PUBLIC 54: Indigenous Art

54

INDIGENOUS ART New Media and the Digital

EDITED BY

Heather Igloliorte, Julie Nagam, Carla Taunton

Contents

5

I N T RO DUC TI O N

Transmissions: The Future Possibilities of Indigenous Digital and New Media Art

66

Megan tamati-Quennell + Lisa Reihana 78

Heather igloliorte, Julie Nagam, Carla taunton 14

Pou Rewa, the Liquid Post, Māori Go Digital?

Reverse Notions, Darkness and Light

Deciphering the Refusal of the Digital and Binary Codes of Sovereignty/SelfDetermination and Civilized/Savage Julie Nagam

90

Skull Stories Jordan bennett

Maree Mills 94 25

Re:lating Necessity and Invention: How Sara Diamond and The Banff Centre Aided Indigenous New Media Production (1992-2005) Cheryl L’Hirondelle

36

A Brief (Media) History of the Indigenous Future Jason Edward Lewis

51

Artwork Skawennati

54

LEFT_CHANNEL Geronimo inutiq

58

Jackson 2bears + Janet Rogers 98

Arctic Cultural (Mis)Representation: Advocacy, Activism, and Artistic Expression through Social Media Erin yunes

104 Tilllutarniit: History, Land, and

Resilience in Inuit Film and Video Heather igloliorte 110 The Phone Booth Project

Martu Media Memories: A Conversation in Three Parts Jennifer biddle, Lily Hibberd + Curtis taylor

Aesthetics, Violence, and Indigeneity Jolene Rickard

63

For this Land: Chiefswood

Coming of Age under Colonialism Wahe Kavara

122 On Indigenous Digit-al Media and

Augmented Realities in Will Wilson’s eyeDazzler: Trans-customary Portal to Another Dimension Laura E. Smith

128

Animation Stills Amanda Strong

132 Nga Whatu-ora: We The Living

Are The Seeing Eyes Of Our Sleeping Ancestors

REViEWS EXHibitiON REViEWS 192 Public Studio

What We Lose in Metrics teresa Carlesimo

Natalie Robertson 194 Richard Ibghy & Marilou Lemmens 146 Bodies that Matter Léuli Eshraghi, Angela tiatia + Jasmine te Hira

Putting Life to Work Michael diRisio 197 Nomi Drory

155

blueberry pie under a martian sky

Pivot

Scott benesiinaabandan

Angela Walcott

158 In Dialogue: Scott Benesiinaabandan’s

waabana’iwewin (exhibition) Jaimie isaac 172

Artwork

bOOK REViEWS 199 Exhibiting the Moving Image: History

Revisited, François Bovier & Adeena Mey, eds.

Eli Horwatt

bracken Hanuse Corlett 201 The Ancients and the Postmoderns, 178 Games as Enduring Presence Elizabeth LaPensée 187

Digital Games Stills Pinnguaq

Fredric Jameson Cody Lang 204 Performance and Temporalisation: Time

Happens, Stuart Grant, Jodie McNeilly & Maeva Veerapen, eds.

Maria Katharina Schmidt 206 Girls’ Feminist Blogging in a Postfeminist

Age, Jessalynn Keller Claudia Sicondolfo 209 biOGRAPHiES

Scott benesiinaabandan, conversation with a kangaroo bone and photograph (2014). digital print. 119 x 119 cm.

Courtesy of the artist.

INT RODUCTIO N

Transmissions: The Future Possibilities of Indigenous Digital and New Media Art HEAtHER iGLOLiORtE, JULiE NAGAM, CARLA tAUNtON

We all now live in a world where new media and digital technology are deeply embedded in our daily transactions—they are our ‘tools for survival’—and for Indigenous artists working with new media there is an imperative to adapt to these tools and to adopt new modes of communication. Though the means have changed, the message remains consistently unrelenting and unending. These calls continue to assert our unique and distinct world views. These are the patterns we retrace that are encrypted in the broad strokes of our art. They are our transmissions past, present, and future to all within earshot and line of sight.

—Cheryl L’Hirondelle1 Aboriginal media is connected in context and cultural practice as a result of shared socio-cultural experiences. Together these works bring forth significant accounts that are embodied in our ancient homelands. Our creative expression sustains a connection to ancient ways, places our identities and concerns in the immediate, while linking us to the future. To a broader audience, this expression conveys an Aboriginal worldview, revealing the Aboriginal experience in all of its complexities. Such expression is an articulation of our cultures and presents an Aboriginal perspective for all those who will listen.

—Dana Claxton2 Our tools of survival are rooted in our ability to work in collective methods and Indigenous methodologies. We are a team of scholars and curators who collaborate together on projects to develop research tools that employ art to create new epistemologies. Our intention is to radically transform public spaces and to create new paradigms for community engagement in the arts. We are also committed to activating experimental exhibition practices that are grounded in interdisciplinary and intermedial frameworks. We do so by theorizing the past and present in diachronic ways to contribute to understandings of Indigenous continuities, resiliencies, and resurgences. We are interested in the notion of a dialogic aesthetics, which is grounded in an understanding of art as a mode for witnessing, thinking about, and interpreting the dilemmas facing Indigenous communities as we/they grapple with the consequences of residential schools, low education completion rates, and mass migration to urban spaces, to name just a few issues. Collectively, we work in areas of Indigenous contemporary art practice in concert with cultural geographies,

5

Maree Mills, Hine Ahu One (2004). Cardboard paper frame, compost, seedpods, video projection from head of life-size figure, DVD, 2mm.

ArtsPost Gallery, Hamilton, New Zealand. Photo: Maree Mills.

14 PUBLIC 54 MILLS

Pou Rewa, the Liquid Post, Māori Go Digital?

MAREE MiLLS

PREFACE 2016

The following article was published in Third Text in 2009.1 Despite exponential changes to image technology and those contributing creative content, the assertions I made regarding the ability of digital media to “explore non-linear time, space, emotion, spirituality and symbolism concurrently and its conceptual suitability in communicating Māori paradigms” have stood the test of time.

Tēnā koutou, tēnā koutou, ngā mihi nui kia koutou Kō Tongariro te maunga Kō Taupō-nui-a-Tia te moana Kō Ngāti Tūwharetoa te iwi Kō te Heuheu te tangata Kō Ngāti Hine tāku hapu, Korohe te marae Kō Maree Mills taku ingoa This formal greeting in the Māori language references landmarks associated with my tribe. An affiliation with the whenua (land) locates my Māori ancestry and provides me a place to speak from. I am from the Ngāti Tūwharetoa peoples of the Lake Taupō district, Aotearoa (New Zealand) and my name is Maree Mills. I am a curator, video artist, and Director of the Hastings City Art Gallery in Hawke’s Bay, Aotearoa, where I am currently undertaking research on multimedia approaches to communicating the female element within Māori philosophy for the twenty-first century.

Art that uses non-traditional media and emerging technologies, specifically the electronic or digital, has the potential to create and nurture a distinctive “public space” for the articulation of alternative Māori worldviews. Although a growing number of publications focus on contemporary Māori art practice, no specific attention has yet been given to the swelling numbers of Māori practitioners operating in the field of digital media. This essay contextualizes my research in the wider framework of Māori digital art and seeks to explain a Māori creative practice.

At the dawn of a new millennium Māori welcomed the sun as it first illuminated Mt Hikurangi in Aotearoa, New Zealand. Contemporary Māori artists picked up technology and moved into the light with Hiko! New Energies in Māori Art (1999) at the Robert McDougall Art Annex. The nationwide interest in Māori “new media art” was largely spearheaded by the prolific Lisa Reihana (Ngā Puhi, Ngāti Hine, Ngāi Tū), who quickly developed an international reputation. Reihana emerged from Ilam art school in Canterbury around the time of the birth of video.

15

Re:lating Necessity and Invention How Sara Diamond and The Banff Centre Aided Indigenous New Media Production (1992-2005)

CHERyL L’HiRONdELLE

“Relating” is etymologically defined as an “act of telling...connection.”1 In this current time of reconciliation (a term many contemporaries argue is problematic due to a dearth of peaceful regard to begin with), I offer this interview with digital and data media theorist Sara Diamond touching on best practices and her dedication to creating and envisioning programs and themes for the Banff New Media Institute (BNMI). I do not offer “re-” as repetition, a “doing-it-again,” as if the practice of inclusion had a precursor. Instead, I am interested in the use of the email subject protocol of “RE:” as in “regarding” combined with the honour and respect that such “regard” suggests.

During her years at The Banff Centre, Sara Diamond consistently created opportunities that facilitated an environment for an ever-widening network of Indigenous artists and thinkers, technologists, and scientists to meet, share knowledge, strategize, and lay the groundwork for future projects and collaborations. Those of us who were fortunate to create new work during thematic residencies, be included in exhibitions, have projects in research, development, or post-production phases, and present at the many ongoing summits, symposia, and conferences during the years Sara was there can attest to how crucial, critical, and opportune this access was for our ongoing practices.

It isn’t possible to chronicle these years and reposition the credit as an exclusively Indigenous intervention. Instead, and in the spirit of the inspiring and inclusive decade-plus of cross-country and international conversations that ensued, I offer a metaphor of hybridity via the Red River cart. The necessary, resolute, flexible sturdiness executed by the spokes held fast to the rim by means of the Indigenous invention of the pîsâkanâpiy2 still do not a usable device make, if one excludes the equally necessary, dynamic, steadfastness of the “hub.” The burgeoning network based on politics, ethics, and relationships that both inspired and spurred on Sara’s promissory vision implicates us all, even now, years after her exodus for the presidency of OCAD University.

CHERyL L’HiRONdELLE (CL): I thought it would be useful to ask you about your background and previous work that eventually brought you to The Banff Centre, and why including Indigenous artists and thinkers became your commitment once you got there?

SARA diAMONd (Sd): I had been engaged, in one way or another, with Indigenous rights movements in Canada since the 1970s. I worked with AIM [American Indian Movement] on its defence of Leonard Pelletier when he was in prison in Canada. Through my engagement with social movements in British Columbia, I collaborated around broader issues of Indigenous rights.

I saw the issues of Indigenous national rights and equity of access as Canada’s fundamental racism, as being one of those cutting edge questions. From a very early age I saw a parallel with

25

FIG. 1 Skawennati, Imagining Indians in the 25th Century—2121 Raven (2001).

Web-based interactive artwork. Courtesy of the artist.

36 PUBLIC 54 LEWIS

A Brief (Media) History of the Indigenous Future JASON EdWARd LEWiS

The concept of the future imaginary seeks to capture the ways people imagine the futures of their societies.1 In Indigenous contexts we often refer to the seventh generation to keep us mindful of how our actions in the present will affect our descendants. Thus, the research group I co-lead, the Initiative for Indigenous Futures (IIF), has taken that frame—150 to 200 years out, science fiction territory—as the future about which we are interested in thinking.2 What do we, as members of Indigenous communities, think about when we think in those timeframes? As I have argued elsewhere, what are ready-to-hand are the images and ideas generated over decades of popular science fiction.3 These touchstones have filled our imaginations with ideas about what kinds of governmental structures we might have, what sorts of rituals we might practice, what kinds of gender structures might be in place, what kinds of drugs we might take and, of course, what kinds of technology we might use. One can think of the future imaginary as a distinct part of the current “social imaginary,” described by Charles Taylor as “the way ordinary people ‘imagine’ their social surroundings…not expressed in theoretical terms, but carried in images, stories, and legends.”4 It forms the popular vocabulary that we use to describe what we see when we see the future.

Given that popular science fiction has historically been the provenance of Western writers, it tends to reflect a particular set of imperial and colonial biases and prejudices. One consequence of this lineage is the fact that recognizable descendants of Indigenous people do not often appear in the settler future imaginary, nor does one see any indication of Indigenous culture as having survived into the seventh generation and beyond. To quote the science fiction writer Nalo Hopkinson (herself paraphrasing the author Ian Hagemann): “when I read science fiction set in the future, where there are no people of color, I wonder when the race war happened that killed us all of and why has the writer seen fit not to mention something so huge?”5 Despite its historical and contemporary colonialism, we at IIF love science fiction. It allows us to dream, concretely, about what the future might hold for our children, communities, and our species. The work we have conducted with the Aboriginal Territories in Cyberspace (AbTeC) research network has focused on claiming territory in the newly forming virtual places of cyberspace.6 We are now turning towards claiming territory in the future imaginary, or, better yet, creating our own.

Manifesting the Future

Indigenous artworks that explicitly imagine the future are not many. There is the work of my codirector at AbTeC, the Mohawk artist Skawennati, including Imagining Indians in the 25th Century (2001)7 and TimeTraveller™ (2008 – 2013).8 These two works, companion pieces, traverse

37

FIG. 6 Lawrence Paul Yuxweluptun, Inherent Rights, Vision Rights (1992). Virtual Environment, video still. National Gallery of Canada. Courtesy of the artist.

FIG. 7 K. C. Adams, “Teepee Creeper”—Cyborg Hybrid Scott (2006), and Cyborg Hybrid Accessories: Laptop, LED Pen, USB Bracelet and LED Choker (2007). Digital print. 38 x 51 cm. Courtesy of the artist.

Geronimo Inutiq, LEFT_CHANNEL (2016). Film still. Archival film material sourced from the Prelinger Archives and the NFB. Courtesy of the artist.

Aesthetics, Violence, and Indigeneity JOLENE RiCKARd

Onondaga linguist Dr. Kevin Connelly spilled a glass of water “accidently” on a table in an undergraduate class at Cornell University during a guest lecture in a course titled, Indigenous Ingenuities As Living Networks, in the spring of 2016. The quotation marks here signify that it wasn’t an accident but a considered part of a demonstration of a key concept in Indigenous philosophy that can be expressed in Haudenosaunee languages. The water spill illustrates a linguistic concept called “aspect,” a property or rule embedded in most Indigenous or polysynthetic languages.1 The discipline of structural linguistics labels aspect a key property for understanding Indigenous ideas about time that can be found in the conceptual architecture of our languages. The spill was part of a broader set of demonstrations calling for the need to recognize a different philosophical ordering of time and space within an Indigenous world view. Dr. Connelly arrested student attention with this action, but the underlying point was that time as a representation of reality is fluid, not static or fixed. Inevitably, a revised comprehension of time will be demanded in order to understand art rooted in Indigenous philosophy.

What is the relevance of considering discrete Indigenous world views2 when Western thinkers including Gramsci, Foucault, Jameson, and others confirmed the hegemony of European culture and philosophy in the twentieth century? Moreover, what is the intersection between Indigenous art and the field of art history whose underpinnings are based in European philosophy?3 Philosophy is a much debated topic in the field of art history, but the thread of thought or influence that links it to Indigenous methodologies is almost invisible. Why, then, should there be a continued effort to visit world views or philosophical traditions if this emphasis has been subdued in the analysis of contemporary art? Although efforts are in process to accommodate numerous histories, initially marked as the cultural turn4 and now discussed through the theorization of post-to-neocolonialism in the field, there remains critical work to be done. However, the manic pace of globalization has almost made the revolutionary re-imagining of the Western “master narrative”5 and uptake of postcolonial methods seem trivial. Ironically, those of us struggling to be heard acknowledge that it had a seismic impact on opening up a space in the humanities to begin to insert diverse histories of art.6 The impact of the second wave of feminist theory in the 1980s, in particular black feminist “standpoint epistemology,” and the recognition of African-American, Native American, Latino/a, and Asian American voices informed the space that Indigenous artists operate in today. The transit from that point in the 1980s to 2016 has seen Indigenous artists engage in exhibitions internationally, but this does not unilaterally translate into recognition of Indigenous governance or cultural autonomy. Rather, it places our work only in settler-state confinement.7 As noted, Indigenous art is in dialogue with contemporary society, but also reflects/projects our past and future. So, what are the methodological strategies that are needed to recognize the artists’ intent? 8

58 PUBLIC 54 RICKARD

Reverse Notions, Darkness and Light MEGAN tAMAti-QUENNELL + LiSA REiHANA

An interview with artist Lisa Reihana about Tai Whetuki, House of Death Redux (2016), created as her exhibition work for the prestigious New Zealand Walters Art Prize, at Toi o Tamaki, Auckland Art Gallery.

MEGAN tAMAti-QUENNELL (MtQ): It is interesting to me the decisions that you made for the representation of Tai Whetuki in your Walters Prize exhibition at Toi o Tamaki, Auckland Art Gallery that I have just seen. The only other occasion I saw Tai Whetuki was on your computer monitor here at your house. It was incomplete then though, I think. You had the footage, but you were still working on it, and you were just starting to work on the sound, James [Pinker, Lisa’s partner]. You were working on it for the Auckland Festival I think, as a single monitor work to screen outside. That time I didn’t really get the sense of it.

This time it is presented large scale, as a two-channel work. I liked it as a two-channel work.

I liked the scale, but that you also worked with the space to show it. From the painted floor that reflected the work and seemed to me, like water. You also situated the projections a bit lower on the wall in the space, so the images spilled onto the floor. There was a shimmer!

I also liked what I called the surreal quality of the projected work, but you used another word, illusionistic, I think you said. There is also a theatrical element of the installation with the steam or dry ice that activates sometimes. What is that? And why use that as a design element, [when it’s] not usual in an art installation or for a visual art experience?

LiSA REiHANA (LR): There is a hazer in the room. We are going to perfect that over the next week. It is a technique often used in theatre productions. So there is a sense of mist in the room, which is somewhat like a spirit. It’s making visible the invisible—what the hazer does is amplify the beams of light emanating from the two projectors, which is kind of interesting for me. As much as the work is very very dark, the darkness therefore intensifies whatever is light. One of the things that I really wanted people to feel when they are leaving the room, is that they are moving towards the light. So there is this haziness and the black floor, which is very sharp and bright, even though it is super dark.

MtQ: So Tai Whetuki focuses on Māori death rituals, Māori ceremonies and beliefs related to

death. Haehae (body laceration) is depicted in the work, Te Hahunga (the exhuming of bones) and Karanga (ritual chants undertaken by Māori women) can be heard in the work. You also make reference to Te Hahunga outside the exhibition in text form, as a pre-contact, early settler period activity and included a quote by New Zealand Ethnologist Elsdon Best about Te Hahunga. Tai Whetuki also extends into Polynesian rituals associated with death with the use of the Tahitian

Lisa Reihana, Tai Whetuki (2016). 2 channel DVD. Installation view. Auckland Art Gallery. Courtesy of the artist.

67

Tilllutarniit: History, Land, and Resilience in Inuit Film and Video HEAtHER iGLOLiORtE

Inuk singer, Beatrice Deer, performs in front of the audience gathered at the Tillutarniit Outdoor Film Festival, Montreal, 2016.

Photo: Ossie Michelin.

In early August 2016, Inuit artists Stephen Agluvak Puskas and Isabella-Rose Weetaluktuk co-curated an original format film festival in Montreal, produced in partnership with Concordia University, the FOFA Gallery and Terres en Vues festival. For three evenings in a row, the FOFA Gallery’s outdoor courtyard, which opens onto one of the city’s busiest downtown streets, offered up Inuit “country” food (traditional cuisine like seal meat and Arctic char), music, Inuit games, and film and video. Each evening featured a series of short and feature-length films directed by or produced in serious collaboration with Inuit, arranged under three distinct themes: Unikausiit (history), Nuna (land), and Pimmariktuq (resilience). The following is my conversation with the curators, reflecting on their experience of the film festival.

104 PUBLIC 54 IGLOLIORTE

The Phone Booth Project Martu Media Memories: A Conversation in Three Parts

JENNiFER biddLE, LiLy HibbERd + CURtiS tAyLOR

This paper is a three-way conversation between anthropologist Jennifer Biddle and the artists/collaborators of the intercultural, new media installation The Phone Booth Project, Lily Hibberd and Curtis Taylor. i. indigenous Media History: A Martu History of Australian telecommunications

JENNiFER biddLE (Jb): In 2012, Martu filmmaker Curtis Taylor and non-Indigenous interdisciplinary artist Lily Hibberd collaborated to create an installation for the exhibition We Don’t Need A Map—a joint initiative between Martumili Artists, Fremantle Arts Centre, and the Martu cultural and landcare organization Kanyirninpa Jukurrpa—in which the question of the so-called “remote,” in relation to the technological promises of modernity, takes pointed shape.

Lily Hibberd & Curtis Taylor, The Phone Booth Project (2012–14). 3-channel video installation, suspended desert phone booth and found objects. Composite image: 3 installation views (2012). Fremantle Arts Centre, Western Australia. Photo: Lily Hibberd. Courtesy of the artists.

In its first installation at Fremantle Arts Centre, The Phone Booth Project comprised an immersive 3-channel video projection occupying an entire room, replete with a real, graffitiadorned, “remote” phone booth sourced from an abandoned Martu outstation with red desert sand from Martu country of the Pilbara, and discarded flour drums and milk crates that provide the requisite and ubiquitous seating of choice in Indigenous communities (at least the ones I am familiar with). The Phone Booth Project created the “feel” and not just the “look” of contemporary desert life: a cacophonous soundscape of the everyday, with ringing telephones, barking dogs, kids’ laughter—the thick sentience of a densely socialized and deeply known occupied territory, what Aboriginal people call “country,” took shape through the distinctive animated cadences of the Western Desert languages of Martu peoples.

110 PUBLIC 54 BIDDLE, HIBBERD + TAYLOR

On Indigenous Digit-al Media and Augmented Realities in Will Wilson’s eyeDazzler: Trans-customary Portal to Another Dimension LAURA E. SMitH

In 2011, photographer Will Wilson (Diné) collaborated with Navajo weavers Joy Farley and Pamela Brown to create a rug made of 76,050 glass beads inspired by a 1970s wool “Eyedazzler” rug his grandmother, Martha Etsitty, wove. Eyedazzlers first appeared in the 1880s; they feature complex triangle and diamond designs woven in bright, contrasting colours that cause visual vibrations (FIG. 1). The design’s pulsations create an illusion of depth and move the viewer’s eyes beyond a static, surface encounter. Wilson extenuates this perceptual experience by inserting two black and white QR codes into the centre of the beaded work, entitled eyeDazzler: Trans-customary Portal to Another Dimension. When scanned, the code links to a short video created by Dylan McLaughlin (Diné) featuring close-ups of the original rug and the beaded piece in progress. As the images advance, Wilson’s mother, Lola Etsitty, and his aunt, Margaret Edgewater, are overheard conversing in Navajo about a rare weaving technique that produces a “two-faced” textile.1 Also presented in split-screen fashion are several sequences featuring the artists, Wilson, Farley, and Brown, and project manager Jamie Smith, directly engaging viewers. Among the fragments the work weaves together are past generations, family, present day community members, memories, Indigenous languages and cultural knowledge, the makers, digital technology, glass beads, wool, livestock industries, and the process and economies of weaving.

Effectively, eyeDazzler transcends a strictly visual encounter to embody Navajo weavers’ longstanding propensity for a dynamic, multi-dimensional, and networked sensibility. Artist and scholar Steven Loft (Mohawk/Jewish) has argued that this kind of interconnected articulation reflects the way most Indigenous North Americans have always seen and experienced their worlds. He identifies these Indigenous ecologies and cosmologies as cyberspaces, and posits them as models for theorizing Indigenous digital media aesthetics. In this way, new media technologies are not so new in that they just enhance the shared connections between past and present, the earth and the universe, and the material and virtual realities that have been and still are intrinsic to Native cultures. Loft writes that, “For Indigenous people, interconnectedness is a key principle underpinning our cosmological understanding of life.” A “networked Indian” “incorporates [a] multiplicity of voices and philosophies as well as artistic practices into an expanded and expanding information structure. We have always ‘mapped’ our environments.”2 Loft builds on Angela Haas’s (Cherokee) recent scholarship that presents American Indians as the first skilled multimedia workers and intellectuals in the Americas. Looking at wampum, a shell bead used for centuries by Woodlands Indians, Haas examines how these communities encoded, networked, and retrieved cultural information, political messages, and histories from it like a hypertext. Not static symbols or media, wampum are alive, embodying “layers of stories… woven together and [that] can be pulled apart” by the community to which they belong.3 Loft Will Wilson, eyeDazzler: Trans-customary Portal to Another Dimension (2011). 76,050 4mm Glass beads. New Mexico Art in Public Places Collection. Courtesy of Will Wilson, Pamela Brown, Jay Farley, Jaime Smith, and Dylan McLaughlin.

Natalie Robertson. A single pingao plant surviving on the sand dunes at Te Wharau Beach, Te Tai Rawhiti. Aotearoa (2014).

Courtesy of the artist.

132 PUBLIC 54 ROBERTSON

Nga Whatu-ora: We The Living Are The Seeing Eyes Of Our Sleeping Ancestors NAtALiE RObERtSON

tikapa tukutuku

“It was everywhere, the kākaho all over the place, down along the beach, down near the river mouth. Nowadays you hardly see it anymore.” Morehu Boycie Te Maro was reflecting on his childhood memories of collecting toetoe, a reedy plant with strong hollow stems known as kākaho, for the creation of the customary Māori art form, the tukutuku (woven latticework) panel.

During the 1930s, children of the Waiapu River would gather toetoe stems for pocket money, to have enough of the material to make ceiling and wall panels in meeting houses and memorial halls. The plants are no longer widespread. Nor are others, such as pingao and kiekie, critical to making tukutuku panels, and all affected by deforestation, erosion and modern farming practices.

Papa Boycie was sharing his recollections at Tikapa Marae1 during the wānanga (a space of learning) on 24–26 November 2014. The purpose of the wānanga with Heritage New Zealand Pouhere Taonga was the restoration of tukutuku panels in Pohatu, a World War Two memorial dining hall, one of two main buildings on the marae. James ( Jim) and Cathy Schuster who work with Pouhere Taonga assisted in both the restoration and the transmission of knowledge on how to do the work, and the ecological conditions and plants needed to sustain Māori customary arts and crafts. The stark contrast between the richness of the material and visual culture of the interiors of these community centres, and the paucity of the plants remaining on the exterior, almost outside the door, is brought into focus by Papa Boycie’s observation. His name, Morehu, means survivor or remnant. He is one of the last remaining tribal elders who grew up at Tikapa.

During the wānanga, Ngati Porou conservationist and native plant expert, Graeme Atkins of Te Whanau a Pokai (whose children are the fiftieth generation of this place) takes us to the nearby beach and shows us where a few plants of pingao (golden sand sedge) and toetoe are being nurtured. With their soft fluffy heads waving in the wind like ponies’ tails, the toetoe is well named as “conspicua,” yet the plants are anything but conspicuous in the terrain before us. I take photos of a pingao plant, surviving on an erosion slip. I position the lens on camera to see the forlorn plant, singularly stranded on the sand dune, between sea and hillside, and in the distance Pohautea, our sentinel guardian mountain at the mouth of the Waiapu and beyond that, East Cape. Wide angle. Sharp depth of field. A camera on the foreshore.

I had returned to Tikapa, at Te Tai Rawhiti, the East Cape of Aotearoa (New Zealand) in the tribal territory of Ngati Porou, to attend the wānanga with the purpose of digitally documenting the tukutuku restoration process on camera and through sound recordings. Tikapa is my turangawaewae, my place to stand, through my Māori whakapapa, my genealogy. The catalyst for returning for this marae restoration project was my relatively recent realization that, in 1923, the illustrious Māori leader Sir āpirana Turupa Ngata2 of the tribal confederation Ngati Porou,

133

Bodies That Matter

LéULi ESHRAGHi iNtERViEWS ANGELA tiAtiA + JASMiNE tE HiRA

I write these lines from where I live and work, the unceded and stolen biik lands, baan waters, and balit ngulu strong hearts of Kulin Nation territory. Narrm, the great bay, is home to the millions of people who constitute the settler colonial context of Melbourne. I belong to Mount Vaea and the Loimata o Apaula creek in the Sāmoan archipelago, and to the plateau around Najafābād in Īrānzamin. I am an artist, writer, and curator. For a number of years now, I have worked and conversed closely with two significant artists, Angela Tiatia (Sāmoan, based in Warrang Sydney) and Jasmine Te Hira (Te Rarawa, Ngāpuhi, Cook Islands, based in Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland), whom I have interviewed across vast distances of liminal spaces. Fa’amālō atu for your generosity.

We live in different cities, work in intersecting circles of consciousness and responsibility to ancestors, to sacred lands and waters, and to futures. My artistic and curatorial research, through my current doctoral candidature in Indigenous curatorial practices at Monash University Art Design + Architecture, focuses on strategies to express ceremonial-political responsibilities, sovereign Indigenous languages, bodies, and material/spiritual territories, connecting from Indigenous Sāmoan knowledges and practices outward across Moananui a Kiwa, Kiwa’s Great Ocean, and North America.

Sea levels rise. Mediatized comfort accentuates in isolation. Climate disasters become more common. Homelessness and genocidal police practices become protracted. Renewable energies are harnessed. Corruption increases. Colonial capitalism becomes more acute. The ocean is in our veins, in our poetic bodies—if our oceans rise and drown our homelands, we have colonial capitalism and hetero-patriarchal knowledges to look to for cause and effect. The river bursts its banks. Again. Again.

Healthy communities, safe spaces, bodies that matter are all forms of resistance to a homogenizing, extractive logic whose roots lie in the European Enlightenment impulse to own and control the living things that span the Earth. Indigenous artists working in new media in the region I live in, the Moananui a Kiwa, centre on the body in performative states of being as the core creative material. Bodies are sovereign, challenged, queered, gendered, unfucked, undone, remade, reworked, and opened out, on our own terms, in accordance with living customary protocols and Indigenous resurgences that steer us towards viable futures where we are all possible in the embrace of all living things.

147

Jasmine Te Hira, The Beauty of Invisible Grief (2015). Frozen water in hei tiki form. Site-specific ephemeral performance. 42mm, looped. Courtesy of the artist.

Jasmine Te Hira, The Beauty of Invisible Grief (2015). Frozen water in hei tiki form. Site-specific ephemeral performance. 42mm, looped. Courtesy of the artist.