Tūtira mai, ngā iwi, tātou, tātou e! Stand together people, all of us. If you grew up in New Zealand, you probably learned it at primary school. Maybe you watched Ruby Tui lead the crowd at the end of the Women’s Rugby World Cup Final last November. Or you might even remember the Rugby Union’s attempts to get everyone singing it for the 2017 World Cup. It’s an iconic kiwi song about being united - one people, standing together.

I’ve been writing here about the process of choosing music for All Together Now, and singing waiata Māori is a really important part of our ethos, so I want to say some things about that. It’s a difficult conversation in many ways, but I think it’s an important one, so I’m going to have a go anyway. And at the outset I should say that I am a very long way from knowing all that there is to know about this - I’m learning. So that’s the spirit in which I want to bring this particular conversation to you.

Like lots of other Pākehā New Zealanders, I grew up with Māori songs and games (remember the stick games to E Pāpā? And making poi out of tissue paper?). I thought these songs were “folk songs” and that they and these cultural treasures belonged to everyone, in the same way that A-Roving or Flow Gently Sweet Afton are English folk songs that belong to everyone, their composers lost in the mists of time. The idea that these might not be the same sort of thing at all is something that has dawned slowly on me, as it has on many others.

When you think of iconic New Zealand songs, you might think of Pokarekare Ana, or Te Aroha. Or Tūtira Mai. These are songs which get performed as “traditional” songs. It’s true that they’re everywhere, along with a number of other well-known waiata. But almost all of these songs have been composed by someone, at some specific time and for some specific purpose. And they are still part of the cultural heritage of that whānau. Some of these songs - Te Aroha for example - have been offered to the wider community as a gift. But I did not always understand that this applies to only a few of them.

So can we sing these songs at all? And if we do, what’s our purpose? And what are we responsible to do, if we sing them? These are questions which have come up for me, and for the other Choir Leaders, more and more in the past couple of years. Before I slowly came to understand that there are some issues here, I arranged and taught some of these familiar songs to my choirs with the intention that we were supporting te reo Māori by doing so, and that by doing our utmost to teach correct pronunciation and respect for the reo, we were contributing. And there is a sense in which we have done that - I know that many of our members have been grateful that they could sing along on the marae or anywhere else where it enabled them to participate respectfully. But it has also become clear to me that I’ve made mistakes, and as we know and understand more, we can do better.

I admit that there are different opinions about whether we should sing waiata at all, and a deeper conversation about whether Pākehā like me should be arranging and teaching them. I do think that we Pākehā don’t always understand what we’re working with, and sometimes our familiarity with the songs we grew up singing leads us to forget what a privilege it is to have them as part of our culture in Aotearoa New Zealand. But there is also the view that these things are indeed part of our culture - Māori and Pākehā New Zealanders. And that we Pākehā can play an important role in preserving the reo and ensuring that it is spoken and sung as well and as widely as possible. So…at the moment, with the guidance of people I respect, we will continue to learn and sing these beautiful songs, because the original reasons still stand. But I’m much more careful now about making sure I know where a song has come from and, if possible, asking permission from the right people. And about giving more context for a song, where I can find it. Hopefully that’s enriching for everyone, as well as honouring someone’s work and culture.

When I was looking for some “new” waiata for this year, in the sense that we haven’t sung them before as a choir, I dredged up an arrangement of Tūtira Mai that Steven and I did back in 2017 and sent it to him to ask his opinion. He reminded me that at Choral Connect in 2021, we had heard from Ngatai Huata that this iconic song, written by her father in the 1950s, is almost always sung incorrectly - wrong tune, and with an error in the lyrics. It is sung this way because it was picked up by the Ministry of Education in the 1960s and published in school song books, without checking accuracy and without permission.