Introduction

Are conversations about Oceania that elide Indigenous voices really conversations? As educators and practitioners in the fields of Asian American studies, Pacific literary studies, ethnic studies, history, Indigenous studies, gender studies, and Pacific Islander studies, the six of us convene here to encourage productive dialogue across disciplines that confronts the uneven relations of the “Trans-Pacific.” We come together as a collective to offer a diversity of opinions of the emerging field, as we have engaged with it through our respective interventions. We are unanimous, however, in our belief that studies of the “Pacific,” including the “Trans-Pacific,” must center Indigenous peoples.

From our various positionalities and disciplinary lenses, we enter into dialogue with each other in order to interrogate Trans-Pacific scholars’ utilization of a cartographic and imperial understanding of “region” that neglects the multifaceted relationships between the places and peoples of Oceania. Utilizing Epeli Hau‘ofa’s notion of Oceania expansiveness, we ask how those in and of diaspora, who are simultaneously rooted to our genealogical homelands, can be a part of the conversations on Pacific Islander and Trans-Pacific studies.1 As scholars who are both “rooted and routed,” we assert ourselves in these regions and fields of study that continue to be affected by colonial and settler-colonial structures and corresponding military forces.2 Drawing from our collective transdisciplinary forays into and out of Oceania, we challenge constructed notions of Indigenous authenticity that demand a vanishing “Native.” Instead, we reaffirm our understanding of and commitment to the discursive power of centering Native bodies through the use of the term “Pacific Islander studies,” a people-centered terminology that asserts ties to place even in the diaspora.

This people-centered terminology also upholds an active focus on the lands, waters, and skies of Oceania since many Indigenous Pacific peoples maintain their cosmogonic or genealogical connections to these spaces. Further, by endorsing a view of the human as always already in relation to the natural world, this terminology centers Indigenous Pacific epistemologies and experiences, which have been marginalized in previous incarnations of area studies. For example, post–Cold War proliferations of Pacific Rim discourse ignored the peoples, nations, and spaces of the Pacific Basin. Study of the Pacific Rim centered economic movement across the Pacific Ocean and, as Rob Wilson and Arif Dirlik note in Asia/Pacific as Space of Cultural Production, was an attempt at “semiotic and conceptual possession of an entire region.”3

We utilize talanoa as a methodology that affirms our umbilical connections to various places throughout Oceania, yet also incorporates our diasporic potential.4 Within Pacific research methodologies, talanoa is seen as both an informal and formal practice that is grounded in relationships that lead to a more authentic knowledge. While there are many versions of talanoa, all forms engage two or more people in dialogue. The root of talanoa, tala, means to “unravel or tell.”5 This methodology of “telling and unraveling” requires us to be in relationality in order to cocreate knowledge. Instead of being the subjects of research, talanoa methodology requires participants to co-construct it. In what follows, we use this cocreation of knowledge across time, space, and disciplinary boundaries to disrupt the non-people-centered approach found within Trans-Pacific studies.

Talanoa reveals our diasporic potential because it allows us to interrogate the ways our physical distance from our home islands and coauthors lets us form new ways of preserving the relationality that exists in the vā, or figurative space between us. Vā, as theorized by Samoans, Tongans, and other Pacific Islanders, is the dynamic, figurative space that governs the relationships between people, places, deities, and things.6 From this perspective, to nurture a relationship is to nurture the space between. Thus, we engage in talanoa to think through distance and relationality to ask: How does our diasporic distance allow us to reconstitute our relationships to our Indigenous homes? How do our disciplinary and intellectual distances from one another as coauthors allow us to refashion the academic and discursive spaces between the field of Trans-Pacific studies and Indigenous Pacific Islanders?

With this dialogue piece we offer one more manifestation of talanoa: a diasporic and transdisciplinary dialogic conversation whose participants engage in oral and written exchanges across a range of digital platforms. This technique allows us to center an Indigenous methodology while challenging the individualistic nature of academia and its constructed borders, which are themselves analogous to the ways the term “Trans-Pacific” insists on rigid, isolating constructions of the Pacific region and Pacific peoples. Just as Sam Ikehara, Hi‘ilei Julia Kawehipuaakahaopulani Hobart, Erin Suzuki, and Aimee Bahng explore in their syllabus on transpacific methodologies, we offer this talanoa to model what Trans-Pacific studies could be—a methodology that centers the Indigenous Pacific, that is inclusive of diaspora, and takes up issues of Indigenous and Asian encounters and solidarities. Our conversation focuses on the following two questions that we developed for this forum:

1. Oftentimes “Pacific” and “Trans-Pacific” studies are confined to the physical locales of Oceania and Asia. What could we learn from Pacific Islanders who are now living in diaspora about how flows across Oceania can be harnessed for purposes of both domination and resistance?
2. What types of solidarities do we engage in that build on understanding the connections between Oceania, Asia, and the United States? How do we actively research and teach these (dis)connections in our various fields?

After engaging with each other in dialogue, each of the contributors took up one of the above questions. A topic that emerged from our conversations was the complex relationships between diaspora and settlement throughout Oceania and beyond. While we offer various and sometimes diverging thoughts on this relationship, as everyone in this forum makes clear, Trans-Pacific frameworks that do not center the entanglements between Oceania and other locales reinscribe the violence of colonial containment, erasure, and displacement onto Native bodies. In this present moment of state violence, global health crisis, and environmental degradation, we write to find hope through the genealogical ties that bind us across and within Oceania.

Question 1: Oftentimes “Pacific” and “Trans-Pacific” studies are confined to the physical locales of Oceania and Asia. What could we learn from Pacific Islanders that are now living in diaspora about how flows across Oceania can be harnessed for purposes of both domination and resistance?

Kēhaulani Vaughn: Many in the Pacific have moved to new locales due to military incursions, tourism, and ongoing settler colonialism and imperialism in the region. Although travel and mobility of Pacific Islanders has a long history, many are unable to live in their genealogical homelands due to the prevailing economic, political, and social forces that remove Indigenous peoples from their land. Living on the lands of other Indigenous peoples, Pacific Islanders continue to maintain their genealogical connection and corresponding responsibilities to place.7 In 2001, Vicente M. Diaz and J. Kēhaulani Kauanui aptly described Pacific Islanders as being both “rooted and routed.”8 These terms describe Pacific Islanders as mobile people while still being inseparable from places of origin. Years after this groundbreaking piece was published, there continues to be a dearth of scholarship that focuses on the large and emergent Pacific Islander diaspora.

Rarely do the fields of Pacific studies and Trans-Pacific studies involve the mobility of Pacific people. Trans-Pacific studies relies on fixed cartographic understandings that centers land masses while simultaneously erasing Oceania and its people—Pacific Islanders.9 Although named Trans-Pacific studies, the field largely focuses on Asia. On the other hand, Pacific studies includes the Indigenous people of the region, Pacific Islanders, but has primarily contained itself to the Pacific Islanders that remain in the Pacific. While Trans-Pacific has not engaged with the “Native Pacific,” Pacific studies principally includes the Native that remains. This inadvertently perpetuates notions of a “vanishing Native” and simultaneously reinforces logics of authenticity. Since many Pacific Islanders are unable to remain in their place of origin, only those who have the ability to remain are considered Native Pacific Islander. Those that leave, or are displaced, are deemed “as being no longer native” due to their inability to maintain daily physical connection to place/land.10 Therefore, both fields fundamentally do not engage or highlight Pacific Islander movement. How can ideas of expansiveness reinsert displaced Pacific Islanders in the fields of study that encompass Oceania and corresponding homelands?

Pasifika theorist Epeli Hau‘ofa described Oceania and its people as always mobile while maintaining a deep rootedness to land/place. In his seminal text, “Our Sea of Islands,” Hau‘ofa describes Oceania expansiveness as not being confined by the hegemonic notions of smallness or “islands in a far sea” and instead urges notions of connection, mobility, and vastness.11 While Pacific Islanders live and encompass multiple diasporas including those that remain in the Pacific, Hau‘ofa reminds us as people of Oceania of our enormity and of our prevailing connections to our homelands, culture, and people. Hau‘ofa expanded on these ideas in “The Ocean In Us” with the words of Teresia Teaiwa, “We sweat and cry salt water, so we know that the ocean is really in our blood.”12 Utilizing the words of Teaiwa, Hau‘ofa reinforces the symbiotic connection between Oceania and its people. These reminders work against the colonial ideas of containment that necessitate a diminishing and vanishing Pasifika people.

The scholars that foreground this piece represent Oceania and its expansiveness. As detailed by Hau‘ofa, perceptions of Oceania often come from the people and places outside of it. Therefore, it is time for research and fields to recognize Oceania and its movement including diaspora. Otherwise, research on our communities will be static or nonexistent. Instead, research on diasporic Pacific Islanders can provide genealogical understandings of expansiveness by (re)connecting and building relationalities to new places and people while maintaining responsibilities and connections to one hanau—sands of birth—homelands. In a world of increasing mobility, ideas of expansiveness can assist in understanding responsibilities to people and place within and outside our homelands. This expansiveness can also model relationalities that lead to recognition among Indigenous people themselves and (re)center the Natives in any particular locale. More broadly, what can be learned from and among Indigenous people themselves?

Trans-Indigeneity is a methodology developed by Chadwick Allen that enables a comparison among Indigenous groups while maintaining specificity.13 Building on Allen’s concept, my work, “Sovereign Embodiment: Native Hawaiians and Expressions of Diasporic Kuleana”14 theorizes trans-Indigenous recognitions as nation-to-nation relations that acknowledge Native/Indigenous people’s spiritual and genealogical responsibility to take care of land with the political authority to do so without settler government interference.15 My scholarship examines the Treaty of Friendship and Mutual Recognition between Kā Lahui Hawai‘i and the Juaneño Band of Mission Indians, Acjachemen Nation, ratified in 1992. Acknowledging other Indigenous people and the traditional tribal territories on which they reside, Native Hawaiians living in the diaspora can embody their understandings of ‘āina—land. In other words, Native Hawaiians, Pacific Islanders, and other Indigenous peoples can and should acknowledge the genealogical caretakers wherever they reside. Recognizing the ongoing responsibility to take care of land, the concept of Kuuyam, or guests in Tongva as discussed by Charles Sepulveda, “is a reimagining of human relationships to place outside of the structures of settler colonialism.”16 Both trans-Indigenous recognitions and Kuuyaam can be useful in thinking of ways that we can envision new relationalities to people and place while always recognizing and affirming genealogical responsibility to land.

Pacific Islanders that understand themselves as Kuyaam in diaspora and engage in trans-Indigenous recognitions can provide new and expansive conceptions of kinship to new places that (re)center genealogical caretakers of land and embody Indigenous Oceanic practices wherever we reside. My study reveals that trans-Indigenous recognitions not only does the important work of tackling settler-colonial violence and institutions that continue to displace and erase California Indians and Pacific Islanders from their homelands, but also are central to ensuring (re)generative social and political futures for Indigenous peoples. Therefore, both Trans-Pacific studies and Pacific Islands studies can move toward ideas of expansiveness that include Indigeneity and diaspora honoring Indigenous responsibility to land while also recognizing that Oceania is always on the move.17

Alfred P. Flores: I agree with Kēhaulani Vaughn. I do not think there is a perfect phrase to describe studies that highlight the Pacific and all of its people who live throughout the diaspora. Some of these terms or phrases include Pacific Islands/Pacific Islander, Pacific World, Pasifika, Trans-Pacific, and Oceania/Oceanic, just to name a few. I prefer to use Pacific Islander history to describe the research and teaching I do because it centers the experiences of Native Pacific Islanders and their Indigenous homelands. I use this phrase because CHamorus (who are the Indigenous people of the Mariana Islands) and other Native Pacific Islanders view their bodies to be an extension of the land, ocean, and sky. As Kēhaulani Vaughn mentioned earlier in this essay, the “umbilical connection” describes how Pacific Islanders are linked to their home islands. This tether to land is evident through the various creation stories and practices of land stewardship that Pacific Islanders believe in. In particular, the CHamoru creation story is based on Puntan and Fu’una who are brother and sister gods that sacrificed their bodies to create the island of Guåhan and its people. Additionally, there are several villages and places in Guåhan that are named after body parts such as the village of Barrigada, which means “side or flank.” Also, CHamoru pattera (midwives) commonly buried the placenta from newborn babies in the villages they were from as a way to link them physically and spiritually to their ancestral lands.18 Thus, Pacific Islander history not only focuses on the people, no matter where they live, but also on the places they are Indigenous to. This Indigenous connection to a specific place is something that scholars of Trans-Pacific studies could learn from especially when it comes to topics such as diaspora, immigration, migration, and settler colonialism.

The “Trans-Pacific” can be a useful frame if it truly centers interactions and connections between communities and places in Asia and the Pacific Islands. For example, the US militarization of Asia and Oceania connects the people who live in these regions.19 In response, CHamorus, Filipina/os, Kānaka Maoli, Okinawans, and White Americans are just some of the groups of people who have advocated for the demilitarization of Asia and Oceania. And as I mentioned earlier, the militarization and the bombing of the land, ocean, and sky in Guåhan is an attempt to destroy the connection CHamorus have to their homelands and has contributed to their diasporic movements.20 Not only have these communities been subjected to US militarization, they have also been at the forefront of fighting against US militarism in their homelands. These communities have worked in interracial and interethnic groups that have sought demilitarization of the entire region. Some of these organizations include DMZ Hawai‘i, Fuetsan Famalao’an, the International Women’s Network against Militarism, We Are Guåhan, and Women for Genuine Security.21 These communities show us it is possible to use Trans-Pacific studies as a framework for meaningful and inclusive scholarship that does not replicate the same violence that some Pacific Rim studies scholars did by intentionally ignoring the Pacific Islands and its people from their work.

Joyce Pualani Warren: As Kēhaulani Vaughn has so cogently laid bare, the fields of Trans-Pacific studies and Pacific Islands studies have actively elided—perhaps even erased—the bodies and attendant lived experiences of Pacific Islanders, whether in their homelands or in the diaspora. And, as Alfred P. Flores deftly reminds us, Indigenous Pacific understandings of lands, skies, and waters are often corporeally articulated: either through fashioning the environment from the bodies of the gods or embedding the bodies of humans into the environment. Thus, I draw on both of their perspectives to ask what may be gained by examining the ways these place-based kinship connections and ontological constructions can be deepened, rather than decreased, by diasporic bodies and communities. Additionally, I use my own positionality as a diasporic and mixed-race Kanaka Maoli to think through how rigid ideas around diaspora and (un)belonging not only foreclose kinship ties with Pacific Islander communities formed beyond the Pacific, but within the Pacific as well.

As a diasporic Kanaka Maoli, I see Hawai‘i as a space that exemplifies both the possibilities for diasporic reconciliation and the pitfalls of proscriptive ideas about movement and (un)belonging. Hawaiian understandings of kinship are broad and expansive, and they are also intimately and inextricably tied to our lands, waters, and skies. While some recognize the boundless potential for relationality, others see diasporic Kānaka as insufficiently connected to the places that mediate our relationships and identity. Growing up in Southern California I understood and experienced the ho‘i mai, the call to return home to the islands of Hawai‘i, in various contexts at different moments of my life. Yet, as I replanted my roots on O‘ahu, I was struck by the many ways that the long-standing kinship ties that meant I could always come home were operating alongside a rejection of greater Pacific kinship connections to diasporic communities in Hawai‘i and, in some cases, particular Kānaka Maoli in their own homelands. The twin forces of militarism and capitalism—which pushed many Kānaka into the diaspora—have produced a social and political discourse that rejects and erases Micronesian and Black bodies in Hawai‘i in seemingly antithetical but shockingly similar ways.22

In recent decades, the social and political discourse around Micronesian communities in Hawai‘i has often been pejorative, framing them as people who do not belong, who have come to Hawai‘i unbidden, and who exist as a strain on already depleted social resources.23 This rhetoric obfuscates our kinship connections and our shared struggles as Indigenous peoples dispossessed by the US empire and military. As a literary studies scholar, I see hope in the ways Pacific writers resist this rhetoric. Kristiana Kahakauwila’s “This is Paradise” offers an interiority and subjectivity to “Micronesian” bodies that are often rendered anonymous or objectified in Hawai‘i.24 Kathy Jetnil-Kijiner’s poem “Lessons From Hawai‘i” warns us of the violence of homogenizing distinct cultures and reminds us that it’s actually “NOT Micronesian” but “Marshallese / Chuukese / Yapese / Pohnpeian” and “Palauan / Kosraean / Chamorru / Nauruan / Kiribati.”25 When we remember the specificity of each community, we also remember the depth of our kinship connections and find new ways to welcome and sustain our Pacific cousins, many of whom are dispossessed from their homelands by the same colonial forces that continue to dispossess Kānaka in Hawai‘i.

An examination of whose bodies are allowed to move within and beyond the Pacific should also pay attention to how the twin forces of militarism and capitalism have shaped our understandings of how particular Indigenous bodies are received within their own homelands. One example of this is the way that Hawai‘i’s unique experience with plantation labor has made Japanese and Chinese bodies assimilable into local culture, with widespread recognition that many Kānaka Maoli have Japanese and Chinese roots as well. Yet, African diasporic bodies, whose numbers were not as large but whose history in Hawai‘i goes back as long, and in many cases longer, are often read as unassimilable in these same local contexts.26 Black bodies in Hawai‘i are often read as symbols of the military and therefore not ever able to become local. This understanding of racialized notions of blackness as sites of exclusion and unbelonging is in direct contrast to the long history of Kanaka Maoli and broader Oceanic constructions of cosmogonic, genealogical, and metaphorical blackness as affirmations of kinship, fecundity, and belonging.27 This leaves Black Kānaka, like myself, often uncomfortable and at times unsure of the ways their bodies are received in their own homelands.

While none of these examples have easy solutions, and I am uncertain that Trans-Pacific studies has the appropriate tools to address them, I do believe that in (re)centering the bodies and relationships of Pacific Islanders we have the most hope of overcoming the trauma of the literal and discursive ruptures resultant from rigid constructions of diaspora.

Question 2: What types of solidarities do we engage in that build on understanding the connections between Oceania, Asia, and the United States? How do we actively research and teach these (dis)connections in our various fields?

Brandon J. Reilly: Pacific Islanders’ practices of building community with others likely exceed the bounds of historical knowledge (at least in the discipline’s more conventional, non-Indigenous modalities). One of the earliest substantive Western sources that describes Pacific culture, Juan Pobre’s 1603 account of his sojourn in the Mariana Islands, bears this out.28

Late in his narrative, Pobre recounts a dialogue he had with a gathering of maga’låhis in Rota. He initiated this conversation by chastising the chiefs for their villagers’ recent killings of a few Spaniards whose ship ran aground. Local villagers had by then integrated the other survivors of the shipwreck, including Black slaves, into their communities. (Pobre leaves out that this was an act of defensive retaliation for one Spaniard’s unprovoked, fatal arquebus shooting of another villager just before.) He accused them of behaving “are-ari,” or “extremely badly” (malísimos). To this accusation, one chief

took the hand of a [slave] woman that was with them and told me, “Worse than all of you? And these are all good people,” [he said] as he pointed to the slave … “Because you do this to them.” And he showed me the lash marks on the black [slave’s] shoulder.29

As this maga’låhi saw it, what the Spanish did to their slaves was unthinkable, including perhaps the fact that they had slaves in the first place. Whereas the Spanish racialized, dehumanized, and coerced their (African) Others, the CHamorus by contrast bade them entrance into the community. And as the source faintly hints, the former slaves for their part accepted the invitation. Both sides forged alliance, for their own reasons, against Spain. We would today describe this as an act of “solidarity.” More likely, in view of CHamoru culture, it was something more customary, human.

This episode from more than four centuries ago communicates the importance of at least two acts. First, we must continue to build and refine our knowledge of these earlier, culturally grounded practices of coalition building and to disseminate our findings in scholarly fora, the campuses where we teach, and to the broader local and global communities. Second, we must bring them into conversations with Indigenous actors, organizations, and institutions that engage politics today, for instance, those Alfred P. Flores describes above.

In light of this history, the question of Pacific Islander–Asian solidarity is of course a fraught one, as Christen Sasaki notes below. In Micronesia, settler communities like Filipinos have served as agents of empire-building, unwitting or not, even as they were racially subordinated to Whites.30 This was no less true in other Pacific nations like Hawai‘i, a fact unchanged by cultural subdivisions among Filipinos.31 One wonders how the longer-standing, largely unexplored history of community between Filipinos and CHamorus, not only before 1898 under Spanish rule, but in the innumerable Austronesian centuries before, might inform struggles today.32 Michael Lujan Bevacqua’s recent invocation of the notion of “neo-CHamorus” provides the subject title to a book on Pacific Islanders’ transregional affinities not yet written.33

The excerpt above captures one of the earliest statements of a Pacific Islander community forging common bond with (in this case) a group of Black former slaves. It proffers useful lessons for us today as we struggle to make “Black Lives Matter,” among other campaigns that seek to build solidarity across racial, class, or other differences. There is nothing preventing scholars and activists from hearing Pacific voices, whether from the lips of contemporary communities or in historical documents, and centering them as the basis for the only genuine history of the Pacific. The issue is that too few do so, as Kēhaulani Vaughn and others note.

Christen T. Sasaki: In the process of thinking through the writings of others in this forum and the connections that exist among Oceania, Asia, and the United States, I began to reflect on my own genealogy. As a fourth-generation Japanese American who was born and raised in Mānoa, O‘ahu, I am a settler removed from my “homeland.” Long forgotten are the names of villages that my ancestors came from, though I still hope to trace their lives back one day. I wonder if they loved the ocean as I do or how they felt during the weeks spent crossing the Pacific as already promised picture brides and plantation laborers.

This disconnection with my family history reflects the shared violence that the people of Asia and Oceania experienced through the colonial rule of Japan and the United States. Although I think we have much to share and learn from each other, I am also reminded by Brandon J. Reilly that the question of Pacific Islander–Asian solidarity is a fraught one. While we must never sidestep the fact that Asian settler communities have oftentimes served as the agents and “brokers” of empire, we can also cultivate solidarity over the overlapping histories of imperial expansion and accompanying militarization that created what is often referred to by scholars of US history and Asian American and American studies as the “Asia-Pacific.”34

In their critique of scholarship on the “Asia-Pacific,” Keith Camacho and Setsu Shigematsu draw attention to the practice of erasing Pacific Islanders and argue that Oceania has been “historically seen by Asian and American studies paradigms as an open frontier to be crossed, domesticated, occupied, and settled.”35 While the paradigm of the “Trans-Pacific” has sought to address this erasure, as Kēhaulani Vaughn and others in this conversation demonstrate, as a field it has not substantially engaged with the Native, and instead replicates the erasure of Pacific Islanders.

Noelani Goodyear-Ka‘ōpua explains that “settler-colonial relations might be transformed by rebuilding, in new ways, the Indigenous structures that have historically sustained our communities,” and engages with the possibilities that emerge when diverse settler groups work in place-based affinity with Kānaka ‘Ōiwi.36 In order to take up this question of refashioning settler-colonial relations, I return to talanoa as a methodology that requires us to be in relationality as we cocreate knowledge. How might our engagement with the “Trans-Pacific” shift, for example, if we approach it as a dialogic conversation that centers the Indigenous Pacific in relation to Asian America? As someone who is a settler in both Hawai‘i and the continental United States, I approach my research and teaching as part of an ongoing attempt to be in active kinship with the Indigenous communities whose land sustains myself and my family. For example, in my current book project I reframe the narration of the years between the illegal overthrow of the Hawaiian monarchy and the annexation to the United States (1893–98), from a period that has typically been referred to as the years of the haole-led “Republic,” to a position that is grounded in Hawai‘i.37 Centering Hawai‘i in this history of imperial rivalry for the “Pacific” opens up space to step beyond the structures of White supremacy and engage with the many intellectual and sociopolitical connections that Indigenous and Asian communities shared.

For Japanese contract laborers in the archipelago, life under the Hawaiian monarchy offered the opportunity for political equity and the right to franchise, a right they did not have in Japan. Some of these contract workers, with the support of Hawaiian royalists, rallied together and traversed more than twenty miles from their homes in West O‘ahu to downtown Honolulu to protest the overthrow at the gates of ‘Iolani Palace.38 This is just one small example of the historical connections that arise out of the attempt to address Trans-Pacific studies through the intersections of Indigeneity and Asian settler colonialism, and build on the connections between Oceania, Asia, and the United States.

I understand that to be in kinship with Indigenous peoples means that I have a responsibility to engage in conversations with the Japanese American community about our position as settlers. Our goal must be not to prioritize settler-colonial guilt or seek absolution, but rather to find ways to transform “colonial complicity into an actionable project that attempts to decolonize and improve relations.”39 While these conversations might be uncomfortable at times, recognizing complicity with the structures of the settler state is a step that must be taken in order to envision a future beyond it.

Juliann Anesi: In Asia Pacific Viewpoint, the late African American and i-Kiribati scholar Teresia Teaiwa writes about militarism and gender in the Pacific. She argues that gender analyses are crucial to understanding the processes of militarization, and advocates for the implementation of multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary approaches.40 Teaiwa demonstrates how militarism is a force that is not contained by military institutions, but one with “bleeding boundaries” that seeps into various and fundamental aspects of social, political, and cultural life. The rest of her introduction to the journal’s special edition is an invitation for further feminist and gendered analyses in security and conflict studies.

Building on the metaphor of “bleeding boundaries,” it is not unfamiliar then to locate the Pacific Islands, Asia, and the Americas as connected through a framework that examines the flows of culture, capital, ideas, and labor across the Pacific. However, what is urgent is the need to engage Native Pacific Islanders’ genealogies positioned “on the edge” of Trans-Pacific studies.41 Our forum dialogue shares our Pacific communities’ multiethnic nature, religious affiliations, and stories that are often glossed over in the notions of the Trans-Pacific. Echoing my colleagues’ points, I also believe Trans-Pacific can be a useful frame and analytical category—“if it truly centers interactions and connections between communities and places in Asia and the Pacific Islands,” as Alfred P. Flores writes. Thus, this is our modest attempt to unpack and connect our relations to resistance and domination experienced by our individual and diasporic communities. In other words, the topics we are discussing are uncontainable within the boundaries of a discipline or region.

Along these lines, “bleeding boundaries” overlap with my research on schools established for disabled students in Sāmoa in the 1970s.42 Specifically, I recall the school organizer’s use of the phrase “flows of money and people” to figuratively describe the aid that periodically flows into the schools from neighboring islands, Asia, and the United States. The monies to nongovernmental organizations on the island often depended on funding and engaged communities from these regions. According to the school’s annual report, “We have formed useful links with appropriate organizations in New Zealand, Australia, the United States of America and the United Nations System.”43 For example, the US Peace Corps volunteer program provided staff for the school, while the Japan International Cooperation Agency (JICA), an organization funded by the Japanese government, appointed skilled staff to the schools, such as engineers, medical professionals, educators, and artists. All of these organizations have offices on the island that coordinated these services. Rosa, a parent, explains the impact of these relations after the volunteers’ contract on island is up, and many of them return home. Finding replacement staff was difficult for the schools. The impact of temporary aid, volunteer staff, and intermittent school resources created arduous issues on a daily basis. Thus, this brief example of how monies to support the schools and engage with organizations in Oceania is a kind of “bleeding” association that crosses and goes across social and geopolitical boundaries, which creates unique opportunities to comprehend the interconnectedness of imperialism. Engaging the intersecting gendered processes and analyses of social movements and disability politics among Native Pacific communities is also an invitation to consider relationality and connections (not disconnections) with people. Moreover, these relations also capture the complexity, including violence, and the “umbilical” connection between land, sky, ocean, and body that marks Native communities’ interactions with others and place.

In highlighting these “bleeding boundaries” and connections to the schools’ concerns, I think about how Native Pacific scholars in Pacific Islanders studies, and more broadly Pacific studies, continually raise the question of unequal power relations inherent in these topics. These concerns are still relevant today and the category of the Trans-Pacific can potentially support our Pacific communities as they are dealing with overlapping imperial expansion and climate change politics. In each of our respective fields of study, we hope to research and teach about the crossing of these topics within an ever-connecting ocean. Moreover, I am struck by the limits of our academic disciplines and wonder if our investment might shift to enriching the scholarly literature so that it catches up to Pacific Islanders’ or Oceania’s contemporary desires at the grassroots level. Heeding Teaiwa’s invitation, perhaps, more bleeding analyses across disciplinary boundaries and communities are needed.

Conclusion

We utilize talanoa as a methodology that affirms our umbilical connections to various places throughout Oceania, yet also incorporates our diasporic potential. These connections lie beyond definitions bound by geographical boundaries to encompass both our inseparability from our genealogy as well as our ability to forge new bonds and relationship to place. Or, as Epeli Hau‘ofa’s “Blood in the Kava Bowl” so intimately and deftly describes the resilience and malleability of the cord that binds all Pacific Islanders, we liken this talanoa to conversations that happen around the kava bowl and propose solutions that are not always discernible through the rigidity of academic proscriptions and disciplinary boundaries:

Across the bowl we nod our understanding of the line

that is also our cord brought by Tagaloa from above,

and the professor does not know.

He sees the line but not the cord

for he drinks the kava not tasting its blood.44

The goal of our discussion has been to critically reflect on how academic fields such as Pacific Islander studies and Trans-Pacific studies have emerged and are defined. We build on the previous scholarship by Pacific Islands studies scholars’ critiques of Asian American studies, cultural studies, and Indigenous studies to comprehend and contextualize the kinds of historical and political struggles that differentiate each community represented in these fields.45 We offer talanoa to model what Trans-Pacific studies could be—a methodology that centers the Indigenous Pacific, that is inclusive of diaspora, and takes up issues of Indigenous and Asian encounters and solidarities.

One immediate task is to be conscious about the lack of geopolitical specificity in the “Trans-Pacific” and acknowledge the issues of access and exclusion in its universalizing use as a field of study. This exclusionary practice has resulted in the marginalization of Native Pacific Islander communities in the region as scholars continue to publish “Trans-Pacific” books and essays that reproduce this erasure. The goal of our collective work is to support the communities we write about and work with, regardless of the terms or phrases that scholars use to categorize their scholarship. Moreover, we seek to ground and theorize Indigeneity, ethnic relations, multirelational politics, and solidarities in Pacific diasporas in order to disrupt fixed and fetishized notions of regions as unchanging and static. This process of intellectual decolonization must include scholarly thinking, theoretical development, and community-centered knowledge production.

Kēhaulani Vaughn (Kanaka ‘Ōiwi) is an assistant professor of Pacific Islander education in the Department of Education, Culture & Society and the Pacific Island Studies Initiative at the University of Utah. Kēhaulani’s research highlights trans-Indigenous recognitions between Pacific Islanders and American Indians living in Turtle Island. These recognitions are central to ensuring (re)generative social and political futures for Indigenous peoples.

Alfred P. Flores is an assistant professor in the Intercollegiate Department of Asian American Studies at Harvey Mudd College. His research and teaching interests include Pacific Islander history with an emphasis on diaspora, Indigeneity, labor, migration, militarization, oral history, and settler colonialism in Guam. Flores’s research has appeared in Amerasia Journal, American Quarterly, and Oxford University Press. His forthcoming book is under contract with Cornell University Press and is tentatively titled Tip of the Spear: Land, Labor, and US Settler Militarism in Guam, 1944–1962, and which examines how the island became a crucible of US empire in the western Pacific.

Joyce Pualani Warren is a diasporic, Black Kanaka Maoli. An assistant professor in the Department of English at the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa, she teaches courses on Native Hawaiian, Pacific, and ethnic American literatures. Her research interests include Pō, Blackness in the Pacific, Native feminisms, diaspora, and Black and Indigenous fantasy and speculative fiction. Her writing has appeared in Ethnic Studies Review, The Mauna Kea Syllabus Project, American Indian Culture and Research Journal, American Quarterly, Amerasia Journal, and Critical Ethnic Studies. She is the recipient of a 2021-2022 Barbara Thom Postdoctoral Fellowship at The Huntington.

Brandon J. Reilly teaches East Asian, Southeast Asian, US, and world history at Santa Monica College. His new publications include six biographical essays about pioneer Filipino anthropologist E. Arsenio Manuel, which are forthcoming in the journal Agham Tao. His current projects include an essay on the early Black Pacific and a monograph on the epic genre in the Philippines over the last five centuries.

Christen T. Sasaki is an assistant professor in the Ethnic Studies Department at the University of California, San Diego. She received her doctorate in history from the University of California, Los Angeles. Sasaki’s research focuses on the politics of race and empire in the Pacific. Her recent publications can be found in the Pacific Historical Review and American Quarterly. Her book, Pacific Confluence: Fighting over the Nation in 19th Century Hawai‘i (UC Press, 2022), examines how the mixing of ideas that occurred between Hawaiian and Japanese, White American, and Portuguese settlers led to the dynamic rethinking of the modern nation-state.

Juliann Anesi is an assistant professor of gender studies at the University of California, Los Angeles. Her research interests include disability and Indigeneity, educational policies, and decolonial feminisms. As a community educator and activist, she has also worked with nonprofit organizations and schools in American Sāmoa, California, Hawai‘i, New York, and Sāmoa. Her work has appeared in venues including Disability and the Global South; Women and Social Movements in the United States, 1600 to 2000; and Disability & Society.

Notes

1. Epeli Hau‘ofa, “Our Sea of Islands,” The Contemporary Pacific 6, no. 1 (Spring 1994): 148–61.

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2. Vicente M. Diaz and J. Kēhaulani Kauanui, “Native Pacific Cultural Studies on Edge,” The Contemporary Pacific 3 no. 2 (Fall 2001): 315–42. We consider Diaz and Kauanui’s inflection of James Clifford’s and Teresia K. Teaiwa’s notions of “roots and routes” as a vital entry point into the issues we discuss below. James Clifford, Routes Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997); Teresia K. Teaiwa, “Yagona/Yagoqu: Roots and Routes of a Displaced Writer,” Cultural Studies and New Writing 4, no. 1 (1998): 92–106.

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3. Arif Dirlik and Rob Wilson, eds., Asia/Pacific as Space of Cultural Production (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995).

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4. Talanoa, which is generally understood to be a process of conversation or storytelling, exists in various iterations across and beyond Oceania. Refer to A. Tecun, I. Hafoka, L. ‘Ulu’ave, and M. Uluave-Hafoka, “Tongan Epistemology and Indigenous Research Method,” Alternative: An International Journal of Indigenous Peoples 14, no. 2 (2018): 156–63.

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5. Tēvita Ka’ili, Marking Indigeneity: The Tongan Art of Sociospatial Relations (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2017).

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6. ʻOkusitino Māhina, “Art as tā-vā ‘time-space’ transformation,” in Researching the Pacific and Indigenous Peoples: Issues and Perspectives, ed. Tupeni L. Baba, ʻOkusitino Māhina, N. Carmago Williams, and Unaisi Nabobo-Baba (Auckland, New Zealand: Centre for Pacific Studies, University of Auckland, 2004), 86–93. Also refer to Joyce Pualani Warren, “Theorizing Pō: Embodied Cosmogony and Polynesian National Narratives” (Doctoral dissertation, University of California, Los Angeles, 2017), 34–38.

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7. Kēhaulani Vaughn, “Sovereign Embodiment: Native Hawaiians and Expressions of Diasporic Kuleana,” Hūlili Journal 11, no. 1 (2019): 227–45.

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8. Diaz and Kauanui, “Native Pacific Cultural Studies on the Edge.”

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9. For more information, see Cynthia Enloe, “Introduction,” in Militarized Currents: Toward a Decolonized Future in Asia and the Pacific, ed. Setsu Shigematsu and Keith L. Camacho (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010), xv–xlvii, http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5749/j.ctttv7q0.

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10. For more information, refer to Vaughn, “Sovereign Embodiment,” and J. Kēhaulani Kauanui, “Diaspora Deracination and Off Island Hawaiians,” The Contemporary Pacific 19, no. 1 (2007): 138–60.

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11. Hau‘ofa, “Our Sea of Islands.”

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12. Epeli Hau‘ofa, “The Ocean In Us,” The Contemporary Pacific 10, no. 2 (1998): 392–410.

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13. Chadwick Allen, Trans-Indigenous: Methodologies for Global Native Literary Studies (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012).

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14. Kēhaulani Vaughn, “Sovereign Embodiment: Native Hawaiians and Expressions of Diasporic Kuleana,” Hūlili Journal 11, no. 1 (2019): 227–45.

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15. Vaughn, “Sovereign Embodiment.”

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16. Charles Sepulveda, “Our Sacred Waters: Theorizing Kuuyam as a Decolonial Possibility,” Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society 7, no. 1 (2018): 40–58.

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17. Diaz and Kauanui, “Native Pacific Cultural Studies on the Edge.”

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18. Christine Taitano DeLisle, “A History of Chamorro Nurse-Midwives in Guam and a ‘Placental Politics’ for Indigenous Feminism,” Intersections: Gender and Sexuality in Asia and the Pacific 37 (March 2015): 1.

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19. For more on militarization in Asia and the Pacific, see Setsu Shigematsu and Keith L. Camacho, eds., Militarized Currents: Toward a Decolonized Future in Asia and the Pacific (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010).

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20. Saina ma’ase and thank you to Joyce Pualani Warren for encouraging me to think of this connection.

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21. For more on Fuetsan Famalao’an, refer to Keith L. Camacho, “After 9/11: Militarized Borders and Social Movements in the Mariana Islands,” American Quarterly 64, no. 4 (December 2012): 685–713. For more on the International Women’s Network against Militarism, refer to Gwendolyn Kirk and Margo Okazawa-Rey, “Making Connections: Building an East Asia-US Women’s Network against US Militarism,” http://www.genuinesecurity.org/aboutus/documents/making_connections_paper.pdf. For more on We Are Guåhan, refer to Tiara R Na’puti and Michael Lujan Bevacqua, “Militarization and Resistance from Guåhan: Protecting and Defending Pågat,” American Quarterly 67, no. 3 (September 2015): 837–58.

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22. Maile Arvin, “Possessions of Whiteness: Settler Colonialism and Anti-Blackness in the Pacific,” Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society, June 2, 2014, https://decolonization.wordpress.com/2014/06/02/possessions-of-whiteness-settler-colonialism-and-anti-blackness-in-the-pacific/.

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23. Anita Hofschneider, “Why Talking About Anti-Micronesian Hate Is Important,” Honolulu Civil Beat, September 24, 2018; Chad Blair, “No Aloha for Micronesians in Hawaii,” Honolulu Civil Beat, June 10, 2011; Alice Keesing, “Pacific Migrants Run Up Hefty Healthcare Tab,” Honolulu Advertiser, March 3, 2002.

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24. Kristiana Kahakauwila, This is Paradise: Stories (New York: Hogarth, 2013).

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25. Kathy Jetnil-Kijiner, “Poem: Lessons From Hawaii,” April 13, 2011, https://jkijiner.wordpress.com/2011/04/13/micronesia-i-lessons-from-hawaii/.

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26. Miles Jackson, ed., They Followed the Trade Winds: African Americans in Hawai‘i (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa Department of Sociology, 2004); Nitasha Sharma, “Pacific Revisions of Blackness: Blacks Address Race and Belonging in Hawai‘i,” Amerasia Journal 37, no. 3 (2011): 41–60.

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27. Joyce Pualani Warren, Keith Camacho, Elizabeth DeLoughrey, and Evyn Lê Espiritu Ghandhi, “Genealogizing Pō: The Relational Possibilities of Blackness in the Pacific,” Ethnic Studies Review 44, no. 3 (2021): 7–16; Joyce Pualani Warren, “Blackness is Life in Hawai‘i and Oceania,” The Mauna Kea Syllabus Project, https://www.maunakeasyllabus.com/units/cultivating-solidarities/blackness-is-life-in-hawaii-and-oceania.

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28. Jesús Martínez Pérez, ed., Fray Juan Pobre: Historia de la pérdida y descubrimiento del galeón “San Felipe” [Fray Juan Pobre: History of the loss and discovery of the Galleon “San Felipe”] (Avila, Spain: Institución Gran Duque de Alba de la Excma. Diputación Provincial de Avila, 1997).

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29. Jesús Martínez Pérez, ed., Fray Juan Pobre: Historia de la pérdida y descubrimiento del galeón “San Felipe” bre: Historia d (Avila, Spain: Institución Gran Duque de Alba de la Excma. Diputación Provincial de Avila, 1997), 422.

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30. Alfred Peredo Flores, “‘Little Island into Mighty Base’: Indigeneity, Race, and US Empire in Guam, 1944–1962” (PhD dissertation, University of California, Los Angeles, 2015).

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31. Dean Itsuji Saranillio, “Colonial Amnesia: Rethinking Filipino ‘American’ Settler Empowerment in the Colony of Hawai’i,” in Asian Settler Colonialism From Local Governance to the Habits of Everyday Life in Hawai‘i, ed. Jonathan Y. Okamura and Candace Fujikane (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2008), 256–78; Patricio N. Abinales, “The Problem with the National(ist) Method,” in Routledge Handbook of the Contemporary Philippines, ed. Eric Vincent C. Batalla and Mark R. Thompson (New York: Taylor & Francis, 2018), 448–61.

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32. Augusto V. de Viana, In the Far Islands: The Role of Natives from the Philippines in the Conquest, Colonization, and Repopulation of the Mariana Islands, 1668–1903 (Manila, Philippines: University of Santo Tomas, 2004).

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33. Michael Lujan Bevacqua, “Transmission of Christianity into Chamorro culture,” Guampedia (2009–2019), https://www.guampedia.com/transmission-of-christianity-into-chamorro-culture/ (accessed August 26, 2018).

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34. Jun Uchida, Brokers of Empire: Japanese Settler Colonialism in Korea, 1876–1945 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard East Asian Monographs, 2011).

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35. Setsu Shigematsu and Keith Camacho, “Introduction,” in Militarized Currents: Toward a Decolonized Future in Asia and the Pacific, ed. Setsu Shigematsu and Keith L. Camacho (Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 2010), xxxii. Shigematsu and Camacho point out that “Pacific Rim” studies oftentimes foreground the economic, military, and political interest of countries on the rim, rather than the people of these places.

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36. Noelani Goodyear-Ka‘ōpua, The Seeds We Planted: Portraits of a Native Hawaiian Charter School (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013), 127.

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37. This book is tentatively titled Pacific Confluence: Negotiating the Nation in Nineteenth Century Hawai‘i and is contracted with University of California Press.

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38. Sworn testimony of Lieutenant Lucien Young, Reports of Committee on Foreign Relations 1789–1901 Volume 6, The Morgan Report, 342.

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39. Malissa Phung, “Indigenous and Asian Relation Making,” in “Field Trip: Settler Colonial Studies, Asian Diasporic Questions,” Verge: Studies in Global Asias 5, no.1 (2019): 18–29.

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40. Teresia Teaiwa, “Bleeding Boundaries: Gendered Analyses of Militarism in the Western Pacific,” Asia Pacific Viewpoint 52 (2011): 1–4, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-8373.2011.01441.x.

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41. Teresia Teaiwa, “L(o)osing the Edge,” The Contemporary Pacific 13, no. 2 (Fall 2001): 343–57, http://dx.doi.org/10.1353/cp.2001.0071. Teaiwa describes “on the edge” as the place, the position she believes some of us feel we must, prefer, or fear to occupy as pioneers of the new scholarship, Native Pacific cultural studies.

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42. Aoga Fiamalamalama and Loto Taumafai are the first institutions established by community members in the late 1970s for students with cognitive and physical disabilities.

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43. Fesili Keil, Annual Report of Loto Taumafai National Society for the Disabled, IHC New Zealand Archives (Rotorua, Aotearoa New Zealand, 1981).

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44. Epeli Hau‘ofa, “Blood in the Kava Bowl,” in We Are the Ocean: Selected Works (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2008), 5–9. References are to line.

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45. Vicente M. Diaz, “‘To ‘P’ or Not to ‘P’?’: Marking the Territory Between Pacific Islander and Asian American Studies,” Journal of Asian American Studies 7, no. 3 (2004): 183–208, https://doi.org/10.1353/jaas.2005.0019; Diaz and Kauanui, “Native Pacific Cultural Studies on the Edge”; Teresia Teaiwa, “Postscript: Reflection on Militourism, US Imperialism, and American Studies,” American Quarterly 68, no. 3 (2016): 847–53, https://doi.org/10.1353/aq.2016.0068; David Hanlon, “The ‘Sea of Little Lands’: Examining Micronesia’s Place in ‘Our Sea of Islands,’” The Contemporary Pacific 21, no. 1 (2009): 91–110, https://doi.org/10.1353/cp.0.0042; David Hanlon, “Losing Oceania to the Pacific and the World,” The Contemporary Pacific 29, no. 2 (2017): 286–318, https://doi.org/10.1353/cp.2017.0032; Terence Wesley-Smith, “Rethinking Pacific Studies Twenty Years On,” The Contemporary Pacific 28, no. 1 (2016): 153–69, https://doi.org/10.1353/cp.2016.0003; Katerina Teaiwa, April Henderson, and Terence Wesley-Smith, “Teresia K. Teaiwa: A Bibliography,” The Journal of Pacific History 53, no. 1 (2018): 103–7, https://doi.org/10.1080/00223344.2018.1440901.

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