STREAM ONE
Going with the Flow: Transindigenous Cultural Revitalization with Shared Traditional Knowledge of Water, Land, and Skyways Among Dakota and Pacific Islanders (hereafter, Flow)
Flow shapes the entire project as it focuses on the more specific process of co-convening hands-on cultural activities and TEK learning with and in the indigenous communities to serve as hands-on sites for investigating and advancing knowledge of specific cultural traditions in their own right, in trans-indigenous or “native to native” contexts (Aikau, Goodyear-Ka’opua, and Silva, 2016; Allen 2012; Cook 2018; Diaz 2018). This cultural engagement in turn contours the self-examination process of exploring appropriate values and relations that will inform the specific STE(A)M lab and studio practices detailed in Stream Two and help direct future research.
Left: Micronesian waa/outrigger canoe and Dakota wata/dugout. Middle: Victor Douville, Lakota Astronomer. Right: Cover image of University of Hawaii Ethnic Studies Conference Program with illustration of Caroline paafu/directional star “compass” connected by coconut sennit cordage. Like the water craft they bind, sennit connects and fastens with durability and flexibility.
In addition to informing project design principles, including “live” furnishing of “data” and experience to be looped back into lab and studio practices, Flow “fields” experiential, participatory action activities, like Dakota and Micronesian canoe building and navigation technologies and knowhow, star and water knowledge, birthing and food-related ceremonies and practices steeped in TEK and protocols in Dakota and Micronesian women’s traditions.
These activities draw from the combined research expertise of Co-PI Diaz (2016; 2015; 2013; 2011) and Co-I Rock, who also bring two to three decades each as cultural practitioners and teachers (Diaz in Micronesian canoe culture, history, and star knowledge; Rock in Dakota astronomy, cosmology, and cultural traditions). Diaz and Rock are joined by Co-PI Johnston-Goodstar, Co-PI Gould and Co-I DeLisle, each of whom also have organic ties of kinship and research experience in Dakota and Micronesian women’s cultures, politics, and histories.
In assisting the community needs in their cultural revitalization activities, we are also engineering and designing opportunities for data gathering to advance the TEK knowledge base (through oral histories, and hands-on learning) as well as for identifying and analyzing key theoretical and methodological concepts and practices relationality, reciprocity, circularity, ceremony and ritual, transindigeneity that can inform and shape new academic inquiry. Here, “engagement” is both service and fieldwork site for cultural and historical investigation, and for exploring and culling conceptual and material insight for the purposes of designing new laboratory and studio-based research in STE(A)M fields such as summarized below. In describing the STE(A)M stream’s (Stream Two, below) role and specific activities, we continue to contextualize a broader history of relations and new possibilities that shape and inform the entire project and give rise to a pioneering set of research activities to be held in conjunction with our engaged activities in the community (discussed above). This dimension of the partnership between Native and STEAM scholars reroutes the winds and torrents of inquiry away from settler colonial knowledge production and potentially into a surge toward indigenous futures (Goodyear-Ka’opua 2018) that is rooted in both TEK and experimental coding for change.