Ecocriticism and Indigenous Studies

Conversations from Earth to Cosmos

Salma Monani, Joni Adamson, Salma Monani, Joni Adamson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317449119
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literatura
• Subtopic: Crítica literaria norteamericana

This book addresses the intersections between the interdisciplinary realms of Ecocriticism and Indigenous and Native American Studies, and between academic theory and pragmatic eco-activism conducted by multiethnic and indigenous communities. It illuminates the multi-layered, polyvocal ways in which artistic expressions render ecological connections, drawing on scholars working in collaboration with Indigenous artists from all walks of life, including film, literature, performance, and other forms of multimedia to expand existing conversations. Both local and global in its focus, the volume includes essays from multiethnic and Indigenous communities across the world, visiting topics such as Navajo opera, Sami film production history, south Indian tribal documentary, Maori art installations, Native American and First Nations science-fiction literature and film, Amazonian poetry, and many others. Highlighting trans-Indigenous sensibilities that speak to worldwide crises of environmental politics and action against marginalization, the collection alerts readers to movements of community resilience and resistance, cosmological thinking about inter- and intra-generational multi-species relations, and understandings of indigenous aesthetics and material ecologies. It engages with emerging environmental concepts such as multispecies ethnography, cosmopolitics, and trans-indigeneity, as well as with new areas of ecocritical research such as material ecocriticism, biosemiotics, and media studies. In its breadth and scope, this book promises new directions for ecocritical thought and environmental humanities practice, providing thought-provoking insight into what it means to be human in a locally situated, globally networked, and cosmologically complex world.

Part I
Resilience

1 Negotiating the Ontological Gap

Place, Performance, and Media Art Practices in Aotearoa/New Zealand

Janine Randerson and Amanda Yates

Whakapapa

Māori whakapapa is an oral transmission of genealogical lines of descent in humans, animals, and plants in a densely layered cosmogony. Whakapapa offers up a radical expansion of “the human” to include our larger kinship group: the lizards, birds, and ferns; the rivers, mists, and mountains. Māori environmental scientist Mere Roberts and colleagues describe the telling of whakapapa as:

typically beginning with the origin of the universe and the primal parents, then continuing to trace the descent of living and nonliving, material and immaterial phenomena, including humans.

(Roberts et al. 2004, 1)

Whakapapa establishes an ontological framework that involves a paradigm shift of sorts for Western academia, a turning from a primary concern with semiotic subjectivities to a more holistic account of the vast biomass as connected to the human. A cosmogony of the world composed of bacteria, phytoplankton, ants, whales, trees, and humans, as well as intra- and extraplanetary energies, resource systems, and flows. The Māori term tangata whenua (“people of the land”) describes a cosmogony where humans and all other biotic and abiotic life are the progeny of Papatūānuku, the Earth Mother. To understand plant and animal whakapapa requires knowledge not only of plant and animal names but also of their accompanying narratives.¹

Artist and theorist Dr. Huhana Smith describes whakapapa as a meta-account of descent; whanaungatanga stands for the reciprocal relations established as part of a highly complex “socio-cultural-ecological system” (2012a, 2). In this framework, all of our actions occur within, or in borders between, socio-cultural-ecological discourses whether we acknowledge it or not, including the domain of contemporary art and design, as we describe below.

This chapter considers the work of three Māori artists who engage whakapapa concerns through creative art and design practice as a generative mode of whanaungatanga. Robertson’s media artwork Uncle Tasman—The Trembling Current that Scars the Earth (2008) brings genealogical narratives to bear on a regional ecological issue of air and water quality in the town of Kawerau.

Figure 1.1 Natalie Robertson. Installation detail. Three-screen video installation, Uncle Tasman—The Trembling Current that Scars the Earth (2008). In the exhibition, He Korowai o Wai Rotorua Museum. 2008. Source: Courtesy of Natalie Robertson.

Māori artists often attend to situated tribal issues, yet in Robertson’s work the global polity is implicated in the transnational flows surrounding the market for the Tasman corporation’s paper products and the complex chain of environmental effects to which their Kawerau factory contributes. Shannon Te Ao’s performance artwork, Untitled (after Rākaihautū) (2012a) follows the ancestral pathways of the chief Rākaihautū as he molds landscapes and lakes with his footprints, according to oral tradition.

Figure 1.2 Video still from Shannon Te Ao, Untitled (after Rākaihautū) (2012a). The performer Te Ao in Waimea estuary, Whakatū (Nelson) at the top of New Zealand’s South Island. Te Ao is filmed by cinematographer Iain Frengley. Source: Courtesy of Shannon Te Ao.

By mark-making with digging sticks in the Nelson mudflats at the top of New Zealand’s South Island, Te Ao draws attention to the seabed and foreshore as a site of ongoing contention over sovereignty rights between the government and the Māori. Amanda Yates’s Pop-up Garden / Māra Iti (2012) aims to reshape urban landscapes by bringing edible gardens into the city.

Working with the Wellington City Council and referencing Māori urban forms that bind landscape and architecture together, Yates utilizes the pop-up garden as an eco-political tool and change agent. We will argue that the respective practices of Robertson, Te Ao, and Yates build relationships (whakawhanaungatanga) between entities and entity-environments through sensitive, forceful, and questioning engagements in the world.

Figure 1.3 Amanda Yates. Pop-up Garden / Māra Iti (2012), Wellington. Source: Courtesy of Amanda Yates.

We propose that the video works, performances, and landscape actions are cultural expressions that attempt to bring ontological difference to the fore. The “ontological turn” in recent humanities and social science discourse has been questioned by some Indigenous researchers (Hunt 2014; Todd 2014), yet we argue that this “turn” as articulated in contemporary philosophies can be supported by the sustained position of the nonhuman in Indigenous philosophies. We begin our discussion by clarifying the debate and our proposal, which builds on Hunt’s notion of the productive ontological “gap.” Then, turning to the work of these Māori artists, we suggest that art and design projects can activate change in the audience through discussion, sharing food, or affective response. Sensorial approaches to nonhuman entities such as mud, mist, steam, or plants probe “gaps” (Hunt 2014) within normative cultural frameworks where socio-ecological change can be imagined.

Ontology and Indigeneity

To operate within the frame of whakapapa requires an ongoing questioning of how Indigenous concepts are being discussed, and for whom, to ensure that such accounts remain mobile and relational. We will preface our account of specific cultural/creative practices by examining both ontology and Indigeneity in the context of the ontological turn across the social sciences and humanities. Movements from various disciplines have foregrounded the agency of things or assemblages of human and nonhuman and a turn toward material and multispecies relations (Adamson 2012; Barad 2007; Bennett 2010; Braidotti 2013; de la Cadena 2010; Haraway 2008; Latour 2004a; Stengers 2005; Whatmore 2002). These authors share concerns around the nature of being and provoke a radical reshaping of how various fields have conceived of human and nonhuman agency, change, materiality, and cosmopolitical, ecological, multispecies, and object relations. Multiple worldings, rather than “the one cosmos” or a mononaturalist approach (Latour, 2004b, 453), meet in the practices we will discuss.

Current ontological concerns parallel Indigenous thought around nonhuman agency and material vitality, embraced in the aforementioned concepts of whakapapa and whanaungatanga. Anthropologist Marisol de la Cadena (2010), while writing of Peruvian Indigenous practices, draws on philosopher of science Isabelle Stengers’ (2005) cosmopolitical stance that advocates a “slowed-down reasoning” in relation to the sacred mountains, known by name as earth-beings. Like Rūaumoko, the god of earthquakes in Māori cosmology, who is referenced in Natalie Robertson’s work (2008), the Andean mountain-being Ausangate demands respect, or he may become dangerous (de la Cadena 2010). This lack of separation between nature and humanity is contentious when incompatible ontologies, such as corporate forestry interests and Indigenous cosmogonies, clash over issues such as air and water rights. For instance, the representation of an alternate Māori cosmos in New Zealand director Niki Caro’s film Whale Rider (2002) foregrounds a multispecies relation (Adamson 2012, 35). The Ngāti Konohi iwi regard the whale-shaped island in Whangara as part spirit (tīpua), part human (tangata), and part taniwha (whale or water-being)—qualities also transmuted into geological form. Yet Robertson also comments (2011) that, tragically, the island, Te Ana-o-Paikea, had its tail cut off and removed for road gravel.

Some Indigenous scholars, working with similar concepts to vitalism and agential matter within Indigenous knowledge systems, have observed the ongoing “turn” occurring in sections of EuroAmerican academia with interest and some irony. Social anthropologist Zoe Todd, an Indigenous Canadian, in critiquing the (neo)colonial time-lag for non-Indigenous academics, tells us to think deeply about how:

the Ontological Turn—with its breathless “realizations” that animals, the climate, water, “atmospheres,” and nonhuman presences like ancestors and spirits are sentient and possess agency, that “nature” and “culture”, “human” and “animal” may not be so separate after all—is itself perpetuating the exploitation of Indigenous peoples.

(Todd 2014)

In addition, Indigenous researcher Sarah Hunt (2014) argues that “the potential for Indigenous ontologies to unsettle dominant ontologies can be easily neutralized as a triviality, a case study, or a trinket, as powerful institutions work as self-legitimating systems that uphold broader dynamics of (neo)colonial power” (30). We share this wariness as writers of both Māori and Pākehā (European settler) descent, but also share a sense of optimism about the possibility of redress of historical injustice that an alignment between Indigenous thought and the ontological turn might produce. The creative strategies discussed below operate from an implicit concern to counter colonial accounts of place and history.

The Negotiated Gap

The value of visual, aural, and performative storytelling as history, representation, and genealogical account is part of our reading of the creative works. The stories occupy multiple temporalities and begin to heal the violence of boundary practices that are asserted through the “mononaturalist” representations of landscape and “land as resource” (Watson 2014, 76). Hunt (2014) highlights a gap between Indigenous and modern ways of knowing while identifying the porous, elusive nature of knowledge itself. Describing an engagement with the ritual practices of the Kwakwaka’wakw potlatch, Hunt notes that:

the ontological differences are difficult to explain, yet that is where their power lies—in the spaces between intellectual and lived expressions of Indigeneity. I would propose that these gaps in regimes of knowledge provide sites where ontological shifts are possible. So how do we better expose and explore these gaps? […] One starting place might be accepting the partiality of knowledge. Its relational, alive, emergent nature means that as we come to know something, as we attempt to fix its meaning, we are always at risk of just missing something (2014, 30–31).

The gap, for the purposes of our argument, is the space in-between, a space of negotiation that exceeds human language and breaks away from a hermetic concern with human behaviors toward other ways of knowing. We suggest that the material and performative practices of art can operate in an unfixed gap, although art is never an unmarked, apolitical space. Many art museums locally and internationally have exhibited the moving image work of Robertson and Te Ao, and Yates’s Pop-up City / Māra Iti was sited in a public square in partnership with the Wellington Council in our capital city; so there is a relationship between artists and mainstream institutions in postcolonial Aotearoa/New Zealand. Yet creative activity occupies a differentiated zone where political resistance can be expressed in free play. Whereas informed Māori protest marches known as hīkoi (Nathan 2015) are often portrayed by the mainstream media as the radical actions of a vocal few (New Zealand Herald 2011), art is often accepted as less threatening than street protest, but the implications are no less radical. By drawing pre-colonial customs into contemporary reshapings or representations of the land or landscape, Robertson, Te Ao, and Yates reveal the partiality of bicultural exchange. The Māori cosmopolitical position that things have mauri (“life force”) is a useful prompt to question the perceived fissure in non-Indigenous ontologies between subject and object, human and the nonhuman.

Natalie Robertson, Uncle Tasman—The Trembling Current That Scars the Earth

While the academic tradition has historically presented itself as having “no geopolitical determinations” (as noted by Gayatri Spivak 1988, 24), Indigenous academics often speak from a grounded ethics of care both for local polities and the wider implications of care for climate or environment. Over the last decade Ngāti Porou/Clann Dhonnchaidh artist Natalie Robertson’s practice has exemplified Smith’s (2012b) assertion that the restoration of fragmented ecological systems is interdependent on the healing of both human and nonhuman communities. Robertson uses video and sound as a means of bringing whakapapa, genealogical narratives and care for the ecosystem (kaitiakitanga), to bear on the economic imperatives of the pulp and paper industry. She interrogates the gap created by the colonial or scientific regard of mountains or rivers as “natural resources” that are out-of-sync with Māori relations to ancestor-beings.

Robertson’s current work focuses on the Waiapu River, a tribal polity on the east coast of Aotearoa/New Zealand’s North Island, a waterway near her east coast hapū, which has been degraded as a result of heavy deforestation. However, the three-channel video art installation Uncle Tasman—The Trembling Current That Scars the Earth (2008–2012) is set in the region of Kawerau, Robertson’s inland birthplace. The camera frame is steadfastly fixed on an ancestor mountain (Pūtauaki, adjacent to Kawerau), a waterfall (Tarawera) and a fumarole at Whakaari (an active island volcano in the Bay of Plenty).

Figure 1.4 Natalie Robertson. Still image of Pūtauaki mountain, from the video installation Uncle Tasman—The Trembling Current that Scars the Earth (2008). Source: Courtesy of Natalie Robertson.

Figure 1.5 Natalie Robertson. Installation detail of Pūtauaki mountain and Whakaari fumarole. Uncle Tasman—The Trembling Current that Scars the Earth (2008), Toi Rerehiko Moving Image Centre, Auckland. Source: Courtesy of Natalie Robertson.

The changing cloud and steam conditions of these sites veil and unveil them, suggesting that they are watched, protected, under the patient gaze of a kaitiaki (spiritual guardian or caretaker). These three places retain their mauri and contain physical reminders, or memories of an adjacent geothermal Lake Rotoitipaku before it became heavily polluted by the activities of the Tasman Pulp and Paper Mill (nicknamed “Uncle Tasman” by local residents). In Ngāti Tuwharetoa’s accounts, Lake Rotoitipaku, the absent subject of the artwork, is the birthplace of the warrior Tuwharetoa and the burial place of his mother, an important descendent from the Arawa waka (that traveled from Hawaiiki). The spring that welled up in the lake, known as “the bubble,” is a sacred spring. The lake was well loved by Kawerau inhabitants and was a safe place to swim once the Tarawera River was polluted by the mill. But the calamitous dumping of waste by the Tasman mill from 1968 onwards ended the health of the body of water. The artwork is a memorial to Lake Rotoitipaku. Robertson now des...