Searching for the Trans-Indigenous

96 Codex Searching for the Trans-­ Indigenous Alice Te Punga Somerville The title of this piece gestures toward Teresia Teaiwa’s 1995 poetry collection Searching for Nei Nim’anoa, which in turn refers to a Banaban female navigator. The titular poem of the collection is about Teaiwa’s own (scholarly, creative, cultural) search for Nei Nim’anoa. The poem opens “I need to learn how to navigate,” a desire expressed in relation to the act of reading: “Read the stars, the wind, and the ocean swells / Like she did.” Teaiwa the scholar, researcher, and writer “search[es]” for this ancestral and historical figure because of her “need” to “learn” how to “read,” a move that—­ in the context of a collection that reflects over and over on her place in scholarly work and institutions—­ gently reframes and reclaims “read[ing]” within Indigenous Pacific knowledge traditions. Declaring that “drifting in a random sea” “has been too lonely,” Teaiwa yearns to engage in deliberate and expert navigation. The purpose and outcome of navigation, then, is to counter loneliness: to find community. The idea of “searching” in the present piece does not suggest that the “trans-­Indigenous” is out of sight, missing, or inadvertently mislaid. Instead , “searching” in Teaiwa’s sense draws our attention to the deliberate, hopeful, careful, necessarily incomplete (and, for many, ancestral) work that underpins global Native literary studies. The present conversation between Huang, Wilson, and me—­ and Allen—­ is another instance or site of such hopeful, careful, and necessarily incomplete “searching”: an attempt both to describe and to enact the transnational critical work suggested by the term trans-­Indigenous. Teaiwa’s search is not only for location and direction but also for navigational expertise, for method. The idea of method—­connective, collaborative , reciprocal method—­is central to Allen’s (2012) Trans-­Indigenous: Methodologies for Global Native Literary Studies and his broader career-­ long work of which it is a significant part. The subtitle of Allen’s book foregrounds its underpinning ambition: to variously propose, moderate, produce, and inspire a broad conversation about methodologies related to Indigenous literary studies. Questions of methodology have long energized Indigenous studies. Broadly, we can trace the language of methodology to the heavy influence of the social sciences in the development of the (inter)discipline, and more specifically, we might note the role of Linda Tuhiwai Smith’s (1999) Decolonizing Methodologies as a text that has perhaps enjoyed singular mobility around the Indigenous scholarly world for almost two decades. (Allen acknowledges a debt to Smith’s work Codex 97 in Trans-­Indigenous.) There can be a temptation in the humanities (especially literary studies) to eschew concepts like “methodology” (or, indeed, method) in favor of theory; the book could plausibly have been subtitled “Theories of Global Native Literary Studies” or “Global Native Literary Theory.” Instead, Allen’s work—­ while certainly not antitheoretical—­ elaborates “methodologies” for global Native literary studies in (at least) two forms: analytical methodologies in relation to what one does with literary texts and institutional methodologies in terms of how we think about the structural contexts (discipline, scholarly association, reading list, graduate training) of literary studies and perhaps Indigenous studies more broadly. Lest this parsing of two kinds of “methodology” suggest these (method and context) are entirely extricable, Smith and others elaborate the ways in which the institutional context of scholarly work shapes, and is shaped by, the specific forms of analytical work undertaken in any one project or classroom. At the level of analytical methodology, Trans-­Indigenous practices what it preaches. Rather than gesturing toward possible or ideal engagements with literary and other cultural texts which one might undertake elsewhere , Allen’s own method centers (and is explicitly derived from) his own careful engagements with specific texts. Much of the book involves long passages of detailed, productive, original, and often highly evocative working-­ through of specific texts (especially, but not only, poetry; more on this later). In their essays, both Huang and Wilson take time to elaborate Allen’s methods of analysis, in which readings of specific texts (and especially pairings or clusters of texts) draw from and inform insights into cultural, aesthetic, and political contexts. Huang celebrates this approach, noting “the cumulative...