From the depths of the seas to the clouds above, from horizon to horizon, our moana connects our communities with ancestors through shared stories, histories, experiences, frustrations, joys, and heartaches. This issue calls on our cousins from the eastern side of the moana/imaqjuak (in Inuktitut, enormous water), Canada and the USA (together also known as Turtle Island), including the Pacific waters of the Arctic, to collaborate and offer the first Indigenous-led issue of ANZJA.
Now is the moment for international publications such as this, where we forge space for Indigenous-to-Indigenous kōrero/talk, initiating encounters between writers, artists, curators, and an increasingly Indigenous readership on a global scale. With this special issue of ANZJA we are compelled to show the significance of Indigenous-led research across writing, art, curatorship, and more, recognising these as the future for our fields and disciplines (art history, visual culture studies, curatorial studies, and art practice, for example). Despite ongoing setbacks within wider non-Indigenous cultures (we see you, opponents of The Voice), platforms like ANZJA allow us to come together to critically analyse the state of our art worlds and ponder the next step.
This issue is conceived as a wananga/kōrero/talanoa/katijut/workshop: we invited new texts embodying our diverse writing styles and welcomed contributions that celebrate the vibrancy of writing being done in Indigenous worlds. We were excited by what we received and hope you will be too.
As co-editors, we wanted to gracefully push back against the expected publishing formats to make space for Indigenous self-determined expressions within peer-reviewed journal practices. We wanted to create something different by bringing together established academic voices with emerging generations. We also asked that the usual ‘articles’ and ‘reviews’ separation be set aside for this issue to recognise that writing is writing; to put them in a hierarchy felt wrong. You will also notice that none of our Indigenous kupu/words have been italicised, the practice of which treats our languages as other. These small wins are important for us as Indigenous editors to reinforce the kaupapa of this issue.
We desired a process in which peer review was supportive and encouraging rather than punitive and culturally alienating; in this, we succeeded partly because of the mentorship available for contributors offered by the ANZJA Editorial Committee. For this issue, it was important that we only called upon Indigenous peer reviewers even though we knew it would be difficult to find community with both the time and availability to support the project. Yet Indigenous scholars are community-minded, so we knew we could rely on them. We rejected the expectation that such reviewers would need to have a PhD, recognising the structural racism that hinders our peoples from long-term academic study and that Indigenous knowledges and educational experiences are equivalent to, or more advanced than, academic qualifications. To this end, we were very selective of the Indigenous reviewers who came on board, whose focus also was to awhi/support with aroha/love the aspirations of the writers. We thank them here for their generous spirit and kind words, which contributed to the diversity and breadth of the contributions in this issue. However, a culture of punishing peer review persists amongst some academics, which requires us to continue to work towards decolonising and Indigenising how we read and examine our colleagues’ work.
The contributions to this edition of ANZJA all speak to the importance of our shared connections, from the northern Alaskan coastlines to the shores of Aotearoa. This special issue posits that we have much in common and, thus, much to learn from one another. For example, Drew Kahu’āina Broderick and Josh Tengan writes from Hawai'i, bringing home the significance of more than one hundred and twenty artworks, part of a multi-site contemporary art exhibition of Kānaka ʻŌiwi. These artworks situate Hawaiian contemporary practices within contemporary resistance and community futurity. In ‘Embodying Oceanic Relationality’, Nicole Ku’uleinapuananioliko’awapuhimelemeleolani Furtado explores how artists of many nations converging from across moana can be in relation with each other through the activation of contemporary art. Meanwhile, a photo essay on The Visiting Curators by Léuli Eshrāghi, Sarah Biscarra Dilley, Tarah Hogue, Lana Lopesi and Freja Carmichael centres exhibitions that consider contemporary forms of Indigenous kinships across the Great Ocean, from K'emk'emeláy̓/Vancouver to Meanjin/Brisbane.
Natalie Robertson takes the awa—the river in te reo Māori—as the locus of her collaborative photographic research focussed on witnessing, restoring, and revitalising cultural and environmental relationships with the Waiapu. A conversation between choreographer-scholars Mique’l Dangeli of the Tsimshian Nation of Metlakatla, Alaska, Tammi Gissell of Murruwarri and Wiradjuri Territories, Australia, and Tanya Lukin Linklater of the Alutiiq/Sugpiag people of Afognak and Port Lions, Alaska, connects the Pacific North to the Pacific South through discussions on dance sovereignty within and beyond institutions. And two reviews, Hana Pera Aoake on Ana Iti’s solo exhibition and Joselyn Flynn on the Pacific Studies conference, explore our interconnections in terms of responsibility, reciprocity, care, and relationality.
The kaupapa/theme for this issue has been brought together by an Inuk and a Māori art historian who were determined to create something which was dynamic and a little unusual, connecting the Arctic to Oceania. We both had experiences publishing in the journal world and knew what we didn’t want. We both felt the juggle between the pressures of normal academic lives alongside our vibrant home lives and have felt solace in the fact that we both love Indigenous art history and that one day soon we hope to meet in person across these seas. Through COVID-19 and other events, the moana/imaq has looked after us, and kept us grounded.
We end today with a blessing to take you, our reader, onto the waka, which will navigate across the writings of Te Moananui a Kiwa:
Kia hora te marino, kia whakapapa pounamu te moana, kia tere te kārohirohi i mua i tōu huarahi.
May the calm be widespread, may the ocean glisten as greenstone, may the shimmer of light dance across your pathway.