Through the Digital Pasifik collections, writer Stacy Kokaua along with her brother, audio producer Hamish Kokaua created artwork that was performed at the “Weaving a Narrative Workshop,” an online seminar series featuring talks and works commissioned by artists.
In this piece, Stacy shares her reflections on how to engage with museum collections as indigenous creatives, and the connections that are facilitated through objects, space and time. She expands on the broader conversations around cultural rejuvenation and empowerment through archives as well as the artistically enhancing practice of working with your sibling.
One objective of the video ‘Weaving the Narrative’, a project created for Ubersee Museum and Digital Pasifik by my brother Hamish Kokaua and I, is to push up against the nineteenth century conventions of museum and archival collections that held Pacific cultural objects. My contribution to the work involves searching through the online collections on Digital Pasifik in different ways and writing a response to those experiences. For example, what are the results produced by the search term ‘Cook Islands women’ and what do they tell us about the collections and their creators? What do the results tell us about how our people are understood by people outside our communities?
Interrogating questions such as these required me to confront problematic ideas of how collections might interpret ‘women’ which was challenging as a va’ine Māori ō Rarotonga, a woman from the Cook Islands. That the practices of museums and similar institutions historically gather objects and information as a cultural and/or ethnic ‘other’, in a way that dismisses Indigenous ontology and values systems is well-documented.
So when I search through the Digital Pasifik collections using the term ‘Cook Islands women’, it is relatively common for the search to generate archival objects that give incomplete information regarding the women’s identities. Within photographs especially, the primary function of va’ine Māori is closer to providing an object to gaze upon as opposed to learning about a person with their own stories, families and experiences.
Does this mean I feel it is better for Indigenous peoples, particularly women, to avoid engaging with these collections? Absolutely not. In fact, our engagement is essential. As a scholar in Pacific Literary Studies, I argue that the problematic framing of women indigenous to the Pacific is not unique to the work of museum and archival collections. The work of the late Teresia Teaiwa and Selina Tusitala Marsh are primary examples of Indigenous scholarship that speaks back to literary representations of Pacific women as dusky maidens who exist in tropical settings for pleasure seeking European men, seeking to live out South Seas fantasies.
It is a very deliberate choice as part of my work for ‘Weaving the Narrative’ that I choose to shift away from the search for Cook Islands women to a search of one line of my own family – the Marsters of Palmerston Atoll in the Cook Islands. In this way I am able to discover images and objects created by people who I am connected to through genealogical and geographic ties. Within those searches, I am able to focus on images and objects that celebrate the weaving talents of my female ancestors. Ultimately, this process speaks to the value of the everyday objects found in many collections that are often overlooked as they may carry less value as display objects but connect more deeply to subjectivities and experiences of the people these objects represent.
What is particularly valuable about Digital Pasifik is how it allows for people to leave comments. For example, I discovered an interview of my father’s aunt and at the bottom of the page was a comment from a cousin where she shared how she is related to my aunt. This type of genealogical information, referred to ‘akapapa.anga in Cook Islands Māori, is highly valued among Cook Islands people as it provides the basis of how we understand the world and the myriad ways we are interconnected across communities, space and time. For holders of collections, the comments provide an opportunity to engage with people who have valuable information about objects. In order to best understand and utilise this feedback, institutions whose collections are reliant on imperial legacies will need to open themselves up to engagement and critique of practices and confront the feelings of hurt and loss that some objects may prompt in the communities that created them. However, these conversations provide opportunities for enrichment, understanding and ultimately a future where archival and museum collections feed into broader conversations around cultural heritage, rejuvenation and empowerment. With sincere and meaningful engagement with Indigenous peoples, we can travel towards ways in which these online collections facilitate connection with and between Indigenous people, their objects, time and space.
Creating ‘Weaving the Narrative’ allowed my brother and I the opportunity to work together for the first time. At the end of March, Hamish and I will be speaking about ‘Weaving the Narrative’ as part of the Digital Oceania: Writing the Pacific paper at Victoria University of Wellington in Aotearoa. For both of us, it is exciting that this specific project continues to contribute to conversations about our people and culture as they exist in museum and archival collections and how we contribute to digital literatures. Early in this work, I realised I would need to broaden my creative writing practice in order for it to translate to digital media.
My brother specialises in coding and audio production and once I had written the initial draft, we worked closely to develop the final video, even including a track that he had recorded with our father. It was a creative process that facilitated connection in a number of ways. Now, every time a Pacific person engages with ‘Weaving the Narrative’, we have an opportunity to connect with them, while considering how, where and why our people, our knowledge and our objects are held in collections and also, how we might connect with these platforms as Indigenous creatives.
.
Find more stories …
As part of preparing our permanent exhibition “The Blue Continent—Islands in the Pacific,” we’ve built networks and collected stories. There are more stories to discover here!