Abstract
This essay builds on environmental humanistic scholarship about the night in a study of arts associated with the Aoraki Mackenzie International Dark Sky Reserve, a lighting-regulated locale in Aotearoa / New Zealand, that is part of an international network of places intended to protect the night sky. Chris Murphy’s time lapse, South Celestial Pole from Mt John (2016), shot in Aoraki Mackenzie International Dark Sky Reserve, hastens time and utilizes a star tracker so that the city and lake of Takapō turn sideways against stars. The film connects relative darkness and highly visible celestial phenomena to startling perceptual change. The film is less evocative of how darkness and other nocturnal processes are interwoven with colonial histories and interconnected socio-environmental injustices. Robert Sullivan, a poet whose ancestral lands include the Aoraki Mackenzie International Dark Sky Reserve, is attentive to such concerns in the collection Star Waka (1999). Sullivan uses karakia (chants, incantation) to frame how stars and darkness nurture Māori practices like navigation but also to evoke precariousness woven into the night, from colonial astronomy to socially uneven policing and lighting. This essay, then, argues for critical caution regarding arts and narratives that only emphasize night’s wondrous qualities and its endangerment. Rather than framing night simply as a good phase to be protected, we might participate in night by addressing both the injustices and the varied dreams and struggles that it bears.
In a time lapse of the South Celestial Pole, Earth’s horizon rapidly tilts sideways against a stream of stars.1 By hastening time, the time lapse illuminates planetary rotation in a way that we could not otherwise see. Low in the frame, lights from the town of Takapō (Tekapo) glow across a gleam of water. The time lapse, South Celestial Pole from Mt John (2016), was shot by photographer Chris Murphy at Mount John Observatory in the Aoraki Mackenzie International Dark Sky Reserve, a 4,300 square kilometer area in Aotearoa / New Zealand, that is part of a global network of lighting-regulated places intended to shape atmospheric clearness, darkness, and a “spectacular night sky.”2
Lighting expansion and other environmental changes bound up with night are a vital and, in the environmental humanities, relatively overlooked topic. In this essay, I argue that we might want to be critically cautious regarding arts or narratives that only emphasize night’s wondrous qualities and their loss and that dream of its intensification and extension. The shared agency of the many elements that come together as “night,” including relative darkness and dropping temperatures, is important to Earthly life and yet also involves environmental injustices, from settler colonial uses of astronomy for mapping and data collection to dawn police raids on Indigenous communities that utilize conditions of darkness. My approach to the above-mentioned argument is through an analysis of time lapse and poetry associated with the Aoraki Mackenzie International Dark Sky Reserve. In the first part of this essay, I explore the startlingly strange and beautiful night staged by means of time lapse in Murphy’s South Celestial Pole from Mt John. An Aotearoa / New Zealand, astrophotographer, Murphy has produced work that has been published by the BBC and won an award in the Royal Observatory’s Astronomy Photographer of the Year competition. I compare this to the quite different nights that emerge in the collection of poetry Star Waka (1999) by Robert Sullivan (Ngāpuhi, Kāi Tahu), an influential Aotearoa / New Zealand, poet whose ancestral lands include the Aoraki Mackenzie International Dark Sky Reserve.3 Through the Western binary of nature and culture, night can appear as a natural, threatened phase that ideally could be protected from human activity. Sullivan rather emphasizes Māori relational frameworks where “human beings . . . are both enabled and constrained by their multi-directional relationships with other beings,” including with the night sky, to draw from Ann Hardy and Hēmi Whaanga.4 Sullivan writes of nights that nurture ordinary Māori practices like navigation but also of injustices interwoven with the after-dark, from Western astronomic cultures that have supported the colonial resource extractive economy to socioeconomically uneven access to lighting and housing and the histories of dawn police raids. From its opening framing of night through a karakia (chant, incantation) to its elegiac poetics of stars as the dead of a resource extractive economy, Sullivan’s Star Waka reminds us of the precariousness and inequality that takes shape beneath the “charred sky.”5 Rather than simply accept narratives of night as a good phase to be protected, then, we might envisage participating in night in ways that address both its precarities and the many dreams it bears.
As successive states, night and day reflect the entanglement of cultural and physical processes bound up with Earth’s rotation and relationality with the Sun. Night is often framed astronomically as the time between sunset and sunrise, whether in daily or seasonal terms, and can involve lower temperatures as well as alterations to light levels, humidity, precipitation, and fog and cloud cover. To draw from Jacques Galinier and coauthors, night also takes its cultural definitions through “specific properties distinct from daytime spaces,” from nocturnal species to states like sleeping and dreaming.6 Many cultures link night’s transformations to distinct potentials for awareness. “The night contains all sorts of figures and movements that remain inexplicable when considered only from a daytime perspective,” write Galinier and coauthors.7 Such emphasis on night’s transformations resonates with environmental humanistic scholarship on the potentially estranging effects of atmosphere and ocean, where conditions such as relative darkness or volumetric movement disrupt norms attuned to terrestrial conditions.8
Yet night uniquely and cyclically transforms places that are intimate to human and nonhuman beings: “In the darkness, above all perhaps in familiar or routine places, everything acquires a subtly different form or volume,” writes Matthew Beaumont in a “nocturnal history” of London.9 Night is a “forgotten background with which we are all familiar,” suggests Robert Shaw.10 Methodologically, in this essay I build on environmental humanistic as well as related scholarship about the night. So marginal is night in policy and scholarship that “McDonald’s, as a $30-billion real-estate powerhouse with an explicit night-time strategy, probably knows more about the after-hours than most policymakers,” suggests Michael Acuto in an argument for a “science of the night” in Nature.11 Advocating for a field of night studies, Christopher C. M. Kyba and coauthors argue that “we . . . still remain in the dark when it comes to our understanding of night, despite the night’s importance to natural and social processes.”12 As such scholars imply, the assumption that daytime environments are a human norm emerges from particular vantage points, including from socioeconomic disparity. Many people are awake through the hours of darkness and their transition into daytime. Acuto describes how inequities in urban labor conditions are shaped by conditions specific to the after-hours, such as reduced public transportation, as well as the impact of nighttime temperature changes on people experiencing homelessness.13
In Aotearoa / New Zealand, colonialism has brought significant disruptions to people’s connections with night. Pauline Harris, Rangi Matamua, Takirirangi Smith, Hoturoa Kerr, and Toa Waaka, among other scholars, write of the importance of the night sky in Māori systems of time, planting and harvesting, art works, navigation, and further cultural practices, and of how Māori astronomy underwent significant losses and upheavals due to colonial processes such as land appropriation and assimilation-oriented education and legal systems.14 These discussions of the relationships between night and colonial history inform my reading of Murphy’s South Celestial Pole from Mt John and Sullivan’s Star Waka. Both artists engage night in terms of dramatic alterations to color and form, visible celestial beings, and darkness. While Murphy links these transformations to wondrous perceptual reorientation, for Sullivan they are inseparable from colonial histories and interwoven socio-environmental injustices and from Māori struggles to renew intimate associations with the many elements that compose the night.
Night Sky Time Lapse
Stars run down skies as buildings and bodies of water turn. Such are the unfamiliar nights of time-lapse films shot in the Aoraki Mackenzie International Dark Sky Reserve. The reserve is in a network of places affiliated with the International Dark-Sky Association (IDA), a nonprofit organization that focuses on lighting policy, legislation, planning, and education to remediate a lit-up Earth and “protect the night skies.”15 The IDA connects its projects to climate change mitigation, endangered species protection, and human health.16 It “recognizes and promotes excellent stewardship of the night sky” through a system of Dark Sky Places that “encourage communities, parks and protected areas around the world to preserve and protect dark sites through responsible lighting policies and public education.”17
Nighttime time lapse, along with astrophotography more broadly, is commonly shot within dark sky reserves and is prominently displayed on affiliated websites. Murphy’s South Celestial Pole from Mt John is the only item in the media section of the Aoraki Mackenzie International Dark-Sky Reserve website.18 The film has been viewed more than four thousand times on Vimeo and YouTube. Time-lapse films also rotate on the home page for the Dark Sky Project, an “astro-tourism attraction” situated in the Aoraki Mackenzie International Dark Sky Reserve and shared by private owners and the iwi (tribe) Ngāi Tahu (Kāi Tahu).19 In one film, stars move across the sky above a historic building; in another, mountains migrate sideways as stars roll upward.20 The IDA’s mobilization of these arts made me curious: how far does time lapse accord with dreams of protecting the night?
Time lapse disrupts experiences in which landscapes might seem to stand quite still and suggests that what we might see and feel is not the limit of how the cosmos can be known. In South Celestial Pole from Mt John, in particular, Murphy uses time lapse and a star tracker to bring traces of Earth’s rotation to the human senses. The film opens by looking across Takapō toward city lights against a bluish and reddish black sky dense with stars. Murphy draws on the visible light of celestial phenomena to evoke our presence in a far larger cosmos. In South Celestial Pole from Mt John, Murphy shows a fast-moving Earthly landscape in this vast space. In the film, the horizon fluidly pitches upward to a sharp angle as the stars remain still. To create this unusual perspective on a highly active landscape, such that the city and lake turn before our eyes, Murphy binds together photographs taken at intervals, hastening time to reveal movement we cannot usually feel or see. Such filmic manipulation of time extends and exceeds human visual capacities. As Colin Williamson writes of time lapse, “Our inability to see a plant growing is overcome by the camera’s supervisual ability to produce an image of continuous transformation. Continuity of movement is achieved by contracting the temporal gaps between changes in such a way that the imperceptible movement of the plant becomes visible on a different time scale.”21 “Time-lapse photography thickened becoming, made it visible,” notes David Lavery.22 In South Celestial Pole from Mt John, Murphy combines still images that reflect a landscape’s changing position as Earth spins on its axis, compressing an unspecified duration within a night into a twenty-second film. By compacting the time scale of the photographs, he renders a landscape’s movement as continuous and watchable.
To show Earth rather than the stars moving, Murphy placed the camera on a star-tracking mount oriented toward the South Celestial Pole, a point in the night sky. He recounts this process on his website:
I had not seen a timelapse video which demonstrated how the earth turns around the axis which points to the celestial poles. So I decided to set one up. This was done with the camera mounted on a tracking mount (Ioptron Sky Tracker) aligned to the South Celestial Pole, a point with no bright star such as Polaris or the North Star on the corresponding northern pole. Once aligned, the tracker simply turns at the same rate as the earth in the opposite direction, keeping the stars fixed while the earth appears to move.23
In many time-lapse films of the night sky, the camera points in a fixed direction, so that the stars move across the sky, rising and setting at the horizon, due to Earth’s rotation. But in South Celestial Pole from Mt John, the camera moves to compensate for this rotation and the stars appear still while the horizon turns. Murphy reminds us that even a seemingly still camera is moving, imperceptibly, with Earth. He counters the imperceptibility of Earth’s (and so the camera’s) movement by having the camera track toward the South Celestial Pole.
Murphy draws on celestial and urban lighting to depict the city and lake as moving. Inseparably, he relies on darkness to create South Celestial Pole from Mt John. As Teresa Alves writes, “Light only puts on a show if it breaks out of darkness and, in order for it to do so, the contrast between light and shadow needs to be redressed.”24 Tim Edensor also emphasizes the relationality of light and darkness: “The melding of illumination and darkness has a unique capacity to transform space and generate atmospheres.”25 In engaging with glowing phenomena that are shaped by darkness in South Celestial Pole from Mt John, Murphy associates night with the potential to perceive Earth’s spinning movement and presence amid stars. It is perhaps not surprising then that time lapse is prominent on websites affiliated with the Aoraki Mackenzie International Dark Sky Reserve. These enigmatic and dramatic films are shot within the reserve and may accord with the proposition that night matters. They show how perception and awareness can be very different in conditions of comparative darkness and highly visible celestial phenomena.
Beyond Dark Skies
Murphy’s South Celestial Pole from Mt John might be read also as bringing somewhat different preoccupations compared to the IDA’s vision of protecting natural dark skies. These divergences are evident in how Murphy’s time lapse envisages and arguably celebrates a night shaped by varied human activities, from cinematic experimentation to urban illumination and darkness.
Rather than framing South Celestial Pole from Mt John as a window into a night endangered by human influence, Murphy foregrounds how time lapse can experimentally mediate night, compacting time and creating visual distortions in connection with more-than-human elements like stars. Time lapse historically has been imagined as a revelatory window into otherwise imperceptible realities and as showing the limitations of the known. For example, in Theory of Film (1960) Siegfried Kracauer states that by condensing what for humans are undetectably slow plant temporalities, time lapse shows “pictures of stalks piercing the soil in the process of growing.”26 Kracauer argues that these “deviant images” should “fulfill a revealing function within contexts focusing on physical existence.”27 In South Celestial Pole from Mt John, indeed, the photorealistic continuity of the horizon’s movement gives an alluring sense that the viewer is catching a glimpse of Earth as it spins. Yet time lapse has also driven admiration regarding the enchantments of cinema. Williamson writes, “The sense of the imaginary attending these cinematic views derives precisely from this: the worlds viewed are no longer seen with certainty because they appear wonderfully through the mechanical eye of an optical device.”28 He argues that commentators on time lapse have appreciated how cinematic technologies can transform nature and can create a mediated view only possible via a camera.29 Murphy encourages awareness of cinematic agency along these lines. As the city lights and lake sharply pitch sideways in a way that would usually be impossible for us to experience, South Celestial Pole from Mt John offers reminders of its animating powers. On his website, Murphy notes that traces of the camera’s presence are further evident in the movement of some of the stars: “The slight motion of the stars closer to the corners is due to lens distortion warping the stars as they change position relative to the lens.”30 He draws attention to the inventive interactions between time lapse and more-than-human elements like stars.
Murphy’s emphasis on creative interactions with night through cinematic experimentation leads to a second way in which South Celestial Pole from Mt John potentially complicates narratives of protecting dark skies: while Murphy relies heavily on the varied intensities and hues of illumination and darkness produced by the city of Takapō, the IDA advocates for the protection of “natural darkness,” a language that may imply that darkness could largely be free from human agency.31 To draw from Taylor Stone’s critical reflection on dark-sky campaigns that polarize nature and culture, “In its contemporary manifestation, the sought-after unpolluted dark sky is categorized as something out there, outside of cities and human activities, which are in turn defined and bounded by artificial light.”32 The imagery of natural darkness resonates with settler colonial norms in Aotearoa / New Zealand. Hardy and Whaanga write of the European binary of nature and culture as an element in settler efforts to undermine Māori conceptions of “cosmic and genealogical relationships” between celestial, human and other elements.33
Murphy’s South Celestial Pole from Mt John complicates the IDA’s Western cultural idealization of natural dark skies as against artificial lighting. Murphy draws on areas of urban illumination and darkness in creating formal detail and color as well as to tell a story about human relationships with Earth. In the time lapse, the city of Takapō appears as a variegated, interconnected terrain of lit and darker areas beneath the night sky. The city’s lights cast a glow over the hills and the lake. These golden lights contrast with the shadowy hills, giving form to the landscape shown in the time lapse. Murphy utilizes the interplay of light and darkness to make a reference to and even to tell a story about the movement of Earth and, with it, human beings. As Takapō’s lights spin upward, I am left grappling with the ways in which a seemingly large city can be turned so easily. Moreover, I am reminded of people’s unfelt rotational movement within these cities.34South Celestial Pole from Mt John is suggestive of an “approach to lighting and darkness that avoids dualistic essentialisms and recognises the ways in which the power of each condition draws upon the relationalities and innumerable intersections of dark and light,” to draw from Edensor’s reflections on urban lighting design.35 He describes how areas both of relative illumination and of darkness are produced in cities, as well as the many potentials for shaping these dynamics, such as through subtle illumination that would allow urban dwellers to have increased contact with the night sky.36
In South Celestial Pole from Mt John, Murphy envisages and appreciates a night shaped by people, including by time lapse and the city. He emphasizes night’s importance, but his time lapse is also somewhat wayward in relation to narratives of protecting the natural night or even dark skies. Murphy’s cinematic preoccupations remind me of uncertainties and tensions regarding what people might dream of when it comes to night and especially regarding what nocturnal elements matter and for whom. Variation in the ways people connect with night becomes even more striking in the juxtaposition of South Celestial Pole from Mt John and Sullivan’s Star Waka, to which I will turn next. While Sullivan expresses concern regarding anthropogenic lighting, as he reflects on injustices interwoven with the after-hours, from resource extraction to policing, he complicates narratives about night as an endangered heritage site.
Night Travelers
Although Star Waka is not referenced on the Aoraki Mackenzie International Dark Sky Reserve website, Sullivan’s poetry is especially relevant here given that the reserve lies within his ancestral lands, the lands of Kāi Tahu (Ngāi Tahu). The reserve stretches through a tussock floodplain rising all around into mountains and includes Aoraki (Mount Cook), the highest mountain in Aotearoa / New Zealand. These lands were included in immense and disputed transactions between 1844 and 1864 in which British colonists purchased 34.5 million acres of land, or more than half the total land area of Aotearoa / New Zealand, from Kāi Tahu. Through a treaty settlement in 1998, the prime minister formally apologized for the history of unconscionable actions with regard to the purchase of the land and for the resulting hardship faced by the iwi. The reserve is composed of both public and privately owned lands, with Mount John Observatory considered a core of the reserve. The observatory was established in 1965 by the University of Pennsylvania and the University of Canterbury, and the US Air Force ran a satellite tracking station nearby from 1968 to 1972.37 Many photographs and films that reach into the night sky rely on astronomic infrastructures in Indigenous people’s lands, but this is usually not at all obvious from these arts. Because South Celestial Pole from Mt John references Takapō as well as a telescope dome, it could invite us to consider the land and histories through which it came to be made. But such a reading is very reliant on the cultural and historical awareness one might bring. Moreover, time lapse’s primary temporal frame is narrow and does not lend itself to thinking about (colonial) histories. In Star Waka, Sullivan more directly explores the entanglement of night and such histories.
Sullivan’s Star Waka, an influential work first published in 1999 and since reprinted five times, contains 101 poems that address Māori and Pacific histories of navigation and migration and the settler colonial history of Aotearoa / New Zealand. In parallel to South Celestial Pole from Mt John, Sullivan’s Star Waka reflects on how night conditions such as darkness and starlight alter how people can connect with Earthly places and expanses beyond. Sullivan casts these transformations as fairly ordinary, for they have long been woven into practices of navigation, agriculture, and time telling. He puts focus on stars and people’s connections with them across expanses far greater than one night. Star Waka opens with “He karakia timatanga” (“Opening Prayer”), a poem in which a waka (vessel) sets out through the ocean into the setting sun. Sullivan’s ocean voyagers draw on the stars as directional markers, sailing beneath a “charred sky where stars become arrows, / lit signs travelling across a black zone.”38 These lines suggest how Māori navigational science draws on rising and setting stars as well as the sun.39 They evoke the journeys by which people first arrived in Aotearoa / New Zealand, describing the voyagers as setting out from the ancestral homeland Hawaiiki, but also the continuation of these traditions. As Alice Te Punga Somerville writes, Sullivan’s use of the term waka reflects linguistic transformations that took place after people arrived in Aotearoa / New Zealand.40 She describes Sullivan’s poetry as evoking past voyages but also as “affirming the continuation of waka traditions through the ongoing articulation of these journeys.”41
Hardy and Whaanga link such continuation not only to human agency but also to the vanishingly deep existences of stars and of Earth’s rotation. The long durations of stars and their power in relation to Earthly life inspire Māori movements to reconnect with ancestral knowledge of the night sky: “Since the stars over the islands of New Zealand or Aotearoa still move in the same patterns as when the main migration of Polynesians arrived 800 years ago, and because there is enough of the natural vegetation and fauna left for seasonal patterns to have continued relevance, there are many star movements that could be looked to for environmental and seasonal guidance.”42 If South Celestial Pole from Mt John compacts the time of just one night, in “He karakia timatanga” Sullivan frames night in terms of the long-standing patterns that emerge in the connections of stars, Earth, and human observers. Stars not only cue navigators but also cultivation and spiritual practices. Through imagery that bundles the stars with food sources like kūmara (sweet potato), Sullivan suggests how cultivation can be shaped by night. Māori delineations of time are responsive to the star fields visible at times of the year as well as to the Sun’s changing pathway and the phases of the moon, and these observations can guide planting and harvesting.43 In linking the celestial and divine, Sullivan engages Māori traditions in which many stars are named deities that share a genealogy with humans.
While Sullivan tells stories of long-term and recurring engagements, he also associates nocturnal environments with unpredictability and precariousness. He frames “He karakia timatanga” as a karakia, a “prayer, a declaration,” for the waka to hold together while traveling through the swelled ocean, that its crew will catch fish, for the preservation of the yam, taro, and kūmara it carries, and for the “health / of all parts celestial, temporal and divine.”44 Te Rangihīroa (Peter Buck) describes karakia as “a formula of words which was chanted to obtain benefit or avert trouble.”45 Sullivan’s use of this mode puts emphasis on longstanding Māori connections with night, for as Karaitiana Taiuru notes, karakia involve words passed down from ancestors.46 Taiuru writes that karakia “often call on the atua [ancestors, gods] and are a means of participation, of becoming one, with the atua and the ancestors and with events of the past in the ‘eternal present’ of ritual.”47 In using karakia, Sullivan frames people as participants along with many elements that might assist or undermine the journey. If people rely on cyclical patterns associated with night, such reliance still involves uncertainties. Indeed, in later poems in Star Waka, Sullivan writes of navigators who turn to wind streamers and water movements on cloudy nights when stars cannot be seen.48
Precarious Nights
Sullivan suggests that empire and capitalism have greatly changed the uncertainties and difficulties of nocturnal living. In a later poem in Star Waka, “Waka 16 Kua wheturangitia koe” (“Vessel 16 You Have Now Become a Star”), he reflects on recent upheavals to Māori material and cultural connections with night. The poem opens with a loved one who has been sent to Hawaiiki to become a star:
The returning patterns of the terms stars and ancestors in these lines echo the familiar movement of the stars that appear in the night sky at certain times of year. Matamua describes the saying that titles the poem, kua wheturangitia koe (“you have now become a star”), as having emerged from a constellation that takes the form of a canoe captained by the star Taramainuku:
Te Kupenga a Taramainuku is the net of Taramainuku and every night the constellation is in the sky, Taramainuku casts his net down to earth to gather the souls of the people who died that day. He carries them along behind his waka for eleven months and then takes them to the underworld when the constellation sets next to the sun in May. The constellation rises again in a month and Taramainuku releases the souls of the dead into the sky to become stars. This is the origin of the saying “kua wheturangitia koe” / “you have now become a star.”50
For Sullivan, the saying accrues traumatic significance due to the relationship between death, empire, and capitalism. He laments four tree species (kauri, totara, kahikatea, and rimu) as well as awa (rivers) that have become stars on their destruction for construction, dams, wars, and other settler colonial industries:
These extractive industries power cultures that “lighten blackness” so that “many stars / are lost in the lightning.”52 Sullivan marks how lighting intensification has affected people’s relationship with the night sky, but he particularly turns us toward the power structures that support such intensification. Illumination is powered by trees and water and through the colonial imposition of a resource extractive economy.
Sullivan’s critical engagement with lighting expansion does not lead into a framing of night simply as a presence that is being diminished. He moves beyond a focus simply on lighting to reflect on how darkness and further nocturnal elements have been drawn on in colonial histories of land appropriation and resource extraction. Sun and Moon have been “tagged for domination,” he writes in “Waka 16 Kua wheturangitia koe.”53 In noting aspirations to dominate the moon, Sullivan turns us toward how colonial powers have drawn on and intervened in night, in the relative absence of sunlight flooding the ocean and islands but amid the light that travels from celestial bodies. Looking from land and sea to the night sky, early European explorers sought to map and claim Indigenous people’s lands. “Astronomy and navigation were mutually inseparable,” writes Wayne Orchiston of James Cook’s Pacific voyages, in which the crew used the moon, sun, and stars to check the location of the islands.54 By the nineteenth century, varied places globally were being drawn into the infrastructures of colonial astronomy, with instruments for observing celestial bodies used in measuring, mapping, and data collection. John McAleer writes that astronomic instruments were “vital to the maintenance and extension of European power in non-European spaces.”55 The cut and burned trees, the dammed rivers, the radiated air that Sullivan describes in “Waka 16 Kua wheturangitia koe”—Western astronomy does not stand separate from these environmental crises.56 Sullivan’s narrator expresses sorrow and fear regarding the forcible imposition of settler colonial relationships with water, trees, and other elements.
Night is woven into settler colonial culture not only through astronomy but also in military and policing operations that utilize darkness. In a further poem from Star Waka, “iv 2140 AD,” Sullivan extends his framing of precariousness and trauma by night to police operations that disproportionately affect Māori communities. In “iv 2140 AD,” he describes a waka (a Māori vessel and its crew) being intercepted by police while engaging with the night sky. The waka reaches for stars to “check the guidance system,” a reference to how stars aid navigators, yet the waka depletes its fuel because “we didn’t have enough cash for a full tank” and “we drift into an orbit we cannot escape from / until a police escort vessel tows us back.”57 The crew’s effort to be active, curious explorers in the night is abruptly undermined. In parallel to the interruption of the waka’s space flight, Sullivan’s imaginative engagement of night seems to be diminished as the poem unfolds. He opens the poem with two seven-line stanzas about the waka’s exuberant journey into the night sky, ending the second stanza with the waka’s encounter with police, before completing the poem with two far shorter and narrowly focused fragments that detail how the police confiscate the waka and fine its crew. It is as if the momentum of Sullivan’s story of a Māori crew’s flight to the stars is thrown off by painful images of night and especially of the police interventions that darkness might bring. Indeed, policing and military operations draw on and even produce darkness, its cover and confusion. They not only actively shape lit environments but also, in some contexts, disrupt electrical power systems to intensify darkness in ways that further shape environmental injustices. In what have become infamous instances of police operations by night in Aotearoa / New Zealand, police undertook early morning raids against overstayers, primarily of Pasifika heritage, in the 1970s and 1980s, and against the Tūhoe people in 2007.
The capacity to turn lights on and off is socially uneven, as night raids suggest. Access to electrical power, and with it lighting, is a further layer in Sullivan’s thematization in Star Waka of precariousness by night. Toward the end the end of “Waka 16 Kua wheturangitia koe,” he writes that the “eyes / of the powerless look up” to the stars on which “divinities / look down.”58 The term powerless can broadly evoke agential capacities in economic, political, military, or other terms. But it more specifically designates electricity, as in the phrase “turn the power off.” Earlier in the poem, Sullivan directly associates power with energy systems and with illumination. Sullivan’s image of a powerless people who can see stars because they reside in darkness may suggest that their relationships with night is shaped by being unable to afford electricity. It reminds me of how not everyone has access to nocturnal lighting in the same way. As Edensor writes of cities, some areas are floodlit while others are thrown into darkness in ways that can map onto social and economic unevenness: “Geographical inequality in the distribution of urban illumination remains with an unevenness in brightness, quality and purpose.”59 In “Waka 16 Kua wheturangitia koe,” Sullivan reflects on how lighting expansion undermines vital connections with stars. Yet he also observes that communities do not evenly share the agency to shape and access brightly lit night environments.
In parallel to Murphy’s South Celestial Pole from Mt John, Sullivan’s Star Waka draws on night’s power to shape the forms and colors we perceive, its always changing dynamics of light and darkness, but Sullivan links these nocturnal conditions to both colonialism and to Māori revitalization movements. He describes a bruised (“black and blue”) night “with only stars / to point away,” referring to the colors of the sky and perhaps of the ocean and waka, too, as seen from the waka at night.60 This image of a damaged night recalls Sullivan’s engagement with Western astronomy and the resource extractive economy in which dead trees and rivers become stars. But the blue-black expanses, intimately connecting the waka, ocean, and sky, and devoid of details aside from stars, also suggest how people’s capacities to perceive forms and to see light are different at night. To return to Alves’s point, light relies on darkness for its most striking effects.61 At night, people can most readily see the light of stars that “point away.”62 As Star Waka suggests, stars guide Māori practices of navigation, cultivation, time telling, and spirituality. Harris et al. describe contemporary Māori movements to reconnect with tātai arorangi (Māori astronomy), including in nurturing Māori food systems and navigation. “Celestial navigation,” they write, “has captured the hearts and imagination of many an enthusiast, and these masterful experts continue to revitalize this old tradition.”63 The dreams that night bears include these creative projects. As guides for Māori social movements, stars “point away” from colonial injustices.64
Conclusion
A vast range of Earthly life-forms and locales exist in the relative absence of sunlight on a cyclical, intimate basis. As Kyba and coauthors write, “At any given moment, half of the Earth’s surface experiences night.”65 Nocturnal environments can affect acoustics, the activity of animals and plants, temperature, and the relationships of darkness and light. In Star Waka Sullivan describes night as a “cloak” that touches and nurtures many elements.66 Earth’s nights are also deeply woven into environmental crises. For example, lighting expansion is thought to affect night skies over around a quarter of Earth’s land.67 Global nighttime temperatures have risen faster than those of daytime in the context of climate change.68
In this essay, I have sought to further environmental humanistic research on night through a comparative reading of arts connected with the Aoraki Mackenzie International Dark Sky Reserve. Our work in this area could include engagement with a diverse range of nocturnal arts, including those recognized by and those more marginal to institutional projects of protecting night skies. Diverging from the IDA’s vision of natural dark skies, in South Celestial Pole from Mt John Murphy affirms specific kinds of human participation in night, foregrounding the creative relationship between time lapse and a nocturnal environment. He forges a connection between cinematic techniques and night’s more-than-human conditions to offer a startling perceptual transformation, negotiating urban and celestial lighting and darkness to allow us to brush up against Earth’s rotation. Because Murphy visually emphasizes a particular night locale, referencing its unique atmospheric and terrestrial features, and also dramatizes the shaping effects of the camera, he creates an opening for thinking about different nights, those not engaged here, and different ways in which the arts might interact with them. This opening is important because South Celestial Pole from Mt John does not readily convey, and perhaps makes it harder to notice, night’s relationships with colonial histories and associated environmental and social injustices, themes that run through Sullivan’s Star Waka. Sullivan writes of many nights, often framing them in terms of precariousness and uncertainty and exploring their relationships with resource extraction, lighting inequality, and policing in Aotearoa / New Zealand. The poetry raises the question, What does it mean to advocate to protect the night if we do not also engage with these injustices? Like Murphy, Sullivan explores the potential creativity of relationships between people and night, but the interplay between Murphy’s and Sullivan’s works is nevertheless uneasy and unequal. Sullivan does not so much mediate night as a good, wondrous phase as reflect on the colonial structures that affect and rely on night, and express dreams of alternative modes of nocturnal participation.
Acknowledgments
Participants in the Environmental Humanities Research Workshop at the State University of New York at Buffalo and in the Environment and Society Seminar at the University of California, Santa Barbara, offered vital feedback on earlier versions of this essay. Andreas Schnyder provided helpful insights into night sky time lapse. I would also like to thank the two anonymous reviewers and the editors for their generous and constructive suggestions.
Notes
Hardy and Whaanga, “Using the Stars,” 5. See also Rangi Matamua, who describes the interplay between Māori temporal systems, elements like stars and regionally specific knowledge, so that time is “bound to culture, to place, and to people” (“Matariki and the Decolonisation of Time,” 65).
Galinier et al., “Anthropology of the Night,” 835. Shaw also argues for studies of “the diversity of lived nocturnal experiences of night” in many places globally (“Night as Fragmenting Frontier,” 645).
For examples on the potentially estranging effects of ocean conditions, see Alaimo, “Violet-Black”; Ingersoll, Waves of Knowing; Jue, Wild Blue Media, and on atmosphere, see Choy, “Tending to Suspension.”
Beaumont, Nightwalking, 2. Flack extends such concerns to human-animal histories that emerge if we engage with night (“Dark Trails”).
Kyba et al., “Night Matters,” 2. As further examples of night-oriented scholarship not referred to elsewhere in this essay, see Bach and Degenring’s Dark Nights, on literary narratives of nocturnal illumination; Bogard’s reflections regarding light pollution (The End of Night); Challéat et al. on the relationship of the nocturnal and ecological networks (“Grasping Darkness”); Ekirch’s history of night prior to industrialization (At Day’s Close); Gandy’s engagement with urban lighting (“Negative Luminescence”).
They note, “In a time of renaissance, the Māori have endeavoured to revitalize their knowledge of language, medicine, song, dance, carving, weaving, science, and now astronomy” (Harris et al., “Review of Māori Astronomy,” 334). See also Matamua, “Matariki and the Decolonisation of Time”; Hardy and Whaanga, “Using the Stars”; Orchiston, Exploring the History of New Zealand Astronomy; Williams, “Puaka and Matariki.”
International Dark-Sky Association, https://www.darksky.org (accessed February 3, 2022).
International Dark-Sky Association, https://www.darksky.org (accessed February 3, 2022).
Dark Sky Project, https://www.darkskyproject.co.nz (accessed February 8, 2022).
These uncredited films can be seen at Dark Sky Project, https://www.darkskyproject.co.nz (accessed February 8, 2022).
Lavery, “‘No More Unexplored Countries,’” 1.
Kracauer, Theory of Film, 52. Caroline Hovanec questions the claim that time lapse can take us directly to nature beyond human intent and intervention. As she puts it: “The idea of a nature film that records natural objects as they ‘live their mysterious, silent lives,’ and of an artist whose gift is not to invent but merely to see and point, is hard to sustain once we start looking at actual, particular films and their conditions of production” (Hovanec, “Another Nature Speaks,” 254).
See also Hannah Landecker’s argument that early twentieth-century makers and viewers of scientific microcinematography observed “the gripping reality of the films” while also not being able to “forget the technical means that made access to this reality possible; it was not any reality, but a scientifically mediated one” (“Microcinematography,” 129, 130).
Stone, “Re-envisioning the Nocturnal Sublime,” 485. See also Pritchard, on how NASA satellite images of Earth polarize regions of light pollution and darkness (“Trouble with Darkness”), and Dunnett, on British dark-sky organizations that frame urbanization as a threat to sublime, rural astronomical experiences (“Contested Landscapes”).
As Hannah Landecker writes of temporal experiments in the medium of film and their effects on scientific research, “Not only did film provide a tool for observing over time things that could otherwise not be apprehended; it rendered other, dominant ways of representing change less transparent” (“Microcinematography,” 126).
Hearnshaw describes this history (“Mt John Observatory”).
Hardy and Whaanga, “Using the Stars,” 6.
Harris and coauthors describe the importance of these temporal frameworks for food cultivation: “The appearance of particular stars at a certain time of year acted as planting and harvest indicators” (Harris et al., “Review of Māori Astronomy,” 332).
McAleer, “‘Stargazers at the World’s End,’” 394.
See also the extensive scholarship on colonialism, astronomy, and the struggle over the Thirty Meter Telescope (TMT) and Mauna a Wākea. For example, Casumbal-Salazar, “Fictive Kinship”; Goodyear-Ka‘ōpua, “Protectors of the Future.”
Edensor, “Gloomy City,” 428. Kohere explores how Māori-owned electricity company Nau Mai Rā addresses energy inequality (“Kaupapa Māori Power Company”). Pritchard reads NASA satellite images as suggestive of “lighting poverty: limited or nonexistent access to electricity, including reliable, adequate, clean sources of artificial light” (“Trouble with Darkness,” 322).
For example, see Sullivan, “He karakia timatanga,” 1; Sullivan, “Waka 16 Kua wheturangitia koe,” 20.
