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National

Te Ataakura Pewhairangi launches bilingual book for tamariki

A board book for tamariki called, Kei te aha ngā kararehe? What are the animals doing?' has just been published, to help children tell new stories about animals using both Te Reo Pākehā and Te Reo Māori.

The author and a Te Reo Māori advocate, Te Ataakura Pewhairangi, was brought up with Te Reo Māori as her first language at home and at kura and did not start to learn English until she turned 13.

She says she now feels a responsibility as a fluent native speaker and writer to further promote Te Reo Māori.

“Everything I do is in the realm of tamariki and constantly I've got young tamariki in my ear asking 100 million questions as tamariki do and so, that was one of the inspirations around this pukapuka, ensuring that we as Reo Māori speakers are developing good-quality resources for not only for our tamariki Māori but also for tamariki and whānau across Aotearoa”

Pewhairangi says the inspiration for her book came from a set of questions that encourages parents and caregivers to talk to their children.

“So the title of a book is a pātai,  a question. And I think that reflects the curiosity of our tamariki. And so that was the theme that I wanted to use in this pukapuka, the different pātai or questions our tamariki ask us.”

Practises on tamariki

Pewhairangi points out that there are fewer Māori books in libraries than English books, and she hopes to see many high-quality resources in libraries for tamariki around the country in future.

“I'm 27 years old now and back then, as both my parents were educators, we had little white sticky notes, stuck on to English pukapuka with a translation on them,

"We're not having to do that as often anymore as good-quality pukapuka become more and more popular with Kōtahi Rau Pukapuka [an organisation aiming to translate and publish 100 books in te reo Maori] also a thing at the moment. So you know we are definitely heading in the right direction in terms of getting more good-quality pukapuka for whānau and for tamariki.”

“There's no better critic than your own so I practise on both my tamariki, who don't have animals at home, and I find them to be the hardest because they pick up on everything and they'll tell you, boring or dumb.”

Pewhairang is well-known for taking her degree entirely in Te Reo Māori.

Lockdown resource

“It's always been my mission to ensure those with Te Reo Maori can use their native tongue and in places like tertiary education we said should be given the ability to practise in our native language. My mission back then was to challenge the university, to challenge the system to ensure we have access, that Māori have access to practice their reo, should they want to, and that was what I wanted to do back then.”

She is also a co-founder of 'Kura mō ngā mokopuna,' a website created during lockdown last year to give an online Māori language teaching resource.

"That just blew up in 24 hours. That kaupapa was put together to ensure we still had that community base. With the Covid-19 lockdown, we all experienced that, we were all in our own bubble away from that collective, communal lifestyle.
"It takes a village to raise our tamariki and so, all of a sudden, we were taken away from our villages and we wanted to create something for our tamariki and whānau to ensure we still had that engagement going."