Graham Adams: Are Pakeha really the bad guys in the demise of te reo?

To mark the beginning of Māori Language Week, veteran journalist Janet Wilson began a Listener magazine story: “It’s the language that refuses to die, despite efforts across generations to kill it.”

There was no explanation in the succeeding six pages of what the writer meant by her opening statement — no doubt because, in the long-running and simplistic morality play staged everywhere in our media, the protagonists and antagonists need no introduction. It is, according to received wisdom, the malign machinations of Pakeha that suppressed te reo Maori “across generations”.