📚Unit Plans → ✊Rights & Māori Resurgence → 📖Lesson 2: Why Resurgence Was Necessary
Year 10 Tikanga-ā-Iwi / Social Sciences

Lesson 2: Why Was Resurgence Necessary?

The causal bridge: land alienation, assimilation policy in schooling, and post-war urbanisation — the conditions the movements of the 1970s were responding to.

🕘 Lesson at a Glance | Te Hōtaka

Do NowThree numbers⏱ 5 min 1 · The language line95% → 25% → 5%⏱ 15 min 2 · The move to the cities26% → 62% in 21 years⏱ 15 min 3 · Policy in its own wordsThe Hunn Report, 1961⏱ 18 min 4 · Build the bridgeCause → movement⏱ 10 min ExitOne cause, one prediction⏱ 5 min

Lesson Overview | Tirohanga Whānui

Movements do not appear from nowhere. This lesson builds the causal bridge between colonisation and the 1970s: what had happened to te reo Māori, what had happened to Māori landholding, and what happened to Māori communities in the twenty years after the Second World War.

This lesson is bounded on purpose. It is not a colonisation unit. It gives students three documented lines of change — language, land, and where people lived — and one government report in its own words. That is enough to make the next five lessons make sense.

The pattern to notice: none of these were accidents. Each had a policy behind it, and the policies said what they were doing.

Learning Intentions | Ngā Whāinga Ako

  • Describe, using figures, what happened to te reo Māori proficiency between 1900 and 1975.
  • Explain how post-war urbanisation changed the conditions Māori communities were living in.
  • Analyse a government policy document for what it says it is trying to achieve.

⚡ Do Now · Three numbers, no context

⏱ 5 min

95%  →  25%  →  5%

Run it

  1. Guess (2 min): these are three measurements of the same thing, taken in 1900, 1960 and 1975. What could be measured that changes like that in one country in 75 years?
  2. Share (2 min): take four guesses without comment.
  3. Reveal (1 min): the proportion of Māori who were fluent speakers of te reo Māori. Say nothing else yet.

Activity 1 · The Language Line — and What Was Under It

⏱ 15 min

What it is: explicit teaching. A decline that steep does not happen by chance; students find the mechanism.

The verified record. The proportion of Māori fluent in te reo Māori fell from about 95% in 1900 to about 25% by 1960, and to about 5% by 1975.

The native schools system ran from 1867 to 1969. From the outset the priority of those schools was the teaching of English, and the plan was to phase the schools out once English had taken hold in a community. At first te reo Māori was allowed in order to help teach English; over time official attitudes hardened against any use of te reo. Many Māori children were punished for speaking their first language at school.

Run it

  1. Mechanism (5 min): in pairs — how does punishing a child for speaking a language at school produce that 95% → 5% line two generations later? Write the chain of steps. Push past “they stopped speaking it” to what parents then decided to do.
  2. The parents’ decision (5 min): a parent who was punished at school for speaking te reo now has a child starting school. What might they decide, and why would that decision look like love rather than loss?
  3. Connect forward (5 min): the petition in Lesson 3 asks for te reo in schools. Now that you know this, why schools specifically? Write one sentence.

🪶 Cultural integrity: some ākonga in this room are descendants of children who were punished for speaking te reo, and some of their whānau are not fluent today because of it. This is a living family history, not a statistic. Do not ask anyone to share their family’s story, do not treat a Māori student as evidence, and do not let the lesson land as a story about loss alone — Lessons 3 and 7 are what people did about it. If a student does choose to share something, receive it and move on without making them the lesson.

Activity 2 · The Move to the Cities

⏱ 15 min

What it is: the second documented line. One of the fastest urbanisations recorded anywhere, and the reason the movements of the 1970s were urban movements.

YearProportion of the Māori population living in towns and cities
194526%
195635%
196662%
1986nearly 80%

Run it

  1. Read the table (3 min): which two dates show the fastest change? Calculate roughly how many years it took to go from about a quarter to nearly two thirds.
  2. Consequences (7 min): in groups, list what changes for a community when most of its people move away from their marae, their whenua and their kaumātua within one generation. Sort your list into losses and new possibilities. Insist on both columns.
  3. Predict (5 min): Ngā Tamatoa and the Te Reo Māori Society were university-based groups in cities. The Ōrākei Māori Action Committee organised in Auckland. Using your two columns, explain why the movements of the 1970s were built in cities.

Teacher listen-for: the “new possibilities” column is the one that makes this lesson a bridge rather than a list of harms. Urbanisation put young Māori from many iwi in the same lecture theatres, workplaces and suburbs. That is a condition for a national movement — and it is also a real loss of connection to marae and whenua. Both are true.

Activity 3 · Policy in Its Own Words — the Hunn Report, 1961

⏱ 18 min

What it is: source work. Students read what a government report said it was trying to do, in its own language, and test the words against the deed.

What it wasA 1961 report by Jack Hunn on the Department of Māori Affairs, making recommendations on social policy for Māori. After it, the “relocation” of Māori families from rural areas to the cities became official policy, supported with accommodation and employment assistance.
Its stated reasoningThe report’s approach was assimilationist: it argued that integrating Māori into Pākehā society was the answer, rather than strengthening a separate cultural identity. It welcomed the growing urban Māori population as, in its own words, the “quickest and surest way of integrating the two species of New Zealander”.

Run it

  1. Read closely (5 min): take the quoted phrase apart. What does the word “integrating” claim is happening? What does the phrase “two species of New Zealander” reveal about how the writer saw Māori and Pākehā?
  2. Word against deed (7 min): the report calls this integration. Using Activity 1 and Activity 2, write what the policy actually produced. Then answer: is “integration” an accurate word for it? Defend your answer with evidence, not with feeling.
  3. Provenance (6 min): who wrote this, for whom, and with what power behind it? Why does a government report count as different evidence from a newspaper article or a protest poster?

The method to name out loud: this is the same move students will use in every remaining lesson — take the official word, set the actual deed beside it, and see whether they match. It works on “integration” in 1961 and it will work on “settlement” in Lesson 7.

Activity 4 · Build the Bridge

⏱ 10 min

Run it

  1. Three causes (5 min): write one sentence for each of the three lines in this lesson — language, land, and where people lived — stating how each one created a reason for the movements you are about to study.
  2. Predict (5 min): given these three causes, predict what the movements of the 1970s will be about, and which of the five kinds of claim from Lesson 1 they will make. Write your prediction down. You will check it at the end of Lesson 6.

Land: this lesson does not do the land story justice, because the land story is a unit of its own. Use the linked Decolonised Aotearoa History unit for raupatu and the Native Land Court if your class has time — its Lesson 3 and Lesson 5 are built on the Waitangi Tribunal’s own record.

Exit · One Cause, One Prediction

⏱ 5 min
  1. Cause: which of the three lines in this lesson do you think mattered most in causing the movements of the 1970s? One sentence, with a figure in it.
  2. Prediction: your Activity 4 prediction, in one line.
  3. Question: one thing you now want to know.
🎯 Curriculum Links | Te Hononga ki te Marautanga

Taught, not asserted: this lesson gives students the documented conditions that the Phase 4 movements responded to, so that “Māori language revival” and “land rights activism” are read as responses to something rather than as events without causes.

  • NZC (2007) · Social Studies · Level 5: “Understand how the ideas and actions of people in the past have had a significant impact on people’s lives.”
  • Te Mātaiaho (2025) · Social Sciences · Phase 4 (Years 9–10) (Knowledge): “Māori language revival, land rights activism (e.g. Land March, Raglan Golf Course protests, and Bastion Point occupation). Urban protest movements (e.g. Ngā Tamatoa, Haka Party Incident, and Foreshore and Seabed Hikoi).”
📦 Materials & Resources
📊 Assessment Framework
  • LI 1: exit slip includes a figure from the language line.
  • LI 2: Activity 2 step 2 produces both a losses and a possibilities column — a one-sided list is not yet meeting it.
  • LI 3: Activity 3 step 2 sets the report’s own word against the documented outcome.
🚀 Differentiation & Extension
  • Support: give the Activity 1 chain as four boxes to fill in rather than an open task. Provide the sentence frame: “Because ______ at school, parents ______, which meant that by ______ only ______ of Māori spoke te reo fluently.”
  • Numeracy: Activity 2 step 1 is a genuine calculation — let students who want it graph all four data points.
  • Language support: pre-teach assimilation, integration, urbanisation, policy. The Hunn Report activity fails without them.
  • Extension: read the fuller Hunn Report extract on Te Ara and find one recommendation that sounds helpful and one that sounds assimilationist. Argue whether a policy can be both.
  • Cultural safety: see the flagged note in Activity 1.
🔗 Unit Progression | Te Ara o Ngā Akoranga

Lesson 1 built the frame; this lesson builds the cause. Lesson 3 takes the language thread, Lessons 4 and 5 take the whenua thread, and Lesson 6 asks why a rugby tour became the moment the whole country had to take a side. The prediction students write in Activity 4 gets checked at the end of Lesson 6.

Sources checked 23 August 2026. Te reo proficiency figures (about 95% in 1900, about 25% by 1960, about 5% by 1975) and the native schools system 1867–1969, its English-first priority and the punishment of children for speaking te reo: Te Ara — Language decline, 1900 to 1970s, Te Ara — The native schools system, and NZHistory — History of the Māori language. Urbanisation figures (26% in 1945, 35% in 1956, 62% in 1966, nearly 80% by 1986): Te Ara — Urbanisation. The Hunn Report (1961), the relocation policy, and the quoted phrase “quickest and surest way of integrating the two species of New Zealander”: Te Ara — The Hunn report. Before quoting the Hunn phrase in assessed work, open the Te Ara document page above and confirm the wording against the extract shown there — it is quoted here from that source and is used in this lesson as an object of analysis, not as an endorsement of its language.