IMPROVISATIONS TOWARDS
A SONOROUS ETHICS IN
AOTEAROA NEW ZEALAND

Sebastian J. Lowe (Tangata Tiriti)
In 2019, I met Jessica Kahukura (Te Ātihaunui-a-Pāpārangi, Ngā Rauru, Ngāti Kahungunu, and Ngāti Tūwharetoa), a taonga puoro practitioner in Whanganui.
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You are listening to the first time we played together.
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Talking and playing with Jess opened a space of sonorous ethics: a relational space composed of many voices, human and otherwise, reverberating together and gesturing towards a particular mode of becoming Tangata Tiriti.

Introduction

Taonga puoro is a Māori art form of many voices. In recent years I have often worn my tākapu (Australasian gannet) bone kōauau1 (small flute) around my neck. When I put it to my lips and play across either of its open ends, as I had been shown how to do, I hear its familiar thin and breathy voice returning to my ears. While I play, I sometimes think about how this had once been part of a large bird that had soared effortlessly in the skies above the ocean. This gannet bone was one of many taonga puoro that I learnt to play, listen to, and explore within the sound worlds of Whanganui in Aoteaora New Zealand. Taonga puoro is a Māori instrumental tradition that cultivates an improvisational form of playing with the world that has its roots deep in Māori tribal histories.2 It does not follow musical notation. Instruments vary from rocks, to bones, to wood, and other non-traditional materials, such as glass. They can be found in situ; or they can be carefully crafted and gifted.3 Each performance is different, new, and responsive not only to the riffing soundings of humans, but to a wider world of more-than-human sensuous agency. To play taonga puoro is therefore to attune, respond, and participate in a world of a very different order to that which I learned to inhabit in the years I spent as a classically trained Pākehā (non-Māori New Zealander) viola player.
Playing taonga puoro with my Māori friends has enabled me to learn how to make new connections between things, and to apprehend what these relationships might mean according to my growing, but still necessarily limited, understandings of whakapapa. The Māori concept of whakapapa is often translated in English to mean ‘genealogy’, and yet, whakapapa is more than this: it is ‘the central concept in Māori culture’,4 as it provides the ‘explanation for the interconnection of all things’, stretching back to the origin of time itself.5 Each taonga puoro is associated with a god and their respective earthly realms connected through whakapapa.6 The rhythms produced by playing taonga puoro are associated with the movements of Papatūānuku, the Earth Mother, and melodies with Ranginui, the Sky Father;7 the primordial parents, who, by means of their forced separation, enabled their children to enter into Te Ao Marama, the world of light and emergent possibility, allowing life to thrive.8
I was born on stolen land.9 I grew up in Aotearoa New Zealand where everything I was taught came through Pākehā eyes and ears. There are ugly stories that lie beneath the heavy asphalt of our present day, but shockingly, perhaps, it has only been in recent times that I have become aware that I had never been told details of the violent truths of what happened in the place that I call home.10
On 6 Feburary 1840, Te Tiriti o Waitangi (the Treaty of Waitangi) was signed by representatives of Māori tribes and the British Crown.11 Shortly after its signing, the Crown began to breach its obligations as a Treaty partner. The new self-governing colonial parliament was established in 1853 giving the colonial administration more power to create new policies and pass Acts of Parliament and to be able to administer them to brutal effect. In the years that followed, huge swathes of land were stolen by the Crown and the mana (prestige, authority) and tino rangatiratanga (self-determination, sovereignty) of Māori hapū and iwi (tribal groups) were grossly insulted, often by violent means. Settlers, mostly from England, continued to arrive in large numbers to build a nation in their own settler colonial imaginary.12 As Anne Boswell puts it, ‘Settler colonialism is a matter of life-world reordering… [with the settlers] conceiving themselves as originators or creators.’13
Te Tiriti o Waitangi has not always been seen as our constitutional document given settler colonialism and its insidious propensity for social-historical amnesia. Yet, it endures and has an important place in the national imaginary moving forward. Mathew Wright suggests thinking of Te Tiriti o Waitangi as a ‘social living entity’ that continues to mediate and be relevant to the day-to-day lives of everyone living in Aotearoa New Zealand.14 This positions Te Tiriti o Waitangi as a framework that holds the values and guiding principles such as partnership, participation, and protection at its core for everyone living in Aoteaora New Zealand today.15 I now understand myself to be inherently bound to a shared history of principles, promises and failures in ways that make me accountable as Tangata Tiriti (non-Māori who are actively committed to a relationship grounded in the Treaty, its principles and promises) to my Māori friends and colleagues both within, and beyond, the research sphere.
I have therefore written this article not about Māori sound worlds nor about taonga puoro per se, but rather about an attunement to my own acoustemology16 as a Pākehā musician-researcher working alongside—and inspired by the insights and sensory invitation of—taonga puoro players, including Jess. I am interested in questioning what it means to attend to the work of becoming Tangata Tiriti: to try to apprehend forms of accountability that are articulated not just as words but as relationships made in and through the composing of sound worlds. I want to argue for the possibility of different kinds of sound practices; practices that do not exclude colonial critique, but which also pursue a form of generative creativity through which new kinds of relations become possible. To do this I draw on Indigenous sound studies scholar Dylan Robinson’s notion of ‘critical listening positionality’, where he argues that colonial practices of listening are driven by a kind of hunger, or extractive drive. Robinson’s notion allows me to try to make an argument about what a ‘critical-creative listening positionality’ might look like when I focus particularly on my own practices as a Pākehā researcher-musician, attuning in relation to a broader, and often fraught, politics and ethics of intercultural participation and invention with taonga puoro in my hands instead of 
my viola.
Is it possible, I ask myself, to enable others to attune to these histories with Jess, while I take up her invitation to play taonga puoro? What new forms of relationship and accountability might emerge within the dynamic creative compositional processes of sharing in and through sound worlds together with the spirit of Te Tiriti o Waitangi as a guiding ethos?
I was introduced to Jess over Facebook by a mutual friend within a few months of arriving in Whanganui in April 2019. We arranged to meet outside the Durie Hill tunnel, where we pressed our noses together in a hongi,17 our physical and spiritual breath intermingling for the first time. We then turned and walked into the tunnel, instantly feeling the temperature drop. Above us, a string of slender lights illuminated the white-washed stone walls.
Before we settled down to play taonga puoro, I gave Jess a pūtangitangi, which I had made out of clay. Pūtangitangi, or ukutangi, are round, egg-shaped flutes with several finger holes. They are easy to make and, if made adequately, they can be played straight away, the clay still wet and malleable. The instructor who taught me to make them, Ngareta Patea, told me that they were played into as a vessel for the mauri or essence of someone’s grief and sorrow.
Jess handed me two pieces of black pakohe18 stone that her father had given to her. In my hands, these pieces of jagged stone felt cold and heavy. When I tapped them together to create a sound, their tone was weighty and rounded. My own set of river stones were lighter, both in the hand and on the ear.
The Durie Hill elevator shaft and tunnel were officially opened in 1919. The 66-metre elevator provided access to what was referred to as the Durie Hill ‘Garden Suburb’. The two hundred and thirteen-metres-long tunnel had been built for the wealthy few who had properties on Durie Hill at the turn of the century.19 Registered historically by ‘Heritage New Zealand Pouhere Taonga’ the tunnel and elevator are still in use today by residents and tourists. The tunnel was also, as I would learn, an incredibly resonant place in which to play taonga puoro.
As Jess and I sat down in the middle of the tunnel, I took off my shoes, following Jess’ lead, and we laid out our taonga puoro on a soft piece of cloth to protect them from the concrete floor. Jess then picked up my new pūtōrino20 and began to blow gently into its māngai (central opening). I commented on how hard it was to get that particular voice on my pūtōrino, though felt immediately clumsy as I was just a beginner puoro player myself. Jess did not answer but instead kept on breathing into the pūtōrino, her breath sounding like wind passing through a stand of trees. Fearing that my comment may have sounded condescending, I picked up my nguru21 and began to play, hesitating slightly before our sounds and our voices converged.
This was the beginning of our friendship. Looking back, I have come to cherish that moment when, simultaneously hesitating and leaning forward, I took up her invitation to participate in creating a shared sound world beneath Durie Hill—a sound world amplified, notably in that context, in a particular way by the reverberating feats and forces of the settler colonial imaginary that the tunnel conjured for both of us. This would be the start of many months of playing, talking, and hanging out, during which time we explicitly sought to acknowledge and respond to the abiding place of colonial histories, the structuring force of Māori politics, and the embrace of more-than-human worlds under threat. In those discussions, but also importantly through our playing together, Jess helped me begin to question my own relationship to the world that I thought I knew. She asked me questions that made me think about my own ancestors and how it was that I had ended up being born in these islands in the South Pacific. She held open a space in which I felt I could share my own thoughts and feelings about the world in a way that enabled truthful dialogue from, and about, our different positionality. Such conversations would often end up with us laughing together as our thoughts and hypotheses became all knotted up and too much for our minds to disentangle. ‘But this is what we do, Bas’, she would say to me, giggling, while I frantically tried to write down our conversations in my little green notebook.
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Critical listening positionality

The sound segments with which I have crafted this article are from an audio recording from that first meeting in the tunnel with Jess in 2019, shortly after which we formed a taonga puoro group called Awa Puoro with others in Whanganui.22 As I composed this article, I found myself listening again. And anew. And always, still, with hesitation. I am a non-Indigenous classical musician. I come with my own history and understandings of listening and playing. I am aware of how my own listening and playing are therefore constantly mediated by the limitations of my body and associated histories; this is a history inflected with presuppositions and inherited privilege that I am still learning to recognise.23 Because of this positioning and the ways that I have negotiated it with Jess and others, I do not regard myself as a taonga puoro practitioner, but a musician-researcher with an interest in, and love for, taonga puoro. Learning how to play them has greatly enriched the relationships I have with others in Aotearoa New Zealand, human and otherwise. I am aware of the kind of identity politics that refuses the very possibility of such actions and I respect that. From this perspective there is no place for me to participate in a Māori tradition. Nonetheless, I seek to claim a more complex and generative possibility of positionality in response to the invitations offered by Jess and other Māori and non-Māori friends and colleagues to play and learn alongside them.24
Dylan Robinson uses the notion of ‘critical listening positionality’ to refer to all the ways we come to know how we listen, and how listening can become a form of aesthetic settlement or assimilation.25 He argues that during colonisation, Indigenous listening and aesthetic sensibilities were deliberately acted upon by settlers, who sought to colonise and therefore settle Indigenous perception itself. Western music academies and other institutions continue to enforce this act of aesthetic settlement through ‘structured listening practices’.26 (I know something about Western forms of perceptual disciplining from my own experiences of being trained as a classical viola player.27) Yet Jess did not approach taonga puoro, either her playing or mine, as already defined by colonialism. It was part of a broader field of social resonance, response, and trust that we played into, each coming from our own histories and biographies.
Standing in the tunnel next to Jess, I became aware that to participate in the world with taonga puoro required an awareness of my own capacity to hold onto the many voices, human or otherwise, that converged together within the sound event itself. I learnt to listen for how these voices would relate to one another as they emerged. It was a relational and participatory mode of listening. It was a way of listening that did not grip nor tighten but rather consciously supported the agency of others, including the space itself with its own reverberant qualities. I came to understand this approach as entailing a form of sonorous ethics. In other words, the care here was about learning to actively join in; to find a way to respectfully listen and play with the voices of the instruments and the soundings and echoes of our surroundings rather than simply standing passively to one side. A sonorous ethics incites a careful and creative participation.
In the world of taonga puoro everything has purpose and intention to it. Nothing is arbitrary. Knowing what taonga puoro to pick up and play is, as my friends would tell me, decided often by the instruments themselves and by the intentions set by the purpose of playing itself. With Jess’ encouragement I began to experiment with my own sound practices to know how far I could push myself creatively and critically with taonga puoro. Sometimes Jess’ critique was explicit and other times indirect. I remember one moment in Whanganui where I, in my nervousness to do the right thing, said to her that ‘I was a guest in Whanganui’ (even though I had been there for almost a year by that stage). She laughed and said, ‘not anymore you aren’t!’ But even though Jess wholeheartedly supported and encouraged me to participate in the ways in which I did, I could not become complacent as my positionality was always tenuous.
When I listen back to this sound recording, I am reminded how sparse the tunnel space seemed at times, especially the further away from the tunnel’s entrance we stood. In any cavernous space there was always the temptation to play loudly because of the thrilling way the sound I made would reverberate off the hard surfaces. Yet, it was often more enjoyable to play as quietly as possible as if we were whispering to one another. That way, we could play with the quieter sounds that surrounded us like the male crickets in the shrubs outside the tunnel’s entrance.
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Approaching sound worlds

As I played rhythms, Jess picked up her glass pūtangitangi and offered a melody in response. I listened, waiting for her to stop playing, but she did not. Instead, Jess kept playing back into the beginnings of our emergent composition. Outside, beyond the entrance of the tunnel, flowed Te Awa Tupua, its presence always there in everything we did.28 As I stood in the tunnel, I could smell the mixture of boiled linseed oil and kōkōwai (red ochre)29 that had been used to varnish my pūtōrino. I started to exhale gently through the pūtōrino. I could feel the warmth of my breath hitting my open hand, which I had placed close to, but not covering completely, its māngai. Beside me I could hear Jess playing, her sound being carried down the length of the tunnel towards the river.
The exponential influx of European settlers after the signing of the Treaty of Waitangi had a huge impact on Māori communities and their ways of life along the Whanganui River. New industries emerged all along the banks, producing wool and other items for trade, which were then taken by boat down to the burgeoning township of Whanganui before being sent around the country or overseas.30 The settler-colonial communities wanted the land, and eventually took it by force against Māori now framed as ‘rebels’ by the Colonial Government.31 By the 20th Century, the Whanganui River had become a tourist attraction. It became referred to as ‘Rhine of the Pacific’.32 Hatrick & Company Ltd. introduced coal-fired steamboats at this time, ferrying tourists from Whanganui up to Taumarunui and back.33 There was no regard for the ancient eel weirs that had been built along the river. These were removed to allow the steamboats to pass unimpeded. Whanganui Māori sought to take legal action, but this was dismissed by the courts. With the advent of hydro-electric power, the Tongariro Power Scheme (now Genesis Energy) was constructed in 1983. In the process, the matapuna, or headwaters of several rivers in the Whanganui Catchment, such as the Whakapapa River and the Whanganui River, were diverted, altering the rivers’ lifeways’.34
For the settlers, the Whanganui River was regarded as a resource to be owned, managed, and exploited at the expense of its own health and wellbeing. The river in this way was seen as an object by the state rather than a subject with its own mauri (life-force, vital essence) and wairua (spirit, soul) that was inextricably bound to the mauri and wairua of its people. The fragmentation of the land into resources that were owned through European law muted the indivisible interplay and interactional forces of a Māori relational ontology. Whanganui Māori regard the Whanganui River was not just a body of water that flowed from the mountains to sea, but as their ancestor, Te Awa Tupua, ‘the source of ora (life, health and well-being), a living whole that runs from the mountains to the sea, made up of many tributaries and binding its people together in a reciprocal relationship with Te Awa Tupua, which is often expressed in the whakataukī (proverb or significant saying): ‘E rere kau mai te awa nui mai te Kāhui Maunga ki Tangaroa, ko au te awa, ko te awa ko au. The river flows from the mountain to the sea, I am the river, the river is me.’35 In 2017, Te Awa Tupua was granted legal personhood by the New Zealand Government, which gave the river the same legal rights as a human being.36
As we played, Jess and I moved about to see if we could catch each other’s echoes. Jess had turned to face the wall of the tunnel so as she could send her sound along its surface. I thought about taonga puoro and about all their different shapes and forms. I realised how many of the materials we played with had resonance chambers that amplified their voices enabling them to travel across distance, just like the bodies of cicadas and other insects.
Māori acknowledge the god of the winds, Tāwhirimātea, ‘the carrier of sound, providing the vehicle for communication’.37 It is he who provides ‘the pito mata or potential for a person to blow and therefore play the kōauau [or any other taonga puoro] through the air that we breathe along with the mauri or essence of a person’.38 Ngā taonga puoro rely on breath in order to sound: ‘a combining of two breaths, that of the instrument and that of the player’.39 Jess said to me once, ‘Breath is a two-way process like teaching and learning. When we talk about breath, we talk about puoro. And as words and their intentions are projected with breath, so too are sounds through taonga puoro’. Thinking about breath is another way to think about the embodied processes of coming-into-relationship that we activated that day.
When I started to play taonga puoro I began to remember things that my viola teachers had said to me over the many years of training in Aotearoa New Zealand and Norway before I abandoned my ambitions to make my life in an orchestra. I recalled expressions such as: ‘Always care for the beginning of your sound’. Or, ‘Once you have found your sound then add colour with vibrato, bow speed and bow pressure, not the other way around’. And ‘throw your ears out to the back of the room so you can listen back to how you sound in the space.’
Unlike the viola, learning to play taonga puoro was never an exercise of practiced mastery, but about forming a working relationship40 with each and every individual taonga puoro and, furthermore, learning about the instruments’ individual whakapapa and kōrero (associated stories),41 which pertain to particular places and tribes around the country.42 My friend and taonga puoro practitioner Ruby Solly (Kāi Tahu, Kāti Māmoe, and Waitaha) would say that ‘forming a relationship with taonga puoro is like any relationship in that it needs work. It is a level playing field. You don’t make all the decisions as the kōauau [or any other taonga puoro] play you.43 This way of composing with taonga puoro was integral to how I was beginning to think about what a sonorous ethics might be. I could not enforce my will upon the instruments, but instead had to let them guide the compositional process. ‘They will play when they want to play’, is what we would say in our community workshops in Whanganui—often in response to first time players who would express frustration at not being able to ‘get’ a sound. In other words, because taonga puoro are not just instruments in a European musical sense, but subjects themselves with their own sense of agency, liveliness, and vitality, then we have to respond accordingly, enabling them to sound their voices (or not, depending) as they do ours.
Jess knew about my background and would teasingly say to me, ‘there was no rehearsal when playing puoro, it just is puoro.’ Each time you play, something different is created. A ‘wrong’ note, for example, is not heard as a mistake as it might be to a ‘European music-trained ear’, but instead is celebrated as part of the composition.44
Jess once asked me about my viola playing and what my time at the music academies had been like. I told her how I used to practice alone for hours in the practice rooms with a metronome trying to master a sought-after sound and rhythm. When she heard this, she jokingly enquired whether I had a permanent click in my head because of the time I had spent learning to play with a machine.
When I listen to this recording, I can hear the raspy sound of my breath passing over the mouth of my wooden nguru. The acoustic characteristics of the tunnel gave me the confidence to try things out because it was forgiving. In other words, nothing we played ever really sounded ‘bad’ in the tunnel. But not all spaces were as acoustically or socially forgiving. Every time I picked up and played taonga puoro, I knew that it was never just about what I sounded like, but about how I participated with others in spaces that were specifically often troubled by settler colonial history and its enduring legacies, like the Royal Wanganui Opera House, another place where we once played together. But when we played taonga puoro into those spaces something more became tangibly possible—a dynamic intercultural and more-than-human relationship that in sounding out held our different lives and histories in a sonic space of resonance and mutuality—without silencing those troubling reverberating undercurrents. This is what I mean by sonorous ethics.
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The politics and ethics of participation

In theorising the place of time and relationship in his own audio-visual recordings, Steven Feld describes how he values them as ‘the audible trace of [his] presence’.45 He goes on to say that ‘the recordings are always an archive of [my] history of listening and of the story of listening that is being recorded’.46 My own sound-based research practice also deliberately and explicitly contain traces of my co-presence with participants who knew that I was in Whanganui as a researcher interested in sound worlds. This participation is what allows room for me as a player and as a theorist, not of Māori culture, but of shared practices of becoming with each other in resonance. In my own recordings, you often hear the sounds of others and me playing, or my breathing with others, or my talking to someone or fumbling about with the technology. In other words, what others listen to is already intercultural, affirmed, enlivened, and humming with emergent compositional potential.
Listening critically and playing creatively are two different modes of attuning. Especially at first. I remain unsure if it is possible to do both at once. It was only after we played together in the tunnel that I felt the amplification of the shadows of the settler colonial past and the importance of engaging my critical ear to how I ‘listened in’ to my own listening.47 As I have already stated, as a Tangata Tiriti researcher-musician I bring with me my own histories, prejudices, ethnocentrisms, and biases, as well as my skills and aspirations into a research space. Any socially mediated interaction I had in Aotearoa New Zealand was never—and never would be—politically neutral, and my actions always had the potential to cause unforeseen harm, despite my good intentions. This is the position from which I navigate always—both as a taonga puoro player and as an anthropologist. Because, for me now, these positions—the critical and the creative, the listening and the playing—cannot be separated.
Taking up this kind of relational positionality allows me to play with an attuned ear always to our complicated history in Aotearoa New Zealand whilst attempting to move beyond the defining boundaries imposed by a politics of representation and into spaces of co-creative collaboration. For what I have learned through my own taonga puoro practice, to play taonga puoro is to attune to the thick sonorous potential of a present that holds both past and future, and which unfolds breath by breath, sound by sound, in a shared attuning to each other and the worlds in, and through which, we played. These could be the sensually mediated forms for vital new sites of relational regard and mutuality, the grounds from which to identify and act on shared social and environmental concerns guided by the broader intergenerational coming into relationship with the spirit of Te Tiriti o Waitangi.
Popping or clicking was often how we finished playing together. There was something in the way the immediacy of these rhythms could softly shift our focus. I listened to the way we played rhythms with each other. I am drawn to the timbral differences between the pops and clicks we made which made me realise that a sonorous ethics was not just about holding space for the convergence of voices, but about an attuning to the vocality or specific qualities of the voices themselves.
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Towards a sonorous ethics

Pākehā are consistently called to account as they navigate their way in the Māori world. This is proper. As I constantly question my own continuing participation in this space, I am aware that I continually on the brink of imposition, or worse. I relied on Jess to teach me about where my voice could not go, and where my body, too, could never follow. For example, she reminded me that I could never step forward alone with taonga puoro into Māori kaupapa;48 and that I always needed to work with and be alongside someone who is Tangata Whenua,49 in oder to keep myself and others culturally safe.50
It is not my place to write about Māori culture, per se. I may, however, write about my experiences of being in the space in-between Māori culture and my own cultural spheres. Māori have a term for this— tūrangawaewae. This space can be seen as place of standing in and of itself. This tūrangawaewae of being in the space in-between is a position that I can occupy as a Pākehā musician-researcher who knows the privilege of working with taonga puoro will always ever be a space of continuous negotiation.51 My practice of attunement as a critical-creative attuned researcher-musician has enabled me to attend to this co-creative way of composing as a method of coming to knowing if, when, and how to add my own voice.
The many months that I spent playing with Jess taught me to listen creatively for the moments where I could feel free to play and to move into our shared acoustic space, learning when and how to add my own voice which was always active and never passive. When I spoke with her about how we approached different spaces together as a pair within our group Awa Puoro, she said that ‘we could prepare as much as we liked and yet there would come a time when the space itself would take over’. We had to attune differently in every place we played. We acknowledged and honoured the gods and the ancestors and did so through appropriate tikanga52 and karakia.53 This was important to do to safely open and close these sacred sound spaces.
Instead of listening critically to my own sound with my classical music-trained ears and associated approaches and behaviours, playing with Jess meant that I had to learn to listen to and take seriously, the resonant histories that reverberated and resonated around me in the Durie Hill tunnel, itself an infrastructure of settler-colonial endeavours. To foreground such experiences of participating in sounding with complex, wounded, defiant, inviting, and intermingling worlds and histories is to not sidestep the work of attuning to the ongoing wounds of colonialism. Rather, the practices of listening and playing taonga puoro together opened up possibilities for critical thinking—not the other way around.
The challenge and opportunity for me as a classically trained musician-researcher in this space has been not about listening to try to conjure an Indigenous listening modality, but instead by finding my own way towards ‘self-unsettlement’ following Robinson54 through my own attuning to the world and the critical and creative adjusting of my own positioning with taonga puoro and the ancient voices until recently suppressed through colonisation. When Jess and I played, our breath mingled, separate yet together at the same time. Our voices colluded and collided in affective reciprocity along with other entities found in and amplified by the Durie Hill tunnel with its own sense of agency and vivid reverberance. The residue of the thickened sound worlds that we had created together deep underground felt like they hung in the atmosphere for a moment before fading. These opportunities for the sharing, creating, and caring for one another have proven rich, rewarding, and worthwhile, certainly for me and, as Jess has told me many times, for her.
The recordings from these moments of playing together are our relationship heard and seen.55 Offered up in the context of this article, they invite others to appreciate the degree to which own ‘aesthetically embedded’56 modes of coming to knowledge are contingent upon our relationship in action. The sonorous ethics that taonga puoro has enabled me to cultivate do not deny colonial histories of violence nor the gods and their enduringly resonant voices. It takes seriously the complexities inherent within these moments of human and more-than-human agents playing together in the shadows of colonialism and the generative potential of Te Tiriti o Waitangi. Jess invited and enabled me to attune and develop my own ‘critical listening positionality’,57 but also to explore the possibilities of an expanded ‘critical-creative listening positionality’. I could only do this by learning to join in. For it is only in these moments of sharing worlds creatively with Jess and others that I felt I could begin to fully question what was at stake as we all played together and sounded out in our shared world of fragility 
and force.
Jess and I enjoyed playing in the The Durie Hill tunnel.

It became one of our favourite places to play together in Whanganui.

We sometimes also filmed there.

What you are about to hear and see is the last time we played together.
To further explore this research and its motivations visit the Wiley TAJA platform to read the AUTHOR’S COMMENTARY.
Acknowledgements
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