Knot

‘I’m going to have a sculpture of me on display as a mermaid!’

‘The native must realise that colonialism never gives anything away for nothing. ¹

For over twenty years I’ve been imagining and producing my Pacific research and scholarship through the performing and visual arts while regularly resisting publishing about most of that process. While discussions of method are there in my 2002 PhD thesis, much of this lack of reflection on the methods is a matter of time and energy and also a resistance to the norms of scholarly discipline and career strategy—avoiding top journals, refusing to play the publishing game, while being regularly inundated with requests to contribute to publishing and editorial endeavours. However, this has left a gap in my own work on methodologies and in sharing approaches with early career scholars in Pacific studies and other fields.

When we left the mother in our country of birth, she was sitting at the kitchen table, sucking on chicken bones, and talking about songs that were hidden in the roots of banana trees. When we left the mother in our country of birth, she said, you will see me again when the sea is on fire. 

In this video, artist and master weaver Vicki Kinai demonstrates how to weave a grass skirt using recycled plastic, adapting the traditional raffia used in in the highlands of her home in Papua New Guinea. She and Arts Gen creative producer and weaver Yasbelle Kerkow then discuss the context of when grass skirts are worn for dancing and ceremony, alongside the commercialisation of raffia production today.

from soil to memory

This newly commissioned audio piece by artist, first nations activist, educator and systems designer, Guy Ritani, explores a spectrum of frameworks that lead us towards different understandings of the environment, including: organics, permaculture, and biodynamic frameworks alongside Indigenous frameworks such as Hua Parakore ( a Maori organics framework) that outline how we might approach a shared language of country, whenua, landscape, and ecology in a form that is accessible for all. Everyone’s individual values sit on a continuum and these values have overlapping languages, understandings, and intentions to other people, cultures, and communities around them. Through understanding the bridges and how these overlapping values function we can navigate a spectrum of cultural frameworks that allow us to better comprehend and develop a more equitable relationship to the landscapes and ecosystems that sustain us.

We recently sat down with Eliki Reade to chat about FAMILI’s We Take Back Our Mother Tongues’ development, it’s connection to land, justice, and communal wellbeing.

‘The effects of climate change often fall hardest on the poorest – and smallholder farmers in developing countries are among those most at risk. With limited savings, limited access to credit, and uncertain access to land, water and so on, poorer farmers are unable to cope with increasingly frequent natural disasters, bad growing seasons or the degradation of agricultural land.

In this essay, Zoe Todd asks how anthropology can adopt a decolonial approach that incorporates and acknowledges the critical scholarship of Indigenous thinkers whose work and labour informs many current trends in Euro-Western scholarship, activism and socio-political discourse. She also queries how to address ongoing structural colonialism within the academy in order to ensure that marginalised voices are heard within academic discourses.

This issue sets off from the term ‘slow violence’ because we believe that the relation with violence should be front and centre in the discussions of the ‘climate crisis’ in order to bring the rather abstract concept of ´climate change´ back in relation to the underlying necropolitics. Moving away from a universal narrative and addressing the different roles people, companies, and nation states play, also opens up the possibility to address the call for climate justice; a topic addressed in a special section of this issue edited by Radha D’Souza and Jonas Staal.
— Errant Journal Editors

In this video, artist and master weaver Vicki Kinai demonstrates how to weave a grass skirt using recycled plastic, adapting the traditional raffia used in in the highlands of her home in Papua New Guinea. She and Arts Gen creative producer and weaver Yasbelle Kerkow then discuss the context of when grass skirts are worn for dancing and ceremony, alongside the commercialisation of raffia production today.

This newly commissioned audio piece by artist, first nations activist, educator and systems designer, Guy Ritani, explores a spectrum of frameworks that lead us towards different understandings of the environment, including: organics, permaculture, and biodynamic frameworks alongside Indigenous frameworks such as Hua Parakore ( a Maori organics framework) that outline how we might approach a shared language of country, whenua, landscape, and ecology in a form that is accessible for all. Everyone’s individual values sit on a continuum and these values have overlapping languages, understandings, and intentions to other people, cultures, and communities around them. Through understanding the bridges and how these overlapping values function we can navigate a spectrum of cultural frameworks that allow us to better comprehend and develop a more equitable relationship to the landscapes and ecosystems that sustain us.