‘THIS WHOLE PLACE IS A FISH’: Refuse, refuge and entangled subjectivities of kai and consumption in a Moeraki midden

This article draws on the writings of Keri Hulme to sketch the Moeraki middens as sites attentive to radical kinships realized by refuse and surplus, kai (food) and kin-making. Middens are dumping grounds filled with shells, bones, tools and other ‘rubbish’. Much has been written about middens in the context of archaeological and anthropological science, which frame them as repositories of dead matter that lend insights into the records of plant and animal domestication and consumption by human communities. I draw upon Hulme’s autobiographical and fiction writing to consider, instead, middens as sites where environmental justice, material surplus and nonhuman subjectivities converge with principles of whakapapa (genealogy), mahika kai (the gathering and preparation of food resources) and kaihaukai (the sharing of a meal), offering insights into human and other-than-human relationalities that disclose principles of inclusion and care in moments of environmental precarity. Hulme traced her whanau’s (family’s) whakapapa to Moeraki; within her writing, the middens of Moeraki become lively spacetimes where intimacies emerge within rubbish piles filled with shells and bones and stones, to ends and by means that account for intergenerational and more-human-human justice requirements. Ultimately, this article will foreground mātauranga Māori (Māori knowledge) in positioning the midden as a place where surplus and refuse compel us to ask how material conditions and practices of care may foster alliances with both living and no-longer-living beings to imagine more habitable, sustainable and compassion-oriented worlds.