Pacific Historians Research Articles

From a Native Daughter: Seeking Home and Ancestral Lines through a Dashboard Hula Girl

In the Hawaiian language the term ‘ae kai refers to the place where land and sea meet, the water’s edge or shoreline, the beach. It is, as Pacific historian Greg Dening has written, an “in-between space…an unresolved space where things can happen, where things can be made to happen. It is a space of transformation. It is a space of crossings.” This expanded definition of ‘ae kai serves as a cogent touchstone for examining Adrienne Keahi Pao’s and Robin Lasser’s most recent installation work Dashboard Hula Girl: In Search of Aunty Keahi, which featured in the Smithsonian’s Culture Lab exhibition ‘Ae Kai: A Culture Lab on Convergence in Honolulu, July 7–9, 2017. In the following writing, I invoke a sort of ‘ae kai of my own in which I merge scholarly analysis with visceral first-hand experience of Dashboard Hula Girl. The result, I hope, is a richly textured exposé that simulates in written form the enigmatic domain that comprises the convergence zone—that is, the ‘ae kai—of intellectual understanding and felt encounter.

‘Modest Monuments’?

The postage stamp issued by the USA in 2002 to commemorate Hawaiian athlete and cultural icon, Duke Kahanamoku, represented the culmination of a 30-year plus lobbying campaign involving a wide cross-section of interest groups. Via this prominent example, this paper examines postage stamps as an under-explored form of social memory and historical evidence and questions the weight and importance of stamps relative to other types of social memory. Intuitively, postage stamps might appear to be a relatively insignificant form of evidence; certainly, they have not been widely utilised by historians, including Pacific historians. Through an examination of the origins, semiotics and impact of the Kahanamoku stamp, this paper argues that stamps have the potential to reveal broad, underlying cultural forces and meanings, and re-evaluates their commemorative and interpretive effectiveness alongside other, complementary forms of social memory.

In Memoriam: Greg Dening (1931–2008)

In Memoriam: Greg Dening (1931–2008) Paul Turnbull and Shef Rogers Greg Dening died in early March of this year. Our comfort is that to the end this great historian of our sea of islands, our beloved teacher, was able to fill his days writing, finding the right words to speak about the past in all its human richness and complexity. Greg was fond of recalling that his first published writing was about lying in spring grass, observing little things, listening intently to small sounds, and wondering what made these things simultaneously larger by their connections to other phenomena, by being seen in different perspectives. All the histories he was to write were inspired by this sensitive curiosity. He sought, as he often said, to give back to the past its present—to reveal the particularities and possibilities of thought, emotion, and action that life once had. His chosen past was that of the indigenous peoples of Oceania and the ordinary seamen, missionaries, and traders they encountered in the century or so after 1760. He wanted, he wrote, “to celebrate their humanity, their freedoms, the ways they crossed the boundaries around their lives.” Fifty years ago, this was not easy. At that time Pacific historians were heirs to a tradition of history writing that was inherently Eurocentric. When they wrote about Oceanic peoples relative to voyagers and colonial administrators, they did so rendering them little more than exotic backdrops to European achievement. Likewise the “little people” caught up in imperial ambition were thought to be of little or no historical significance compared to the great explorers and makers of empire in the South Seas. Greg was warned that his project would end his career as a historian before it got started, especially given his thinking that in attempting to write this history he could benefit from studying anthropology. However, Greg was by this time a Jesuit priest. This gave him the freedom, he later recalled, “to be engaged utterly and altruistically in learning”—to explore things unconstrained by disciplinary boundaries and academic rivalries. In addition to formal anthropological studies at Harvard, Greg’s twenty years as a Jesuit contributed much to his becoming an acutely sensitive reader of the fragmentary and partial traces of early cross-cultural interactions in Oceania, with a remarkable ability to tease out the possibilities of meaning these interactions had for both islanders and their sea-borne visitors. At the same time, his priestly experiences made him acutely conscious that every particularity of life possesses a breadth and depth that needs to be understood. In Greg’s histories, brief and hastily written records, passing descriptions [End Page 189] of bodily gesture and sound, became transformed into a theater of understanding, in which he sought to reveal through the playing out of localized events their connectedness with larger historical forces. Greg’s suspicion was that often the true significance of events lay in the participants’ having drawn upon deep memories and implicit beliefs. Thus he felt it crucial to write about what was not said, what did not happen, even if this meant risking the accusation of leaving the realism of history for fiction. However, Greg’s priestly experiences left him acutely conscious that writing about the actualities of human experience demanded he take this risk. As he observed about the time of publishing Beach Crossings (Pennsylvania, 2004), his remarkable account of his journeying in the history of Oceania: “There is a multivalency, a multivocality, in every human act. That is its realism.” Greg was Professor of History Emeritus of the University of Melbourne. But in retirement he embarked on a new career through his association with the Centre for Cross-Cultural Research, at the Australian National University. At least once every year, Greg ran a residential program of seminars and workshops for a dozen or so graduate students in history or any other discipline interested in some aspect of past human experience. Greg worked with these students to stimulate their creativity as thinkers and writers. He encouraged them to read the traces of past human experience with all the attentiveness employed in everyday life. He taught them the importance of empathy with those whom they were...

Tasman Epiphanies: The 'Participant History' of Alan Ward

The article discusses the history and life of Alan Dudley Ward, a Kiwi and Pacific historian, to better understand the influence of significant Trans- Tasman individuals who operated easily within an expanded Tasman world. Land appears to be the key focus of values and aspirations of people of the Tasman world.

Malinowski: odyssey of an anthropologist, 1884-1920

Volume I of Michael Young's biography of Malinowski is a big book: hefty; the fruit of long labour; and about one of anthropology's giants. For many people who have followed in Malinowski's professional footsteps, his life has a visceral fascination, and the attention that Young's book has received since publication last year could be explained partly on these grounds. But Malinowski speaks to a wider audience. It stands as a biography among biographies (shortlisted for the James Tait Black Memorial Prize) and represents a feat of research ? on a figure who, as Young notes (p. xx), both personified historical trends, and left complicated legacies, not least for researchers engaged with the Pacific. The journal has hosted this forum in recognition of the different directions from which Young's book can be read: and our participants offer distinctive, and in some respects conflicting readings. Howard Morphy delivers a slightly edited version of a talk he gave at the Canberra launch of Malinowski, and treats the book 'not so much as the biography of an anthropologist as an anthropological biography'. Fellow anthropologist, Linus digim'Rina is of all the members of this panel the most familiar with the site of Malinowski's pivotal fieldwork, oral traditions about him, the biography's author, and indeed, its development. He shares a unique perspective. Peter Hempenstall, both a biographer and Pacific historian, reflects on the relationship of biography to historiography; the biographer as historian; and Malinowski's a-historicism. Henrika Kuklick, whose research on the history of social science has tackled themes central to Young's project, extends the consideration of scholarly method. Indeed, the sharpest differences and some of the most intriguing issues to emerge from this forum relate less to the interpretation of Malinowski the man than they do to the biographical task. Michael Young most generously accepted the invitation to respond, and has the last say.

Connected by the Sea: Towards a Regional History of the Western Caroline Islands

Few Pacific historians examine island communities as part of wider spheres of indigenous interaction. Indigenous relations with Europeans receive the lion's share of attention, while ongoing and new interactions between local communities tend to be neglected. As a result, European influence is perhaps exaggerated. This paper examines the Western Caroline Islands in the century prior to the imposition of modern colonial rule. It argues that the history of this period is best understood as a series of interactions between four distinct, yet interconnected worlds. When a regional perspective is adopted, the Western Carolines become a more dynamic place, with Europeans just one of many groups of outsiders to influence communities. Indigenous history becomes more prominent, and inter-island contacts become an important part of that history.

John Muir: Life and Legacy. Edited by Sally M. Miller, The Pacific Historian 29, Nos. 2–3, Summer/Fall 1985. Dear Papa: Letters Between John Muir and His Daughter Wanda. Edited by Shirley Sargent

<i>John Muir: Life and Legacy</i>. Edited by Sally M. Miller, <i>The Pacific Historian</i> 29, Nos. 2–3, Summer/Fall 1985. <i>Dear Papa: Letters Between John Muir and His Daughter Wanda</i>. Edited by Shirley Sargent

Coping with Samoan restistance after the 1918 influenza epidemic: Colonel Tate's problems and perplexities.

independence emerged in Western Samoa with the formation of the Mau in 1926. Earlier forms of resistance to colonial rule sought merely to remedy specific grievances of the two separate sections of the community, Samoan and local European. Yet all were interconnected. Seeds of the Mau were sown by the German governors 1900-14 and the first two New Zealand administrators, 1914-23, though neither allowed them to germinate as did their more forceful, self-confident successor, Major-General George Spafford Richardson. The suppression of the Oloa movement of 1904 and the Mau a Pule of 1908 by the first German governor, Dr Wilhelm Soif, has been well researched and analysed by Pacific historians.1 The efforts of the acting New Zealand Ad ministrator, Colonel Robert Ward T?te, to smash the Toeaina Club and its satellite company (heirs of the Oloa) and to subdue unrest in the aftermath of the first World War and the influenza epidemic have been largely ignored.2 About 1935, in retirement, T?te himself began to write a history of them. Although he intended it to be primarily an account of what he did and saw in Samoa for his children, he also felt the need to justify his past actions. Among the fragments he drafted are 10 pages on the Samoan scene as he found it, in January 1919, and 15 pages on the resistance and unrest he encountered, in the months that followed, from the Toeaina Club and Afamasaga Toleafoa Lago Lago, and during the harbour board enquiry and the arrival and sitting of the Epidemic Commission. These drafts, together with his personal diaries and correspondence,3 provide a much franker, more intimate picture of his prob lems and perplexities than his official reports and despatches to the New Zealand Government.4

Sister to the Sioux: The Memoirs of Elaine Goodale Eastman, 1885-91

'A woman ahead of her time, the 'Little Sister' ...adds unique and fascinating chapter to the literature of the West' - Pacific Historian. 'We must be impressed by this talented woman who gave herself so completely to the people she chose to serve. Her story is fascinating, real contribution to the history of the period' - American Indian Quarterly. 'It is particularly refreshing to see Indian women viewed through the eyes of another woman' - Valerie Sherer Mathes, North Dakota History. 'It was held distinct adventure back in the demure 1880s for properly brought-up New England girl to open day school in primitive Sioux village,' Elaine Goodale Eastman recalled in later years.With boundless energy and dedication she had set out to teach the white man's ways to the Sioux. The Indian women called her little sister as she entered wholeheartedly into village activities. She watched the emergence of the Ghost Dance religion, visited with Sitting Bull shortly before his death, and was at Pine Ridge during the last month of 1890 - a time of grim suspense. There she met her future husband, Dr. Charles Eastman, the agency physician and mixed-blood Sioux. A short time later they shared in the heart-wrenching job of caring for the survivors of the Wounded Knee massacre. Kay Graber, editor emeritus at the University of Nebraska Press, is also editor of Standing Bear & the Ponca Chiefs (Nebraska 1995).

Two Leggings: The Making of a Crow Warrior.

...was one of the last Crow Warriors. From 1919 to 1923 he told his story of Crow life and wars to William Wildschut, an ethnologist with the Museum of the American Indian ...This is the poignant story of the end of traditional Crow life and attitudes, which Two saw ending with the last warfare rather than the death of the buffalo' - Pacific Historian. 'This is the story of Two Leggings' desire for fame, his rise as a warrior, and his efforts to achieve a spiritual vision. He takes us along on buffalo hunts, war parties against the Piegans, and horse stealing raids against the Piegans and Sioux. His obsession to become a chief and famous warrior drove him to repeated forays against enemy tribes for scalps and horses. He relates the religious relationship between vision fasts, medicine bundles, and a war raid's outcome, sun dances in which performers pierced their breast muscles with wooden skewers, and wife stealing between rival warrior societies...It is a remarkable story' - Chicago Tribune. 'This is a rare piece of Americana - a first-person account of the psychological, religious, and social life of a nineteenth century Indian. The dramatic recital is a real contribution to our native biography, history, and ethnology, and an important treatise in a fascinating but curiously neglected field' - Baltimore Sun. 'A valuable addition to our knowledge of the life of the Plains Indian' - New York Times. 'Two Leggings lifts the curtain on a kind of life it is almost impossible to imagine anywhere in the United States during the second half of the last century. Mr. Nabokov has preserved a priceless document not only for ethnologists bur for plain readers as well...His narrative lays open, as by a surgeon's knife, the inner world of Indian religion and morality' - Mark Van Doren. Peter Nabokov is on the faculty of the Department of Anthropology and the American Indian Studies Program, University of Wisconsin, Madison, and the author of Native American Architecture (1988) and editor of Native American Testimony: A Chronicle of Indian and White Relations from Prophecy to the Present, 1492-1992 (1991).