Volume 8, numéro 2, 2024 (Re)crafting Creative Criticality: Indigenous Intergenerational Rhythms and Post–COVID Desires Sous la direction de Ruth Faleolo et 'Inoke Hafoka

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This article presents imagery representative of Pasifika (Sāmoan and Tongan) diaspora (nofo ‘i fafo o Sāmoa/ tu‘a Tonga) intergenerational sense-making and meaning-making. The main author, Ruth (Lute) Faleolo, presents a selection of eleven photographs shared with her by Pasifika knowledge holders across Aotearoa (New Zealand), Australia, and the United States, alongside six personally photographed people/events in Aotearoa. Collectively, these images show important Pasifika meaning-making and sense-making processes that are occurring intergenerationally in tu‘a Tonga/ nofo ‘i fafo o Sāmoa. These selected images were collected as part of an ongoing larger study of Pasifika migration and mobilities (2013-2023). The second author, Sh’Kinah Tuia‘ana Nauna Faleolo, presents pieces from her art collection (2015): Two Woven Identities and discusses her meaning-making and Indigeneity enfolding these pieces while growing up in Aotearoa. The third author, Lydiah Malia-Lose Faleolo, presents her Identity artwork (2019) and Duality design pieces (2023) that demonstrate her current and continued Indigeneity as a Sāmoan Tongan woman, living and studying in Australia. The fourth author, Nehemiah Thomas Faleolo’s artistic expressions captured in his annotated sketches and sculpture work were selected from a collection he had created in Australia. Nehemiah’s respected artwork and meaning-making, carefully documented by him in 2020 was (posthumously) selected by Faleolo family members, from his private exhibition and collection (Brisbane). Scanned documents and photographs stored on his mobile device have been contributed to this article on his behalf, with permission.

For many Pasifika living in Aotearoa, Australia and the United States, the processes of intergenerational sense-making and meaning-making occur in the diaspora contexts of faith, family, community, and education. The imageries presented by Ruth (Lute) Faleolo follow these thematic contexts, with short analyses about the intergenerational sense-making and meaning-making observed per photo. The purpose of her contribution to the discussion is to promote imageries as a way of conveying Pasifika understandings and knowledge. Sh’Kinah Tuia‘ana Nauna Faleolo, Lydiah Malia-Lose and Nehemiah Thomas Faleolo’s contributions present personal accounts of intergenerational sense-making and meaning-making as experienced through their artistic expressions, within nofo ‘i fafo o Sāmoa/ tu‘a Tonga contexts of Aotearoa and Australia.

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The making and gifting of koloa faka-Tonga (women’s valuables, also known as koloa) has been an integral part of Tongan identity and culture for as long as anyone can remember. Working collaboratively on tapa and ngatu provides space for discussions and understanding, and reflections of Tongan identity and culture. The practice of gifting koloa has continued outside of the Kingdom of Tonga as Tongans migrate for new opportunities, including Aotearoa New Zealand (henceforth Aotearoa NZ). Using two different examples, this article will explore, through talatalanoa, how Tongan family partnerships working with tapa/ngatu in contemporary ways are sites of intergenerational knowledge sharing through art practices in Aotearoa NZ. Sulieti Burrows and Tui Emma Gillies are a mother-daughter partnership of tapa artists who work and reside in Aotearoa NZ and use their time together to share stories and make tapa works depicting what concerns them in contemporary society. Also residing in Aotearoa NZ, Lavinia and Fire Fonua are a mother-son partnership who turn koloa into contemporary personal adornment, alongside Fire’s wife, Sonia. In this article, the four Tongan authors’ reflections on inter-generational knowledge sharing and practices related to koloa making and gifting are described and illustrated using examples of their work. Their diverse stories also reflect on Tongan material culture, and Tongan identity, and demonstrate how working on practices that centre koloa provides opportunities to consider what it means to be Tongan in Aotearoa NZ, and how Tongan ways of being, knowing, and doing are valued as tu’atonga.

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This article is taken from my dissertation study that explored the lived experiences of three Tongan Americans, each of whom were incarcerated in juvenile hall and are now attending college as a part of a transition program into local community colleges. The study introduced a Tongan version of the school-prison nexus by highlighting the ways in which the education and the justice systems work to ignore the dual culture realities of Tongans living in the United States. Adopting and fusing Fa‘avae’s (2016) talanoa and Lawrence-Lightfoot and Davis’ (1997) portraiture methodologies, I co-created a new approach Artiture—in collaboration with Taniela Petelo, my cousin, a Tongan-based international artist—to explore the following question: What are the challenges Tongan students face when they attend college after being incarcerated in the juvenile justice system? Findings from this Artiture highlighted intersections of family, history, cultural obligations and expectations, and the impact on Tongan Americans who deal with what Vakalahi (2009) calls “dual culture” (pg. 1259).

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This article is an articulation of Tongan angafakafonua (way of the land, culture)as Tongan identity and its (re)makings through religion and gangs in the United States. Based on a section of my doctoral thesis, I examine the influence of the Mormon Church on Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) Act charges.1 This article acknowledges that legislators, driven by their Mormon religio-racial ideology, interpreted the legislation in an exclusive manner. They took liberties to explicitly exclude first-generation Tongan Americans based on their preference for street gangs rather than the fraternal organizations associated with the Church. During the period between the settlement of Utah and the RICO trial of Siale Angilau, American-born Tongans of the first generation modified angafakafonua to address the needs of a growing Tongan community in the United States. In the later years of this transitional period, second-Generation Tongan Americans utilized angafakafonua to counteract excessive surveillance by gang task forces, racial profiling, and discriminatory practices employed by the state.

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Our article is an investigation of the architectural meanings of Moana when located in Aotearoa, as Pacific practitioners, designers, and academics. This article will traverse sensitive topics, such as how Aotearoa’s Pacific peoples relate to Tangata Whenua today and how this is expressed in the built space. How can we navigate Te Tiriti o Waitangi through our voyaging histories, moving beyond the muddy relations within urban conditions in Aotearoa? The phrase Mana Moana is used to refer to the ancestral relationships between Tangata Whenua and the wider Moana, or vast Pacific region, as a positioning framework for our discussions. Mana Moana reinforces connected genealogies of Māori and Pacific peoples across deep time and space beyond the shores of Aotearoa, New Zealand. The article draws on architectural case studies from Aotearoa that investigate placemaking concepts and praxes that provoke, educate, and inspire current and future built environments of Aotearoa, New Zealand.

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Stories provide listeners or readers a doorway to understand the storyteller’s context and live in the telling. We, as Māori Indigenous scholars (doctoral students, researchers, and academics), bring together our stories, in the forms of creative nonfiction and poetry located in Aotearoa New Zealand and Te Whenua Moemoeā Australia, to tell the ways we navigate colonial spaces while also imagining our desired future. Centring Indigenous storytelling methods and sensory ethnography, we bring together the interrelatedness that situates our stories across time and place. The next wave of Indigenous researchers will be stepping into these spaces that we now walk, so it is timely and crucial that we find creative ways to provide clearer direction for them. We tell our stories in this paper as an act of hope that our stories might spark a fire in the reader’s heart to also tell theirs.

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This article presents our theoretical musings on practicing decolonization as Christian Tongan academics, recorded and shared within our Australian collective during 2022-2023. We aim to discuss the strength and power that comes from our Indigenous inheritance of God and Tonga, living in diaspora of Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand (tu'a Tonga). Amidst this Indigenous strength, there are also subtleties and crescendos of coloniality taking place in and around us, as well as the complexities and vulnerabilities with which Tongan Christian academics grapple in their sense making and meaning making processes. The significance of this discussion is that Oceanian women’s opinions and experiences of decoloniality are not often considered, particularly within the contexts of academia. We pray this article offers insights into how we can successfully navigate simultaneous private, public, individual, and collective journeys, daily, as Christian academics in the decolonization of these various spaces. This is our contribution as Christian academics, as daughters of Tonga, and wives and mothers of Oceania.

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Audacious Dancing is an evolving framework for critically considering indigenous Pasifika art-making, legacy-leaving, education, service and leadership through the lens of social justice. Located at the juncture of the performing arts and education for young Pasifika leaders in South Auckland, Aotearoa New Zealand, and drawing on indigenous scholarship in the performing arts, Audacious Dancing offers a way to consider what it means to be a ‘creative native’, learning and leading across generations, cultures and artforms. The four strands - courageous space, indigenous excellence, critical hope and powerful action - weave intergenerational indigenous knowledges with what it means to be growing up Pasifika in the largest Polynesian city in the world.

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Storytelling through the arts is embedded in Pacific cultural ways and is meaningfully expressed by interweaving history, genealogy, cultural values, and beliefs. My investigation into Pasifika students’ success as Pasifika in visual arts was revealed through the students’ artworks and stories. Visual art teachers’ beliefs, attitudes and pedagogical practices were also examined to illuminate the critical role they play in affirming Pasifika student success as Pasifika. The inclusion of my own experiences and artworks as a visual artist of Tongan and German descent, grounds the research project and offers voice to my creative critical sense-making process. This article also presents an exploratory examination of falanoa, alongside Caroline Scott Fanamanu’s analysis, as an intergenerational arts-based research method, specifically in the context of my own body of koloa, a personal collection of treasured artworks generated across a 30-year period. Recognising my duality of distinct ancestral worlds, this article suggests that falanoa can be a valuable method for arts-based research, particularly in the context of creative critical sense-making, cultural preservation, and intergenerational knowledge.

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This article is a reflection on an attempt to create a space of flux through the concepts of positionality, vā and talanoa within the design academy. This was presented as an academic course, originally intended to address a gap in established learning, and to make space for intergenerational knowledge systems that were originally being shared outside of the studio (shared at the knee, through office hours, and in passing conversations). This sharing led to key questions regarding how we (re)craft our ways through our practices and what cultural conditions are needed to enable safe design and cultural production. Five students enrolled in the course and are featured as co-authors in this article. They whakapapa as Tangata whenua (Māori, people of the land) or Tagata o le Moana (specifically Sāmoan). They are enrolled in a range of design disciplines such as spatial design, fashion design, and concept design. Classes were held once a week over a 12- week semester period. These in-person classes involved reflecting and re-presenting our positional contexts, a sharing and setting of kai, hikoi to gallery exhibitions featuring Māori and Pacific art practitioners at an institutional level and a community level, alongside the sharing of scholarship developed on the concepts of vā and talanoa, while coming back to ourselves and our familial, generational social settings.

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This article unfolds intergenerational sustainability and relational rhythms through Tongan language and culture and the interrelationships between older and younger Tongan people and between Tongans and non-Tongans in Aotearoa New Zealand (NZ). It also unpacks the interconnected ways in which Tongans as Indigenous people honour the inseparability and sensibilities of knowing–seeing–feeling–doing–being–becoming Tongan across tā–vā (time–space) in language and cultural realities, and their implications on Tongan people’s success in life. I argue that there is still space to strengthen Tongan language and culture through intergenerational relationships between Tongans in loto-Tonga, the motherland, and communities settled in tu‘a-Tonga, the diaspora such as Aotearoa NZ.

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Our search for collective meaning-making across spaces and places as Tongan global scholars carries intergenerational rhythms. This article is a diasporic collaboration between members of the Tongan Global Scholars Network (TGSN), an online cultural collective drawn together through creatively critical rhythms and a desire to make space for ongoing criticalities through Tongan concepts, knowledge, and approaches. Employing the art of e-talanoa in our search for ways of crafting meaning, we unfold our narratives about TGSN’s humble beginnings using a range of modalities expressed as words, images, screenshots, and poetry. Our desire to connect early career scholars of Tongan heritage across the diaspora of Australia, the United States of America, Aotearoa New Zealand, and Tonga via the online space, led to enabling intergenerational relational rhythms between more seasoned and emerging scholars, sharing their understanding of Tongan knowledge and its relevance in the dominant Western academe. Intergenerational rhythms are central to TGSN’s survival. As a global network, TGSN continues to provide meaningful spaces for creatively critical meaning- making and intergenerational collaborative dialogue.

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This book review is a talanoa (discussion) with Winston Halapua’s 2008 text, Waves of God’s Embrace: Sacred Perspectives from the Ocean. This review is an interpretation and evaluation of the text and Halapua’s narrative musings. Readers are invited to engage with Indigenous concepts and forms of creative criticality, fronting Oceania meaning-making and sense-making through storytelling, poetry, and proverbial or wise sayings. In my review, I employ sacred vā-rhythms to engage in talanoa with key themes, ideas, and insights noted by Halapua, a well-respected religious leader and academic. I offer questions and provocations about God’s embrace and the ways in which sacred vā is framed today as being in-relationship with the more-than-human world (i.e., the fonua-vanua-whenua and moana) for Tongan as well as Oceania families across Oceania and the diaspora.

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I have purposefully used a narrative approach in my review of Ka‘ili’s (2017) Marking Indigeneity: The Tongan Art of Sociospatial Relations to support my meaning making as a Tongan academic and Pasifika researcher. I considered elements of the text that worked well for me as an early career researcher and that are accessible to Tongan and non-Tongan academics alike. The Oceanian artistic traditions of time (tā) and space (vā) promoted in this book offer a continuation of ancient oral traditions into the contemporary realm of academic literature. In essence, Ka‘ili’s book brings significant understandings of the tā-vā theory into interdisciplinary research spaces and across the global landscape of Pasifika research and academic practice. This is evidenced in the more than 60 Pasifika authors’ citations of Ka‘ili’s book, to date. My recommendation of this book draws upon these facets: the accessibility of the text, the elements of the text, and the global reach of the text.