| Summary: | This project seeks to bring together a body of literary texts that focus on the experience of environmental disaster and drastic land change from the perspective of indigenous, island peoples. This research not only stems from devastating climate-change related ecological disasters that have plagued island communities in recent years (Puerto Rico comes to mind), but from the lasting impacts of destructive colonialism. For instance, New Zealand's high rate of depression and mental illness is considered (by certain Maori people) to be a result of fading cultural ties and connection to the land. Focusing on a collection of Pacific indigenous texts, I highlight Pacific traditions and ways of knowing which have been obscured by colonization and the western canon. I explore the ways in which grief, nature, love, and life are inseparable from one another and from the self. This is important because existing critical work has focused on the tragedy of environmental disaster, and identified nature as an external, bodiless force-- this is not a way of knowing for indigenous island peoples, who see themselves as an extension of the land, and an attack on nature is an attack on the self (and vice versa). This literature breaks away from the environmental genre of Pacific texts that Laurence Buell identifies as "toxic gothic," and centralizes it in the affirmative traditions of indigenous praise. Key texts examined include Sia Figiel's Where We Once Belonged, Hone Tuwhare's Deep Water Talk/No Ordinary Sun, and Witi Ihimaera's Tangi. While recognizing that indigenous peoples are not, indeed, the stories that they tell, the collection of literary works I analyze in this thesis reveal aspects of culture unseen through sociological or scientific research. Of these collected works, each foreground interconnected themes of tragic loss, questions of identity, and integral familial bonds, all of which cannot be divided from poetic representations of the natural world.
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