The Healer’s Wound: A Queer Theirstory of Polynesia (Second Edition) is an artists’ book, a poet’s collage, based on years of archival research by Sāmoan fa'afafine artist and poet Dan Taulapapa McMullin. Originally published in 2022, this second edition re-imagines much of the material presented by the first edition, and expands with a new collection of poems punctuating the existing work. The half-size, coil-bound format invites readers to treat the publication less as a finished project and more as a journal. The work of healing is ongoing.

The healer’s wound is in reference to the conflict between colonialism and indigenous queer cultures of Polynesia, through texts and images from and of the peoples of the archipelagoes of the South Pacific Islands, extending from the northeast in Hawaiʻi to the southwest in Aotearoa, including Sāmoa, Manu'a, Tonga, Viti, Tahiti, Rarotonga, Rapanui and others. Archival trauma informs Dan’s search for connection to ancestral queer cultures of healing, the arts and the sciences, and political and communal relationships among genders, elites, commons, generations, all beings and the environment. -Publisher