He Huia Kaimanawa / Canada

We are still finding our way back to our language.

That journey may never really be finished.

It is a story of what was interrupted, what was nearly lost, and what we are choosing to reclaim.

Reclamation is not about arriving. It is about continuing to return.

02 / Ours was taken at school

In 1867 a law made English the language of our classrooms.

Children were strapped for speaking Māori in the playground.

Our grandparents decided not to pass it on. It must have felt sensible at the time.

We are the ones who came after that decision.

03 / Finding its way back

At night, after work.
After the kids are fed.
After the day has already taken what it takes.

We sit in classrooms and begin again.

One word at a time.
Mistakes made out loud.
Sentences started, lost, tried again.

Learning with our children the language our grandparents were made to put down. Trying to be the generation it changes with.

There is no quick way back.

Only a generation choosing,
night after night,
to keep returning.

We went and read for a while first, to find out whether this work would mean anything here.

Or whether we would just be a company from a long way away with a show.

65,680: people speaking an Indigenous language they did not grow up in
27.7%: of all Indigenous-language speakers learning it as a second language
A third more: speakers of Haisla, Halkomelem, Heiltsuk and Michif between 2016 and 2021

2021 Census

Sixty-five thousand people in the same position as the people on our stage.

Not the history books. The smaller losses. The ones that live inside families.

A grandmother carrying words her grandchild cannot answer.

An adult learning from a child what should have travelled easily between generations.

The pause after someone reaches for a word and cannot find it.

The embarrassment of trying.
The grief of not knowing.
The courage it takes to keep speaking anyway.

These things may have happened differently here. But we may recognise the feeling.

The distance language loss creates between generations, and the long, imperfect work of closing it again.

Time together.

Our learners with yours. People who know what it is to search for a word,
to make mistakes,
to keep going.

No audience.
No presentation.
Nothing to prove.

Time for our kaumātua to sit with the people she should be sitting with.

And enough space around all of it for the conversations that cannot be scheduled.

Seven people on stage, learning the language they are performing in.

We have only read about how any of this sits here, and reading isn’t the same thing.

If we have some of it wrong, we would rather know. Write back and tell us.