One Salt Water: Writing the Pacific Ocean in Contemporary Indigenous Protest Literatures

Etherington, Bonnie Joy

doi:https://doi.org/10.21985/n2-p84b-4755

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One Salt Water: Writing the Pacific Ocean in Contemporary Indigenous Protest Literatures

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Abstract This dissertation studies a creative archive composed of poems, novels, performances, and visual art produced after 1990 that increasingly represent the ocean as “one salt water”: a space of relations among Indigenous oceanic peoples, animals, plants, and other beings. In doing so, these texts work to forge solidarities and conversations among Indigenous peoples throughout the Pacific that protest against exploitation and mobilize to build sustainable and just oceanic futures. Wansolwara, or “one salt water,” is a Tok Pisin (Papua New Guinea Creole) expression popularized in the past two decades through Oceania-wide Indigenous political and environmental activist movements. Also translated as “one ocean, one people,” Wansolwara increasingly appears on social media and other platforms denoting Oceania’s enormous diversity and highlighting critical issues in the Pacific including climate change, militarization, and decolonization. It indicates how Indigenous protest literature and art from Oceania convey a resistance politics built on prioritizing Indigenous systems for being in the world and coalitions across Indigenous peoples. While not all literatures in this archive use the word “Wansolwara,” they all engage the ocean as a literal and metaphorical space for the storied work of local and global Indigenous self-determination. First, they show that the ocean constitutes Indigenous Pacific ecological and genealogical systems, livelihoods, and networks of kinship and exchange. Second, the ocean is a place that generates and disseminates Indigenous intellectual and story practices. Finally, the ocean is enmeshed with Indigenous experiences of colonization but also acts as a means to pursue self-determined futures. By illuminating the oceanic relations established by these texts, I use “one salt water” as a concept that emphasizes the storied activist work of asserting interconnected Indigenous presences and persistence in the Pacific.

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