Karanga Mai te Pō: Calling on Darkness as Protection Amidst (En)light(ened) Pollution

The Tīpuna Project is a creative community-based collaboration between Tangata Whenua (Indigenous) and Pākehā (White settler) researchers, artists and activists in Aotearoa to experiment with the decolonial possibilities of communing with our Indigenous and settler ancestors. In this performative piece we, the co-leads of The Tīpuna Project, attempt to tell our stories of how we arrived here, honouring our ancestors as co-researchers in our ‘participatory action research’ (PAR) process, considering and enacting our emerging relationship with each other and with darkness and te pō.

Darkness and te pō help us to exist both because and in spite of a colonial episteme that is violently inhospitable to the more-than-human. With them, we move into the cracks, into spaces of entanglement where our senses are heightened and where we are less able to be commanded by binaries, urgency and mastery. And with them, those of us who are Tangata Whenua also move into the caves, into spaces of rest, rhythm, story and breath. These cracks and caves protect us from an (En)light(ened) pollution that otherwise stops us from seeing the stars, enabling us to be (with) our shimmering otherworldly guides – our ancestors, our tīpuna.

In turn, both our project and our collaborative relationship are also (more) sheltered from a colonial hierarchy of Knowing, Knowledge, Knower that structures the colonial episteme. Calling on darkness and te pō, then, is how we struggle for freedom within the colonial academy – an academy within which Indigenous scholars in particular are both disappearing and Still Here.