Every year Livingmaps Network celebrates the pioneering achievement of radical cartographer, William Bunge, by inviting someone who has made an outstanding contribution to the theory and practice of counter- mapping to give a special lecture about their work. We are delighted to announce that this year’s lecture will be given by Candace Fujikane.

In her recent book ‘Mapping Abundance for a planetary future’ Candace Fujikane argues that native economies of abundance provide the best foundation for collective work against climate change. Drawing on the methods of narrative cartography and her research in Hawaii she challenges the conventional wisdom of much environmental activism. In this lecture she will present some of her key ideas in discussion with environmentalists and living mappers, Bob Gilbert and Barbara Brayshay.

Summary

As we bear witness to the wastelanding of the earth by late liberal capital, Kānaka Maoli are returning to ancestral mapping of the elements to map our intimate pilina, our relationships, with the elements around us so that we can transform devastating global climate change events to possibilities for greater abundance. In this talk, I focus on the cartographies of the akua, the 400,000 elemental forms and natural processes. Kekuhi Kealiʻikanakaʻolehaililani, teaches us lessons in stewardship in the Hālau ʻŌhiʻa training program, sifting through archives of story and song for ancestral knowledge that teach us how we can map our genealogical relationships with elements and to grow our pilina to them. As the sea walls of settler capital exacerbate the erosion caused by rising tides, artist Kaili Chun creates a series of living maps of future inundation scenarios for Waikīkī, teaching us to embrace the rising of Kanaloa (deity of the deep consciousness of the ocean) as the restoration and resilience of the natural world, where the ruins of capital become reefs for the return of native fish and Native knowledgeways.

Candace Fujikane is Professor of English at the University of Hawaiʻi. She is now working on a new book entitled Elemental Cartographies for a Changing Earth. She has stood for lands and waters and Hawaiian political independence for over twenty years, presenting testimony before settler state agencies, sharing her research with Kanaka Maoli and ally communities, and standing on front lines against police officers armed with tear gas and sound cannons.

Barbara Brayshay is an environmental campaigner and a member of the Guerrilla Archaeology Group. Her background is in environmental science and social research. She has worked with charities and Local and Central Government in mapping projects designed to enable greater citizen empowerment and edits the Waypoints section of Livingmaps Review..

Bob Gilbert has been a long-standing campaigner for inner city conservation and the protection and improvement of urban open spaces.Bob’s books include ‘The Green London Way’, (1991 and 2012) and ‘Ghost Trees’ (2018). His new book, provisionally entitled ‘The Missing Musk’, will be published by Sceptre in 2022.