Toward Transpacific Ecopoetics: Three Indigenous Texts

In this article, I employ "the Pacific" as a contact zone, method, and concept with which to examine the dynamic, shifting relationship between land and sea that allows indigenous literature in the transpacific context to engage all of its ecopoetic complexity. The Pacific is the largest oceanic divide on earth. In recent years, issues around global capitalism, national identity, community, and the ecology of the Pacific region have sparked intriguing and provocative discussions. Research along these lines celebrates the networking and coalition activities of various groups of people in the Pacific, and highlights the circulation of ideas and cultures that I believe to be crucial to contemporary ecological scholarship. It offers an oceanic perspective that serves as a counterweight to continental ways of thinking, and it supplements or challenges transnational approaches to imperialism, postcolonialism, indigeneity, globalization, and ecology.¹

A recent special issue of the Contemporary Pacific titled "Native Pacific Cultural Studies on the Edge" examines uncharted spaces of the Pacific Islands and historicizes indigenous discourses about making landfall, showing how they have contested the production of new transoceanic environments. The articles in this special issue "explore notions of Pacific indigeneity as they circulate through geographical, cultural, political, and historical flows of people(s), things, knowledge, power—between islands and continents."² As the United States and China battle over this geographical space, the message from the indigenous Pacific can be inspiring: neighboring communities have always exchanged ideas and products, often across vast oceanic distances. It was a large world in which indigenous people intermingled along numerous interconnecting routes, unhindered by the boundaries erected much later by imperial powers. Indeed, the recent wave of research on transnational Pacific indigeneity has contributed significantly to the study of both the environment and literature. For instance, Elizabeth M. Deloughrey's Routes and Roots: Navigating Caribbean and Pacific Island Literatures (2010) moves beyond restrictive national, colonial, and regional frameworks, highlighting how island histories are shaped by oceanic environments. Engaging oceanic literary studies in a sustained dialogue, Deloughrey borrows Kamau Brathwaite's idea of "tidalectic" between land and sea as a dynamic starting point by which to identify a nexus of historical process and seascape, intertwining geography and history in her exploration of how island writers inscribe the complex relation between routes and roots.³

I conceptualize the contours of indigenous communities as crossing national, regional, and international boundaries, and I formulate a platform on which to carry out a cross-cultural comparison of indigenous ecopoetics across the Pacific. I aim to offer an alternative rubric of the "transindigenous" for the study of literature and the environment and to represent center-to-center, indigenous-to-indigenous relationships and connections in the Pacific as a site of transindigenous solidarity that seeks to protect oceanic environments.

Chadwick Allen's essay "A Transnational Native American Studies? Why Not Studies that are Trans-Indigenous?" challenges us to think beyond "the national borders of contemporary (settler) nation-states" and to focus on indigenous-to-indigenous relationships instead. He reminds us that conventional theories of the transnational operate on a "vertical binary" that subordinates indigenous peoples. As we work toward a new model, which Allen calls "transindigenous," we need to treat indigenous texts "on their own complex and evolving terms."⁴ I move toward a transpacific and transindigenous ecopoetics that promises to preserve an ocean and offer a vision of transnational belonging, ecological confederation, and indigenous solidarity. Drawing on Linda Hogan's 2008 People of the Whale (fictionalized Makah, North American West Coast), Witi Ihimaera's 1987 Whale Rider (Maori, New Zealand/Aotearoa), and Syaman Rapongan's 2012 天空的眼睛 (Eyes in the Sky) (Aboriginal Taiwan Tao), I convene a shared oceanic poetics across diverse indigenous cultures in the Pacific region. Like the rooted and routed indigenous people of the Pacific, these works begin in salt water and subsurface earth and aquifers and trace ecological connections across the waters. A transpacific and transindigenous ecopoetics bring to the fore an alternative model of reckoning space, place, and time that requires active, participatory engagement with the Pacific seascapes while simultaneously necessitating a planetary consciousness. All three authors navigate a course that is...