Cassandra Barnett is a māmā and writer of Māori (Raukawa), Irish (Darragh/McGuire), Scottish (Buchanan) and English (Cornish) descent. Her son is also Rwandan (Cyangugu). Together, they traverse the borders between indigeneity and diaspora, whiteness, brownness and blackness, singularity and multiplicity, hau kainga and waewae tapu, home and exile, coloniser and colonised.
Cassandra has published her written work internationally in academic books and journals, literary journals and anthologies, art books and ephemera and more. She has co-edited anthologies including a collection of whenua stories and pūrākau for her hapū, compiled through a series of whānau-led hīkoi and wānanga. She also maintains an independent publishing practice spanning zines, single-print handmade books, and a range of small presses both individual and collective (Taraheke, Anemone, Repo Press). These provide an outlet for a myriad of otherwise unpublished texts, paintings, collages and other outpourings, and provide a swifter path to activation when things need activating. They also join a powerful whakapapa (genealogy) of zines for mana motuhake and indigenous resistance in Aotearoa, tracing back to Te Hōkioi (the first Māori owned printing press and newsletter, c.1858). In addition to writing and publishing Cassandra exhibits visual poetry and audiovisual artworks, runs writing and zinemaking workshops, and teaches kids and grownups about the Māori histories, ecologies, art and taonga of the Waikato region.
Life and ever-intensifying global politics keep her in the leaks and abysses, slippages and seepages, faux pas and creative eruptions of the contact zone. So she writes this experience, haphazardly, across essays, fiction and poetry. Landback is a thread. Water is a thread. Reo learning and tikanga learning are threads. Creolisation and transgression and boundless transformation are threads. Love is a thread. Decolonisation and deterritorialisation (despite everything) are threads. Walking backwards into the future, holding hands with ancestors, is a very long and bright thread. Futurism is a thread. So is darkness, so is absurdity. This weave is a work in progress. Her hunch says that healing lies in paradox and not-knowing, and in tending to the needs of the earth. Abstract tendencies remain. She is honing her purpose.