that's, yeah. So, you can do your education in English definitely, in Māori definitely, in one place in Samoan, and possibly a few others, but I don't know off the top of my head. Yeah.

Carrie: So, you document Cook Island Māori. What made you decide to do that? Like, what made you decide to work on documentation? 

Ake: When I first sort of started studying linguistics when I was an undergrad and sort of learned that was a thing that happened and simultaneously learned that hadn't happened for Cook Islands Māori, that it was undocumented. There was no grammar and no documentation. I kind of knew that that was probably going to be my job? And I took a while to get to it, but yeah, basically it's sort of, without getting too woo-woo about it?

Carrie: Oh, like it was your destiny. 

Ake: Yeah.

Megan: Your calling. 

Carrie: So there wasn't a grammar available. When you started this. 

Ake: No. So, that's part of what I did for my PhD is I described the grammar. So, now there is. Many people are actually surprised because from the New Zealand perspective, people know, I have heard of that language.

That's a local language. People know about it. And people were often surprised that it hadn't actually been described because New Zealand Māoris had lots of attention. Samoans had quite a bit of attention. Tongan has, even Nguyen, which is a smaller one, the French Polynesian languages and so on. But this Cook Islands Māori had just been missed out in the milieu, which is interesting in and of itself. I can talk about my theories about that if you want to, but yeah, so as it happens, no, it hadn't been. Now it has. 

Carrie: Yeah, no, tell us your theory about why you think it had been neglected. 

Ake: The Cook Islands, politically, is actually technically part of New Zealand. It's complicated sort of constitutional arrangement where the legal entity that is New Zealand is actually something called the realm of New Zealand, and it includes... 

Carrie: Ooh.

Ake: Yes, very sort of imperial. 

Megan: It's like the Dominion of Canada. That's what Canada used to be called.

Ake: New Zealand used to be called the Dominion of New Zealand. It's the same deal. But then once New Zealand got independent from Britain, it decided what it needed to do was get some colonies of its own and it went around grabbing bits of the Pacific, right?

And so, one of the bits it grabbed was the Cook Islands. So, inside the realm of New Zealand is the thing you think of when you think of New Zealand. If you do, the North Island and the South Island, that bit in the South part of Polynesia where most of the people are. But it also includes the Cook Islands.

Niue, which is another island in the western Polynesia, and Tokelau, which is in the northwest, which are three island areas in the central Pacific, which are all technically part of New Zealand. So, everyone who lives there is a New Zealand citizen. They can come and go freely.

In the New Zealand UN, people represent those places and all of that kind of stuff. To an American analogy, it's a similar constitutional arrangement to the Federated States of Micronesia to the United States. It's like that. Because of that, and that happened in the early 20th century in relation to the Cook Islands, and because of that, that means for that whole time, for 150-ish years, well a hundred and so years, people from the Cook Islands have had completely easy in terms of your legal right to travel between the Cook Islands and New Zealand.

So, Cook Island people have been migrating to mainland New Zealand for 50 years longer than Samoan people and Tongan people and other people who live in New Zealand now. And that's given them lots of time to assimilate in two directions. Assimilate to the general sort of colonial cultural norms, but also assimilate to the New Zealand Māori cultural norms because they're buddies, cousins, close relatives, very similar, similar language, similar cultural stuff, get along well, a lot in common.

A lot of Cook Island people who've lived in New Zealand proper for a long time have been integrated into the New Zealand Māori cultural system. And so, that's what they do. And so, it just, sort of, we're very invisible. This is no longer a fact as of the last census. So, I have to stop saying this, but until two weeks ago, I've been saying for the last ten years, Cook Islands people are the second largest Pasifika population in New Zealand, to anywhere I speak in public, and everyone's really surprised because they're not the sort of discourse dominant Pasifika population in New Zealand, like the Samoan and Tongan stories dominate that discourse very strongly.

Actually, until two weeks ago, there were more Cook Island people in New Zealand than there were Tongan people, but people are absolutely really, really surprised when they hear this information, because we're pretty invisible. We're invisibilized by that two directional assimilation. And the recent census data that just came out two weeks ago, the Tongans have surpassed us. So, we're now the third most. 

Carrie: But still, there are so many that the fact that the country's discourse doesn't really talk about you, means that there is like explicit erasure. 

Ake: That's right. Absolutely. Yep. That's a thing. Yep. So, it's resulted in, including in the scholarly world, people just glossed over other linguists before who work in Polynesia or whatever, just like, "Oh, well, that's not an important thing. That's just too similar to New Zealand Māori or whatever, or not of interest." 

Megan: It's amazing the stories we tell ourselves, even as linguists that aren't from the community when you go in that these are dangerous things, I think, if you don't talk to the community and see who's there and what they need. Because things like that, like erasing people, happens.

Ake: Oh yeah, it's a whole big thing. Pasifika aggregate problems. Yep. In New Zealand in particular. 

Megan: So, the university you're at right now is in New Zealand proper? 

Ake: Yeah, so it's in Auckland. 

Megan: Okay. So, the students that you teach there at university, they are shocked when they come into your class and hear this stuff about Cook's Island Māori.

Ake: Yeah, whenever I speak in any public context, I bring it up when I'm talking about the language vitality. It's a factor that I usually would have used to have thrown out. I'm going to have to adjust it now. It's this, did you know shocking fact, and everybody, students, colleagues, people in the community, government workers, everybody is surprised.

The Cook Island people who are politicized and work in public housing, all that kind of stuff, they know because they deploy this as well in their discourse. But everybody else is surprised like a good party trick for anybody and any crowd.

Megan: So, you bring up public housing. Does that mean that, I'm assuming that this is true but correct me if I'm wrong, that there is just on this construct of a social hierarchy then, that people that speak Cook's Island Māori might be lower on the socioeconomic ladder, then?

Ake: Yes. Unfortunately, this is definitely true as is typical in any settler context. The indigenous people are at the bottom of the pile for most of that stuff. And in New Zealand, the indigenous people are Māori, Māori Aotearoa. They're the indigenous people to New Zealand proper. But then there's the Pasifika population, which in New Zealand jargon that means Polynesia people from not New Zealand and also Fijians is basically what that means. 

Or the non-New Zealand to local Pacific people who live in New Zealand, who are diverse population in New Zealand. And they are a sort of, although they're not Tongan te fenua, indigenous to that island, they are indigenous people of that region and all of us know that we're all related to each other and there's an intact kinship, genealogy story between everybody and that there's a strong relationship there between those people.

So, sometimes they get umbrella called broad, indigenous broadly, not indigenous to New Zealand proper, but indigenous people of the region. And of the region that New Zealand, the colonial power is busy interfering with and messing with. And so, to follow on from that, of course, those people are the next worse off in the system. And within that the Cook Island people are the most worse off on most measures, in particular, income, access to education, tertiary education and incarceration.

Carrie: It looks a lot like that in the US as well.

Ake: Well, yeah. Obviously, this is the pattern everywhere in any settler context, right?

Carrie: It's just a different group of people. That's all it is.

Megan: And the invisibility as well. I think, Carrie, you've mentioned it a couple of times. But I've definitely read it when I read native writers, or indigenous writers of the US. They talk about how some people do not know they're still here. I'm like, "What?" The invisibility thing, making people invisible is one of the worst things we can do to other people and it's actually happening in 2019.

Ake: Yeah, it's wild. I mean from the perspective of New Zealand generally, or New Zealand proper, the actual indigenous people are not nice. There's very different from say the States or Canada or Australia, because of the late colonization of New Zealand, it's played out a bit different in terms of, at least on a tokenistic level, the acknowledgement, the indigenous people were human, which didn't really happen in all those other places, but it did happen here. So the Maori language in the Maori culture and the place of Maori people in the role of the Treaty of [inaudible] which is the constitutional document that allows the settler people to live in New Zealand is fairly dominant in the sort of cultural discourse here. I mean, it's controversial amongst racist people and so on, but no one thinks there's no Maori people. That would be possible.

Carrie: That's true in Canada too. Nobody thinks that there are no indigenous people in Canada. At least that is not a thing there. That's why it was so shocking when I moved to the States. I was like, wow, what? Anyway.

Ake: Yeah, well, if you're going to rank the bad places [overlapping]

Carrie: I don't want to do that. So it'll get dark fast. Let's switch to language revitalization because I think that's a more positive thing that we can talk about. What is language revitalization

Ake: Sort of loosely, it's the practice of a community when community whose language has been marginalized in some way doing things together, usually to try and increase the number of speakers and the number of places where that language is spoken. And to encourage the intergenerational transmission, that's when the children learn from their parents or grandparents as opposed to having to learn later in life where it's harder as we know, and that kind of stuff. And any kind of collection of activities where the goal is to try and increase the health, if you will. That's a slightly problematized metaphor, but of that language. And that usually describe people as being involved in language revitalization when there are some speakers and some intergenerational transmission still happening because there's not, we sometimes use words like reclamation or other stuff, other words like that. Yeah. And this is happening all over the world in lots of places where there's a community whose language has been marginalized and it can apply not just to indigenous language context, but to other kinds of language communities, migrant communities and places or various kinds of things.

Carrie: You talk about the importance of teachers in language revitalization. So can you explain to our listeners what you mean by that?

Ake: It's a widely expressed idea that language maintenance or language should be looked after in the home, right? This is presumably an idea you've come across and that the best place for children to learn language is in the home and all that kind of stuff. And that is all technically true. But what are you supposed to do if your adults in your household don't have that language, which is the norm in our context, at least than in many other people's context. So most Cook Island kids in New Zealand have parents who don't speak and probably have grandparents who don't speak. Our preschool age children now probably have grandparents who are not speakers, let alone parents who are not speakers. So households, families like that don't have the tools, don't have the capacity to solve that problem themselves. And furthermore, I don't like that discourse because I think it's a individualizing solve your own problem kind of narrative as well. It's that you look after your kids. It's not the collective's responsibility to look after language, it's your personal individual household's problem. And that's not practical, especially in a hugely hegemonic linguistic context. Like any place that has English as the dominant language, we know you are worse off than other contexts where there's a all sort of imposed languages do bad stuff to local languages. But English seems to be much more powerful in the bad stuff. It does. I'm not making this up. You can look it up. It's true.

Carrie: Absolutely.

Megan: No, it's true.

Ake: And to ask vulnerable families who are vulnerable in lots of ways, economically, vulnerable, et cetera, et cetera, to take responsibility for that is immoral, in my opinion. So the place we need to focus that action is schools, because all our children go to school is generally true in New Zealand. All our children go to school and the people who have the most capacity to do action the educational infrastructure is there. We should be focusing on the educational infrastructure to help with that problem rather than outsourcing that to under-resourced families, put it into the relatively well-resourced thing of the education system and do it there. And there's evidence also that, and we get this from the Maori stuff and for Wales and other places like that, that if children are educated in the target non-majority language, so in New Zealand for example, if you have Maori medium education in the English hegemonic context, you are more likely to transfer that language to your children when you have children.

The theory it's about a prestige and about normalization and things like that. So if you are educated and you learn your maths and science and history in your target language, then you are more likely to pass on that language to your children and they are more likely to go through the education system and maintain that thing. There's a little trick in our systems and our culture where we've put all our children into school and we capture them. And that's such an important part of their entire childhood identity is in school. That's the place where we can do it. We can't suddenly make all these parents learn the language. That's impossible. But we can inject that capacity into the teachers who are getting all the kids.

Megan: And then so does that mean there are teachers that are also speakers of the language? Does that mean that there are a lot of teachers that do speak Cook Island Maori?

Ake: No, unfortunately. So that's the next problem down. So in New Zealand proper, where most of our children are like 90% of our Cook Islands children are in New Zealand proper, not in the home islands. There's very limited capacity and opportunity for them to have Cook Islands Maori speaking teachers. There's also, and when we're talking about Cook Islands Maori, there's a policy barrier because it's not straightforward in New Zealand to make a case to teach in a language other than English or Maori. There's protection for English and Maori, but it's difficult for other languages. And that's a political problem that people are trying to deal with or have been for the last 20 years. That's not straightforward in the New Zealand context, but I have a thing that I'm involved in with the University of the South Pacific, which is a university where the head offices in Fiji, and they have campuses at various other places in the Pacific like Vanis[?] and PNG and the Cook Islands.

There's a program that they've set up in the last few years called Diploma in Pacific vernacular languages, whatever it is your language. I'm involved in the one which is brackets, cook Islands, Maori. And we are targeting as students teachers based in the islands and public servants based over there who are speakers. So we're not teaching them language, we're teaching them the linguistics of the language and language teaching. We've got a cohort of 20 who are halfway through and we are getting another one this coming January of people who, they're based mostly in the islands, but we're sort of in a long game sort of thing. If these teachers who all have their 30 kids for every year for their whole careers or whatever are upskilled in this way and can integrate more Maori as the media of instruction into their classrooms, then that might long term produce capacity that of the people who come to New Zealand who could carry on doing that thing.

Megan: That's fantastic.

Ake: A lot of hope there. It depends on all kinds of things, but so far it's going really well.

Megan: Yeah. Did you say that was the last 20 years this has been happening, this program that you're a part of?

Ake: No, it's been happening since 2017.

Megan: Oh, it's very new.

Ake: Yeah. What I said about 20 years was education, people in New Zealand trying to lobby to make it more straightforward to teach in your community language in a school in New Zealand, which is, there's policy barriers against it. So it can get confused when I jump from New Zealand context to Cook Island context, which are separate and also not separate it. It's messy. Yeah,

Carrie: Right. it's definitely complicated.

Megan: But does that mean that New Zealand, the Dominion? No, that's not, what is it? The realm of New Zealand is being more supportive when it comes to policies towards being able to teach your own language in the last 20 years there's been more support.

Ake: No, there's kind of been less and that's why.

Megan: Oh, so it's going up.

Ake: It's been a problem. Yeah.

Carrie: Okay. Why do you think it's been less?

Ake: Because there was a right-wing government for 10 years in the early, 2008 onwards, and they put in the education policy document that the language of instruction had to be English unless you were in a Maori medium school.

Megan: Yeah, sure. God dammit.

Carrie: That would've been my guess, I'm guessing. Yeah, that's how it plays out here too. Does New Zealand have enough official language? Do you have to wrestle with that kind of those definitions?

Ake: New Zealand has two official languages. They are Maori and New Zealand sign language.

Carrie: Oh, interesting.

Ake: Yes. We were the first place in the world to make a sign language and official language of the country. And English is the defacto for sure and has no legal status, but because it's so

Carrie: Ubiquitous, yeah.

Ake: Yes. It just doesn't matter. It doesn't need looking after. But yeah, so Maori is an official language as is sign language, but the protections that gives you are pretty limited. What that means is you have the right to do legal processes in that language. So if you go to court, you have a right to conduct your business in Maori or NZSL and a few other limited context. It isn't a broad, the rights that comes along with the legal rights that comes along with are fairly limited. It's mostly a symbolic sort of thing.

Carrie: Yeah. It just goes to show that official language thing only matters if it comes with certain powers anyway.

Ake: Yeah, I mean, I don't think it's worthless. I certainly think it's been positive.

Carrie: Yeah, I mean, symbolically, it's great.

Ake: Yeah, I think it's been particularly positive with the NZDSL, which has seen quite a big, I don't quote what the word is, but a lot of people interested in NZDL these days. It's a different sign. Interpreters all important stuff. It's made it much, what's the word? Increased, I'm losing my English word.

Megan: Like visibility?

Ake: Yeah, visibility. Significantly because of, not in part because of that political move.

Megan: And was that move a right wing? I mean, not right wing move, left wing move.

Ake: I can't remember who did that. It probably was the Clark government, I think, but I can't exactly remember.

Megan: Which one was the Clark government?

Ake: So we've got Damania[?] now. You may have heard of her.

Carrie: Yes.

Megan: Yeah. Wow. Wait, she's the one that outlawed guns right away?

Ake: Yeah. Her name's Jacinda Ardern, and she's the current prime minister of New Zealand. I call her Jacinda Damania[?] because to make fun of everything. But before this current government, we had a right wing government for about 10 years, and then before that we had a centre left government, which is the one I called the Clark, and that's Helen Clark. After she was the prime minister of New Zealand, she was the head of the UN development something, got a flash job in the UN after that. It was probably her who did that, but I can't exactly remember.

Carrie: Yeah, it would make sense. That would be the one before the rightwing one.

Megan: Rolling back protections. Has there been any moves with this new government, with any of the language policy?

Ake: Well, no. It's been disappointingly slow, in my opinion. They started off with this big thing, which is really soon after she got elected, she toured around the Pacific and said, Pacific Reset, we're going to apologize for all the bad things we've done and we're going to change, make our relationship better and more respectful and blah, blah, blah. And there's a lot of big talk about various facets of life that they were going to be doing a better job with and language didn't come up at all.

Carrie: It didn't even come up. Oh my God.

Ake: No. No. It wasn't even mentioned at all.

Carrie: Oh, that hurts me so much. Yeah. Wow.

Megan: Yeah, it does not surprise me.

Carrie: No, I guess it shouldn't really surprise me. I mean, thinking of the Canadian context, there's a lot of lip service, but then when it comes to paying for language stuff.

Ake: Yeah, exactly. Right.

Carrie: Yeah.

Ake: Having a conversation with my boss about this recently, he was like, just because it's not in there doesn't mean we can't pitch this argument to them if we're trying to come after money for it. Which is true.

Carrie: Oh, it's true. But it's still hard. It makes it harder.

Megan: And those seem to be the things that they take away language rights quietly in the middle of the night because no one makes, I just feel like so many people in power have never had their language questioned, so they don't even think of it as a thing.

Carrie: Oh no. They think of it as a thing. It's on purpose. It's not ignorance. They want to destroy the other languages.

Megan: That's true. You're right. I , yeah, I guess there could be both. There could be the people that are really racist, English only, and then there are people that are like, wait, why do you care about language kind of thing

Carrie: But those people aren't usually actively destroying. They just don't want to make it better.

Megan: Except both are bad.

Carrie: They're both bad.

Megan: Yeah, exactly. No, it's so true. It's violence. It's definitely violence against people.

Ake: Harms people's overall wellbeing in a very significant way.

Megan: Absolutely.

Carrie: And that's why I loved how you talked about how it was just luck and the luck of the draw of what languages you learned, the languages I learned and didn't learn. When you speak to maybe the children or the parents that are sad that they didn't learn language, is that how you talk to them?

Ake: Oh yeah. I really make a point of it because, I think you know about this, it's a burden. It's a psychological burden on people who are from a minorities language community who are adults or teenagers or whatever, who are aware that there's a problem with it. That the language is threatened, aware that it's important to try and revitalize insecure with their own capacity, that that's a really heavy psychological slash spiritual burden that people go around with. And you see this difference between people trying to learn their heritage language and outsiders learning it for fun.

I've taught Maori and university to big classes for a few years where 70% of the students are Maori and with varying degrees of prior knowledge. And then the rest are various Toi [?], which is the Maori word for people who aren't Maori. There's always a bunch of real nice and hardworking and good at university learning process. Fuck our kids, white kids who do really, really well and have this great blossoming experience. Oh, this is so wonderful. I love this language. It's very, makes me feel good to have learned it and et cetera, et cetera. And it's all very wonderful. And then we have this big bunch of people who own the language, the actual people whose language it is struggling and feeling stressed out and having all kinds of barriers come to their learning process, some of which are the obvious material ones about being a materially marginalized person, but some of them are psychological slash spiritual where it's the pressure of having that responsibility on your shoulders is like, it is my job to revitalize this language.

I have to learn this language so I can teach this language to my children that I haven't had yet. It is ultimately important and I have to do it. And it's the most grievous responsibility that I can't ever throw off. And that is a difficult thing to walk around with that is really stressful. And so I have quite a big thing about trying to reframe that a little bit for people who are suffering from that experience, which is everybody. And it's me. I feel that I'm a good speaker of both those languages. And I sometimes lose it with self-doubt about not being good enough and not doing a good enough job and all of that kind of stuff.

Megan: And this is very intergenerational too. So if your parents don't speak it, they may pass on that shame to you. And so you're getting your parents shame too. And then that's why you think about the kids you haven't even had, you're like all of a sudden all this pressure to teach these kids. You don't have to speak the language. It's really stressful. I'm glad to hear that program that you're doing since 2017. What's it called again?

Ake: It's got a cumbersome name. So diploma and Pacific vernacular language brackets, cook Islands, Maori. It's from the University of the South Pacific is a great institution. It's cool. And the linguistics department is great. They're doing all kinds of great things.

Carrie: So I have a slightly different question. So when we talked to my friend who's [inaudible] or Navajo, she had this interesting description of a different way of conceiving of the world through her language versus English. Is there something similar for you in Cook Islands, Maori?

Ake: An expression that sometimes gets used to describe all the Polynesian people, all the East Pacific people is something like [inaudible], like the people of the ocean. There's an interesting difference between how most Western people consider the physical world compared to how we consider the physical world, where we consider the ocean to be part of where we live. There's a famous article that our sea of violence thing with famous tone and anthropologist who talks about it, which is the Western people, the white people come in and they see this empty ocean. It's just water. It's just water. It's just water. And there's small islands in it, right? It's just all these small, tiny islands. But the way we see it is, this is our whole place where we live is this entire big ocean and we can go between all the islands in it and we know each other and we live in this place, the ocean, we live in the [?], that's where we live.

Megan: And it gives you food, right? It gives you sustenance.

Ake: That's right. Everything. And this came up sort of significantly in, there was a colonial scandal that happened during the Clark regime actually in New Zealand, where due to a bit of a, it's a long story. You can Google it, the for sure. And Seabed drama. We're in a panic about the sort of restitution process that happens in New Zealand. The government at the time passed a law which sort of immediately confiscated, which is the word we use here, or stole the entire what's called the foreshore and seabed off the indigenous people. And it was something entire high tide and blah, blah, blah. It's the bit where you go and collect your food from when you're walking, not paddling. And they just sort of blanketly confiscated it off everybody. It was complicated. There's probably no time to get into it now, but one of the things that came up in that conversation is how can you chop that part off, that part's not separate like land that's under the sea and the sea is still part of our land. You can't just say that's not part of where we are and where we live. And it's still absolutely part of our traditional areas and all of that kind of stuff. Because the European concept was like, it's the sea. There be dragons. We don't go there. And it's separate from the dirt that those are separate places and therefore able to be chopped in that way. Whereas we don't see it that way in our conception of what the world's made of. Right?

Megan: Is that cleared up though? Did you get that land back?

Ake: No, no. That's not clear. Oh, it's not.

Megan: Why would it be? I'm just kidding. It's a good question.

Ake: No, it's still really bad.

Megan: How would you say don't be an asshole in Cooks Island Maori?

Carrie: Oh, that's a good question.

Ake: I've tried to prep for this. I've tried to prep for this because I knew this was a thing that you were going to ask me. And I've got a bit stuff, two languages that I know well from East Polynesia. Bad words, insults can vary quite a lot between whether they're really, really bad or whether they mean, oh yeah, actually you are pretty cool. So in [inaudible] Maori you might say something like [inaudible], which is you're a pig, literally the animal, which could mean you're being a fucking asshole. Or it could mean you are doing really well at sport, or you're very charming.

Megan: Love it.

Carrie: The two ends of the spectrum for me, those are the things you could be good at sports or being a fucking asshole. Funny. So that's Cook's Island Maori.

Ake: Yeah, that's a Cook Island Maori expression. There's various colorful things in New Zealand Maori, which cover that kind of range, but it gets a bit tricky. So it's probably easier if you were trying to get that message across to actually do it positively and say, kiamarukwe[?] be good and kind, which is more clear.

Carrie: I accept that. Let's do that.

Megan: I love that.

Carrie: For this episode. We will end that way.

Megan: Yes. Be good and be kind. I really like that.

Carrie: That's what we're all just trying to do, right? Accept the asshole [overlapping] I know I wish it were what we were all trying to do.

Megan: So before you go, is there one last thing you want to leave our listeners with?

Ake: Well, let's go back to that message that we touched on quite a bit, right? It's not your fault you didn't learn your language.

Carrie: I like that. Yeah.

Megan: It makes me want to cry.

Ake: Well, it's a heavy emotional thing, right? If that's your story is full on. It's overwhelming.

Megan: Well, especially when people for so long have told you it is your fault.

Carrie: At least implicitly.

Megan: Implicitly, yeah. Maybe through tests that you didn't pass or you couldn't answer that person, you're being reminded over and over again. It's your fault. At least that's how it's been internalized.

Ake: That's right. Absolutely. And it sucks.

Megan: It sucks.

Carrie: It does suck.

Megan: Yeah.

Carrie: Okay. Well thank you so much for coming on. We live our listeners this time. Be good and be kind. The Vocal Fries podcast is produced by me, Carrie Gillen for Halftone Audio theme, music by Nick Gran. You can find us on Tumblr, Twitter, Facebook and Instagram at vocal fries pod. You can email us at [email protected] and our website is vocalfriespod.com.



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