‘Why haven’t you known?’

Abstract

This article critically examines the character and extent of transoceanic solidarity in feminist anti-nuclear activism. Drawing on archival research into a British-based solidarity network, Women Working for a Nuclear Free and Independent Pacific (WWNFIP), the article centralises the rhetorical question ‘Why Haven’t You Known?’ demanded by Māori activist Titewhai Harawira of her British audience in 1986, and extends it to contemporary scholars of feminist anti-nuclear activism. The article makes three main empirical claims. First, the WWNFIP archive pushes Indigenous women from across the Pacific into the limelight as experts and teachers, with British-based counterparts playing a supportive role. Second, the archive foregrounds Indigenous knowledge claims about nuclear colonialism and correspondingly represents decolonisation as essential to nuclear abolition. Thirdly, solidarity is shaped in ambivalent ways by these knowledge claims, which simultaneously evoke sisterly closeness and the discomfort of potential white allies. Overall, WWNFIP’s relatively successful construction of transoceanic solidarity, notwithstanding some ambiguities and limitations, points to the crucial relationship between knowledge and solidarity. The case study not only offers some valuable lessons for contemporary efforts to forge anti-nuclear solidarities but also disrupts dominant accounts of feminist anti-nuclear activism, past and present.