Country and sovereignty

Tîr Aho Studio is based on the unceded lands of the Jagera, Yuggera and Ugarapul peoples on Tulmur and around Meeanjin/Magandjin. We pay our respects to Elders past, present and emerging, and acknowledge the continuing sovereignty of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples over the lands, skies and waterways of which they have been faithful stewards for tens of thousands of years.

Te Tiriti o Waitangi

Tîr Aho Studio honours Te Tiriti o Waitangi and the mana of tangata whenua. We recognise the rangatiratanga of ngā iwi Māori across Aotearoa, the Great Ocean and beyond. We gratefully acknowledge the manaakitanga we receive when our work carries us across Te Moana-nui-a-Kiwa. We commit to working in ways that uphold Te Tiriti.

Where we stand

Timothy Liam Brown is a settler Australian. Nabil Sabio Azadi is Ngāti Irāna o Aotearoa — a term in te reo Māori developed by Azadi through dialogue with various Māori scholars in 2020, naming the position of diasporic peoples in Aotearoa who understand themselves to have been born or to live in Aotearoa under the manaakitanga and mana of tangata whenua.

Tîr Aho Studio works in Australia, Aotearoa and across Te Moana-nui-a-Kiwa, also known in English as the Great Ocean region. Tongan-Fijian scholar Epeli Hauʻofa argued that the region had been belittled by colonial thought into 'islands in a far sea' when its older and truer description was 'a sea of islands'.¹ We work in the latter region — a relational geography in which 'things are seen in the totality of their relationships'.²

Our practice operates in a kind of intertidal zone — between disability, inclusion and equity, First Nations Australian and Māori knowledge systems and arts practices. We organise ourselves by the rhythms and protocols of each project and community for and with which we work. As a non-Indigenous studio, we hold ourselves accountable to the specific Indigenous communities, artists, scholars and authorities whose work and wisdom continue to teach us stewardship and responsibility to lands, waters and each other. We believe this accountability involves tangible obligations, which we discuss below.

Working with cultural protocols: Critical Indigenous studies and kaupapa Māori scholarship

When our work touches cultural materials, protocols or knowledge that belong to specific communities, we work under the guidance of, and in accountability to, those communities — through Elders, Traditional Owners, iwi and hapū representatives, and cultural authorities specific to each engagement. We name those accountabilities in our scopes of work and in the deliverables themselves whilst working with Indigenous communities, artists, or knowledge holders. We understand that we do not hold speaking rights in Australian First Nations and Māori gathering contexts.

The intellectual register we read in is critical Indigenous studies and kaupapa Māori scholarship, both of which usefully delineate what a non-Indigenous practice can credibly do. We take seriously Aileen Moreton-Robinson's analysis of how settler institutions reproduce the nation-state's 'ownership, control, and domination' through what she calls possessive logics³ — and we take her injunction at its sharp end: the work of a non-Indigenous practice begins with the analysis of whiteness in our own field of thinking and praxis.

When working across the Great Ocean, we recall Dr Linda Tuhiwai Smith, who reminds non-Indigenous researchers that 'research' is 'probably one of the dirtiest words in the indigenous world's vocabulary'⁴, and who sets exacting conditions on non-Indigenous practice: research must be invited and parametrised by the community itself and the institutions involved must be willing to alter themselves. Where the language of decolonisation enters our field, we follow Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang in refusing it as metaphor: decolonisation, in a settler-colonial context, 'brings about the repatriation of Indigenous land and life; it is not a metaphor for other things we want to do to improve our societies'.⁵

We aim to meet that standard whilst recognising that the work accessibility, inclusion and equity consultancy operates one step removed from the material conditions Tuck and Yang name. We use the more honest words: anti-colonial, Tiriti-led, in accountability to, standing with.⁶

Notes

¹ Epeli Hauʻofa, 'Our Sea of Islands', in Eric Waddell, Vijay Naidu and Epeli Hauʻofa (eds), A New Oceania: Rediscovering Our Sea of Islands (Suva: University of the South Pacific School of Social and Economic Development, 1993), pp. 2–16, at p. 7. Reprinted in The Contemporary Pacific 6:1 (Spring 1994), pp. 147–161; and in We Are the Ocean: Selected Works (Honolulu: University of Hawaiʻi Press, 2008).

² Hauʻofa, 'Our Sea of Islands', p. 7.

³ Aileen Moreton-Robinson, The White Possessive: Property, Power, and Indigenous Sovereignty (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015), p. xii. The concept is first articulated in her 'The Possessive Logic of Patriarchal White Sovereignty: The High Court and the Yorta Yorta Decision', borderlands e-journal 3:2 (2004), and reworked as Chapter 6 of The White Possessive.

⁴ Linda Tuhiwai Smith, Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples (London: Zed Books, 1999; 3rd ed. London: Bloomsbury, 2021), p. 1.

⁵ Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang, 'Decolonization Is Not a Metaphor', Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society1:1 (2012), pp. 1–40, at p. 1. We take seriously Tuck and Yang's typology of 'settler moves to innocence' — particularly the move they call 'conscientisation', in which decolonisation is reduced to a question of mindset rather than of land and life.

⁶ The phrase standing with is Kim TallBear's, from 'Standing With and Speaking as Faith: A Feminist-Indigenous Approach to Inquiry', Journal of Research Practice 10:2 (2014), Article N17. TallBear describes a researcher 'willing to be altered, to revise her stakes in the knowledge to be produced'. We use the phrase advisedly: it names a relational discipline, not a posture available without long-term, accountable, named relations to a specific community. Tiriti-led is the operative Aotearoa political register, naming a practice oriented to the specific obligations Te Tiriti o Waitangi places on non-Māori; anti-colonial is the broader analytic tradition we work in, distinct from the metaphorical use of decolonialthat Tuck and Yang refuse. Cognate scholarship informing this section includes Audra Simpson, Mohawk Interruptus: Political Life Across the Borders of Settler States (Durham: Duke University Press, 2014); Maile Arvin, Possessing Polynesians: The Science of Settler Colonial Whiteness in Hawaiʻi and Oceania (Durham: Duke University Press, 2019); and J. Kēhaulani Kauanui, ''A Structure, Not an Event': Settler Colonialism and Enduring Indigeneity', Lateral 5:1 (2016).