ABSTRACT This article engages with the conjunctures between migration and religion by focusing on the celebration of Papua New Guinea's ‘National Patron Saint’, the Blessed Peter To Rot, in the Australian diaspora. Both in Sydney and Brisbane, Catholic Papua New Guinea (PNG) migrants have been ‘relocating’ PNG shrines, regalia, relics and ritual celebrations to Australia to celebrate their Blessed Peter To Rot. As shown, by relocating spiritual material and performing pilgrimages, migrants create belonging and new communities, but they also mobilize To Rot's divine presence and intervention in the diaspora. This article shows how Australian Peter To Rot chapels have become potent sites for the expression of PNG identity and nationalism, as well as for moral intervention in the diaspora.
This article examines an Indigenous-led approach to conservation developed through more than 17 years of collaboration between Ailan Awareness, a community-based organization in New Ireland, Papua New Guinea, and an anthropologist working in the region. Our partnership is grounded in kinship, reciprocity, and long-term accountability, and it demonstrates how conservation can be reimagined as an Indigenous resurgence practice rather than an externally imposed model. Drawing on ritual traditions such as Vala, which integrates socio-spiritual authority with ecological restoration, and institutions such as the Ranguva Solwara Skul, which fosters intergenerational knowledge transmission, we show how biocultural diversity is enacted as both a political claim and an ecological necessity. Ethnographic, ecological, and archival research conducted in partnership with local communities reveals that conservation here is inseparable from Indigenous sovereignty, spiritual obligation, and cultural revitalization. We argue that these efforts constitute biocultural sovereignty: a mode of environmental governance that centres customary law, ancestral ties, and collective decision-making. By situating conservation within the lived moral fabric of kinship and community life, our work challenges dominant conservation paradigms and offers pathways for decolonial, place-based environmental practice. Ultimately, we show that conservation grounded in kinship and love sustains both ecological and cultural futures.
