Decolonizing ocean spaces: Saltwater co-belonging and responsibilities

Abstract

Oceans in the colonial Anthropocene are haunted by the brutal racial logics of slavery, indenture, plunder, violence, death, and multispecies extinction. This brutality manifested through uneven burdens of climate extremes, global warming, ocean acidification, sea level rise, pollution, and threats from offshore energy extraction, chokes the “life force” of oceans that sustain planetary belongings and futures. Global agreements on climate change, biodiversity conventions, sustainable goals, and laws of the sea increasingly attempt to transform dystopic planetary futures through openness to Indigenous and local knowledges. But these overlooked Indigenous, Black, Brown, and southern intellectual traditions of belonging and responsibility in settler colonial, postcolonial, and post-apartheid societies have always existed alongside white, western Euro-American ontologies of the ocean. As subaltern southern and Indigenous scholars, our privileging of ontologies of the ocean amid the racial, colonial, and capitalist logics that continues to suffocate people and the planet, seeks to do more than enrich white, western, English-speaking Euro-American institutions. We, therefore, face ethical dilemmas as we assemble and prioritize strands of literature in our decolonial, polyphonic place-based ocean storytelling that seeks to advance new directions in Environmental Geography.

I Whose Oceanic Futures?

Indigenous, Black, Brown, and Southern intellectual traditions are energizing, “enriching” and decolonizing contemporary environmental scholarship on ocean spaces, oceanic justice, and oceanic futures in the western academy (Carter 2019; DeLoughrey 2019; Peters et al. 2022; Pugh and Chandler 2021). This innovative scholarship, at the fluid intersections of Geography (Physical and Human), Critical Ocean Studies, and the Environmental Humanities, focuses on wet ontologies of place and archipelagic conceptualizations of governance, that draw on the pivotal work of Edouard Glissant, Epeli Hau’ofa, and Kamau Braithwaite, among others. Given the creeping as well as catastrophic impacts of global warming, sea level rise, ocean acidification, “ocean grabs” (McCormack 2021, 211), cracking of shore-fast ice, melting glaciers and biodiversity loss, reworking, and advancing geographical thought on oceanic futures is urgent.

There are ethical challenges, however, when Indigenous, Black, Brown, and Southern-led environmental scholarship struggles to emerge in closed circles of academia and policymaking. In addition, tokenistic white recognition that regulates entry into these circles, risks reducing knowledge holders and environment stewards situated in the Global South to sources of data. As a first-generation Australian woman of color from India and an Indigenous Māori woman from Aotearoa New Zealand, we seek to produce turbulence in literature and global agreements that choke the “life force” of oceans. In response to anthropogenic climate change, biodiversity loss, and the urgent need for oceanic justice, we are concerned about the management of responsibility from relatively comfortable positions of white/settler/class privilege, anxious belongings, guilt, and eco-anxiety. Transnational Indigenous, Black, Brown, Black, and subaltern Southern feminisms give us courage to drift in decolonial ocean spaces, and unsettle western, scientific, masculinist, elitist modes of knowing and governing the planet (Ahmed 2021; McKittrick 2021; Okafor-Yarwood et al. 2022; Sultana 2022; tebrakunna country and Lee 2019).

This intervention is an experiment in decolonial, polyphonic, place-based, ocean storytelling from the Antipodes. We argue that our collective storying of Indigenous, Black, Brown, and Southern ocean ontologies, as an ethnic minority and Indigenous women, shape and reshape the entwined geographical concepts of race, belonging, and responsibility in the Anthropocene. As geographers, ocean or saltwater ontologies enable us to dream and craft new world beginnings, at a time when greed and irresponsibility are producing world endings. Amid environmental upheaval produced by racial, colonial, and capitalist logics, we respond to Hartman's (2019, xiv) invitation to elaborate, augment, transpose, “break open archival documents” (and we add concepts) that might make it possible to craft “dream book[s] of existing otherwise.”

This article that focuses on decolonizing ocean spaces and advancing new directions in Environmental Geography has four main sections. First, we illuminate critical desires that drive our bold attempt to bring brilliance to storying ocean ontologies, and the re-crafting of taken-for-granted key concepts, such as race, belonging, and responsibility. Second, we explore ocean kinship as embodied performances of saltwater co-belonging and responsibility that, in modest ways undo racial injustice and mend broken promises made by international institutions. We argue that listening with and learning from charismatic, mobile plant, and marine species contribute to affective, multiscalar, decolonial insights into belonging and responsibility. Third, we decolonize marine governance through the poetics and politics of oceanic justice that privilege the radiation of plural belongings and responsibilities. We conclude by opening a space for a chorus of human and more-than-human voices that might churn and soak geographical thinking, and so unsettle the racial, colonial, and capitalist logics that suffocate people and the planet.

II Critical Desires

Three critical desires drive our exploration of saltwater co-belonging and responsibilities. First, the desire to stir up Indigenous, Black, Brown, and Southern transoceanic dialogue and solidarities from our settler colonial island homes. Second, the desire to produce waves of more diverse citational politics that privilege Indigenous, Black, Brown, and Southern-led ontologies of the ocean. Third, the desire to produce reverberating echoes of polyphonic oceanic knowledge that is in danger of disappearing, if ocean stewardship by racialized, marginalized, displaced, and dispossessed ethnic/ethnoreligious minorities and Indigenous peoples are denied (Lobo 2019; Lobo et al. 2022; Locke, Trudgett and Page 2021; Rarai et al. 2022).

These critical desires emerge through our shared experiences of colonial and racial harm in the Indian, Southern, and Pacific Ocean. Chari (2021, 1038) regrets, however, that Indian Ocean histories of slavery and indenture are harms that are easily overlooked, given the “hyper-availability of the cultural and political archives of the Black Atlantic.” Therefore, while we seek to undo racial injustice, we stay attuned to the risks of being “native informants for first-world intellectuals” and white, western, English-speaking Euro-American institutions interested in the voices of human and nonhuman Others (Spivak 1994, 79).

Indigenous, Black, Brown, and Southern experiences in settler colonial, postcolonial, and post-apartheid societies are different, but a “Black” solidarity praxis attentive to diverse oceanic connections can challenge the long-term consequences of “talking past each other” (Winter 2021, 71). Such talking has produced a language of crises, which exacerbates racial injustice, climate colonialism, capitalist extractivism, and multispecies extinction with material consequences (Sultana 2022; Whyte 2021b). These consequences unfold when Indigenous rights to govern and manage seas, seafloors, and fisheries are denied (Kearney 2018, Kearney et al. 2022; Mehta, Parthsarathy and Bose 2022; Reid 2015; Richmond and Kotowicz 2015), or the state places hurdles, making it difficult for Indigenous Peoples and ethnic/ethnoreligious minorities to participate in processes of marine spatial planning (Lobo et al. 2022; Parsons et al. 2021; Diggon et al. 2019). Or, when “sacred energies” (Marawili 1999, 54), laws, creation stories, songlines of ancestral beings, and interspecies kinship that weave responsibility through Sea, Land, and Sky, are broken by climate change, extractive capitalism (oil, gas, fish), and the pollution of oceans by nuclear waste, plastics, and toxins (Bordner, Ferguson and Ortolan 2020; Bradley 2010; Bundle, Rushton and Wade 2022; Fuller et al. 2022; Liboiron et al. 2021). The next section argues for responsibilities that center ocean kinship, undoes racial injustice, and mends broken promises enshrined in global agreements on oceanic justice.

III Ocean Kinship and Intimacy: Embodied Performances of Saltwater Co-Belonging and Responsibility

Kin-centric ecologies include affective relationships as well as ethical and political obligations of “response-ability” with more-than-human worlds, including ocean homes, living species, fossil kin, and ancestral spirits of Sea Country (Lobo et al. 2022; Fackler and Schultermandl 2022; Haraway 2016; Todd 2022, 17). These reciprocal relationships and obligations of responsibility are often strengthened through the diversity of Indigenous and Southern laws, intergenerational storytelling, subaltern animal stories, poetry, religious and cultural ceremonies, as well as practices such as swimming, diving, surfing, rowing, and even contemporary Indigenous whaling that provide food security (Lobo et al. 2022; Ingersoll 2016; McGarry, Walne and Mthombeni 2021; Sakakibara 2020; Waiti and Wheaton 2022).

Ocean kinship informed by Indigenous sovereignty and partnerships that are inclusive and meaningful, decolonize and reset relationships of governance amid fossil-fuel energy extraction, colonial injustice, system racism and inequalities in global power (Fackler and Schultermandl 2022; tebrakunna country and Lee 2019; Todd 2022; Winter 2021). This focus on “plural kinscapes” (Todd 2022, 3) decenters the consciousness of “Western scholars and elites” implicated in the creation of racial injustice, marine vulnerabilities, and inequities (Okafor-Yarwood 2022 , 2). Oceanic ways of being born out of the Black Atlantic/Middle Passage and asylum seeker voyages, however, may not sit comfortably with notions of belonging, love, and kinship; responsibility might be configured quite differently from these subject positions. Walcott (2021, 65) argues that Black people have an “ambiguous and ambivalent relationship” with oceans that are the site of Black birth and Black death.

Ocean ontologies of inter and intraspecies kinship, reciprocity, and duties of care often struggle to emerge in postcolonial societies such as India and Vanuatu. They struggle to emerge because colonial legacies live on among “educated natives” international experts and funding agencies who privilege Euromodern ontologies, western scientific knowledge, and technical fixes (Mathur and da Cunha 2020, 200; Rarai et al. 2022). Even soaked estuarine cities in the Arabian Sea, such as Mumbai, India, or the low-lying islands of the heritage-listed Sundarbans Mangrove forest in the Bay of Bengal, shaped by rivers, torrential monsoon rain, tides, and floods, have become western laboratories for controlling the “nuisance” of wetness when framed within the context of vulnerability, resilience building, and “war” with the sea (Lahiri-Dutt 2014; Mathur and da Cunha 2020). Thus, these framings have not been informed by positive coping strategies that nourish ocean optimism and collective responsibility in saltwater homes (Lahiri-Dutt 2014; Mathur and da Cunha 2020; Okafor-Yarwood et al. 2022).

Among Indigenous Māori, the sea is not simply a body of saltwater, but the home and marae (ancestral meeting house) of Tangaroa (the god of the sea), and the source of mauri (life force) and wairua (spiritual integrity) of many human and more-than-human beings. Māori are, therefore, legally and ethically bound (under Māori laws or tikanga) to care for their moana (Aramoana Waiti and Awatere 2019; Ataria et al. 2018). Whakapapa (genealogy) connects each iwi (tribe) and hapū (sub-tribe) to moana, a part of not only their geographical domain but also their tupuna (ancestor). Thus, the hauora (health) of the whole environment (taiao), including the moana, is interconnected with the health of Māori and the health of their moana rohe. This includes individual or collective water bodies (sea), fauna (be it a bed of oysters, a pod of dolphins, or a coral reef), flora (seagrass, seaweed, mangroves), physical or climatic features (sand, waves, winds, ocean floor, underwater volcanoes), or supernatural beings (gods, spirits) (Parsons et al. 2021).

In Australia, Sea Country comprises not only the water, waves, plants, and animals but also seagrass beds, coral reefs, ocean floor, saltpans, submerged lands, sacred sites, and supernatural beings, all of which required care as more-than-human kin. Indigenous Australian kin-centric ecologies mean that it is neither fantastical nor radical for saltwater peoples to consider “a white-bellied sea eagle … one's maternal grandmother, the conch shell a paternal ancestor, the brolga one's father's father, and the groper one's mother” (Kearney 2018, 157). Tebrakunna country and Lee (2019), a trawlwulwuy woman from Australia, focuses on kinship relations to reset settler colonial governance through land and sea management policies, which privilege leadership initiatives by women who are of Sea Country in Tasmania. Through decolonial strategies of “love bombing” attentive to kinship and reciprocity, the “placelessness and non-existence” (tebrakunna country and Lee 2019, 1, 15) of Tasmanian Aboriginal women's powerful connection to the sea is affirmed.

Women climate activists, poets, performance artists, and educators illuminate and bridge visceral, multisensory knowledges that center oceanic and transoceanic kinship. In the Nguni languages, including isiXhosa spoken in South Africa, Ulwandle, or the ocean feels, breathes, heals, is a resting place for “liquid” ancestors (McGarry, Walne and Mthombeni 2021). Blue Blanket, a poem and video artwork produced from the ocean's perspective, responds to broken promises made at climate conferences, and multinational Shell's plans to explore offshore gas and oil along the Wild Coast, South Africa. The poem performed by Malusi Mnqobi Mthombeni highlights the vitality of the ocean as a spiritual and material place that is disrespected and wounded, every time there is a sonar blast or “seismic bomb” for oil exploration. Rise, a video performance by Kathy Jetñil-Kijiner from the Marshall Islands and Inuk writer Aka Niviâna (2022) from Kalaallit Nunaat (Greenland), speaks back to the legacies of “colonial monsters” that have sacrificed their oceanic homes threatened by melting glaciers and sea level rise. Together as sisters of ocean, sand, ice, and snow, they respond to “climate-damaging petro cultures” through a ceremony of gift-giving that includes shells, stones, and the exchange of stories (Fackler and Schultermandl 2022, 2). In a special issue of Atlantic Studies: Global Currents, led by Fackler and Schultermandl (2022), this performance sparks a decolonial approach to ocean kinship/kinlessness as a critical idiom and methodology for exploring transatlantic slavery, labour mobilities, as well as interspecies relations of belonging, care, and responsibility. Their performance values listening that reweaves interspecies relations.

3.1 Listening with and Learning from Whispering Charismatic Species

Dispersed fruits and seeds of the charismatic baobab tree and migratory marine mammals such as whales, who hitch a ride on ocean currents, strengthen interspecies relationships, and more-than-human solidarities (George and Wiebe 2020; Rangan 2019; Stevens and Wanhalla 2019). Although these charismatic species are often accompanied today by curious marine scientists, wildlife scientists, citizen scientists, conservation biologists, as well as satellite tracking devices and acoustic sensors, in the precolonial era, they had different companions. Focusing on the precolonial era, Rangan (2019) “breaks open archival documents” (Hartman 2019, xiv) through an exploration of baobab genetic histories, structures, relationships, and mobilities that map Indian Ocean crossings. These crossings from east Africa to western India were prior to the age of ecological imperialism and Portuguese, Dutch, British, and French trading in the seventeenth to nineteenth century. For example, botanical exchanges, sometimes traceable to the second millennium BCE, were enabled by African sailors, soldiers, slaves, and servants who made Indian Ocean crossings. Although this dispersal of plants across the western Indian Ocean suggests precolonial racial hierarchies, a new oceanic vocabulary across spatial and temporal scales is also produced through African Indigenous agency and whispering baobabs in the living archive of environmental history. This whispering chorus of plants from the Indian Ocean intensifies the conceptual force of saltwater co-belonging and responsibility. Whales from the Atlantic, Southern, Arctic, and Pacific Oceans join this chorus.

Ancestral and migratory whales are “acoustic beings” who whisper and sing as they use echolocation in their long transoceanic journeys to nurseries in warmer waters. These whispers are heard by women shore whalers, Indigenous whalers, Indigenous story holders, and Black artists (Harrison 2023; Russell 2012; Stevens and Wanhalla 2019; Yin Han 2021, 224). Irresponsibility in the form of sonic violence unfolds, however, when the ocean is saturated with anthropogenic sonar blasts, whale carcasses sink to the seafloor and become “whale snow” (Yin Han 2021, 225). In regional areas of Canada, Greenland, Alaska, and Russia, the endangered Beluga whale, central to the identity and well-being of Arctic Indigenous peoples, is impacted by melting sea ice, retreating ice shores, shipping, pollution, and industrial development. As whale stewards, Indigenous hunters have observed changes in their abundance, health, behavior, and migratory patterns (Breton-Honeyman et al. 2021). Inuit People in the Nunavik Marine Region of Canada are, therefore, critical of enforced scientific management, harvesting, and conservation of Beluga whales that overlook Indigenous scientific knowledge and reproduce cultural imperialism. In contrast, Nunavik Inuit manage whale populations through performances of response-ability that avoid hunting lead whales, or females with calves during spring and late autumn migrations. Although sustainable practices increasingly attempt to value Indigenous Knowledge in inclusive, equitable, meaningful, and respectful interregional collaboration with hunters, Elders, scientists, and wildlife managers, Breton-Honeyman et al. (2021) regret that Indigenous researchers rarely lead scientific research.

In the Atlantic whale nursery off the Bahian coast, Brazil, African American artist Michaela Harrison listens and sings to and with humpback whales, as they migrate northwards to calve from July to November. Singing is an aural response that creates belonging and collective healing spaces, given the trauma of the Middle Passage and the ongoing harms of colonial brutality that hinge together Black and Indigenous peoples (Lethabo King 2019; Harrison 2023). These situated solidarities across the Arctic and Atlantic diversify performances of saltwater co-belonging and responsibilities.

In Ngambaa and Gumbaynggirr Countries in the mid-north coastal area of New South Wales, Australia, Smith and Yandaarra Collective (2022) and the Yandarraa Collective, including yiraali (white) scholars, follow Indigenous songlines to reweave a story of ocean belongings that is accessible to primary school children. The songline in the children's book, The Dunggiirr Brothers and the Caring Song of the Whale, follows creeks, rivers, cliffs, and beaches where ancestors once greeted the rising Pacific Ocean. In the story, Gurruuja's (the whale) song of love and respect for the ocean that offers gifts, and the earth that is home, is heard and felt. Given apocalyptic narratives of the climate crisis and sea level rise, the book strengthens a chorus of intimacy and belonging by saying hello (giinagay gaagal) and welcoming the ocean with fire, food, dancing, singing, and homecoming ceremonies.

In the Arctic Ocean, where Indigenous futures are closely tied to the petroleum industry and the oil economy, the book Whale Snow traces the story of Iñupi intimacy with the bowhead whale and the lived experience of climate change that is sensed through the retreat of shore fast ice, coastal erosion, sea level rise, the “smell of the ocean” (Sakakibara 2020, 78) and whale death. The book by Chie Sakakibara, a culturally adopted Japanese woman, is inspired by a children's book of the same name Uqsruagnaq/Whale Snow. Uqsruagnaq is written from the perspective of Amiqqaw, a young Iñupiaq boy in Utqiagvik (Barrow, Alaska) by Edwardson (2003) , a whaler's wife. Building on the story of emotional attachments with the charismatic megafauna, Sakakibara (2020, 12–13) develops a “whale-centric perspective” that focuses on cetaceousness or “cetaceous consciousness”, a social and emotional process of responsibility that unfolds through Iñupiat-whale communication, food practices, and ceremony. An embodied form of responsibility involves knowing, learning, eating, and dancing with the whale, in ways that strengthen connections to place, regulate overhunting, build sociocultural resilience, heal the ocean, and contribute to political sovereignty amid the stresses of an “unforeseeable future” (Sakakibara 2020, 11). Nature is kept in balance in the Inupiaq universe of land, sea, and sky through “partnership, obligation, mutual respect, and reciprocity,” or more-than-human solidarities that have the potential to transform the Arctic Ocean into a “glorious interspecies haven” (Sakakibara 2020, 3).

The discussion so far on ocean kinship, ocean intimacy, and charismatic plant and marine species opens a space to decolonize Eurocentric/western forms of marine governance.

IV Decolonising Marine Governance: The Politics and Poetics of Oceanic Justice

Islands and archipelagos echo not only the brutality of racism and environmental colonialism but also political possibilities for the poetics of the otherwise, which can decolonize marine governance in settler and (post) colonial societies (Carter 2019; Drabinski 2019; Ray 2021; Stratford et al. 2021; Young 2019). The radical thought of Black and Indigenous scholars, including Caribbean philosophers such as Edouard Glissant, as well the Black Lives Matter protest following the death of George Floyd in 2020, have been influential in opening a “vernacular space of intellectual work” (Drabinski 2019, 211; Ray 2021). Ray (2021) argues, however, that the archipelago may not be a useful metaphor to explore decolonization in postcolonial contexts such as India, where continentalist thinking prevails and attitudes to Indigenous peoples vary from state domination and exploitation to noninterference, as in the Andaman Islands in the Indian Ocean. Considerable work is required to produce “political recognition and a well-informed praxis” informed by the diversity of Indigenous and Brown scholarship within and beyond the walls of the western academy (Lobo 2021; Ray 2021, 4). But southern scholars with few accessible resources struggle to engage in these debates that come across as dense, difficult, demanding, and distant; emancipatory subalternist politics situated in many souths of the world often emerge from white and subaltern elites in the western academy (Ray 2021).

Can marine governance be decolonized if what counts as knowledge continues to be regulated by western institutions with colonial intellectual legacies? In reflecting on the colonial Anthropocene, Gomez-Barris (2019, 28) takes us to the sea edges of Chile near the Aconcagua oil refinery. Her engagement with artist Cecilia Vicuña's vision and homage to the Pacific Ocean is visceral and attentive to Inca Andean cultural histories that are submerged, buried, and forgotten. Rather than mare nullius, Gomez-Barris (2019, 43) reimagines oceans as “connective tissues of living otherwise” that can be revitalized. In northeast Arnhem Land, Australia, Yolgnu laws, beliefs, and creation stories revitalize the management of Sea Country in the Dhimurru Indigenous Protected Area (IPA), the first to be declared in 2000, that recognized sea rights in settler colonial Australia (Dhimurru Aboriginal Corporation 2015). In Australia, Paleert Tjaara Dja, the Aboriginal-led Wadawurrung Country Plan (2020–2030) along the Southern Ocean, Victoria, focuses on Dja (land and) Warre (sea country) as one. Wadawurrung Traditional Owners invite all people to koling wada-ngal (walk together) to address environmental change that impacts ocean homes (WTOAC 2020, 81).

In their exploration of “shared oceanic space” in Colombo, Sri Lanka and Accra, Ghana, Siriwardane-de Zoysa and Amoo-Adara (2021, 73, 82) call for decolonial approaches that build diverse “aquatic imaginaries” attentive to Indigenous ways of “seeing, knowing, relating and/or becoming,” that have been occluded and silenced in postcolonial cities. In the Canadian Arctic, Inuit who lives with anthropogenic climate change and ecological destruction use the Internet as a tool to intervene in depoliticized, hegemonic debates on adaptation and resilience (Young 2019). For example, when a shift in responsibility from the white settler government threatens their subsistence hunting of polar bears. In addition, if Inuit Qaujimaningit (IQ) or the Inuit knowledge system that is spiritual, empirical, and sociocultural is perceived as local and traditional, it is limited in bringing about “broader structural change” compared to (colonial) Western science (Young 2019, 3). Digital politics, including the sharing of stories and photographs, enables Inuit organizations and residents in remote communities to regenerate knowledge, mobilize responsibility among qallunaat (non-Inuit), and build global partnerships.

In Aotearoa, New Zealand, Māori knowledge (mātauranga Māori) of the moana (ocean), together with western scientific knowledge, informs the management and governance of marine environments (Ataria et al. 2018; Stevens, Paul-Burke and Russell 2021). A whakataukī (proverb) says:

Ko te moana

Ehara rawa i te wai kau

No Tangaroa ke tena marae

He maha ona e hua e ora ai

nga manu o te rangi

te iwi ki te whenua

The sea is not any water

It is the marae of Tangaroa

It yields life for many things

the birds in the sky

the people upon the land

(Royal 1989, 9)

Māori and non-Māori researchers, for instance, are identifying how place-based Māori marine knowledge, about the traditional sizing and distribution range of taonga (culturally important) marine fauna species in coastal areas, was and is still harvested and managed by consecutive generations of Māori whānau (families). The findings of the transdisciplinary research are being used to create new management plans and strategies, to help Māori and Government institutions to improve how they use and care for marine species into the future (Sunde, Astwood and Young 2019).

Marine governance can be decolonized through an ethic of interdependence and shared responsibilities that values cyclical kinship time rather than western linear time (Whyte 2021a; Yunkaporta 2019). But often, the implementation of renewable energy projects with zero carbon emissions is harmful, when the linear time of climate change is captured and privileged in reports by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Given this ticking clock of time, wind, solar, hydro, and biofuel projects produce irresponsibility, making it difficult to establish, restore, and respect Indigenous safety, well-being, and self-determination (Whyte 2021a). For the Anishinaabe people in eastern Canada, Mishipizhu [underwater panther] has always been a guardian of the waters and keeper of balance between the water spirits, land creatures, and sky beings. This guardianship is driven by Anishinaabe kinship time as well as intellectual and scientific traditions that continue to be threatened by human-induced changes in long-term climatic cycles (Whyte 2021a).

Indigenous ways of life, ceremony, and storytelling methodologies respond to environmental change through a focus on the “life force” of oceans and seascapes that invite an “emergent and reciprocal dance with more-than-human lifeworlds” (George and Wiebe 2020, 503; Ingersoll 2016; Marawili 1999). In Kanaka Maoli (Native Hawaiian) and Coast Salish (Canadian) territories, Nuučaańuł scholar George and Wiebe (2020, 505), a non-Indigenous political ecologist, challenge Western Eurocentric understandings of citizenship through a focus on seascape epistemologies, a “moving force” such as ocean currents and tides. Building on Kanaki Maoli scholar, Ingersoll's (2016) theorizing of seascape epistemology, embodied and spiritual oceanic literacies produce diverse “ways of being, knowing, and sensing the world,” and more fluid visions of decolonial futures in white settler societies (George and Wiebe 2020, 501). An opening quote from Kanahus Manuel, a land-defender from the Secwepemc Nation, Canada, highlights water as animate and a life force with the power to heal and harm, rather than a resource awaiting extraction: “[The] ocean water dances, sings, vibrates and loves.” Invoking Hawaiian philosopher, Ha‘uofa’ (1993), the ocean is a place that is deep with generosity, hospitality, and fiery in the way it engulfs and awakens—we are the ocean!

V Transoceanic Storytelling: Awakening Literacies of Saltwater Co-Belonging and Responsibility

This intervention is an experiment in transoceanic storytelling that calls for saltwater belongings and responsibilities amid the brutality of racial, colonial, and capitalist logics in the many “souths of the world” (Walter and Walter 2018, 15). Our polyphonic storytelling that listens to oceanic spaces does not refuse white knowledges with colonial legacies en bloc but tries to open up a space that would welcome a chorus of human and more-than-human voices. These stories of the ocean churn and soak our thinking, so we can begin to dream about how things might be otherwise, as a first-generation ethnic-minority migrant of color and a Māori Indigenous woman living in white settler colonial societies. There are absent bodies and spaces in our exploration of ocean ontologies because we relied on literature published in English as well as academic journals and reports electronically available, rather than gray and multilingual literature. Loch and Riechers (2021), in their review of literature on environmental change in coastal ecosystems in the Global South, regret that Indigenous and Local Knowledge is in danger of being lost unless research paradigms and methodologies are broadened, and the power dynamics of hierarchical governance is unsettled. Indigenous-led research by Locke, Trudgett and Page (2021) use the metaphor of the oyster to describe Indigenous knowledges as a grain of sand that agitates the shell of Western knowledge, but when these knowledges interact across difference in a shared space, beautiful pearls of knowledge begin to form.

As geographers, it is necessary to awaken inclusive memories, imaginaries, and philosophies that nourish pearls of knowledge and breathing oceans. Listening to Aboriginal scholar Yunkaporta (2019), who engages in sand-talk yarning, maybe we need a kinship-mind, a story-mind, a dreaming-mind, an ancestor-mind, and a pattern-mind to produce new saltwater literacies of belonging and responsibility. But how do we answer Mathur and da Cunha's (2020, 192) when they use the Sanskrit word Sindhu or “ocean of rain” and ask: “Wetness is everywhere. Why do we see water somewhere?” This intervention that draws on literatures, spaces, people, and connections across different Indigenous, Black, Brown, and Southern ways of knowing enables belonging and responsibility that feels the proximity of the wetness of the high seas that is distant or invisible. The recent agreement on an ocean treaty by United Nations member countries to protect the biological diversity of areas beyond national jurisdiction (BBNJ) (McVeigh 2023) seems to promise collective responsibility in conserving nourishing wetness. Indigenous, Black, Brown, and Southern peoples strengthen commitments to flourishing oceanic futures through their refusal of fossil-fuel extraction as well as embodied obligations, spiritual gifts, laws, cultural protocols, ethical principles, and calls for Rights to Sea Country. They are joined today in their struggles by allies, accomplices, and publics who use western legal instruments to reshape and enforce oceanic responsibilities in the Anthropocene.