ANCESTRAL COMMS THROUGH ANCESTRAL LANGUAGES

JANUARY 2024 by DANI PICKERING

The first wānanga for the Pākehā stream of the Tīpuna Project was a deeply provocative and moving experience. At it, much of our kōrero was dedicated to what we mean by ancestral “comms”—what encompasses communing with ancestors, what conditions are necessary for that communing to take place, and how that communing might shape us in turn, especially as white settlers whose ancestors [also] did a colonialism, to put it glibly.

Two people from the Pākehā-stream wā speaking to each other. They are standing on a brick patio, next to a strip of native bush. Ordinarily they’d have a stunning view of Tāmaki Makaurau, but a thick cloud enveloped us during the wā, so the white background almost looks Photoshopped.

For me personally, though, the idea of comms with those ancestors is slightly more literal. Like many Pākehā I’m a classic “mongrel” mix of the usual Scottish, Irish, English and Welsh immigrants to Aotearoa from the nineteenth century; however, in recent years I have become particularly animated by my Gaelic ancestors from the Scottish Highlands, one of whom left behind almost two decades of bilingual English and Gàidhlig (Scottish Gaelic) diaries of their time in Aotearoa.

Tha mi air a bhith ag ionnsachadh na Gàidhlig a h-uile latha air ceithir bliadhnaichean a-nis. I’ve now been engaging with Gàidhlig every day for the last four years. To say it has enriched my life is an understatement—it has completely changed how I see and engage with the world, reshaping how I think and understand relations between the human, the ancestral, the more-than-human and the combinations therein.

Amongst other targets, then, our first wā helped me find the words to explain why reclaiming my own endangered heritage language, instead of being another Pākehā bum-on-a-seat in a reo Māori class, has in its own way enabled me to explore what it means to be tangata Tiriti.

A series of carved pou leading up a grassy hill to the Rangiriri Pā Memorial site near Te Kauwhata in Waikato.

To explain what I mean, bear with me as I start off with a bit of linguistic theory. In her 2020 book Māori Philosophy, Georgina Tuari Stewart (Ngāpuhi) ascribes to the “’weak’ Sapir-Whorf hypothesis”, otherwise known as linguistic relativity. While the original hypothesis was that the language(s) you have determine(s) how you think, the “weak” version more commonly accepted today accepts that the languages you have don’t determine how you think but can still meaningfully inform it.

Reclaiming mo chuid Gàidhlig has absolutely come to inform how I think. For a more obvious example, Gàidhlig, like many world languages, has a very different understanding of possession than the hyper-capitalist approach of modern English. While present-day vernacular English tends to flatten possession into things you either “have” or don’t, it very much depends in Gàidhlig; some things are on you (e.g. clothes), at you (e.g. kitchen utensils, pets, husbands), with/alongside you (e.g. brought with you from another place), yours inalienably (e.g. your fingers), and more.

It’s one thing to know that the language structures things in this way—it’s another to live it and use it every day. While opportunities to converse sa Ghàidhlig have been limited in Aotearoa, I’ve nevertheless had enough of them and become conversational enough through them to begin noticing the difference. When I speak Gàidhlig now, it forces me to think about how I relate to everything and everyone else around me more consciously than I ever did as a monolingual English speaker. Is my husband at me or inalienable? Did I bring that blanket with me or to me? Having to consider these things just to follow the grammar of the language has led to broader, more profound realisations about the interrelations of the world around me.

Of course, Gàidhlig is not unique in this respect; many (in fact, most) languages have their own ways of emphasising relational ways of perceiving the world, te reo Māori among them. According to Stewart, whakapapa is of course the Māori expression of those relations, and through this journey I’ve come to understand why ancestry remains such a crucial part of that. By reclaiming mo chuid Gàidhlig, my thought patterns are becoming more closely aligned with those of my ancestors; doing so has thereby made me closer to my ancestors. Every time I speak or even write in Gàidhlig, their presence becomes that much clearer, their past now far more irrevocably part of my present.

I also discovered very quickly, however, that because of this personal connection, learning Gàidhlig was going to be so much more than the intellectual exercises Spanish and Japanese were for me in high school. It has come with emotional and spiritual challenges, challenges whose parallels in the Māori context have been impossible to ignore. Both languages have been ravaged by British colonialism, past and present; the strategies used to marginalise te reo in the 19th and 20th centuries were fine-tuned in the Gàidhealtachd and deployed concurrently in both places. Today, alarmist media reports signal Gàidhlig’s imminent extinction, despite decades of knowledge sharing between revitalisation movements for te reo and the other Celtic languages. Learning a language so severely threatened, when it is integral to your own whakapapa, is heavy shit, which can lead to a deeply personalised sense of futility at the best of times.

So using Gàidhlig reinforces my connection to my ancestors, but also to the historical traumas I have inherited from them (and which we then inflicted on Māori in turn—I’m getting to that). Through this journey I have found stories about my own family’s experiences of the Highland Clearances, wherein Gaels were evicted from our ancestral lands by Anglicised clan-chiefs-turnt-landlords to make room for more profitable uses of those lands.

Myself, beside the stone ruins of a home in the village of Arnish on the isle of Raasay, Scotland. My ancestors were Cleared from Arnish in 1865—25 years after the signing of Te Tiriti o Waitangi in Aotearoa.

While I could dwell on the harm my ancestors endured through the Clearances, it would be dishonest to ignore how the Clearances impacted not only the Scottish present, but Aotearoa’s as well. As I found in my ancestor’s diaries, his own forced separation from his ancestral home in the Gàidhealtachd and subsequent language loss in Anglophone New Zealand contributed to his assimilation into Pākehā whiteness through the Armed Constabulary—and he’s far from the only one enlisted there under a “Mac” surname (the Gaelic word for son).

Because that ancestor was killed five generations ago though, before he could pass any of his Gàidhlig on to his children, I lack the living memory of language loss. I’ve only witnessed it secondhand, in the handful of Gaels and Māori I’ve known whose languages were beaten and/or bullied out of them in schools for well over a century. The wounds are there in my family too, but they’re not quite as fresh.

Moreover, the baggage of reclaiming an endangered heritage language therefore comes into the reo Māori classroom for Māori in ways that it simply doesn’t for Pākehā—even in my case—for the simple reason that the vast majority of us learn te reo in Aotearoa, on whenua Māori. That’s always going to hit different; the chance I had last year to do an immersion short course at Sabhal Mòr Ostaig on Skye, to speak Gàidhlig in the land Gàidhlig comes from, where our own people have struggled for sovereignty and then survival, was a qualitatively different experience for me than it seemed to be for my classmates who lacked that whakapapa connection to the language and place (they were all lovely, but it was a noticeable difference all the same).

A stage in the stone-built Talla-Mhòr (great hall) at Sabhal Mòr Ostaig, the Gaelic college on the Isle of Skye. A neon sign with the letters SABHAL MÒR OSTAIG overlooks the stage.

So after experiencing these smallest of insights into “what it’s like” from multiple standpoints, I’ve realised I’m simply not ready yet to share space with Māori going on their own version of the heritage language reclamation journey. I’m far too aware now of what that journey entails: a conversation with ō tātou tīpuna, a’ toirt a-steach ar sinnsearan Gàidhealach—sa Ghàidhlig. As The Tīpuna Project continues, I’m eager to see where this conversation goes.