What it feels like to have your reo beaten out of you

This story is part of Te Wiki o te Reo Māori. Check out the rest of the stories here. 

“When you are caned and whipped for speaking Māori, it’s virtually impossible to really share the feelings that you get fifty, sixty years later.” – Hon. Dover Samuels, Former Native School Pupil

Whenever teachers corporally punished children, they had to record the name of the child being punished as well as why they were punished. While there are masses of anecdotal evidence from kaumatua who went through the native schools at the time (including Sir James Henare), after extensive research by the likes Professor Linda Tuhiwai Smith, no one has ever been able to find a record of children being punished for speaking Māori. This suggests that it was an unofficial policy.

Former native school pupils Nanny Kaa Williams and Matua Dover Samuels describe what it was like to be punished for speaking te reo Māori as children. 

This is a clip from a new documentary from Hi Mama Productions called Speak no Māori, available from September 13 on TVNZ+. 

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