It took living on the other side of the world to trigger his desire to learn the language originating from his home country.
He recalls: “I was sitting on a beach with a couple of South African mates. We were talking in English but when they were talking to each other, they would switch to Afrikaans, and I remember thinking how people from different countries living overseas bring their language with them and how cool it was that those two dudes spoke to each other in Afrikaans. I thought, ‘Why can’t I do that?’ because I felt like we should be able to.”
He was already bilingual with French, which he’d taken throughout high school before embarking on a Bachelor of Arts studies at Waikato University.
This included an introduction to linguistics, where he revisited his French, leading him to journey to France during the third year to enhance his studies.
However, what was intended to be a brief stint became eight years after the birth of his son San, and Braden continued to live in France with two years in London.
His father’s terminal illness brought him home, where he finally completed the last two university papers, obtaining a Bachelor of Arts degree with a double major in linguistics and French.
However, the beach-based epiphany was the catalyst for his te reo journey, and a further two-year Master of Arts degree ensued with a focus on language revitalisation, while also attending Te Wānanga o Aotearoa for four years.
“The trouble was, I spent so much time studying, I thought, ‘Why am I doing it if I can’t pass the knowledge on?” recalls Braden, 43.
Nia and Carson are in full-immersion Māori classes.
He completed an additional year, obtaining a Graduate Diploma in Teaching, and soon got a job as a French teacher at a large Waikato school.
Learning his native country’s language differed hugely from learning French.
“I was s*** at learning French at high school and I’m a French teacher.
I tell my students that. I was terrible and, even when I went to university, I was terrible … I had all the bones of the language, I just hadn’t managed to put them into place.
“Then when I got to France, within about two months, I got to a level of fluency very quickly because you have all those things up there in your brain, you just haven’t really put them all together.
“Then when I came back and was learning Māori, it was very different. It’s got a very different grammatical structure. You say the verb first, followed by the subject, then the object – it’s called a VSO structure, whereas English and French are SVO.
“For example: ‘I go to the shop’ is ‘Kei te haere au ki te toa’. ‘Kei te’ (is the tense marker so tells you I’m talking about now) ‘haere’ (go) ‘au’ (I) ‘ki te toa’ (to the shop). In French, it’s ‘Je vais au magasin’.”
Braden at Puriri Bay, Northland, where they spend every Christmas camping.
However, apart from korero with several other teachers on staff and with his kids, Braden says, in reality, there are limited opportunities he can speak his te reo day-to-day.
“That’s the fight people have where they are trying to maintain a staunch use of te reo. The biggest challenge for them is they’re trying to do that but everything around them is in English. So, it’s hard because you’re being beaten down by the English world around you.”
Which is why he is playing a part in the revitalisation, not only himself, but through the next generation by raising his children to be bilingual.
While San, now 20, still lives in France, with English his second language, Braden and his Australian partner Lisa’s subsequent children, Carson, 10, and Nia, 6, have been immersed in te reo from birth, both attending the bilingual daycare at the Māori tertiary institution Braden attended.
“It was going back to my experience and how it was a shame that I didn’t have that language. Why wouldn’t I do that for them when the opportunity was there?”
From there, they were enrolled in a mainstream school but in the rumaki (full immersion) section where they are among few Pākehā and te reo is the only language used in the classroom.
“I get a lot of comments asking how they are going to learn English, but English is their first language,” Braden explains. “Carson reads chapter books in English every day at home and has an advanced reading age in English.”
He adds that research has shown kids in Māori immersion education reach a certain level of brain development maturity in their mid-teens, enabling them to naturally transfer from one language to another. “I notice now, if I ask them a math equation in English, they will be working it out in Māori.”
While outside their school environment English dominates, Braden intentionally integrates te reo where possible, supported by Lisa, whom he met flatting in London. Although Lisa grew up in Melbourne, she was raised speaking Hungarian, so coming from a bilingual background she also saw the importance.
“She doesn’t speak it but would probably have a higher understanding of Māori than most non-Māori in New Zealand just through exposure,” Braden says.
When Carson was younger and Braden’s studies were around language normalisation, whereby it becomes more evident in society, he played an active role.
“I had a really good structure in place where our routine was, if we left the house, I would only speak to him in Māori. I felt that exposing more people to the language in everyday situations was a proactive way of helping the cause.”
The kids are well-travelled and culturally adept.
Nowadays, it’s a more relaxed mix of whichever language comes naturally.
“I’ll be speaking to the kids in te reo in the supermarket and people will be doing double-takes because obviously we’re a very Pākehā family. You notice people pause to make sure they heard right,” tells Braden, adding that they then often approach with positive feedback.
He laughs: “I remember, one time on my way home to Northland, we’d pulled into the Autobahn to get food and the kids wanted to go play in the playground.
“I was yelling at them in Māori and this fulla came up and started yarning with me in Māori.”
He explains that there are varying degrees of fluency. “For example, one of my students might ask me a word and I’ve genuinely never heard of it and they say, ‘Oh, I thought you were fluent!’ and I reply, ‘Well, do you know every word in the English dictionary?’
“I consider myself a fluent speaker but at a certain level in a general conversation, whereas when you get to a higher degree of fluency, Māori language can get a lot more metaphorical. The language itself holds a lot more culture and tikanga within it.”
While he’s never come up against any negativity, Braden says he’s aware of “staying in his lane”.
“With people like me who have gone down this pathway, you believe in the kaupapa, you support it, and you are pro-active in supporting it but, as a non-Māori, it’s not really your place to actively lead or make certain decisions.”
Carson recently placed first-equal in his class for a Ngā Manu Kōrero speech competition and went through to the finals where he placed third.
Braden and Lisa with Carson and Nia.
His speech was based on a comment from a fellow student asking why he was part of rumaki when he wasn’t Māori.
His four and a half minute speech in te reo Māori outlined his journey as a tangata tiriti (non-Māori New Zealanders who are people of the Treaty), upholding the mana of the Treaty and what its original intentions were for.
“I was pretty proud of him,” says Braden, before chuckling. “Last year he did his speech on cheetahs.
“He went on about [how] cheetahs are his favourite animal because they run up to 130km fast and they’ve got cool camouflage.
“So, for him to take on this topic and it’s personal, not just to him but to our family and other families, and what it meant to him, was pretty special.
“What was cool was hearing other families as he was talking, agreeing essentially and acknowledging what he was saying as being powerful.”
Nia, 6, and Carson, 10, have been immersed in te reo from birth.
Braden hopes New Zealand will become a bilingual nation, the way it was heading in the 1840s when English settlers arrived and learned to speak te reo for trading and other purposes before the flood of immigrants and colonisation.
His eyes were opened on a recent work trip to Montreal, which is part of the Quebec French-speaking region of Canada, where he found the bilingualism fascinating.
“You would say something to someone in French and, if they heard our accent, they would speak back to us in English, and we would speak back to them in French, but they kept replying in English, and I finally asked why.
“They said they didn’t even realise they were doing it, they were so used to bilingualism.
“I was standing in a queue one day and overheard a couple of teenage girls having a full-on dual-language gossip session about something they’d seen on social media. One was speaking French and the other was speaking English.
“I find it interesting and fun to be able to switch between languages, and I’d love to see that for New Zealand because that could have been how it is today.
“If Māori hadn’t been marginalised, te reo could still have been widely heard and used by, not just Māori but Pākehā as well.”
However, he notes that a lot of progress has been made in recent decades.
He also points out that te reo Māori language skills would supplement a CV, given the language is becoming increasingly relevant in work sectors with more openings in jobs for bilingual roles because of the need to communicate with iwi.
“Some of the negative arguments are that people will say, ‘Why would I want my kids to learn te reo? I’d much rather they learn a useful language’.
“But, I’ve got personal experience from this because I did learn an overseas language and it was useful to me and still is because I’m working with it but, at the end of the day, while many of us are going to perhaps have an overseas experience, most of us are going to come back and live and raise our families in New Zealand.
“New Zealand is founded on the blending of the tangata whenua and tangata tiriti.
“Some people are just so negative about having anything to do with it in their lives, and I just hear that and say, ‘Why?’ What’s so bad about it? Why wouldn’t you encourage your children or yourself to be able to walk in both worlds?”