Dr. Keziah Wallis is a Maori anthropologist who teaches a variety of anthropology courses at UFV. She’s completed a BA in Asian studies, a postgraduate diploma in film and media studies, and a PhD in social anthropology and religious studies. Wallis has taught at several institutions in New Zealand and pursued research that explores Indigenous cinema, Myanmar Buddhism, and Indigenous virtual reality. This semester Wallis is teaching IPK 344: Indigenous Methodologies and a special topics course, ANTH 299I: Fantastic & Speculative Worlds.
Teaching in New Zealand vs. teaching in Canada. Can you talk more about the differences you encountered?
I think some of it’s just that I’m really familiar with the cultural context in New Zealand. So, I tend to be a professor who tries to make things as fun as I can. Often I’m dealing with really intense subjects. I teach a lot about colonialism, colonial trauma, you know? These sorts of really hard topics. One of the ways in which I’ve always dealt with teaching that is to try and bring a little bit of levity that releases some of that burden. I know that I can do that in New Zealand because I’m so comfortable with the cultural context. Some of being here is learning where those boundaries are between what’s levity to break the tension and what’s levity that someone might actually find really hurtful or offensive.
… On a whole I was a bit worried that Canadian students wouldn’t be as responsive. Kiwis, we joke about ourselves a lot. We joke about everything. That’s kind of the Kiwi way. I was like, “Is that going to work in Canada?” But I don’t think my students are finding it too strange.
I was reading your course description for ANTH 299I: Fantastic & Speculative Worlds. I noticed it was quite vague and it varies each semester. What did you have planned for this semester?
What Fantastic & Speculative Worlds is, is a kind of study of the intersection between speculative fiction and anthropology. It’s looking at how both science fiction and fantasy posit the same kind of questions that anthropology posits. What does it mean to be human? What is culture? How do we describe culture? How do we account for cultural difference? It’s exploring all those big issues. Students are writing — this is the [class] I have an essay for — they have to write an ethnographic essay about N.K. Jemisin’s The Fifth Season; it’s a fantasy novel. They have to practise applying anthropology to a fantasy world. Think about concepts like caste, power, belonging — these big concepts. They have to apply it to the world that’s created in there.
I was really interested when I saw your work in VR and using VR to empower Indigenous storytelling. Can you give us an idea of why VR in particular works so well for this?
That was definitely the best job I’ve ever had — sorry UFV. I was literally paid to find Indigenous VR projects, get access to them, and try them, and write up notes on them. That was my job. Best job ever.
We created a database called fourthVR. A lot of discussions that happen at the moment are talking about how there aren’t enough people or Indigenous people with the skills to do VR. And so we are like, “Okay. Well, let’s map what’s happening.” And we went into it thinking there won’t be that many, but what we found is a massive, massive number. Way more than we ever expected, which was really challenging those ideas. But also what I found, which was an unintended consequence through doing these VRs, was how, in a way, they allow for a really different experience of storytelling than even film does.
… There’s something about VR that really grounds you in that experience. And the research that I’m working on at the moment is thinking about how that relates back to Indigenous experiences of time and narrative. For Maori we have this concept of wa, and wa is like time and space merged. It’s not time and space together; it’s just there’s no difference between the two. It’s also past, present, and future at the same time. So, when we talk about walking in wa, we’re talking about the fact that we’re present with our past, our ancestors, our future generations, and ourselves. And to me that’s what VR does.
There’s other things too like AR — augmented reality — so you think Pokemon Go. There’s some really amazing work being done with Indigenous knowledge keepers and AR, so the ability to use that to disseminate and curate. Say you went to a particular site, whether there might be an app that could tell you a story of what happened at that site.
… You imagine it like you hold up your phone and you would see that village where it would be, and you might be able to listen to multiple stories from different sites telling you about what happened during that incident, or about a mountain … I did work on VR but I’m really interested in the power of augmented reality to think in that way. To allow us to visualize and experience the world in a way that I think is closer to how our ancestors used to.
You said AR is closer to how your ancestors might have seen it. Do you mean because things are laid out where they’re literally located?
I can’t speak for all Indigenous peoples, but my ancestors lived in a very different world. They lived in a world where the spirit world and the physical world were not separate. They lived in a world of the living and the dead. They lived in a world where a mountain is our ancestor, right? They lived in a world where the land was us. This very different world that many of us today are trying to get back to, but it can be really hard for us because [of] a colonized mindset. We see the world in this sort of particular way, and I think augmented reality allows us a way to perhaps recapture that magic or recapture that other way of peeling back layers that are present.
And for your future research, you said it was based in AR? Is that what’s next?
I would like to move into that space. At this point I’m still finishing up some work I did on methodologies — so thinking about new ways to engage in research about colonial history. But also thinking about the stories that we tell — so cultural memory and colonial trauma — the stories that are told about a nation and those impacts. But yeah, I’m wanting to move into this AR space, but also I’m interested in media in general, so film, gaming, AR, all of these things as expressions of resistance, and also how we might change the foundations of how it’s expected to take place.
… [For example] Bollywood film. Bollywood is this kind of classic example of how India has taken — not just Bollywood, Masala film in general. It’s taking this Western framework and making it its own. Not just in the production, but in the story, the expectations, all of those things. In a way what I’m trying to do is trying to think about that in an Indigenous context. What do we have? … There’s this history that predates colonialism, this long tradition of arts and creativity. So what I’m really interested in is what do we have in our communities that we can draw on in that way? How do we engage in that? How do we colonize these spaces and produce our own narratives?
Keziah Wallis. May 18 2019. (Chris Allen)
Chandy is a biology major/chemistry minor who's been a staff writer, Arts editor, and Managing Editor at The Cascade. She began writing in elementary school when she produced Tamagotchi fanfiction to show her peers at school -- she now lives in fear that this may have been her creative peak.