Contemporary Pacific Research Articles

A Contemporary Pacific Village: A Proposal

This paper proposes a contemporary Pacific village as a response to the pressing housing issues of Pacific communities in Aotearoa New Zealand. More specifically, the proposal explores this at the scale of a neighbourhood. Three branches are considered in the process of designing such a village: Pacific concepts of tā–vā; Pacific churches as housing partners; and Indigenous partnerships with Māori. These are imagined through hyper-local processes. The proposal is not conceived to be applied directly to other contexts in the South Pacific region. However, the proposal could become a point of reference to where other localities across the South Pacific can begin to shift and change their own direct built environments.

Contributors’ Notes

Contributors’ Notes

ARTventures: Art and Life in the Contemporary Pacific

The unpublished work ARTventures: Art and Life in the Contemporary Pacific is a literary memoir recounting Susan Cochrane’s unorthodox life as a roaming curator of contemporary Pacific art. The narrative intertwines vignettes of the author’s personal life with her experiences as a “poken” (slang  for English-speaking foreigner) in New Caledonia; on fieldwork trips collecting art in remote areas of Papua New Guinea, the Solomon Islands, and Vanuatu; and encountering Māori and Pasifika artists in Aotearoa New Zealand, and Aboriginal Taiwanese in Taiwan. The text is subtly layered with insights into the attitudes and operations of the art world and strategies to establish Indigenous art in its own right.

Secession, self-determination and territorial disagreements: Sovereignty claims in the contemporary South Pacific

AbstractThis article maps the legally varied sovereignty claims in the contemporary South Pacific; whether secessionist, self-determination based, or consisting of territorial disputes or lesser disagreements. The analysis reveals that Pacific practice in this domain is consistent with general international law; that despite any fractures at the domestic level, relations between the states and territories of the region is peaceful, that their shared values have instead given rise to innovative solutions to legal problems concerning territory, either through the leveraging of regional institutions – so vital to the region’s identity – to pursue claims against metropolitan powers, or through innovative arrangements to alleviate territorial problems left by colonial powers. Indeed, the region is replete with innovative legal solutions based on shared values and peaceful international relations. As such, Pacific practice and engagement with international law can provide a blueprint for others around the globe.

Mobilities of Return: Pacific Perspectives ed. by John Taylor and Helen Lee

Reviewed by: Mobilities of Return: Pacific Perspectives ed. by John Taylor and Helen Lee John Connell Mobilities of Return: Pacific Perspectives, edited by John Taylor and Helen Lee. Canberra: ANU Press, 2017. isbn paper: 978-1-76046-167-6, iii + 215 pages. Paper, us $45.00. In this century, migration and mobility in the Pacific region have involved more people and have become ever more complex. As demonstrated in Mobilities of Return, mobility has emerged not just as "a defining paradigm" of the humanities (1), but as a means whereby many Islanders shape and reshape their destinies, some much as they have always done and some in quite new forms. This book focuses on one particular strand: the "return" of people "back" to places that are designated, however ambiguously or ambivalently, as "home." Just as return is eclectic, so too is this book, reflecting the range of possibilities in terms of duration, distance, intentions, and outcomes but centering on the cultural significance of return and what that implies and means for identities. It is then a collection of valuable vignettes—vastly different by age, gender, and place and by authorial intent. With a cast of anthropologists, the perspectives are social and cultural; economics and the world of mirab are dismissed by page three in favor of Epeli Hau'ofa's cultural "sea of islands" (see "Our Sea of Islands" in The Contemporary Pacific 6 [1]: 148–161). Yet although the opening chapter refers to the familiar tropes of roots and routes, none of the chapters reflect on the earlier work of Murray Chapman and Joel Bonnemaison and other pioneers who offered valuable reflections on Indigenous agency and [End Page 608] whose shadows linger over several chapters. The book offers a generous definition of the Pacific and a range of rationales for and destinations of return—a diffuseness that makes for uneasy comparisons. From an Indigenous group in Taiwan and hiv-positive women in West Papua to the much smaller islands of Rotuma and Banaba, diversity reigns. Some are scarcely returning; Tongan youth have been forced to return from Australia and Aotearoa/New Zealand to home-lands they have never seen, a somewhat painful rite of passage. Many returnees are "next generation," born beyond their ancestral homes. Some return is jubilant, rather more is reluctant, and emotions are ubiquitously challenged. Thorgeir Kolshus focuses on the ambiguities of "urban castaways" from the small northern Vanuatu island of Mota and points to the diversity of experiences of return and thus of what can be regarded as successes and failures by any mode of accounting. Only Kolshus points to the role of material hardship (but alongside fear of sorcery) in alien places and the need to return to the security of home, however fraught with its own divisions, rivalries, and tensions it may be. Unlike almost every other group in the book, Mota islanders have come to "the realisation that the world outside their small island home has little to offer them" (10), and yet, as Kolshus makes clear, they also realize that the maintenance of footholds elsewhere is crucial to face the uncertainties of the future. Even they, who more than most have experienced the frustrations of other places, accept the necessity of maintaining some form of dispersed and diffused livelihoods. At the other end of an arbitrary scale, Kirsten McGavin recounts the almost impossible task of long-term métis Australian residents seeking to connect with homelands they have rarely seen, never quite at home and anguishing over whether identity is about being or doing. Wolfgang Kempf offers a fascinating account of the island of Banaba, whose population was forcibly removed to Fiji seventy years ago to make way for mining. Some of these Banabans and their descendants have moved back to Kiribati, which now includes the culturally and geographically distinct Banaba as an outlier. They are thus spread across Kiribati, Fiji, and beyond, within "a transnational space of multiple belongings" (15), following decades of contemplating and legislating for place and identity. Many now see Rabi (the Fijian island to which they were uprooted and resettled in the 1940s) as home. Few have even seen Banaba. Frustratingly, the few hundred in the...

About the Artist: Jasmine Togo-Brisby

About the Artist:Jasmine Togo-Brisby Katerina Teaiwa Jasmine Togo-Brisby is a fourth-generation Australian South Sea Islander with roots in Ambae and Santo, Vanuatu, and now based in Wellington, Aotearoa/New Zealand. Her practice is multidisciplinary, including painting, early photographic techniques, and sculpture, and her research examines the historical practice of blackbirding, a euphemism for the Pacific slave trade, in which over sixty thousand Islanders were taken to work on Australian sugarcane plantations between 1847 and 1903. This labor trade has a contemporary legacy, continuing to impact those who trace their roots to Aotearoa/New Zealand and Australia through the South Sea Islander and other slave diasporas. Togo-Brisby, whose great-great-grandparents were taken from a beach in Vanuatu in 1899 and put to work as house slaves for the Sydney-based Wunderlich family, is one of the few Pacific artists exploring cultural memory and shared histories of plantation colonization and displacement across the Pacific. Click for larger view View full resolution Photo by Nadai Wilson Ships, displacements, arrivals, and belonging are regular themes in Togo-Brisby's powerful works. She is deeply inspired by her ancestors' difficult stories and experiences, as well as by what she needs to share with her daughter, who features in her artworks. In a 2020 interview for the New Zealand Maritime Museum, titled "Unfurling Tākiri with Jasmine Togo-Brisby," she spoke on the importance of identity within a community still marginalized in mainstream Australia: "What does it mean to be South Sea for me? Like, it's everything, you know. It's my culture. It's my people. It's why I exist." Jasmine Togo-Brisby is the first artist of Australian South Sea Islander heritage to be featured in The Contemporary Pacific, and we hope that awareness and inclusion of Australian South Sea Islanders as an integral part of Australian and Pacific histories and families will continue to gain attention and establish the recognition and justice these communities deserve. [End Page vii] Click for larger view View full resolution Bitter Sweet, by Jasmine Togo-Brisby, 2015. Unrefined sugar and resin, dimensions variable; installation 2,000 x 2,000 x 1,200 mm. Photo by Shaun Waugh. Racial segregation was heavily enforced in Australia throughout the nineteenth and much of the twentieth century. Respectful burial of non-white people within cemeteries was often difficult to facilitate, and many plantation owners opted to dig large burial pits on the outskirts of their plantations. Today, mass unmarked graves of South Sea Islanders remain scattered across plantations throughout Queensland and northern New South Wales. Often dug up by accident, each discovery reopens wounds from a past that most Australians would rather forget. This work exists as a memorial to those who did not survive the journey on slave ships, to those who passed away through lack of immunity to Western diseases, and to those who endured the toil and burden of hard labor only to be left out of Australian history books. [End Page viii] Click for larger view View full resolution Into Something Else, by Jasmine Togo-Brisby, 2021. Crow feathers and mixed media, diameter 2,500 mm. Photo by Bo Wong. South Sea Islander erasure was initially pathed through mass deportations (the largest in Australian history), and those remaining were forced by governmental structures to identify their South Sea bodies as Indigenous Australian, a terrain of "Blak" political struggle that continues to reinforce South Sea placelessness today. Into Something Else interrogates this spatial dilemma and acts as a physical manifestation of the Pacific slave diaspora—exploring the complexities of contemporary South Sea Islander identity. The black crow is often claimed by our South Sea community and used in unity as a symbol of the blackbirding trade and of our collective memory and cultural identity. My practice takes shape using reoccurring motifs, and in this piece, I claim crow products as my own South Sea material culture. The installation moves both backward and forward in time, refusing to sit in either the past or the future, while offering itself as a site of South Sea possibility. [End Page ix] Click for larger view View full resolution Post-Plantation, by...

A Power in the World: The Hawaiian Kingdom in Oceania by Lorenz Gonschor

Reviewed by: A Power in the World: The Hawaiian Kingdom in Oceania by Lorenz Gonschor Kealani Cook A Power in the World: The Hawaiian Kingdom in Oceania, by Lorenz Gonschor. Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2019. isbn hardback: 9780824880019; isbn paper: 9780824888299, xiv+235 pages, maps, tables, photographs, glossary, notes, references, and index. Hard-back, us$68.00; paper, us$28.00. Lorenz Gonschor’s A Power in the World: The Hawaiian Kingdom in Oceania is a well-researched addition to the growing body of work reexamining how Hawaiians, and in this case the Hawaiian Kingdom, shaped and reshaped their relationships with nations and peoples beyond Hawai‘i. Merging the fields of political science and history, Gonschor argues, convincingly, that the Kingdom of Hawai‘i played a pivotal role in shaping Oceanic politics in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Chapter 1 examines the development of the Hawaiian constitutional monarchy as a model for a hybrid government recognized by the great powers of the day. Chapters 2, 3, and 4 explore Hawaiian thought and action related to diplomacy in the Pacific, specifically the promotion of the Hawaiian model by kingdom diplomat Charles St Julian and, later, by King David Kalākaua and his government. Chapters 5 and 6 investigate the far-reaching impact of the Hawaiian model in both the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Gonschor’s research, contained within an attractive volume and complemented by a number of helpful tables and maps, draws on a diverse set of sources, threading together Hawaiian- and Tongan-language newspapers, government archives and [End Page 273] records from across Oceania, and a variety of published and archival materials from around the world. While elements of this research have been covered before, no other scholar has brought together such a wide range of materials or crafted anything approaching such a thorough examination of the kingdom’s impact on Oceanic governance. Gonschor brings considerable nuance to our understanding of ties between different parts of Oceania. More importantly, he adds considerable weight to the argument that these connections must be assigned more significance when looking at the past, present, and future of individual Oceanic peoples and of the region as a whole. Gonschor argues convincingly that the kingdom not only proved, to Islanders and outsiders alike, that a hybrid government could work but also succeeded in using that government to shield itself against the colonial aggression being suffered across the Pacific. Furthermore, the kingdom and its representatives actively promoted this model in an effort to stave off such aggressions against its neighboring states and fellow Oceanic peoples and to make the kingdom a political power in the region and, arguably, the world. While Gonschor does a solid job of analyzing the perspectives and actions of the kingdom’s government and its representatives, his final two chapters on the kingdom’s regional impact stand out as particularly engaging. Gonschor carefully traces the direct and differing impacts of the Hawaiian model in Sāmoa, Fiji, and especially Tonga. He also explores the importance of the Hawaiian kingdom in promoting pan-Oceanic institutions and, to a certain degree, sentiments in the more recent past. As one might imagine, this includes a discussion of Epeli Hau‘ofa’s seminal 1994 essay “Our Sea of Islands” and the influence of Hawai‘i on his thinking about Oceania (see The Contemporary Pacific 6 (1): 148–161). It also includes consideration of contemporary organizations, such as the Polynesian Leaders Group, that look to the pan-Oceanic elements of Kalākaua’s reign as precedent for their own work. Gonschor’s work also touches on the need to reevaluate the role of non-ethnic Hawaiians in Hawaiian history, particularly those working for and with allegiance to the kingdom government. Once given outsized importance by historians with little faith in Islanders’ ability to shape their own history, many of these individuals fell to the historical wayside as a new generation of historians set out to re-center Islanders in Island histories. As Gonschor notes, in the process, some historians, including myself, have neglected prominent actors in the history we write. While the resolution of this issue will require a broader discussion far beyond the scope of...

Pacific Women in Politics: Gender Quota Campaigns in the Pacific Islands by Kerryn Baker

Reviewed by: Pacific Women in Politics: Gender Quota Campaigns in the Pacific Islands by Kerryn Baker Monique Mironesco Pacific Women in Politics: Gender Quota Campaigns in the Pacific Islands, by Kerryn Baker. Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2019. isbn hardback: 9780824872595, 212 pages, illustrations, references, and index. Hardback, us$68.00. The Pacific Islands context is rife with opportunities for analysis of women’s participation in contemporary politics. Kerryn Baker’s Pacific Women in Politics: Gender Quota Campaigns in the Pacific Islands, the latest addition to the University of Hawai‘i Press’s Topics in the Contemporary Pacific Series, edited by Brij Lal and Jack Corbett, makes an important contribution in this area through an exploration of the diversity of recent gender quota campaigns in Sāmoa, Papua New Guinea, Bougainville, and France’s Pacific territories. As noted by the editors, Baker offers a theoretical approach to exploring the merits of the different gender quota campaigns and a “how-to” overview of the processes that brought the campaigns to fruition (viii). Using interviews with campaign participants, Baker outlines the paths followed in each setting, participants’ varying definitions of “success,” and the distinctive outcomes of each. Significantly, she brings gender quota literature into conversation with the Pacific Islands context. Baker also successfully examines the colonial legacies of these four geographic spaces in terms of traditional gender roles and cultural norms in order to argue for increased women’s participation in the political sphere. That said, the book’s methods and data section is lacking, and the author does not sufficiently situate herself in relation to her interviewees. While the depth and breadth of the interviews are significant, the absence of analysis of the researcher’s positionality is problematic. The book’s central chapters consider the geographical and political contexts in which, and processes by which, each gender quota campaign was organized and, where successful, implemented, with one chapter devoted to each. Chapter 2 examines the path toward and successful implementation of Sāmoa’s parliamentary gender quota campaign, which called for 10 percent of seats to be reserved for women prior to the 2016 election. Baker begins the chapter by analyzing historical changes to the fa‘amatai system, the extended family unit headed by a chosen matai (chief or titleholder), explaining that women’s complementary gender roles and influence within Sāmoa’s feagaiga (sacred covenant) were diminished as a result of colonial and missionary influences (31). She argues that women’s lack of participation in contemporary Samoan politics can be attributed to the matai title system and the notion that women are more risk averse than men when it comes to seeking public office (34). Sāmoa’s parliamentary gender quota campaign sought to address this disparity, and it received a boost when it gained the support of Prime Minister Tuila‘epa in 2011. The varying involvement of international nongovernmental organizations is a running theme in all four case studies. In Sāmoa, those who opposed the gender quota campaign argued that outside involvement evoked colonial hegemony and that anything supported by international nongovernmental organizations [End Page 287] should be avoided. Ultimately, Baker argues that political stability in Sāmoa resulting from the prime minister’s leadership was instrumental to the gender quota system’s passing. Chapter 3 is distinguished from the other chapters by its focus on Papua New Guinea’s “unsuccessful” gender quota campaigns for nominated and reserved legislative seats. Contemporary Papua New Guinean culture ascribes gender norms that perpetuate male-dominated public political participation (64). Notably, opposition to the gender quota campaign painted women’s political participation as promulgated by urban, elite, educated women—a demographic sometimes portrayed as less culturally “authentic” than rural women and as promoting a Western approach to women’s political participation. Although the gender quota campaign prior to the 2012 general election was not ultimately successful (it was not adopted), Baker demonstrates that the political actors she interviewed did not all characterize the campaign as a failure. Rather, they found success in women’s overall increased participation in Papua New Guinea’s national political decision-making process as a result of the campaign. Chapter 4 situates Bougainville’s gender quota campaign...

About the Artist: Lisa Hilli

About the Artist: Lisa Hilli Katerina Teaiwa Born in Rabaul, Papua New Guinea (PNG), and living in Narrm/Melbourne, Australia, Lisa Hilli is a contemporary artist with lineages from PNG (Tolai/Gunantuna), Finland, England, and South Africa. Her work highlights the in/visibility of Black and Melanesian women’s bodies through themes of landscape, history, and archival research, which she explores through photography, video, textiles, and installation. Her major works have culminated in touring exhibitions, including Trade & Transformations (2018), Social Conditioner (2015–2016), Vunatarai Armour & Midi (2015–2016), and Just Like Home (2010–2013), while others have been featured at galleries and events in Australia, Belgium, and the Netherlands. Hilli holds an MFA from RMIT University and is currently an experience developer for Te Pasifika Gallery at Melbourne Museum. She has been an artist in residence at institutions in PNG, Australia, and Finland, she worked with Pacific communities in Australia and Solomon Islands to create short films for the eleventh Festival of Pacific Arts (2014), and she cofounded the Pacific Women’s Weaving Circle and the Contemporary Pacific Arts Festival (Footscray Community Arts Centre, 2013–2015). Click for larger view View full resolution Photo by Atong Atem As Hilli discussed on The Art Show with Namila Benson regarding her three-video animated work Afrophobia, her experiences as a Black woman have deeply shaped her creativity. For instance, on the politics of Black womanhood and afro-textured hair, she explained, “Hair is such a key identifying feature of who I am. . . . It’s a powerful marker on my body. . . . I’m standing in my strength and being proud of who I am, and it took me a long time to get there. It’s something that’s used as a significant tool of political movements . . . that definitely unites Black people across the world” (abc Radio National, 10 June 2020). The art featured in this issue can be viewed in full color in the online versions. [End Page vii] Click for larger view View full resolution Damien Kereku, Vunalagir Vunatarai, Tolai People, Wearing Midi, by Lisa Hilli, 2015. Returning the midi to the Tolai male body helped me understand its historical and contemporary significance to Tolai people today. Through remaking a midi, I learned the power of embodied and ancestral knowledge. This is the first midi to be made in over a hundred years. Click for larger view View full resolution In a Bind, by Lisa Hilli, 2015. Pigment print on cotton rag; 76 cm x 51.5 cm. Frustrated by museum displays of fractured, decontextualized, and disembodied Melanesian cultures, I challenge the viewer to contemplate the tensions between a perceived artifact and the fact of my body. Through this impractical mask and while standing on my matrilineal lands, I reduce my body to hair texture and skin tone to signifythe historical and contemporary legacies of derogatory labels and geographical terminologies based on Melanesian and Papua Niugini peoples’ physicality. Click for larger view View full resolution Raim Wearing Vunatarai (Matrilineal) Armour, by Lisa Hilli, 2015. Cotton, cardboard, digital photographs on paper; diameter 46 cm. Vunatarai (Matrilineal) Armour draws on matrilineal strength and Tolai knowledge systems. I center and reinsert my vunatarai (clan) totem— Makurategete (cordyline and croton plants)—onto paper tags usually attached to museum artifacts that are generally devoid of cultural makers’ identities. Stitched onto red cloth, the circular and repetitive design feminizes the midi, a historical Tolai male body adornment. This work is worn by my mother, Raim. Click for larger view View full resolution Sisterhood Lifeline, by Lisa Hilli, 2018. Photo commissioned for the exhibition The Commute, Institute of Modern Art, Brisbane, Australia. Vinyl wall mural; dimensions variable. A creative response to a personal experience of institutional racism, Sisterhood Lifeline celebrates and honors the sacred space that Black women and nonbinary people hold for each other through vulnerability and strength. This photographic work unapologetically affirms the bodies that are familiar to me and serves as a call for all people of color to boldly take up space when working in cultural institutions to bring about change. Click for larger view View full resolution Social Conditioner series, by Lisa Hilli, 2016. From left to right: Me...

How (not) to Globalize Oceania: Ecology and Politics in Contemporary Pacific Island Performance Arts

Answering the call for a new ecological democracy, representational and performative initiatives by Oceanian writers and spoken-word artists, dancers, choreographers, and filmmakers render the conditions of life in the contemporary Pacific visible globally and counter the threat of disappearance posed by both global warming and a global economy. Acting in concert and insisting on the indivisibility of people and the land, their performative actions exemplify an “ecology of practices.”

Walking backwards into the future: Indigenous wisdom within design education

This research parallels Tongan academic Hūfanga ‘Okusitino Māhina’s assertions in the 1994 Contemporary Pacific article Our Sea of Islands, that ‘People are thought to walk forward into the past and walk backward into the future, both taking place in the present, where the past and the future are constantly mediated in the ever-transforming present’ alongside those of Professor Terry Irwin and fellow Transition Designers in which they discuss the use of Indigenous Wisdom to enable designing for the Long Now as defined by Brand in his 1999 book The Clock for the Long Now: Time and Responsibility. In the 2015 Transition Design Monograph Irwin asserts that, ‘Transition Design draws on knowledge and wisdom from the past to conceive solutions in the present with future generations in mind’. This paper draws on the pre-industrial wisdom of indigenous knowledge, specifically that of the Pacific regions, Moana, who have lived and designed sustainably in-place for generations to illustrate the value it holds for the formulation of sustainable and sustaining futures.

Sinuous Objects: Revaluing Women's Wealth in the Contemporary Pacific ed. by Anna-Karina Hermkens and Katherine Lepani

Sinuous Objects: Revaluing Women's Wealth in the Contemporary Pacific ed. by Anna-Karina Hermkens and Katherine Lepani

Mac Marshall, Drinking Smoke: The Tobacco Syndemic in Oceania. Honolulu: University of Hawai`i Press, 2013.

[Extract] Simplistic explanations of health, wellbeing, and disease in complex environments often result when analysts retreat into theoretical and methodological certainties embedded within their own, specific disciplines. Such explanations provide partial, and in some cases naive understandings of how disease is manifest in groups of people across time, place, and space. Mac Marshall's Drinking Smoke is not one of these simplistic explanations—he embraces complexity. He systematically describes historical, political, environmental, socio-cultural, and economic aspects of how tobacco has become rooted in new ways in which people live in the contemporary Pacific. He also describes new ways in which they die as result. This complexity is analyzed through the relatively new concept of syndemic: how two or more of complex population health problem are intertwined, and through different combinations that emerge over time, manifest in greater disease. In the case of tobacco, the author clearly articulates how it connects various biological diseases across Oceania, and describes the assorted historical, political, and sociocultural factors which introduced and then embedded tobacco there. Marshall describes a complex, interrelated, multivariate phenomenon made up of both biological and sociocultural parts (p. 191). Drinking Smoke in this way provides an in-depth, multi-disciplinary analysis of tobacco's negative impacts in Oceania, but also how it has been perceived as commodity of desire, exchange, and progress.

Livelihoods and Fisheries Governance in a Contemporary Pacific Island Setting.

Inshore marine resources play an important role in the livelihoods of Pacific Island coastal communities. However, such reliance can be detrimental to inshore marine ecosystems. Understanding the livelihoods of coastal communities is important for devising relevant and effective fisheries management strategies. Semi-structured household interviews were conducted with householders in Langalanga Lagoon, Solomon Islands, to understand household livelihoods and resource governance in fishing-dependent communities. Households were engaged in a diverse range of livelihoods. Fishing, shell money production and gardening were the most important livelihoods. Proximity to an urban centre influenced how households accessed some livelihoods. Perceptions of management rules varied and different reasons were cited for why rules were broken, the most common reason being to meet livelihood needs. Current models of inshore small-scale fisheries management that are based on the notion of community-based resource management may not work in locations where customary management systems are weak and livelihoods are heavily reliant on marine resources. An important step for fisheries management in such locations should include elucidating community priorities through participatory development planning, taking into consideration livelihoods as well as governance and development aspirations.

Nonahere Òri Tahiti: Pipiri Mā by Patrick Araia Amaru, Edgar Tetahiotupa, and Matani Kainuku (review)

Reviewed by: Nonahere Òri Tahiti: Pipiri Māby Patrick Araia Amaru, Edgar Tetahiotupa, and Matani Kainuku Terava Ka‘anapu Casey Nonahere Òri Tahiti: Pipiri Mā, by Patrick Araia Amaru, Edgar Tetahiotupa, and Matani Kainuku, 2012. In Tahitian and French. Papeete: Editions des Mers Australes. isbn: 978-2-905808-44-8; 46 pages, illustrations, audio cd, dvd. €30.00. During the 2011 national celebration of Heiva in French Polynesia—an annual festival of culture and patrimony well known for dance competitions often involving elaborate preparations, costuming, oratory, and musical performances—the Tahitian dance troupe Nonahere Òri Tahiti realized the legend of Pipiri mā. A significant contribution to that year’s Hura Tau (Senior Division) section of the Heiva competition, this performance has been captured in a combination book, cd, and dvdpackage. Collaboratively realized by prize-winning Tahitian literary author Patrick Amaru, Marquesan anthropologist Edgar Tetahiotupa, and Matani Kainuku, director of the dance troupe Nonahere, this collection offers audiences an extraordinary window into Tahitian culture through a key myth related to the constellation Scorpio while capturing a sense of the vital energy and possibility of multimedia art in the contemporary Pacific. In the legend of Pipiri mā, Pipiri and Rehua (brother and sister) run away from home after being starved and neglected by their parents. They climb the tallest mountain, and, before their parents can reach them, they are tricked by an evil spirit and carried away on an enormous kite. They ascend to the highest heavens and take their place in the stars as the constellation [End Page 302]Scorpio. An important part of what this collection makes visible is that knowledge of traditional histories and stories has endured despite centuries of massive social and cultural change and is being used to revitalize cultural practices that Pacific Island communities are enacting in creative and sometimes surprising ways. Moreover, contemporary media-technology can now bring knowledge sources and performance traditions into mainstream accessibility beyond the temporal borders of onetime events and annual festivals. In the long-term scope of cultural preservation, Pipiri māis a notable example of the role played by high-quality media releases in how rising generations view themselves—as participants in these cultural practices and as audiences in diasporic contexts, removed from actual performance events but participating in globe-spanning conversations surrounding culture, art, dance, music, and story. In their local and regional circulations, such compilations engage regional and extra-regional audiences in a process that asks them to question what these legends mean for contemporary lives and what roles they can play in education and cultural renewal. Nona-here Òri Tahiti used approximately 160 cast members (dancers, singers, chanters, drummers, musicians, and costume designers) in this collaboration in order to display traditional and expected dance routines that breathe life into this story. The traditional pā‘ō‘ā, for example, is a group routine in which the dancers sit in a circle and sing/chant while select members of the group dance in the middle of the circle. However, Nonahere uses the pā‘ō‘ā as a highlighted scene in the beginning of the story when the parents are gathering the meal. This supports the story line, fulfills the dance requirements of a Hura Tau presentation for Heiva, and lends a creative edge to a dance style appropriate to the event. The dances are interwoven into the legend, much like the male and female counterparts are paired in the opening ‘ōte‘a (a fast, vigorous dance), to represent the balance and harmony necessary in humanity. This tale considers underlying tones of gender within legendary stories, intertwined creatively in order to remind us of the lessons of humanity in a tale of sacrifice. The presentation depicts a customary parable, while displaying aspects of culture that correspond to dance and drumming traditions. The intensity and speed of the drumbeats help the story to climax, while contributing a sense of conflict and complexity to the plot. Soloists serve as highlighted characters who embody significant ideas of the legend, such as the mischievous spirits that lead Pipiri and Rehua to the kite. Similarly, the ‘ōrero becomes song-like, matching the tone of the drumbeats to create a melodic, soulful emphasis on the drama. Both in...

Decolonization, Language, and Identity: The Francophone Islands of the Pacific

This article is both an introduction to this special issue of The Contemporary Pacific and a more general reflection about francophone research in the Pacific Islands and about their cultures and populations. The common topic of the essays selected here is the difficulty of maintaining an indigenous identity within the French colonial system in the French or francophone islands of the Pacific (New Caledonia, French Polynesia, and Wallis and Futuna). Four contributions from contemporary scholars of New Caledonia and French Polynesia bring their research on the cultural, social, and political struggles of their interlocutors to better visibility for a broad, largely anglophone audience in Pacific studies. The Resources section, produced by the chief librarians of the University of New Caledonia and the University of French Polynesia, provides a very useful overview of bibliographic and research materials about these two territories. Putting things in broader perspective, this introduction discusses what may be a common denominator in research work produced by francophone scholars that makes it distinctly different from the work of Anglophones. As well, it raises the epistemological issue of the political commitment of researchers born in the francophone Pacific Islands or living there on a permanent basis.

Wood growth indices as climate indicators from the Upper Cretaceous (Cenomanian–Turonian) portion of the Winton Formation, Australia

Although the mid- to Late Cretaceous is regarded as a global warm period, increasingly a more complex picture of warming and cooling is emerging. New techniques allow more precise dating of terrestrial localities, opening opportunities for using climate proxy approaches on terrestrial fauna and flora to better capture the complexity of Cretaceous climate. Here an attempt is made to understand the seasonality and inter-annual variability of two newly dated localities from the upper preserved portion (Cenomanian–Turonian) of the Winton Formation, Australia. Primarily quantitative approaches to palaeodendrology are used. The results suggest both seasonality and high variability in climate conditions that affect growth between years, including evidence for floods. The longest series (QM F44338) suggests oscillatory patterns of good and poor growth in a 15year alternating cycle similar to the contemporary Pacific Decadal Oscillation, although other potential explanations should be considered and tested.

Pacific Research Protocols from the University of Otago

Pacific Research Protocols from the University of Otago Judy Bennett, Mark Brunton, Jenny Bryant-Tokalau, Faafetai Sopoaga, Naomi Weaver, and Gary Witte In November 2011, the University of Otago, New Zealand, formally launched a document outlining its Pacific Research Protocols. In keeping with its mission to document the growth and maturation of Pacific Islands studies as an academic field, The Contemporary Pacific (TCP) requested and received permission from the protocols' editors and compilers to reproduce a slightly updated version in its Resources section. The original version is available online at http://www.otago.ac.nz/research/otago028669.pdf As part of the journal's standard referee process, the protocols were submitted to anonymous readers, which ultimately yielded two questions that the TCP editorial board felt were important to address when publishing the protocols: (1) why there is no reference in the document to either Russell Bishop or Linda Tuhiwai Smith, given their significance as scholars examining the nature of research among indigenous peoples of the Pacific, and (2) whether the protocols go far enough in repositioning relations between researcher and researched, such that true equality is engendered and reflected in the research project. In the second case, the reader who raised this question felt that, though the protocols call for collaboration, the researcher remains as the driver of the project, rather than one who is engaged in a mutually collaborative endeavor. We therefore invited Professor Judy Bennett, coeditor and chair of the committee that compiled this document, to write an additional introduction for the journal, in part to address these specific questions, but also to [End Page 95] more broadly place the protocols within a context that might aid readers unfamiliar with the setting in which they were produced. STUART DAWRS Resources Editor, The Contemporary Pacific Many thanks for the publication of the University of Otago's Pacific Research Protocols. In draft form this document was sent far and wide in New Zealand and to universities and some government departments in the wider Pacific. Comment was taken on board but someone has to take the first step, subject, of course, to revisions. No one raised the points your readers have, so we are grateful for the opportunity to respond. While the eminent academics you mentioned have stimulated research thinking in regard to Māori ways of knowing and of kaupapa Māori research methodology, our view was that many Pacific thinkers have taken things further to better fit their specific situations and places, which often are not entirely comparable to Māori. Māori have a unique place in this country as a partner to the Crown/state under the Treaty of Waitangi. Your readers will appreciate this is an Aotearoa/New Zealand perspective where Pacific peoples are still a minority and who come from or whose immediate ancestors came from many different island states—from Kiribati south to Fiji, from Tokelau and the Cook Islands south to Sāmoa and Tonga, and others as well. Pacific peoples in this country share the same status as other tauiwi or settlers and are not first peoples of the land. They are seeking their own paths in this country. While respecting Māori, the tangata whenua (people of this land), Pacific people also look to their own communities' needs here, as well as in their former homelands, almost all of which have been independent states for thirty to fifty years. Unlike Aotearoa/New Zealand and Hawai'i, the vast majority of these Pacific homelands are not European/American settler societies and thus have their own intellectual, philosophical, and epistemological traditions, valued by their descendants here. In the wider Pacific context, there have been many indigenous challenges to Western thinking in arts, education, and areas such as anthropology as well, and articulation of indigenous-based research methods, going back to at least the 1970s. Albert Wendt asserted Pacific values and poetics in "Towards a New Oceania" (1976); Epeli Hau'ofa advocated of a more humane anthropology (1975); and Mālama Meleiseā offered a critique of [End Page 96] introduced ideologies (1987). Konai Helu Thaman's work on education and Tongan ways of knowing spans the 1980s to the present (1988, 1998, 2000). David...

Once Were Pacific: Māori Connections to Oceania by Alice Te Punga Somerville (review)

Reviewed by: Once Were Pacific: Māori Connections to Oceania by Alice Te Punga Somerville Erin Suzuki Once Were Pacific: Māori Connections to Oceania, by Alice Te Punga Somerville. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012. ISBN cloth 0-8166-7756-6, ISBN paper 0-8166-7757-3; xxx + 288 pages, photo, notes, publication history, index. Cloth, US$67.50; paper, US$22.50. The study of indigenous Pacific literatures tends to reflect the oceanic vastness of its scope. Alice Te Punga Somerville's Once Were Pacific: Māori Connections to Oceania combines the oceanic sweep of contemporary anglophone Pacific literary studies with a focused study of Māori cultural articulations of Pacific identity, calling attention to the critical intersections of Oceanic and indigenous identification. By tracing out the ways in which Māori "once were" (and still are) Pacific, the author draws critical attention to the many unspoken disjunctures and unexpected connections between what is understood as "Māori" and what is considered "Pacific," ultimately presenting an elegant and flexible analysis of the discourses surrounding indigeneity, [End Page 207] migration, and diaspora in the contemporary Pacific. In one of its most crucial interventions, Once Were Pacific illustrates the way that Māori articulations of indigeneity—"We were always here"—and Oceanic affiliation— "We arrived here"— are mediated through the triangulation of the colonial nation-state (Aotearoa/New Zealand), the historically and genealogically linked Polynesian Pacific region (Oceania), and indigenous cultural heritage (Māoritanga). The resulting relationships highlight three key metaphors: tapa (cloth), koura (crayfish), and the paintbrush, which Te Punga Somerville uses to organize her book. These key metaphors are drawn from the author's reading of a famous early painting created by Tupaia (a navigator from Ra'iatea who traveled with Captain James Cook on his first voyage to Aotearoa) that depicts an exchange between English naturalist Joseph Banks and a Māori chieftain. While the painting has often been taken as a relatively straightforward representation of Māori-European contact, Te Punga Somerville's introduction notes that Tupaia's implied presence behind the paintbrush, as well as the items being traded—a koura for a piece of tapa cloth—reframes this encounter not only as a moment of first contact between Māori and the West, but also, and more crucially, as a moment of reconnection to a remembered Pacific past. She points out that the "extraordinary fondness" that Cook noted the Māori held for the tapa cloth (xv) —which exceeded Māori interest in any of the Western goods the Europeans could provide—testified to the ongoing affinity between Māori and other Pacific cultures whose technology they shared. By reframing this moment of first contact as a moment of remembered connection, Te Punga Somerville shifts the terms of the discourse to decenter the primacy of European culture and technology and focuses instead on the intra-Pacific dynamics that have shaped Māori culture, literature, and identity. The first section of the book, covering the "realm of tapa" (4), analyzes a variety of works, performances, and individuals that have attempted to articulate what it means to be Māori living in the diaspora. Chapter 1, "Māori People in Pacific Spaces," analyzes a range of historical and cultural events testifying to Māori peoples' ongoing investment in a broader Pacific world. Te Punga Somerville draws examples from the life of Te Rangihiroa/Sir Peter Buck, a Māori scholar-politician who spent twenty years in Hawai'i as the director of Bishop Museum; from the development of the Māori village in the Polynesian Cultural Center on the north shore of O'ahu; and from the ambivalent inclusion (or non-inclusion) of Māori work in a variety of Pacific and New Zealand literary anthologies. The second and third chapters focus more specifically on literary work, with close analyses of texts by Māori writers from the diaspora (Vernice Wineera, Evelyn Pathuawa-Nathan, and Robert Sullivan) as well as by selected Māori writers in Aotearoa whose works engage directly with Pacific regional politics (Witi Ihimaera, Hinewirangi). The book's second section is framed by the metaphor of the koura, referring [End Page 208] to...

Errata: Contemporary Pacific Vol. 24, No. 1 (2012)

Errata: Contemporary Pacific Vol. 24, No. 1 (2012)