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Review

Meghann O’Brien is a weaver descended from the Haida and Kwakwaka’wakw nations. She lives and works in Vancouver, BC.

These writings are reflections on growing up in the Kwakwaka’wakw community of Alert Bay, where I also learned to weave. After we moved away, I returned each summer with my family for the commercial salmon fishing season. One year (2007) I brought around a typewriter with me everywhere I went, including on the fishing boat and into the forest. When I look back on the writing from this time I value it so much. Because, I feel like at that time I was the kind of person that the weaving wanted to give itself to, or trusted itself with.

I feel like the weaving took root in my heart as a worthy place to flourish in, and lately I find myself wondering if I’m still that person. It offered so much, but to translate this skill from another time into the capitalist structure we exist within poses challenges. The weaving has been my hiding place, quiet, private, intimate, the place where I can love the way that I want to, and that is why I treat the tradition with such respect. I wouldn’t go back and take out my original weavings from that time to make them perfect aesthetically. They carry the same weight if not heavier than current work, even if the exterior expression is more re ned now. In the same way I wouldn’t want to heavily edit these words. They stand as are. I see them now as in protest to the english language and the world it evokes into being and its lack. I may be abiding to tradition in my weavings, but the english language is something that was violently imposed on my people. I take free reign in assembling the colonizers’ language in any way I feel fit to do so.

> 19\. There are such gifts of the past so valuable, that they must be repeated. There is the weaving of cedar bark and I wish with my heart to learn of it. To learn such means of practicality. I desire to wear the love of my ancestry as a headband on my head that comes down to a basket who was woven for berries. I have a certain desire to sleep after this. I have a desire to compose boxes of bent maple or cedar for the storage of herbs and weeds from the sea and berry cakes of all kinds. And things such as dinosaurs and guts from the sensitive type of man who loves. The kinds of love offered are terrible. I despise the love as it exists between humans on this planet. I want love like it is shared between roots and the soil.

> 21\. yesterday was the 5th july, Thursday. I worked on the net and made patches with a needle and tar twine, and Billy was drunk and had scabies. At his house Jared was cutting the lawn for beer money, and I was gathering clover; only especially ones who were very colorful. When the time had come for finishing the net for the day, Billy and I went to gator gardens swamp and he showed me the means of stripping cedar bark from trees and bending it for carrying. His son Kyle was four now, he stamped his feet to that certain rhythm from the log drum at the big house and started singing in kwakwala. Billy said he was praying and singing songs for the trees while I took it’s bark.

> Then I went and gathered more rose’s petals. I seen Dorothy Daniels, and I collected salmon berries, and the sun had a beautiful time, I think, in the sky. It was evening now, I was by myself, we were together on the other side of the island that is more empty than the other. This side of the island is looser, it looks at Malcom Island, although they do not have eyes. It was so lovely last night, just so. It is so lovely here tonight, I’ve spent this evening by myself, it was nice out and the clouds were out too. My salmon berry cakes were ready when I returned, so I took them out and put new ones in. Then that night I am stripping the outer bark from the inner bark from the cedar trees bark. Is it that you are weeping for the naked flesh of the living tree unclothed? It was dark by then, there was cakes to be made from salmon berries, and there was a pot of honey wine to be made. And rose petals to be laid down then, down in the spare bunk. My dad said the roses made them smell good like roses. I felt pleased at this yesterday. 

> 24\. July 7th, 2007.  
> Today I went to Jeanette’s parents house and picked some of their raspberries. On the way down I found my way to some salmon berry bushes and was gathering a few of those when they came alive, the whole bushes when I looked into them they just began to be bursting with berries. And I picked them, then some leaves would rustle or shift and then and then awhole new bunch of perfectly ripe huge berries would jump out, so shiny. They were so shiny, and dark and soft, . I made my way into the thicket. It was so thick, so old. There was an opening, and the prickles were surprisingly prickly. There was so much old dead twigs under there, it looked really excellent. Then there was the main trunk of the bushes, a few of them, they were so awesome. When the salmon berry bushes get older, their trunks get thicker. There is an outer skin like paper or bark that forms, like a arbutus tree. And it grows sideways, shooting up shoots straight up in the sky, so from the outside it looks like the bushes just grow straight up. But they don’t they grow very sideways with the shoots straight up. They make it look like the bushes grow up, not sideways. It was so thick with skinny dead twigs all in the underbrush. There were  
> some dead looking leaves, slightly brown colored and crinkly like foil paper, and then these berries hanging everywhere, like being inside a salmon berry Christmas tree. It felt like I was inside the heart of the salmon berry. It felt like the salmon berries had come from the centre of the earth, and that it was the energy from the centre of the earth, the heart of the salmon berry spirit. The thicket felt and looked like it was really old, it was magnificent and I miss it already. It reminded me of the thicket that was beside the house I grew up in. That thicket we used to play in it every day when we were little. Me and Kimberley and Andy Wagald. He was my first friend. I think me and him played together more in there than Kimberly and I did, or more than he and I and she. 

> Aug 5th, Finally I have made it to the forest near the beach with my typewriter. I find myself fond of small lilies in this step forest, an interest towards the way they grow, their beauty makes it hard to stand being alive, they have a pattern, owing, it is flowing, the way similar to how the heart would flow, if it could contain love.

> there are straw grasses too, green ones, the typewriter sitting on quite a hill, this hilly forest with an ocean underneath it, and rocks who are larger than they appear from a distance.

> There is devil’s club, i was sifting about the lillies and green grasses when i got a small blue jay’s feather, how lovely, i like the devils clubs presence, and the ferns, who have their powdery seeds all lined in a row on their undersides, fidgeting, this is a lovely place to be. My basket looks good here, too, I went for a brief walk up the slope. A slug has made friends with the typewriter while I was absent. Then I sang songs to the devil’s club and i watched it in the breeze. Then the sun went behind the mountain, and I decided to walk to the rocks down the slope to go back to the boat to sleep or skip rope. I keep fear about the kinds of beauty that wakes us. I have finally made it to the top of the boat at dusk with my typewriter. And now, look, I’ve nothing to say. Except for how the mosquitos are out and perhaps its time to hide under sleeping bag covers for the night. 

Writer

Site/ation

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issue-136-p65-67.pdf

Meghann O’Brien, a weaver, looks back on the tradition with respect. Included are excerpts from her writing during her family trip to Alert Bay, the place where she learned to weave, in 2007.

Where I Learned to Weave

Léuli Māzyār Luna‘i Eshrāghi (Sāmoan, Persian, German, Chinese ancestries) is an uninvited guest in unceded Kulin Nation territory, and a PhD candidate at Monash University Art Design Architecture (MADA). His work centres on ceremonial-political renewal, languages, embodied futures, diasporic and local Indigeneities.

> tagatanu‘u  
> People/s of the land/s  
> People/s of the country  
> People/s of the village/s  
> People/s of the culture/s  
> People/s of the ocean/s  
> tagatavāsā

Ua fuifui fa‘atasi ae sa vao ‘ese‘ese is an enduring Sāmoan expression that signifies that we have gathered together from different parts of the forest. ‘OSā. Our clans. ‘O ‘āiga. Our families. ‘O tupuga. Our ancestors. ‘O tapuafanua. Our guardian spirits. ‘Osuli – descendants. ‘O atua ma āitu. Our kin animals and birds and plants. ‘O mauga. Our mountains. ‘Ovaitafe. Our rivers. ‘O ma‘umaga. Our food gardens. ‘O matafaga. Our beaches. ‘O fale sā. Our temples. Our lands and waters shared amongst clans for the use of all, disputes and all. All this in the ancestral time of the lupe pigeon’s heyday before plantation and missionary colonial rule in the 1800s destroyed lupe pigeon numbers and our own with hunting, abduction into forced labour and blackbirding into overseas slavery, and introduced diseases decimated our numbers, all across the ocean. Before we moved offshore in vast numbers. Before our coral and fish boiled in high-temperature waters. Before nuclear testing and overfishing poisoned our primary ancestor, Vāsālaolao, sacred-far-reaching-undulating-relational-space, who cares for us yet. Before the body-, sex-, spirit-shaming of the missionaries and Eurocentric knowledge systems imported into our language, culture and outlook were unleashed to destroy us one by us, long after the original violators from Europe had passed on to the spirit world.

Before we resisted and fought back. Before we remade ourselves in our ancestors’ image for our own Indigenous diasporic and archipelagic resurgence. I know this every time I stand in our ancestral belonging, and recently when I spent a few days on a sanctuary island, Namu‘a, to the southeast of our main island, ‘Upolu. There, debris installations wash up every day from far across the sea; there, pe‘a flying foxes, laumei turtles, pa‘a crabs and manu birds rule the land, air and sea! There, humans only spend a little time at a time, and this decentring of human-centrism is salvatory to me and my kin there. The smell of the sea on the breeze, the humidity and rain gliding off leaves in the forest, nearing creatures of the sky, remind that this is not only our home, that Earth-centred ways of knowing are active yet.

What is a city but a collection of villages? What is an aesthetic experience but a passage of moments? All lands and waters are known and inhabited by living beings, sometimes including us humans. All cities are built on still-sacred lands and waters. In unceded Kulin Nation territory, where I mainly live and work, the Wurundjeri and Boon Wurrung clans of inner Narrm/Melbourne and their relations, the Wadawurrung, Taungwurrung and Dja Dja Wurrung clans further west and north, are in sovereign resurgence right now. Their oratory, performing and visual languages are expressed with power. The settler colonial city of Melbourne/Port Phillip was built over their territory but has not subsumed them, rather a rebalancing is afoot where their cultures, and those of other First Nations and global Indigenous cultures, are being centred in accordance with protocol and respect. The city is also Country, to amplify the concept of First Peoples in “Australia.” As Elders teach us uninvited guests in every Welcome to Country ceremony, Country will nurture you if you respect it, and if you do not harm the children of Bunjil. All of the mineral resources used to create the built environment also come from the very lands and waters we are indebted to for our lives. So, Country is really all around us.

Ninety rotations of Lā Sun and many more of goddess Māsina Moon. Indigenous matriarchy heals and binds. Ia manuia lou aso fānau, peleina Tinā matua, Nātia Fa‘ase‘e Tautua. In my ‘āiga, we call grandma, great-grandma, mum, aunty, cousin, “mum” across generations. My grandma has looked after many generations of children, nieces and nephews, from our extensive family and those needing love and a home, for decades. Every day, amongst all the affairs she is managing in our 40-member household (not including all of us in the diaspora), she has a cup of tea or fresh lemonade, some fruit, sets up her weaving space in the living room, primes the fala pandanus lengths, fashions scary/amazing dolls with cube heads and siapo barkcloth attire, rectangular handbags with fala squares and triangles for the trocus shells and siapo lining the inside. She shows my younger cousins how to spin the fala into a tight length to be used as a strap on the bags, my aunts and older cousins watching on and weaving their own magic. Tinā matua has created ‘afa coconut sennit and fala dresses for couture competitions in our archipelago, her creations, the models and her glowing in the local paper and in our memory. The sounds of our village, the soundtrack to Tinā matua’s daily practice: chickens scuttling along, a Tarago van slowing down behind an old rusty and faithful pickup along the village road weaving around our ancestral Mount Vaea, children screaming with glee/hurt around the open-air and closed-air houses of all our relations, the melodies of church choir practice, the water flowing (when it does) in Loimata o Apaula Creek from our ancestors to us, and the excitement of young people able to forsake duties and homework for some volleyball under the big trees before dinner.

Last December, we celebrated Tinā matua’s 90th birthday in the hall of the Papauta Girls’ School, which she attended as a young girl, just on the main road side of our village. I remember the officiating of my orator uncle, Leuli, the local pastor, the organizational prowess of my mother, Sone, and aunts Sally, Elisapeta and Sualua, the tribute songs performed by cousins living in Aotearoa and Sāmoa, the classics in our language playing on the speakers so the third age could dance a little before the bones crackle again. I remember the intense aromas of seafood, landfood, served in delicious arrangements by my chef uncle, Siaosi, and the protocol of serving the eldest to the youngest, the best pieces of meat, lobster, limu seaweed, taro, ta‘amū yam going out first. The village gossip about who prepared such sumptuous take-away packs of food, so fresh and generous. (This is eternally the measure of a successful event in the islands: was the food good, generous and were you able to get extra take-away packs for those who didn’t make it to the event? You really just want another pack, but let’s say, it’s for the ancestors, of course.) I don’t live in my village, more than half of my ‘āiga don’t, but my brothers and I did grow up there for a few years when we were much younger. Mum moved back three years ago, and this anchoring always brings a rebalancing to what’s going on in my life in Narrm. My grandma has been an artist her whole life, independent of the gallery system, supporting our expansive family relationships across lands, waters, airs, in a sovereignty that is care from the land, in a matriarchy that is love from the ancestors, in a binding of diasporic children that is making with the fruit of your labour what is denied from us in the capitalist system of our colonizers, who left but never leave our minds, spirits, bodies. The keys to our liberation are also found in the wisdom of the diaspora for all our people (more Sāmoans, like many Indigenous archipelagic peoples, do not live on our lands and waters). Tinā matua reiterates her messages to me and my cousins in Sāmoan and in English. Don’t forget me. Don’t take too long to come home, I don’t want to be buried already when you do. And the excited cackle when I respond in Sāmoan: ‘Ou te alofa ia te ‘oe, Tinā. E lēgalo ‘oe, e lē galo lo tātou atunu‘u. 

issue-136-p63-65.pdf

Indigenous

Nature

Women

Family

Landscape

Léuli Māzyār Luna‘i Eshrāghi recalls tender moments of his family dynamics and life in Narrm, meditating on the ways that his matriarchal figures, specifically grandmother Tinā matua, live as artists free from any art institutional structures. The text explored the intersections between indigenous matriarchy, community, land, colonialist history, diaspora and creative practice. 

tagatavāsā

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