June 23, 2013
Te Reo ō Taranaki building archive whare
An award-winning organisation dedicated to reviving Te Reo Māori in Taranaki is setting up a tribal archive.
Te Reo ō Taranaki was last week named Tangata Whenua in the Adult and Provider of the Year Community Education Aotearoa annual awards.
Chairwoman Puna Wano-Bryant says as part of its new headquarters on the Western Institute of Technology’s New Plymouth campus, it is building a whare tāonga.
It means people can find resource material there rather than having to travel to the national archives in Wellington.
"We want it to be a living community resource but it is literally an archive, it has to be safe, in terms of the heating, that if there are photos in there the quality is preserved over time, and we're in touch with all our Māori land incorporations so we can get copies of documents, so minutes of meetings from the 1940s and 50s of our tupuna koroua talking about how to deal with our whenua," Ms Wano-Bryant says.
Te Reo ō Taranaki believes it is important that language revival goes hand in hand with community development.
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