To the many hands of the Tīvaevae

I’m not just talking about matriarchal quilters, though they deserve their flowers too 
But the liberated babes of Mangaia and Aitutaki that shook Scottish missionaries to the core
A mihi to Uncle Ken and all the departed whose hands it passed through
A mihi to the other whānau tivaevae on their journeys elsewhere 
A mihi to my dear friend, the artist, Tehani Buchanan 
A mihi to all those who helped her bring this work into being 

Together, you’ve created a multi-generational invitation. It’s one fit for this season. Among a dark uncertainty, something bright and unfinished asks: “what if the best is yet to come?”

We genre bend their straight definitions of time. The future we dream of is vivid with return and restoration, but we don’t long for a romantic sepia past. Our longings are curvier. Riskier. You don’t win, live, love, create- or have style- without making peace with risk.

What if, maybe just maybe, the future before us is just as indigenous and even more liberated than the past? We tend to a garden of buried histories, beating away dust and hanging our truths sunward. We enact one great renaissance after another. We can also execute any emerging desires we have, right here. Right now. These are best reclaimed on the bosses time. 

There is and always was exploration without domination, and love without abuse. In fact, our radical love is only possible in a space without said domination. And as Cornel West says, “justice is just what love looks like in public”. We can love a place or person without claiming ownership and we can know family beyond whakapapa. We know imperfections are signs of life. We are all living testimony that migration and fucking are as natural to our world as tides and childbirth. We have always remixed and sampled, and the vast swelling oceans have always carried forth generous bodies of resistance, expression and art on to distant shores. 

Let us go forth remembering and reimagining ourselves in all our imperfect colourful glory. Along that journey knowing that both memory and the future are not products of isolation, but of interdependence: we relate, collide, we collab and we thread the glittering needle of time together. 

Maybe just maybe, with all that we possess shared, celebrated and honoured, the best is yet to come.