Rootz Vaka Transits: Traversing Seas of Urban Diasporic Indigeneity by Collapsing Time and Space with the Songs and Stories of the Kava Canoe

Abstract

Fai Kava represents the most common and diverse types of Kava drinking gatherings among Tongans in the Kingdom of Tonga and its diaspora, which is the focus of this multi-sited ethnographic research. Rooted between Te Ika a Māui, Aotearoa and Soo-gahni, Utah on Turtle Island, with some additional points of reference from travels to Australia and the Kingdom of Tonga, this thesis explores: What is Fai Kava today? What does Kava in diaspora tell us about urban Indigenous identities? And, what is the contemporary relationship between music and Kava? Faikava are practical and creative ways for urban diasporic populations to make, and keep connections to their Indigenous identities by transporting ethno-scapes of ocean, land, and ancestors. Kava is a metonym for fonua (land, placenta, ancestors, tradition), which heals temporal and spatial displacement (diaspora) by collapsing space and time. Kava gatherings are thus sites of Indigenous cultural reinforcement that facilitate keeping close relationships to a homeland while relating to new places in Indigenous time. Indigeneity is revealed through performances of identity, song, story, sociopolitical mediation, the embodiment of ancestors, and the production and transmission of communitybased traditional knowledge. Faikava is a space of mediating mana (potency) and tapu (sacredness) to yield noa (equilibrium) revealing truths. The conflicts, adaptations, and continued negotiations between Indigenous and modern western metaphysics is revealed in the intersection of kava and religion, which reveals resistance, syncretism, and local agency. Faikava cultivates and transmits cultural values, language, and Indigeneity where ancestral identities are formed and re-formed anew in diverse ways, contesting modern colonial temporalities that imagine Indigenous pasts and people as static. New music is performed in older styles, and old songs are remade within new styles, with lyrics telling the stories of past futures. This reflects complexity and a broad spectrum of tradition and Indigeneity, within a growing global phenomenon of urban and diasporic Indigenous peoples. Gender relations between spouses, siblings, as well as explorations of masculinities and women in kava reveals conflicts, negotiations, and adaptations that contest constructs within paradigms of western modernity. The metaphorical canoe of transported Kava carries deep ancestral memories anchored in story and songs in transit, which arrive as an intricately diverse spectrum of contemporary Indigenous identities. This thesis imagines a Rootz Vaka (Kava Canoe) reconceptualization of Indigeneity as a metaphorical memory of an ancestral humanity, guided by song, story, Tāvāism, decolonial thought, Indigenous theorizing and remembering. This thesis on kava invokes the past into the present in order to shift into an Indigenous paradigm with a rootz way of thinking, doing, and being