I often think about the fact that fourteen of the sixteen last remaining official colonies in the world - which are all a part of the United Nations Decolonisation List - are islands located in the Atlantic, Carribean or the Pacific. The island from which I come from is Te Ika-aa-Maaui, or the North Island in the settler colony of New Zealand. My tuupuna travelled across Te Moana-nui-a-Kiwa 700 years ago following Maahutonga , the southern cross. The great ocean was deed the name ‘Pacific’ by the Spanish coloniser Magellan describing it as, “making or desiring to make peace; peaceable, desiring to be at peace, free from the disposition to quarrel; peaceful, in a state of peace.”
The Pacific has been anything but peaceful.
In this text I engage with a number of the works for Issue 24 of Runway Journal, which is centered around Islands. I wish to expand upon questions and ideas raised within Islands and hopefully fill in some gaps I feel should be addressed, as well as unpack the editorial by Jasmine Powell. My intention is to write with urgency, to unpick our relation not to islands but to the water that surrounds them.
The etymology of the word ‘island’ traces back through Middle English yland, and Old English igland or igeland, to the Proto-Germanic awjo meaning ‘thing on the water’. This way of understanding an island as a ‘thing on the water’ doesn’t sit right with me. From a geological perspective, an island is either an extension of the oceanic crust; for instance volcanic islands such as the Marshallese Islands, or islands belong to a continental plate containing a larger landmass; for instance New Zealand or Green Island, in Far North Queensland, Australia. Islands are, in many ways, a construct of the imperialist imagination. They represent the individualisation prominent in western ways of knowing and of the ontological understanding we have of islands as being separate from the waters that surround them.
In the editorial in Issue 24, editor Jasmine Powell stated that, “Whether exotic or dangerous, romantic or political, islands conjure up diverse associations. They can be a place of refuge or a site of disorder and chaos. An island is in many ways its own world, a status that inevitably piques the interest of the adventurous....Islands can be many things to many people..” I was struck by this choice of words and the imperial framing of islands as being “exotic”, “romantic” or “adventurous”. Though I agree with the framing of islands as political and that they conjure diverse associations, depending upon your positionality, I would argue that this framing is dangerous to the Indigenous peoples that inhabit these places. Whether this be through the geo-political repercussions of rising sea levels; the consequences of colonial projects all over the world (anthropomorphic climate change), or through the lack of sovereignty bestowed upon many island nations. The real danger is perhaps romanticising islands as within colonial island literature as a “journey into the unknown and the discovery of new knowledge” or in any way aligning them with books like Robinson Crusoe [1]. Thenovel Robinson Crusoe reads like a handbook of how Europeans could efficiently colonize territories in Africa and the Americas, and exploit both the resources and the people there. When I recall Robinson Crusoe I remember that the title character is set off course and lands on an island where he meets ‘Friday’, a black man. From the onset Robinson Crusoe considers ‘Friday’ his property by calling him that after the day in which he encounters him, and acts as though ‘Friday’ never had a language, religion, a history or a family of his own. He was merely just property. Robinson Crusoe reminds me of the violence both in the colonial framing of otherness on those who were colonised and the violence of re-naming people and places or assuming they don’t already have names. For instance, Rarotonga and fourteen distinctive islands that surround it are called the Cook Islands, named after Captain James Cook. These same Cook Islands were made a part of the ‘Realm of New Zealand’ in 1901 and New Zealand is still responsible for the Cook Islands’ defence and foreign affairs and that Cook Islanders are citizens of New Zealand, as well as the Cook Islands.
It's important to constantly remember that so-called Australia, New Zealand and the Cook Islands, amongst many other places are stolen Indigenous lands. These unceded lands have been carved up with created nations and borders as part of vast empires and renamed things like ‘Magnetic Island’ or ‘Rottnest Island’. The latter of which went from being a place known as Wadjemup, which for the Whadjuk Noongar people was where spirits moved to the next world. It later became a prison for Indigenous dissidents and today is a place for the middle class to holiday. We often think of colonisation as being something inflicted merely upon the settler colonies we live in and fail to recognize how our governments have always had imperialist agendas across the Pacific.
There are many islands surrounding Australia that are considered a part of Australia, such as the Cocos Islands, a small Australian territory consisting of two atolls and 27 coral islands. In 2016, a number of asylum seekers washed ashore on the Cocos Islands, before being sent back to Sri Lanka. An island can be in place in which to imprison, it can be a military base, and it can be a testing site for chemicals or a site for extraction (of, say, phosphate). The fact that places like Christmas Island, Nauru and Manus Island have been places under Australian control and have become sites to detain people, by keeping them in terrible conditions and violating human rights, continues the process by which countries like New Zealand and Australia have replicated imperial agendas.
In the text No Man is an Island, Kate Britton examines Alex Seton’s work Someone Died trying to have a life like mine (2014) which responds to asylum seekers washed ashore on the Cocos Island, as well as attempting to examine the construction of nationhood, empire and borders. The work, commissioned for the Adelaide Biennale, consisted of 28 marble life jackets, representing the 28 empty life jackets that washed ashore in Cocos Islands in May 2013. No Man Is an Island thoughtfully articulates the historical events and political decisions that are made around citizenship, safety and the brutality of colonialism, in relation to Cocos Island. Britton fails to make clear the privilege of being able to make marble sculptures about asylum seekers. Immediately I wonder whether it might have been better for Seton to use his artist fee and marble to directly work with an organisation that supports refugees in South Australia, that are under-resourced. What can art do besides mediate over the trauma of others over a glass of wine? There are limits to artmaking of this kind no matter how good the intention. The development of ‘art’ as an industry and the histories of spaces like the gallery of South Australia are built around imperial foundations of knowledge. The use of marble makes me feel uncomfortable because of its permanence and its association as a material of Empires. It cannot be divorced from its colonial context. As anonymous French collective, Tiqqun noted, “Empire is not and cannot be a power separated from society.”[2] Someone died trying to have a life like mine also made me think of the way that the trauma of others is always viewed as a topic by which artists should make work about, but actually perhaps there are better ways we can start dialogues with refugee communities, that isn’t making a spectacle out of their deaths. It’s as Amita Kippalani wrote in her essay, How to be,
“...We should… reflect on the means of our investment, not only by analysing our ‘product’ (the artwork, the exhibition, the writing), but by scrutinising the way we communicate and participate.”[3]
Maybe it’s time we actually did work that focused upon better ways of sharing the world, rather than making work that does not quite do enough to give agency to those who are affected and those whose activist work is on the front line.
I often think about the different ways in which we share the world with others, as an Indigenous person this is a distinct way of viewing the world and of “being”[4]. Growing up online I have always been interested in the parallels between the Pacific and the internet being a giant wheke (octopus). Both are a giant body connected by the ocean. While watching Pacific Island Life Record(ing)s by Lucinda Dayhew (2014) in the Islands issue I thought about the ways in which we share parts of ourselves online and the way in which images become commodified. The video consists of Dayhew screen recording her research of ‘Pacific Islands’, ‘Island Life’ etc. It also had videos of the artist from photobooth dispersed throughout. A lot of personal details about the artist, including advertisements on Facebook are blurred. It feels personal yet impersonal. While watching this I remembered how in Europe people responded to me being from the Pacific with this idea of it being a tropical paradise filled with Hobbits. When I google ‘The Pacific’ an image of Denarau Island comes up. Denarau Island is a fake island off the coast of Fiji, known for its luxury hotels, golf course, and resorts. It was developed using land ‘purchased’ in 1969 by an American developer.
When reflecting upon islands as sites of mass luxury tourism and destruction, I feel horrified and angry at the reality of islands like the Maldives, which are sinking as sea levels rise. Within my lifetime much of the Pacific will slowly become uninhabitable, as we speak Indigenous people are losing their homes. In 2015, New Zealand deported Ioane Teitiota, a climate refugee from Kiribati. Upon arriving in New Zealand Teitiota was held in Mt Eden Prison and after a long legal struggle, went to the Supreme Court who ruled that, "...while Kiribati undoubtedly faces challenges, Mr Teitiota does not, if returned, face 'serious harm'[...]from the effects of environmental degradation." In her article, Rising Rights, Unbound Islands and Contingent Movement, Laura McLean wrote a consideration of artist Nabil Ahmed’s presentation HVC SVNT LEONES (Here are Lions) at Contingent Movements Symposium in 2014 in Venice. McLean noted that, “...Under current international law there is no such thing as a ‘climate refugee’...Refugee status, and therefore the protection of human rights by host nations, is not currently afforded to individuals displaced by ‘natural’ forces. [5]
As expressed throughout the editorial of Issue 24, islands mean many things to many people. For example, the name Turtle Island, is given by many Indigenous Peoples to the lands of North and Central America. Although different regional versions exist, the core of this creation story relates to a time when the planet was covered in water. Many animals all tried to swim to the bottom of the ocean to bring back dirt to create land but they all failed. A muskrat was the last animal to attempt the task. The muskrat swam deep and remained under water for a long time. Eventually the muskrat resurfaced with some wet soil in its paws. The swim took the muskrat’s life, but Nanabush (an atua or supernatural being) took the soil and placed it on the back of a turtle. With this act, land began to form and so became Turtle Island. Some Indigenous stories don’t feature this turtle, but rather refer to a pregnant sky woman or raven or an ocean spirit or atua called Sedna. The notion of an island is expansive within an indigenous ontology.
An idea I often return to is that the Pacific is a giant wheke with the waterways linking our bodies across large expanses of the world. It is as writer Jackie Wang explained in her talk, Oceanic Feeling and Communist Affect, where she spoke on the potentialities for an Oceanic feeling as an affective state to open up and dissolve the boundaries of subjecthood [6]. I imagine an oceanic feeling as a means of connecting myself to the stories of my tuupuna through citing my pepeha naming myself as a body of water, interconnecting myself like coral to other bodies long since past and to many ‘islands’ across Te Moana-nui-a-Kiwa. The ocean acts as means for unravelling the categorisation of bodies and islands as separate, isolated spaces surrounded by water, and highlights how we are connected through water. It is how the I-Kirabati poet, Teresia Teaiwa described “We sweat and cry salt water, so we know that the ocean is really in our blood.”[7] Such ways of being and understanding the world does not represent the separation of islands from bodies of water into individualised nation states. Although Indigenous people are not a homogenous group, we are always connected across time and space by our relationship to water and our ways of relating to the world which are based upon reciprocity, care and love.
As noted in the editorial essay, Powell discusses Australia’s ‘cultural cringe’ [8] and describes Australia as having an ‘island mentality’. Although attempting to critique this in terms of cultural inferiority, the use of the term ‘island mentality’ represents the dominant ways in which the Pacific and Pacific islands are seen as being empty, small and without any real value [9]. In his essay Our Sea of Islands, Michael Lujan Bevacqua explained that,
“According to this view, the small island states and territories of the Pacific, that is, all of Polynesia and Micronesia are too small, too poorly endowed with resources and too isolated from the centre of economic growth for their inhabitants to ever be able to rise about their present condition of dependence on the largesse of wealthy nations.”. [10]
He goes on to seek a radical shift both in the way that we view the Pacific, and the ways in which Pacific people live in the Pacific as place and space. Hau’ofa situates the body as being the Pacific. He advocates for a shifting of our vision and imagination, not necessarily to return to a distant “authentic” past, but to find relation and understanding to the way peoples of the Pacific survive and thrive through the Ocean in us. Our bodies are after all over 80% water. Ko au te moana, ko te moana ko au. I am the ocean and the ocean is me.
[1] Please refer to Nourin Binte Saeed’s Colonial Representation in Robinson Crusoe, Heart of Darkness and A Passage to India, https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/61803058.pdf
[2] Tiqqun, Introduction to Civil War. Semiotext(e): LA, California, 2010, 124
[3] Amita Kippalani “How to be” in ARTSPACE 25: Every cloud has a silver lining, ed . Caterina Riva. Everbest printing company: China, 2012, 19
[4] Shaun Wilson, Research is Ceremony:Indigenous Research Methods. Fernwood Publishing: Canada, 2008, 15[5] Guterres, António, ‘Climate change, natural disasters and human displacement: UNHCR Legal and Protection Policy Research Series, August, 2009 http://www.unhcr.org/4901e81a4.html (accessed 18/6/13)
[6] Jackie Wang, Oceanic Feeling and Communist Affect. Riga Biennale, https://rigabiennial.com/en/riboca-2/programme/event-dreams-jackie-wang?dm_i=56G9,AC2W,32JF2X,160IB,1
[7] Greg Dvorak, “S/pacific Islands: Some Reflections on Identity and Art in Contemporary Oceania”, E-Flux, Journal #112 - October 2020, https://www.e-flux.com/journal/112/352069/s-pacific-islands-some-reflections-on-identity-and-art-in-contemporary-oceania/
[8] Phillips, A.A. The Cultural Cringe, Meanjin, 1950. In Powell, Jasmine. Editorial, Runway Journal Issue 24: Islands.
[9] Bevacqua, Michael Lujan. Their/our sea of islands: Epeli Hau'ofa and Frantz Fanon [online]. LiNQ, Vol. 37, Dec 2010: 80-92. Availability: <https://search.informit.com.au/documentSummary;dn=201103902;res=IELAPA> ISSN: 0817-458X. [cited 17 Nov 20], 81
[10] Hau' ofa, Epeli. We Are the Ocean, Selected Works. Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 2008, 28
Hana Pera Aoake (Ngaati Mahuta, Ngaati Hinerangi, Tainui/Waikato) is an artist and writer based on stolen Kaai Tahu, Waitaha and Kaati Mamoe whenua in Waikaouti, in the settler colony, New Zealand. Hana co-runs Kei te pai press, has edited a number of other journals like Tupuranga and founded the now defunct art collective, Fresh and Fruity. Hana has published and co-published a number of different essays and prose, including on Granta, Overland, Un Magazine, Running Dog, and the ACC-CCA. Hana just published their first book, A bathful of kawakawa and hot water with Compound Press. Hana enjoys defacing colonial property, eating kaimoana, collecting junk and swimming.
I often think about the fact that fourteen of the sixteen last remaining official colonies in the world - which are all a part of the United Nations Decolonisation List - are islands located in the Atlantic, Carribean or the Pacific. The island from which I come from is Te Ika-aa-Maaui, or the North Island in the settler colony of New Zealand. My tuupuna travelled across Te Moana-nui-a-Kiwa 700 years ago following Maahutonga , the southern cross. The great ocean was deed the name ‘Pacific’ by the Spanish coloniser Magellan describing it as, “making or desiring to make peace; peaceable, desiring to be at peace, free from the disposition to quarrel; peaceful, in a state of peace.”
The Pacific has been anything but peaceful.
In this text I engage with a number of the works for Issue 24 of Runway Journal, which is centered around Islands. I wish to expand upon questions and ideas raised within Islands and hopefully fill in some gaps I feel should be addressed, as well as unpack the editorial by Jasmine Powell. My intention is to write with urgency, to unpick our relation not to islands but to the water that surrounds them.
The etymology of the word ‘island’ traces back through Middle English yland, and Old English igland or igeland, to the Proto-Germanic awjo meaning ‘thing on the water’. This way of understanding an island as a ‘thing on the water’ doesn’t sit right with me. From a geological perspective, an island is either an extension of the oceanic crust; for instance volcanic islands such as the Marshallese Islands, or islands belong to a continental plate containing a larger landmass; for instance New Zealand or Green Island, in Far North Queensland, Australia. Islands are, in many ways, a construct of the imperialist imagination. They represent the individualisation prominent in western ways of knowing and of the ontological understanding we have of islands as being separate from the waters that surround them.
In the editorial in Issue 24, editor Jasmine Powell stated that, “Whether exotic or dangerous, romantic or political, islands conjure up diverse associations. They can be a place of refuge or a site of disorder and chaos. An island is in many ways its own world, a status that inevitably piques the interest of the adventurous....Islands can be many things to many people..” I was struck by this choice of words and the imperial framing of islands as being “exotic”, “romantic” or “adventurous”. Though I agree with the framing of islands as political and that they conjure diverse associations, depending upon your positionality, I would argue that this framing is dangerous to the Indigenous peoples that inhabit these places. Whether this be through the geo-political repercussions of rising sea levels; the consequences of colonial projects all over the world (anthropomorphic climate change), or through the lack of sovereignty bestowed upon many island nations. The real danger is perhaps romanticising islands as within colonial island literature as a “journey into the unknown and the discovery of new knowledge” or in any way aligning them with books like Robinson Crusoe [1]. Thenovel Robinson Crusoe reads like a handbook of how Europeans could efficiently colonize territories in Africa and the Americas, and exploit both the resources and the people there. When I recall Robinson Crusoe I remember that the title character is set off course and lands on an island where he meets ‘Friday’, a black man. From the onset Robinson Crusoe considers ‘Friday’ his property by calling him that after the day in which he encounters him, and acts as though ‘Friday’ never had a language, religion, a history or a family of his own. He was merely just property. Robinson Crusoe reminds me of the violence both in the colonial framing of otherness on those who were colonised and the violence of re-naming people and places or assuming they don’t already have names. For instance, Rarotonga and fourteen distinctive islands that surround it are called the Cook Islands, named after Captain James Cook. These same Cook Islands were made a part of the ‘Realm of New Zealand’ in 1901 and New Zealand is still responsible for the Cook Islands’ defence and foreign affairs and that Cook Islanders are citizens of New Zealand, as well as the Cook Islands.
It's important to constantly remember that so-called Australia, New Zealand and the Cook Islands, amongst many other places are stolen Indigenous lands. These unceded lands have been carved up with created nations and borders as part of vast empires and renamed things like ‘Magnetic Island’ or ‘Rottnest Island’. The latter of which went from being a place known as Wadjemup, which for the Whadjuk Noongar people was where spirits moved to the next world. It later became a prison for Indigenous dissidents and today is a place for the middle class to holiday. We often think of colonisation as being something inflicted merely upon the settler colonies we live in and fail to recognize how our governments have always had imperialist agendas across the Pacific.
There are many islands surrounding Australia that are considered a part of Australia, such as the Cocos Islands, a small Australian territory consisting of two atolls and 27 coral islands. In 2016, a number of asylum seekers washed ashore on the Cocos Islands, before being sent back to Sri Lanka. An island can be in place in which to imprison, it can be a military base, and it can be a testing site for chemicals or a site for extraction (of, say, phosphate). The fact that places like Christmas Island, Nauru and Manus Island have been places under Australian control and have become sites to detain people, by keeping them in terrible conditions and violating human rights, continues the process by which countries like New Zealand and Australia have replicated imperial agendas.
In the text No Man is an Island, Kate Britton examines Alex Seton’s work Someone Died trying to have a life like mine (2014) which responds to asylum seekers washed ashore on the Cocos Island, as well as attempting to examine the construction of nationhood, empire and borders. The work, commissioned for the Adelaide Biennale, consisted of 28 marble life jackets, representing the 28 empty life jackets that washed ashore in Cocos Islands in May 2013. No Man Is an Island thoughtfully articulates the historical events and political decisions that are made around citizenship, safety and the brutality of colonialism, in relation to Cocos Island. Britton fails to make clear the privilege of being able to make marble sculptures about asylum seekers. Immediately I wonder whether it might have been better for Seton to use his artist fee and marble to directly work with an organisation that supports refugees in South Australia, that are under-resourced. What can art do besides mediate over the trauma of others over a glass of wine? There are limits to artmaking of this kind no matter how good the intention. The development of ‘art’ as an industry and the histories of spaces like the gallery of South Australia are built around imperial foundations of knowledge. The use of marble makes me feel uncomfortable because of its permanence and its association as a material of Empires. It cannot be divorced from its colonial context. As anonymous French collective, Tiqqun noted, “Empire is not and cannot be a power separated from society.”[2] Someone died trying to have a life like mine also made me think of the way that the trauma of others is always viewed as a topic by which artists should make work about, but actually perhaps there are better ways we can start dialogues with refugee communities, that isn’t making a spectacle out of their deaths. It’s as Amita Kippalani wrote in her essay, How to be,
“...We should… reflect on the means of our investment, not only by analysing our ‘product’ (the artwork, the exhibition, the writing), but by scrutinising the way we communicate and participate.”[3]
Maybe it’s time we actually did work that focused upon better ways of sharing the world, rather than making work that does not quite do enough to give agency to those who are affected and those whose activist work is on the front line.
I often think about the different ways in which we share the world with others, as an Indigenous person this is a distinct way of viewing the world and of “being”[4]. Growing up online I have always been interested in the parallels between the Pacific and the internet being a giant wheke (octopus). Both are a giant body connected by the ocean. While watching Pacific Island Life Record(ing)s by Lucinda Dayhew (2014) in the Islands issue I thought about the ways in which we share parts of ourselves online and the way in which images become commodified. The video consists of Dayhew screen recording her research of ‘Pacific Islands’, ‘Island Life’ etc. It also had videos of the artist from photobooth dispersed throughout. A lot of personal details about the artist, including advertisements on Facebook are blurred. It feels personal yet impersonal. While watching this I remembered how in Europe people responded to me being from the Pacific with this idea of it being a tropical paradise filled with Hobbits. When I google ‘The Pacific’ an image of Denarau Island comes up. Denarau Island is a fake island off the coast of Fiji, known for its luxury hotels, golf course, and resorts. It was developed using land ‘purchased’ in 1969 by an American developer.
When reflecting upon islands as sites of mass luxury tourism and destruction, I feel horrified and angry at the reality of islands like the Maldives, which are sinking as sea levels rise. Within my lifetime much of the Pacific will slowly become uninhabitable, as we speak Indigenous people are losing their homes. In 2015, New Zealand deported Ioane Teitiota, a climate refugee from Kiribati. Upon arriving in New Zealand Teitiota was held in Mt Eden Prison and after a long legal struggle, went to the Supreme Court who ruled that, "...while Kiribati undoubtedly faces challenges, Mr Teitiota does not, if returned, face 'serious harm'[...]from the effects of environmental degradation." In her article, Rising Rights, Unbound Islands and Contingent Movement, Laura McLean wrote a consideration of artist Nabil Ahmed’s presentation HVC SVNT LEONES (Here are Lions) at Contingent Movements Symposium in 2014 in Venice. McLean noted that, “...Under current international law there is no such thing as a ‘climate refugee’...Refugee status, and therefore the protection of human rights by host nations, is not currently afforded to individuals displaced by ‘natural’ forces. [5]
As expressed throughout the editorial of Issue 24, islands mean many things to many people. For example, the name Turtle Island, is given by many Indigenous Peoples to the lands of North and Central America. Although different regional versions exist, the core of this creation story relates to a time when the planet was covered in water. Many animals all tried to swim to the bottom of the ocean to bring back dirt to create land but they all failed. A muskrat was the last animal to attempt the task. The muskrat swam deep and remained under water for a long time. Eventually the muskrat resurfaced with some wet soil in its paws. The swim took the muskrat’s life, but Nanabush (an atua or supernatural being) took the soil and placed it on the back of a turtle. With this act, land began to form and so became Turtle Island. Some Indigenous stories don’t feature this turtle, but rather refer to a pregnant sky woman or raven or an ocean spirit or atua called Sedna. The notion of an island is expansive within an indigenous ontology.
An idea I often return to is that the Pacific is a giant wheke with the waterways linking our bodies across large expanses of the world. It is as writer Jackie Wang explained in her talk, Oceanic Feeling and Communist Affect, where she spoke on the potentialities for an Oceanic feeling as an affective state to open up and dissolve the boundaries of subjecthood [6]. I imagine an oceanic feeling as a means of connecting myself to the stories of my tuupuna through citing my pepeha naming myself as a body of water, interconnecting myself like coral to other bodies long since past and to many ‘islands’ across Te Moana-nui-a-Kiwa. The ocean acts as means for unravelling the categorisation of bodies and islands as separate, isolated spaces surrounded by water, and highlights how we are connected through water. It is how the I-Kirabati poet, Teresia Teaiwa described “We sweat and cry salt water, so we know that the ocean is really in our blood.”[7] Such ways of being and understanding the world does not represent the separation of islands from bodies of water into individualised nation states. Although Indigenous people are not a homogenous group, we are always connected across time and space by our relationship to water and our ways of relating to the world which are based upon reciprocity, care and love.
As noted in the editorial essay, Powell discusses Australia’s ‘cultural cringe’ [8] and describes Australia as having an ‘island mentality’. Although attempting to critique this in terms of cultural inferiority, the use of the term ‘island mentality’ represents the dominant ways in which the Pacific and Pacific islands are seen as being empty, small and without any real value [9]. In his essay Our Sea of Islands, Michael Lujan Bevacqua explained that,
“According to this view, the small island states and territories of the Pacific, that is, all of Polynesia and Micronesia are too small, too poorly endowed with resources and too isolated from the centre of economic growth for their inhabitants to ever be able to rise about their present condition of dependence on the largesse of wealthy nations.”. [10]
He goes on to seek a radical shift both in the way that we view the Pacific, and the ways in which Pacific people live in the Pacific as place and space. Hau’ofa situates the body as being the Pacific. He advocates for a shifting of our vision and imagination, not necessarily to return to a distant “authentic” past, but to find relation and understanding to the way peoples of the Pacific survive and thrive through the Ocean in us. Our bodies are after all over 80% water. Ko au te moana, ko te moana ko au. I am the ocean and the ocean is me.
[1] Please refer to Nourin Binte Saeed’s Colonial Representation in Robinson Crusoe, Heart of Darkness and A Passage to India, https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/61803058.pdf
[2] Tiqqun, Introduction to Civil War. Semiotext(e): LA, California, 2010, 124
[3] Amita Kippalani “How to be” in ARTSPACE 25: Every cloud has a silver lining, ed . Caterina Riva. Everbest printing company: China, 2012, 19
[4] Shaun Wilson, Research is Ceremony:Indigenous Research Methods. Fernwood Publishing: Canada, 2008, 15[5] Guterres, António, ‘Climate change, natural disasters and human displacement: UNHCR Legal and Protection Policy Research Series, August, 2009 http://www.unhcr.org/4901e81a4.html (accessed 18/6/13)
[6] Jackie Wang, Oceanic Feeling and Communist Affect. Riga Biennale, https://rigabiennial.com/en/riboca-2/programme/event-dreams-jackie-wang?dm_i=56G9,AC2W,32JF2X,160IB,1
[7] Greg Dvorak, “S/pacific Islands: Some Reflections on Identity and Art in Contemporary Oceania”, E-Flux, Journal #112 - October 2020, https://www.e-flux.com/journal/112/352069/s-pacific-islands-some-reflections-on-identity-and-art-in-contemporary-oceania/
[8] Phillips, A.A. The Cultural Cringe, Meanjin, 1950. In Powell, Jasmine. Editorial, Runway Journal Issue 24: Islands.
[9] Bevacqua, Michael Lujan. Their/our sea of islands: Epeli Hau'ofa and Frantz Fanon [online]. LiNQ, Vol. 37, Dec 2010: 80-92. Availability: <https://search.informit.com.au/documentSummary;dn=201103902;res=IELAPA> ISSN: 0817-458X. [cited 17 Nov 20], 81
[10] Hau' ofa, Epeli. We Are the Ocean, Selected Works. Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 2008, 28
Hana Pera Aoake (Ngaati Mahuta, Ngaati Hinerangi, Tainui/Waikato) is an artist and writer based on stolen Kaai Tahu, Waitaha and Kaati Mamoe whenua in Waikaouti, in the settler colony, New Zealand. Hana co-runs Kei te pai press, has edited a number of other journals like Tupuranga and founded the now defunct art collective, Fresh and Fruity. Hana has published and co-published a number of different essays and prose, including on Granta, Overland, Un Magazine, Running Dog, and the ACC-CCA. Hana just published their first book, A bathful of kawakawa and hot water with Compound Press. Hana enjoys defacing colonial property, eating kaimoana, collecting junk and swimming.
Runway Journal acknowledges the custodians of the nations our digital platform reaches. We extend this acknowledgement to all First Nations artists, writers and audiences.
Runway Journal is assisted by the Australian Government through the Australia Council, its arts funding and advisory body.
Runway Journal receives project support from the NSW Government through Create NSW.
Runway Journal acknowledges the custodians of the nations our digital platform reaches. We extend this acknowledgement to all First Nations artists, writers and audiences.
Runway Journal is assisted by the Australian Government through the Australia Council, its arts funding and advisory body.
Runway Journal receives project support from the NSW Government through Create NSW.