Many Nights

Abstract

This essay builds on environmental humanistic scholarship about the night in a study of arts associated with the Aoraki Mackenzie International Dark Sky Reserve, a lighting-regulated locale in Aotearoa / New Zealand, that is part of an international network of places intended to protect the night sky. Chris Murphy’s time lapse, South Celestial Pole from Mt John (2016), shot in Aoraki Mackenzie International Dark Sky Reserve, hastens time and utilizes a star tracker so that the city and lake of Takapō turn sideways against stars. The film connects relative darkness and highly visible celestial phenomena to startling perceptual change. The film is less evocative of how darkness and other nocturnal processes are interwoven with colonial histories and interconnected socio-environmental injustices. Robert Sullivan, a poet whose ancestral lands include the Aoraki Mackenzie International Dark Sky Reserve, is attentive to such concerns in the collection Star Waka (1999). Sullivan uses karakia (chants, incantation) to frame how stars and darkness nurture Māori practices like navigation but also to evoke precariousness woven into the night, from colonial astronomy to socially uneven policing and lighting. This essay, then, argues for critical caution regarding arts and narratives that only emphasize night’s wondrous qualities and its endangerment. Rather than framing night simply as a good phase to be protected, we might participate in night by addressing both the injustices and the varied dreams and struggles that it bears.