Wayfinding and Critical Autoethnography

Fetaui Iosefo, Stacy Holman Jones, Anne Harris, Fetaui Iosefo, Stacy Holman Jones, Anne Harris

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN:
  9780367343798
• eBook ISBN:
  9781000220421
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Human Geography
• Index: Social Sciences

Wayfinding and Critical Autoethnography is the first critical autoethnography compilation from the global south, bringing together indigenous, non-indigenous, Pasifika, and other diverse voices which expand established understandings of autoethnography as a critical, creative methodology. The book centres around the traditional practice of 'wayfinding' as a Pacific indigenous way of being and knowing, and this volume manifests traditional knowledges, genealogies, and intercultural activist voices through critical autoethnography.

The chapters in the collection reflect critical autoethnographic journeys that explore key issues such as space/place belonging, decolonizing the academy, institutional racism, neoliberalism, gender inequity, activism, and education reform. This book will be a valuable teaching and research resource for researchers and students in a wide range of disciplines and contexts. For those interested in expanding their cultural, personal, and scholarly knowledge of the global south, this volume foregrounds the vast array of traditional knowledges and the ways in which they are changing academic spaces and knowledge creation through braiding old and new.

This volume is unique and timely in its ability to highlight the ways in which indigenous and allied voices from the diverse global south demonstrate the ways in which the onto-epistemologies of diverse cultures, and the work of critical autoethnography, function as parallel, and mutually informing, projects.

Section 1

Wayfaring and wayfinding indigeneity in the academy

1Wayfinding as Pasifika, indigenous and critical autoethnographic knowledge

Fetaui Iosefo, Anne Harris and Stacy Holman Jones

From knowing that and knowing about to knowing how and knowing who

Aotearoa New Zealand: a collection of lush, vertiginous islands, snow-capped mountains, lava plateaus, icy rivers and crater lakes. Sovereign homeland of Māori, who call their birthplace ‘land of the long, white cloud’, and adopted homeplace of Pacific Islanders, indigenous peoples of Samoa, Tonga, Cooke Islands, Niue and French Polynesia. Surrounded by ocean and sea, New Zealand is the most remote large land mass in the water hemisphere. No surprise that this far-away land—far from the reach of tax laws, complicated citizenship processes and novel viral infections—harbours the vast estates and luxury survival shelters of U.S. Silicon Valley billionaires. White men and women and children whose fortunes and doomsday survival planning exempt them from social isolation in their home countries. In the era of COVID-19 panic, the “clean, green island nation…known for its natural beauty, laid-back politics and premier health facilities” is fertile ground for ‘planting’ private bunkers. The New Zealand bunkers are part of a global underground network designed to shelter thousands of privileged people from disease and the looting that follows pandemic-related economic collapse (Carville 2020). There’s a 300-person bunker near Christchurch, and the Rising S Co (based in Texas) has planted ten or more multimillion-dollar private bunkers throughout New Zealand in the past several years (Small 2018). With their palatial bathrooms, gyms, shooting ranges, theatres and surgical beds, these shelters look more like luxury cruise ships than the cramped, concrete boxes constructed by previous generations. From the old Swedish bunke, for boards used to protect the cargo on a ship, these ‘luxury bunkers’ offer clues about how material goods, greed, and seafaring come together in the land of the long white cloud. Aotearoa has long been fertile ground for colonisation.

There has been significant scholarly discussion over the past twenty years regarding the notions of wayfinding and wayfaring, particularly in two branches: wayfinding in gaming/design/virtual environments, and wayfinding as indigenous knowledge. In this chapter, we are concerned with the latter.¹

Despite the traditional terms through which wayfinding is understood as the sea or land navigation skills of indigenous peoples, some scholars still attribute the term to contemporary anthropologist Tim Ingold. For example, Petri Hoppu (2016) writes:

wayfinding is a term coined by the British anthropologist Tim Ingold based on his study among indigenous peoples, most notably the Sámi, to discuss the travels of people who make up their paths as they go rather than navigate along preset routes from A to B.

While it’s true that Ingold (2000) has popularised an explication of wayfinding in ways that articulate to the western forms of knowledge, that the practice exists on in relation to its naming belies the colonial framework through which not only ‘knowledge’ but also embodied practices can be ‘understood’. Ingold’s act is not one of invention, but translation. And in that act of translation, the use of one term—wayfinding and the indigenous practices of knowing and doing it describes—to stand in for another—wayfaring, or white, western travel over land or sea—demonstrates what Walter Benjamin (himself a white western thinker) says is the work of the storyteller. Storytellers take what they know of experience—theirs or that reported by others—and they in turn make it into the experience of those who are listening to the story (1936/1969, p. 7). When Ingold explains that “wayfinding in the wayfaring sense is understood as a skilled performance in which the traveller, whose powers of perception and action have been fine-tuned through previous experience, ‘feels his way’ towards his goal”, (p. 220), he names without saying for whom this understanding is made clear. Through telling a defining story of wayfinding, Ingold is speaking to—whilst making wayfinding the experience of—western readers. He is playing the role of interlocutor, despite the fact that there were many others before and during this time who have explored the notion of wayfinding from a perspective much more clearly grounded in longstanding expert indigenous knowledges, practices and histories.

Ingold was not the first to tell the story of wayfinding to the west. In 1986, Michael Halpern uses the word ‘wayfinding’, but in no less a traditional anthropological and colonial tone. For example, speaking of white western contact with Pasifika peoples, he says:

We now know, of course, that at a time when European seafaring was a mostly coast-hugging tentative affair, loin-clothed ‘primitives’ of Asian origin were braving the long swells of the Pacific. Their craft were probably sennit-lashed vessels of low freeboard (Sinoto 1983) and their navigational feats seemingly uncanny. Thanks to the recent work of such scholars and experimenters as Dodd, Finney, Goodenough, Alkire, Gladwin, and Lewis we now have a good idea of how such long-distance navigation may have taken place. The ‘discovery’ of modern practitioners of the indigenous arts of noninstrumental celestial navigation, especially in Micronesia, has shed much light on the particulars of Pacific wayfinding.

(1986, p. 441)

By the time Ingold is ‘re-colonising’ the term wayfinding fourteen years later, he omits any significant reference to the well-documented ancient practice of wayfinding and its central role in diverse Polynesian and Pasifika cultures, noting:

One could hardly expect any such capacity to spring, fully formed, from an individual’s genetic make-up, in advance of his or her entry into the lifeworld. It would rather have to undergo development in the very unfolding of the individual’s life within an environment. Thus, the life-historical process of ‘getting around’ – or in a word, wayfinding – would appear to be a condition for the emergence of a ‘mapping capacity’, rather than a consequence of its application. This leaves us with the third sense of mapping – the retelling of journeys made (or possibly the rehearsal for journeys to be made) – as perhaps the most appropriate. I admit, however, that the distinction between wayfinding and mapping is not hard and fast. For one way of retelling the story of a journey is to retrace one’s steps, or the steps of ancestors who made the journey in the past. In effect, since travelling from one place to another means remember the way, all wayfinding is mapping, though not all mapping is wayfinding.

(2000, p. 232)

Even in such a nuanced discussion, Ingold stops short of recognising that Pasifika wayfinding is defined not just by the individual’s pedagogical experience ‘within an environment’, but rather by the generations of knowledge shared and passed down. In doing so, he writes over the cumulative knowledge of Pasifika culture.

As Michel de Certeau’s aphorism, “what the map cuts up, the story cuts across” (1984, p. 29) suggests, the tensions between different ways of knowing are demonstrated in these scholarly treatments of wayfinding. By and large, most of the scholarly treatments of wayfinding as a ‘traditional’ form of knowledge come down from anthropologists. The “active, intimate, hands-on”, and participatory ‘traditional’ knowledges of Pasifika people are obscured by the “official, objective and abstract” knowledge of the academy (Conquergood 2002, pp. 144–145). While this in itself is not surprising, the lack of contemporary acknowledgement of the almost-complete absence of indigenous voices on this topic is. And although the vast majority of work on ‘wayfinding’ related to indigenous knowledge was authored by white/western/global north scholars, there are some notable exceptions. For example, Ted Jojola (2000) notes an “indigenous planning framework” for community development and the gathering of native activists and scholars from the U.S.A. and Canada called the Wayfinding Indigenous Multiversity of the Americas (WIMA), 1994, building on activist Native American scholarship since 1961.

David Lewis’ 1972/1994 account We, the Navigators is perhaps the most widely cited text on traditional navigation methods of Pasifika peoples. Despite his extensive experience and writing from 1967 through the 1976 Polynesian Voyaging Society’s voyage on Hokule’a, Lewis reportedly clashed with his indigenous navigators (teachers) Nainoa Thompson (from Hawaii) and Mau Piailug (from Satawal, Micronesia) and left the project soon after the voyage. It did not prevent him, however, from an enduring fame as the westerner who ‘brought’ wayfinding knowledge to the west. In 1991, anglo-Hawaiian Harriet Witt argues that the ‘debate’ over wayfinding is not an academic or scientific argument about history. Instead, it is “a real-time struggle-to-the-death between native and Western ideas about human intelligence, the place and purpose of people in the universe, and the nature of reality” (p. 2). She writes that the wayfinder’s

point of concentration is his navel, called the piko in Hawaiian. This is considered the center of one’s body and being, so that it – not the brain – is the point from which to live. Instructions for psychologically locating one’s piko and for staying centered there have been passed down through the centuries in chants. Instructions for wayfinding explain that your piko is your canoe.

(p. 3)

Witt details some aspects of ‘Hawaiian wayfinding’, which until recently has remained (and in many ways still is) a mystery to white westerners. She notes in true anthropological fashion that there are only a “handful of remaining wayfinders” and they are—surprise!—sharing their ancient wisdom with westerners like David Lewis, famous for sailing solo across the Pacific in 1968 under instruction from Polynesian and Micronesian wayfinders (p. 2).

Witt notes that it is “unfortunate” that the “handful of remaining wayfinders live so far west of Hawaii” and that the “search for Hawaii’s discoverers is what’s propelled the revival of interest in wayfinding. This interest gave birth to the Polynesian Voyaging Society in Hawaii in 1973 to build a performance-accurate replica of a traditional, double-hulled canoe” (p. 7). Readers would be forgiven for thinking that Pasifika wayfinding had disappeared from the face of the earth, given this kind of commentary. Yet she concludes by noting the “sad irony” that a replica trip from Hawaii to Tahiti in 1976 required “a fully initiated navigator to be brought in from the western Pacific to lead the effort” (p. 7).² This geographic claim to authenticity (e.g., that an authentic navigator should have come from Hawaii, and not the western Pacific) is no irony for many Pasifika New Zealanders (including Fetaui) who continue to remind others that their embodied, practical and ‘subjugated’ knowledges of wayfinding are the bedrock of their families and cultural inheritance.

Then Pamela Colorado (1992), an Iroquois scholar raised on a reservation in Wisconsin, one of the first Native American women to earn her PhD at Harvard, and the founder of the Worldwide Indigenous Science Network (WISN), speaks about bridges between indigenous and western knowledges as being required for shared survival. She refers to that 1976 Polynesian Voyaging Soci...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Endorsements
• Half Title
• Series Information
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Front cover image
• Contents
• List of figures
• List of contributors
• Preface: Stars and stones in Aotearoa
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Critical autoethnography and/as wayfinding in the global south
• Section 1 Wayfaring and wayfinding indigeneity in the academy
• Section 2 Wayfinding and way-fairness in the digital age
• Section 3 Wayfinding in the liminal spaces
• Index