Introduction: Tīvaevae: Connection, collaboration, and new directions in Cook Islands research

It may be surprising to some that this is the first publication to collect reflections on the use of the Tīvaevae in scholarly discourse. Over the last decade, Cook Islands scholarship has grown significantly in volume and many of the graduate research theses and innovative policy frameworks produced over this time have invoked the stitched quilt as a way of Pacific Dynamics 9 Special Issue 2025 1000 conceptualising the relational threads that make up a Cook Islands imaginary. During this time, the Cook Islands world has experienced changes wrought by climate change, neocolonialism, and the transnationalism of its peoples and in this milieu, researchers have turned toward the cultural practices of ancestors to determine modes of thinking that can help make meaning of our relationships with one another as these forces reshape our lives. As a practice and a material object of the Cook Islands and the Eastern Pacific, the tīvaivai is quite simply iconic. Stunning in size, complexity, and aesthetic, the endurance of tīvaivai as a key part of the Cook Islands’ material culture has been driven by its ability to hold a mnemonic power that affirms ꞌakapapaꞌanga for each of us, created through the gathering of tāꞌunga tīvaivai and the stitching of aroꞌa into each piece of fabric that makes up the whole. There is an irony, then, in the predictable allure that the tīvaivai has had for critical minds over the last (almost) two decades, and the absence of any work that has attempted to cohere what those minds have produced.