EDITORIAL 

Blue Assembly ~ Situating Knowing in the Majority World

Peta: As a migrant-settler on Treaty Seven Territory for almost a decade—ancestral lands of the Stoney Nakoda, Tsuut'ina, and Blackfoot—I spent most of my time between so-called Banff and Moh'kins'tsis/Calgary. The temporary and enduring communities made possible at the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity rendered me lucky enough to work and learn from established thinkers and peers whom I admire and am indebted to in my practice: Marjorie Beaucage, Lisa Myers, Nicole Kelly Westman, Caroline Monnet, Katarina Veljovic, Candice Hopkins, Tiziana La Melia, Safia Siad, and Jacqueline Bell among others. I retain many of these connections across oceans. I count your practice, Léuli—grounded in constant generosity and global kinship—as one I am also beholden to and feel affinity with.

 

The mention of our journeys across ancient seafloors, at both ends of the earth, trigger two simultaneous memories of place and deep time for me, and two indelible poems. At an elevation of 2,286 metres, the 508-million-year-old Burgess Shale contains visible remnants of the ancient sea in the form of sea shells and other fossilised life. And in the stratum of the 144-million-year-old inland sea, under what is presently called the Central Desert: we laid eyes on wave patterns in rock, compacted layers of former ocean floors at Watarrka, and melaleuca trees being grafted and healed with hessian and herbal poultices by Luritja rangers. 

 

In these moments, bodies stand as witness on Country—this uniquely First Nations "Australian" conception of territory as place of belonging and responsibility—as gnomons of time, memory and futurity. I, we, like others have been altered by this phenomenon, and I am reminded of an excerpt from "Full Moon Hawk Application" by CAConrad, the gender non-conforming poet and activist which was written on residency around the same time I first met you there at Banff; 

 

On one of my first nights, a young man drove me to the top of the mountains above the art colony to show me the hot springs and lake. There were fish in the lake. There were fish swimming above Banff Art Centre, swimming above my head each night, and this became part of my writing ritual. I would go to sleep with a piece of celestite crystal, meditating on the swimming above me, the swimming above me. The notes for the poems were often informed by nightmares. Every night sleeping was difficult, the magnetic iron dumping toxins into my blood. A few nights it seemed I didn’t sleep at all, but was instead dreaming about not sleeping. Once I dreamed I had a vagina for a nose and this dream was fantastic! ¹

 

I also am reminded of a section of the poem "Learning Bundjalung on Tharawal" by Bundjalung poet Evelyn Araluen, from the 2022 Stella Prize-winning collection DROPBEAR (2021), which you shared with me while we drove through the desert:

 

We are relearning this place through poetry:

I open my book and say wayan, 

here is a word which means road, but also root

and in it I am rooted, earthed,

singing between two lands

I learn that balun is both river and milky way,

and that he is baray-gir, the youngest child

and the top of the tree

where the gahr will come and rest — 

to call its own name

across the canopy, 

long after his word for it

is gone.²

 

Léuli: These poets render complexities in this unending form of orature through soundwaves, as on paper or screen. This complex intersectional understanding of humanity’s varied places and histories that we have both embraced for so long, and in which we are yet leaning deeper into learning, is in stark opposition to the anthropocentric literature about, but not responsible to, the Great Ocean.

 

By this I mean the falsified texts of Margaret Mead (and all before and after her) written during her visit to Tāʻū, in the Manuʻa group in the east of the Sāmoan archipelago, while she was a very naive graduate student. I don’t believe that the extraction of fanciful conclusions on Indigenous pubescence and sexuality that Mead took from the tamaʻitaʻi ma teine Sāmoa [Sāmoan girls and women] has ever been reciprocated in material and intellectual opportunities for our people in the ivory towers currently occupied by anthropology and museology. I hold this understanding only from precisely reading beyond Euro-America, from delving into Lana Lopesi’s significant 2021 essay collection Bloody Woman: a welcome salve and affirmation of Indigenous femininity that deserves to be much more known than the fabulations of Mead, Malinowski, and Guiart.

 

~~~~~

 

I am surprised when I enter the National Gallery of Australia to see Great Ocean artists’ works framed by European fantasies projected onto our Ancestors, such as through the infamously simplistic Les Sauvages de la mer Pacifique (1805) by Joseph Dufour and Jean-Gabriel Charvet, itself based on impressions from newspaper accounts rather than anyone who actually traveled to our region. Of course the saturation of sexual abuser colonist Paul Gauguin’s œuvre in place of genuine Māʻohi art practices continues to inform, almost exclusively, the romanticized notions of oceanic placehood, visuality, and knowledges that Euro-American museums and universities lazily perpetuate. Lauded literary works are equally based in racist interpretation such as the work by Robert Louis Stevenson, an abuser colonist on my own clan lands in central Sāmoa, and James A. Michener, a military colonist in northern Vanuatu, among too many others.

 

There is scant mention in their works, or in their umpteenth reprise in theatres or art museums, of the transoceanic slave trade, nuclear testing regimes, and persisting militourist occupations. Myriad atrocities remain unaddressed in the lazy white supremacist gloss of complex oceanic continental worlds, which still defy essentialist categorization or cloisonnement. These outwardly cis-heteropatriarchal Western authors, as the sole "translated" voices in European languages speak over and about Great Oceans peoples and places, reiterating the oft-deployed misnomer that they were universally loved in their time, despite being harbingers of mass death, evangelization, capitalism, plantations, gender binarism, and sociopolitical westernization. But why am I still shocked to find James Cook, Paul Gauguin, and Louis Antoine de Bougainville’s travel accounts in the Oceanian literature section of an international bookstore in Paris?

 

Productively for us, it is equally important to consider the responsibility to histories and the right to speak of specific Indigenous and racialized peoples, as opposed to the continuing postmodern impulse to appropriate and incorporate any and all narratives—as if to say that any impression of our storied places and histories will suffice. I want to cite Vehia Wheeler and Mareikura Whakataka-Brightwell’s searing writing on the epistemic and economic violences of pan-Pacific artistry, written from the French oceanic colony of French Polynesia: 

 

As Tahitian people who trace our genealogy to the islands and people directly related to Gauguin’s work, we have a lot to say that is pertinent as a response to Gauguin’s works, and also adds so much richness to the larger conversation of Gauguin and his impact. What are the ways that we in Tahiti (a French colony) are still celebrating Gauguin? What does tourism look like in Tahiti? What are the ways that Europeans celebrate and expect stereotypes of our population as initiated by Gauguin? Tahitian people know the answers to these questions as first-hand experiences that other people in the Pacific cannot know. While we are all affected by the dusky-maiden images, the South Sea islander images, the Gauguin stereotypes, Tahitians are specifically and directly affected by Gauguin, and his impact continues today, almost 130 years later.³

 

In a sense, you and I never leave the shore, and on this planet that means not really ever leaving the embrace or possibility of aqueous expanse, as it is not as much earth as it is rich in saltwater and freshwater. 

 

Peta: I take heed of your comment to upend the lazy reliance on anthropocentric texts and poets in the Western literary canon, where accounts of riverine and oceanic spaces are highly saturated as sites of romantic and militaristic conquest, yet blaringly omit perspectives and authorship of Indigenous and racialized peoples. This has led to a surface-based approach to watery writing that does not, and cannot, fathom or plunge the depths of the intricacy and interconnectedness of these spaces for both human and non-human kin. Western literature has often done a great disservice to the description of ocean spaces, often espousing and defining them as empty, dark, impenetrable, terrifying, and there to be crossed and pillaged in the name of empire. 

 

I particularly implore settler readers and writers to seek out texts and passages from Indigenous and racialized perspectives, and from gender-nonconforming writers that shed misconceptions of sites that the Western humanities may understand as already fixed, across the smaller and larger spaces we may term climates. Among those I would like to share are Anita Heiss's indelible novel Bila Yarrudhanggalangdhuray [River of Dreams] about the Murrumbidgee, Alexis Wright’s Carpentaria, Ali Cobby Eckermann’s Inside my Mother, Ellen van Neervan’s Heat and Light, and writings by Kimberley Moulton, Clothilde Bullen, Freja Carmichael, Neika Lehman, and Hannah Donnelly, among many others.

​

 

PART III: MANGROVE DAUGHTERS AND SUPRATIDAL FUTURITY

 

Peta & Léuli: In a sense, our work currently and prior to now is anchored in the possibilities of rematriation, to use the eponymous collective’s term, itself denied by dominant Western software. We understand rematriation as a restoration of matriarchal knowledges that leads us to futures not defined by the terms of pessimistic Western death drive practices and failed theories. Through the multi-year initiative Blue Assembly we are joined by many incredible actors in a new theater of creativity, hope-mongering, and restoration of what we might call interdisciplinarity, but would just be called ways of knowing, being, and relating in many Indigenous worlds.