Beyond Preservation Where Difference Breathes: Indigenous Continuities of Creativity
Beyond Preservation Where Difference Breathes: Indigenous Continuities of Creativity

Summary/Abstract: This article brings together a curated body of Indigenous scholarship, artistic practice and community knowledge to explore creativity as a living, relational continuum across Te Moana-nui-a-Kiwa. Rather than positioning Indigenous arts within preservationist framings that render them static or historical, the article considers creativity as an ontological and epistemological force, an ongoing process of renewal grounded in genealogy, environment and collective life. Drawing on Māori, Sāmoan, Tongan and wider Pacific perspectives, the article draws attention to cosmological frameworks such as Te Kore (realm of ‘potential being’ in Māori cosmology), Te Pō (realm of ‘darkness’ as a space of transformation) and Te Ao Mārama (‘world of light’ in Māori cosmology), alongside Oceanic concepts including hā (‘breath’), manava (‘heart, centre, womb’) and vā (Pacific epistemologies as ‘relational space’), suggesting creativity as a practice of emergence, connection and return. Engaging literature across performance, visual arts, pedagogy, architecture and community practice, the article traces how Indigenous creativity is expressed through relationships between people, place, ancestors and the more-thanhuman world. These works suggest that creative practice is not confined to artistic output but may also be understood as a mode of theorising, a way of knowing and being that supports cultural continuity while allowing for transformation. In this context, creativity can be approached as a relational methodology through which knowledge is generated, shared and reconfigured across time and space. The article also remains attentive to the term Indigenous, recognising both its grounding in genealogical and place-based sovereignty and its entanglement in colonial classificatory systems. Through creative practice, Indigenous artists and scholars are seen to engage with and rework these conditions, offering approaches to knowledge production that challenge dominant Western separations between theory and practice, human and environment, and art and life. Organised across thematic domains, including artistic lineages, oceanic connections, pedagogies, community practice, cultural spaces, embodied performance and environmental relations, the article offers a constellation, rather than a singular narrative, of Indigenous creativities.

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