Voyages ‘Across the Board’: A game of postcolonial chess

Abstract

Abstract ‘Across the Board’ is a project initiated by the author, which explores diaspora and migration, bringing together representations of ancestors to a chessboard, which is used as a metaphor for the postcolonial relationship between Maori and Pakeha in Aotearoa New Zealand. Sir Peter Buck, renowned Maori anthropologist, once described his forebears as the ‘Vikings of the Sunrise’. Why? Because his ancestors were part of a wave of remarkable seaborne migration that carried people from their origins to the margins of human imagination and endurance – to the land where the sun rises first in the world. But the word Viking communicated more than just sea travel or migration, it evoked the spirit of a people whose warrior history was conveyed orally in songs, in eddic and skaldic poetry, in myths and legends, and in its amazing tradition of ivory, stone and wood carving. In 1831, Viking chess pieces were discovered on the Isle of Lewis in the Outer Hebrides. It is believed that the pieces were made in a workshop in Norway in the mid-twelfth century. Their role as a carrier of culture and memory remains. By reflecting on research and the practice of a twenty-first century bone workshop to make a new chess set inspired by the Lewis pieces, this article explores these ideas in relation to biculturalism in New Zealand. It also examines the conceptual underpinnings of a project that uses the game of chess as a metaphor to consider the impact of diaspora in New Zealand.