Year 10 student Tiaki Sharp (Ngāti Kahungunu, Tuhoe) was awarded first place in the Sir Turi Caroll competition for junior students speaking in English at the regional 2019 Ngā Manu Kōrero speech competition.

This was held at Queen Charlotte College in Picton on May 24th.

Tiaki was supported on the day by Matua Ihaka and five whānau class students who accompanied him. He says the haka the group performed for him at the end of his speech was “strong”.

Tiaki chose the topic ‘Māori are potential to be realised’ from about ten possible topics. During the nine days he had to think about, devise and rehearse his speech, he ended up with his own unique take on it.

“I realised I could probably have some fun with it, kind of flip it on its head because that’s not entirely true. So, I decided to make my speech about how we have already realised our potential and we’ve used it to mold this entire world around us. This entire country of New Zealand has been carved by Maori. In fact, in the story of how Māui pulled up the North Island, in a rather literal translation, his brothers fighting over who would get which part of the fish hacked at it and those became the mountains and valleys, so people have literally carved this land.”

“But now that it’s breaking - we’ve got global warming, we’ve got overpopulation, we’ve got plastic in the ocean - everything’s just going kaput. I say that this is because we have forgotten our potential and we’ve just gone along with the flow of everything, instead of forging ahead and making it better, so we have to remember our potential in order to fix it, because we can do whatever we want afterwards, but we if we don’t remember what we can do, we’re not going to get anywhere."

He says that the thinking process was a journey that built on his knowledge of his whakapapa, experience of visiting Taranaki maunga (Mt Taranaki) earlier this year, and his concern for the environment.

“When I was actually writing about how [my] ancestor Whātonga and his descendants left their canoes on the shore and became tangata whenua, and how I had realised that our world was not fine by seeing it from that height and from the gaze of Taranaki, and then coming back here and seeing it again, that was really the journey.”

He is modest about his achievement. “Yeah, I put some thought into it,” he said.

Tiaki will travel to Palmerston North in September to perform his speech again at the National Secondary Schools Ngā Manu Kōrero Competition.