Te reo Māori (the Māori language) is the language of the indigenous people in New Zealand and has a long-short vowel contrast. This study first investigates the cues used to perceive vowel length for Māori fluent users and learners. Secondly, it explores the effect of an everyday listening environment in the form of a traditional meeting house (wharenui) on cue-weighting between duration and stress for identifying long and short vowels when the stimuli are rendered with the wharenui room acoustics. An identification test was carried out with three pairs of words that differed in stress location and were manipulated in vowel duration. We found both groups to mainly use duration as a cue, even though the advanced listeners commented that they were listening for 'intonation'. For the wharenui acoustics, there were no differences observed between the groups and only a small categorical shift for the /a:/ vowel for the learners.