Naomi Toilalo first fell in love with te reo Māori at the age of 11. The daughter of a Māori mother and a Pākehā father, she grew up in the tiny farming town of Lawrence in South Otago and had little contact with her Māori side. But when she was 11, she went to Te Araroa on the East Coast of the North Island, where her mum had grown up. There, Toilalo visited a marae for the first time and heard her extended family speaking te reo all around.
“I didn’t understand anything, but I remember thinking even as a young girl, this is who I am. It felt like it belonged to me,” says Toilalo. “From that point on, I was determined to learn Māori.”
Despite the limited opportunities for learning te reo back in Lawrence, Toilalo started a correspondence course right away and joined the local kapa haka group – and after finishing school, she got a degree in Māori studies and landed a job working for Māori Television. Every step of her journey was shaped by the desire to learn and celebrate her family language.
A creative rut
Life took its course and after marrying and having four daughters, Toilalo found herself frequently at home with her kids while her husband went to work… and a little bored.
“Creatively, I was dying,” she laughs. “But I’d always done lots of baking and that was keeping me afloat.”
Baking runs in Toilalo’s family. Having grown up in a farming community, where ‘smoko’ breaks for a cuppa and a couple of biscuits are part of daily life, baking was part of her childhood.
“In farming communities there’s a real celebration of food and no one’s on keto or
