The Tīpuna Project is a community-based collective of Indigenous and non-Indigenous activists, artists and academics in Aotearoa who experiment with the decolonial potential of communing with our ancestors - Indigenous, settler, pagan and non-human.
Kaupapa
We believe that coloniality is structured by a hierarchy of knowers, knowing and knowledge that violently denigrates Indigenous ways of being in the world. This 'kkk' hierarchy is premised on an idea of the 'human' as one who is separate from flesh, past and cosmos. Countering this dehumanisation therefore requires counter-practices that open-up other ways of being human.
The Tīpuna Project began as a participatory action research (aka ‘PAR’) project to draw on the expertise within te ao Māori, European paganism and embodied racial/healing justice movements, to see if ancestral mahi could be one such counter-practice.
Our PAR process was guided by an overarching pātai:
‘What are the decolonial possibilities and complexities of including ancestors as co-researchers in PAR?’
In other words, our project is grounded in our ancestors being explicit, active members of our collective too.
