Every morning, Ramari Maipi begins the day by sharing the maramataka with friends and relations — a simple daily act carrying with it a lifetime of commitment to te ao Māori, whakapapa and the survival of te reo Māori.
For Ramari, the maramataka is more than information about the Māori lunar calendar. It is another way of keeping mātauranga Māori alive, sharing knowledge between generations and ensuring tikanga remains part of everyday life.
Her story is also intertwined with one of the defining periods of the Māori language revitalisation movement.
Ramari is the sister of Hana Te Hemara, one of the leading figures behind the 1972 Māori Language Petition, and was herself part of Ngā Tamatoa alongside her husband, Timi Maipi.
More than half a century later, however, Ramari’s relationship with te reo remains deeply personal.
Despite years of struggle and determination to learn the language, becoming a fluent reo speaker remains a dream for her.
But that dream has also taken another form.
Her children and mokopuna speak te reo Māori.
A generation that refused to let the language disappear
Ngā Tamatoa emerged during a period when generations of Māori had experienced the consequences of assimilation and the decline of te reo Māori.
The movement challenged the Crown and wider New Zealand society over racism, land, culture and language, helping force Māori issues into the national consciousness.
The Māori Language Petition became one of the movement’s defining moments.
Presented to Parliament in September 1972, it carried more than 30,000 signatures calling for te reo Māori to be taught in schools.
Hana Te Hemara was central to that kaupapa.
Ramari’s own involvement with Ngā Tamatoa places her within the same generation of Māori activists who fought to ensure the language inherited by their tūpuna would not disappear on their watch.
Their activism helped create foundations upon which later generations would build kōhanga reo, kura kaupapa Māori, Māori broadcasting, wānanga and a much wider revitalisation of te reo.
The personal cost of language loss
But the history of language revitalisation is not simply the history of protests, petitions and political victories.
It is also the history of individual Māori who wanted to speak their own language but found that the intergenerational transmission of te reo had already been disrupted.
For many Māori of Ramari’s generation, learning te reo as adults required reclaiming something that should never have been taken away in the first place.
That journey can take decades.
And it means the success of Māori language revitalisation cannot always be measured by whether the generation that began the fight ultimately achieved fluency themselves.
Sometimes the victory is found in the generations who came next.
Her children and mokopuna carry the reo
That is what makes Ramari’s story particularly powerful.
The dream she has spent years pursuing can now be heard in the voices of her own children and mokopuna.
Where one generation struggled to reclaim the language, another has been able to grow up speaking it.
That is intergenerational language revitalisation in its most personal form.
It also demonstrates why the fight for te reo Māori was never simply about individual language learning.
The bigger ambition was to restore the language within whānau, homes and communities so future generations would not have to begin the same journey from scratch.
For Ramari, having tamariki and mokopuna who speak te reo represents part of the outcome that activists such as Ngā Tamatoa fought for more than 50 years ago.
Maramataka as a living practice
Her daily maramataka carries that commitment into the present.
Maramataka Māori draws on generations of observation of the moon, environment, seasons and natural world.
Its contemporary revival is part of a wider resurgence of mātauranga Māori across Aotearoa.
By sharing it every morning, Ramari is doing something characteristic of the movement she has been part of for decades — taking Māori knowledge and making sure it continues to circulate among Māori.
It does not need a protest march.
It does not need a petition.
Sometimes revitalisation happens through the everyday act of one person sending mātauranga to their whānau and friends before the day begins.
From protest to regeneration
The Māori language landscape today is profoundly different from the one Ngā Tamatoa confronted.
Te reo Māori is an official language.
It can be heard across broadcasting, schools, universities, workplaces, government agencies and public life.
Thousands of tamariki are learning through Māori-medium education, while new generations of speakers are raising their own children with the reo.
But the revitalisation is unfinished.
Many whānau continue trying to reconnect with a language interrupted generations earlier, and access to quality Māori-language education and fluent speakers remains uneven.
That makes stories such as Ramari’s important.
They remind Aotearoa that today’s growth in te reo did not happen by accident.
It came from people who organised, protested, petitioned, taught, learned and refused to accept that the decline of the language was inevitable.
A dream measured in generations
More than 50 years after Ngā Tamatoa helped force te reo Māori onto the national political agenda, Ramari Maipi continues her own journey.
She may still describe speaking te reo as a dream.
But around her, part of that dream has already become reality.
Her children speak it.
Her mokopuna speak it.
And every morning she continues sharing the maramataka, passing mātauranga forward in another form.
For a generation that fought against the possibility of te reo Māori disappearing, perhaps there is no greater measure of success than hearing the language living confidently in the generations that followed.
The struggle was never only about becoming speakers themselves. It was about making sure their mokopuna could be.
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