I learned a Fijian proverb recently: a kena laya sa vakaoqo, sa drau na kena votu.
(Its buds – the calyx of the breadfruit – are like these, its fruit will be hundreds).
From seed beginnings, great things will come. And so, the art, the stories, the movements... were seeded by our ancestors; they are bearing fruit. (1)
Over the past two decades images beamed across the television and internet have notified the world of the severe environmental challenges facing the islands of the Pacific: sea-level rise, category five cyclones, coastal erosion, coral bleaching and droughts. The dominant visual culture regularly presents a vulnerability and an acceptance of a demise of an Oceania pushed to the brink of habitability. Understanding these fatalisms, Elizabeth DeLoughrey argues, has occurred through several allegories which fable both island(scape) and ocean(scape): hot rising seas from climate change, a repository of nuclear contaminants from military-grade weapons testing, a swirling garbage patch of plastic waste with oceans overfished and islands over-excavated due to capitalist cultures of mass production and extractivism.(2) In response to such visions which more than overtly impact Pacific wellbeing, collective art-action in Oceania has taken place and is a conspicuous force shaping the region. By generating a ‘sovereignty over image, narrative, and space,’ Oceanic peoples combat the tired colonial trope of the native lost to protracted environmental destruction of their islands.(3)
In Oceania, the arts are the calyx, or vital channel for resistance, critique and mobilisation of regionalism in times of ecological crisis. Articulations of planetary stewardship and fierce environmental attachments are core and omnipresent themes imparted by ancestors to their children. Talk-stories, chants, songs, dances, carving and tataus historically were receptacles for environmental principles, ethics and customs, which were passed down through generations. Instilled was an environmental literacy of ourselves in relation to our surroundings. Such art forms conveyed stories of the human genesis from the environment, cross-species relationships and lessons on proper stewardship of the land. Today, bearing this heritage and in the face of colonialism many Oceanic artists have radically employed environmental art-story to ‘protest the historical exploitation and further degradation to lands’ as well as to ‘re-connect people to the sacredness of the earth, [which] honors the earth as an ancestor, and insists that land (and literary representations of land) are sites of healing, belonging, resistance, and mutual care.’(4) Through a cultural renaissance of environmental citation, we remember our pasts in the hope of eco-justice for all. For Cresantia Frances Koya an islander politics of care is demonstrated in Oceanic arts, in which more recently:
…art initiatives demonstrate the resilience of the Pacific spirit to capture the essence of the holistic view of ‘Land, Sky and Sea’ so clearly articulated indigenous cosmology and stories of creation.(5)
Nevertheless, this commonality across island cultures has generated a core sense of Oceanic regionalism. A highly influential example of this, which fuses Oceanic arts and scholarship, is Epeli Hau’ofa’s expansive vision of Oceania as a ‘sea of islands’ rather than disparate ‘islands in a far sea.’(6) The former places islands ‘in the totality of their relationships’, whereas the latter emphasises ‘dry surfaces in a vast ocean far-away from the centres of power’ exaggerating their ‘smallness’ and ‘remoteness.’(7) Hau’ofas piece became a doctrine of empowerment within and beyond academia, highlighting the latticed, transoceanic trajectories of Oceanic peoples, underlining their shared similarities in geo-pelagic relation. This vision challenges those rooted in nationalistic frameworks, as well as those vested in both contemporary and historical cartographic anxieties.
Building on this in the essay The Ocean in Us, Hau’ofa inscribes the ocean as a critical space of cosmological origins, futures and a continuous, shifting base of political and cultural operations. He remarks on the coalitional potential of Oceania, envisioning:
Just as the sea is an open and ever-flowing reality, so should our oceanic identity transcend all forms of insularity, to become one that is openly searching, inventive, and welcoming. In a metaphorical sense, the ocean that has been our waterway to each other should also be our route to the rest of the world.(8)
As such, the connection to the land is not entirely fixed to allow old myths and genealogies to shift but always ‘in relation to an enduring spatial nexus’ of Oceania. As Astrida Neimanis states:
[T]o figure selves as blood in water, or bodies of water, not only rejects a human separation from Nature out there; it also torques many of our accepted cartographies of space, time, and species, and implicates a specifically watery movement of difference and repetition.(9)
The edges of Oceania’s frames are thus loosened, allowing more expansive ideas of who constitutes an Oceanian. Two assumed polarising ‘articulations of identity’ fuse: the rooted native built on ‘primordial, trans-historical attachments to land’ and the routed diasporic figure ‘enabled as a result of a clash with forces of globalisation.’(10) As Vince Diaz and J. Kēhaulani Kauanui have explored, despite their mobility, Oceanic peoples do not abandon an attachment to homeland, and bear a range of attachments to land and place, old and new traditions of native dwelling and travelling, in a globalised world of elaborate complexity.(11) To reject the metonymy of a fragile and vulnerable island through this wet constitution then, is to reject the representation of a fragile and vulnerable people, instead imbuing their representation with the resilience of the ever-changing yet constant ocean with the capacity to ebb, flow and endure. New Oceanian identities are articulated as fluid, unfixed and amorphous, to recognise this diversity of cultures and their attachments to environments.(12)
These fluid identities must also be considered with the contemporary threat of climate change in the time of the Anthropocene. To properly address climate change, processes of decolonisation must be enacted. As Heather Davis and Zoe Todd assert:
[T]he Anthropocene – or at least all of the anxiety produced around these realities for those in Euro-western contexts – is really the arrival of the reverberations of the seismic shockwave into nations who introduced colonial, capitalist processes across the globe in the last half-millenium in the first place.(13)
And yet, it must be noted that climate change remains in the distinctive arena of big science rather than that of Indigenous thinking, the humanities or arts. Amitav Ghosh has gone further to acknowledge the Anthropocene presents ‘a challenge not only to the arts and humanities but also to our common-sense understandings and beyond that to contemporary culture in general.’(14) While it is true that a vocabulary of climate change has not previously existed in Oceanic expressions in the arts, Oceanic cosmology is deeply intertwined with the environment. This is frequently overshadowed in Western settler and post-colonial projections and provides an important source of creativity to generate a culturally relevant, socially apposite avenue for commentary and education on climate change. Moreover, given the legacy of unconsensual colonial impositions on our islands and waterways, climate change represents just another chapter in a continuation of apocalyptic dispossession and violence upon Oceanic people. These new perspectives and knowledges are being transmitted within the pan-Oceanic archipelagic framework, viewing Oceania as inside of us all yet with our islands as our site of belonging over which we must retain sovereignty.
And so, the fruits from the calyx of resistance are events which understand that ‘Indigenous claims transcend colonial disruptions’ in asserting ‘we were here before all that; we are still here; we will make a future here’(15) overturning the geostrategic and commercial futurities of powerful nations in the recent ‘Rush for Oceania.’(16) For Noelani Goodyear-Ka’opua native Pacific futurities are multiple:
[T]he assertion of indigenous epistemologies and practices renews intergenerational pathways through connective watery bodies – human, lake, harbor – linking ancestors with descendants.(17)
By pronouncing a firm identity of resistance through Oceanic materiality, Pacific art-story draws on wellsprings of solidarity from past movements against colonial imposition emplaced in a watery archive. Our place is in water and by water, and it is a referential point of such in the face of ongoing and shifting ecological crisis.
(1) Qolouvaki, T., ‘The Mana of Wansolwara: Oceanic Art/Story as Protest and Decolonial Imagining.’ Hehiale.wordpress.com. https://hehiale.wordpress.com/2015/04/27/the-mana-of-wansolwara-oceanic-artstory-as-protest-and-decolonial-imagining/ accessed 23 September, 2019
(2) DeLoughrey, E., Allegories of the Anthropocene, Duke University Press: Durham, 2019
(3) Kauli, J and Thomas, V., Koya-Vakauta, C and Bendrups, D., Pacific Art as Activism: Sovereignty Over Image, Narrative and Space. La Trobe University, Melbourne https://soundcloud.com/user-976756407/pacific- art-as- activism-sovereignty-over-image-narrative-space (accessed 23 September, 2019).
(4) Perez, CS Pacific Islander Climate Change Poetry, TheMissingSlate.com. http://themissingslate.com/2017/10/01/pacific-islander-climate-change-poetry/ (accessed 23 September, 2019).
(5) Cresantia Koya Vaka’uta, ‘In the Absence of Land, All We Have Is Each Other,’ in Dreadlocks edited by Mohit Prasad, (Pacific Media Centre Auckland: Auckland, 2011), 49-74.
(6) Hau’ofa, E., ‘Our Sea of Islands; in The Contemporary Pacific 6, 1 (1994), p: 31.
(7) Ibid. p: 7
(8) Hau’ofa, E ‘The Ocean in Us’ in The Contemporary Pacific. Reprinted in We Are the Ocean: Selected Works, University of Hawaii Press: Honolulu, 1998, 2008.
(9) Neimanis, A., Bodies of Water, Bloomsbury Academic: London, 2017.
(10) Clifford, J., Returns: Becoming Indigenous in The Twenty-First Century, Boston Harvard University Press: Boston, 2013, 64.
(11) Diaz, V., and J. Kēhaulani Kauanui, ‘Native Pacific Cultural Studies on the Edge’ in The Contemporary Pacific 13, (2001), 315-342.2.
(12) Wendt, A., ‘Towards a New Oceania’ in Mana Review 1, (1976), 49-60.1; Hau’ofa, E., ‘Our Sea of Islands’ in The Contemporary Pacific 6, 1 (1994), 147-162; Clifford, J., Returns: Becoming Indigenous in The Twenty-First Century, Boston Harvard University Press: Boston, 2013, 67.
(13) David, H and Todd, Z., ‘On the Importance of a Date, Or, Decolonizing the Anthropocene’ in ACME: An International Journal for Critical Geographies 16, 774. 4.
(14) Ghosh, A., The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable, (The University of Chicago Press: Chicago), 9.
(15) Clifford, J., Returns: Becoming Indigenous in The Twenty-First Century, Boston Harvard University Press: Boston, 2013, 64.
(16) Reclaiming Oceania Collective, ‘The Rush for Oceania: Critical Perspectives on Contemporary Oceans Governance and Stewardship’ in SGDIA Working Paper Series, (University of the South Pacific: Suva, 2018).
(17) Goodyear-Kao’ōpua, N., ‘Protectors of the Furture, Not Protestors of the Past: Indigenous Pacific Activism and Mauna a Wākea’ in South Atlantic Quarterly 116, (2017), 186.1.
Talei Luscia Mangioni is a Fijian and Italian writer and researcher based in Ngunnwal-Ngambri land, Canberra. She is a proud i-Taukei Fijian (Namosi, Rewa), Samoan (Lotopa) and Sicilian (Poggioreale) woman. She grew up on unceded Gadigal land of the Eora Nation (Sydney, Australia) and now lives on Ngunnawal and Ngambri land (Canberra, Australia). Her current scholarship aims to chart the Nuclear Free and Independent Pacific movement across Oceania through historical ethnography, braiding archival records and material objects, with oral histories.
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.