History of the Pacific Islands

At the commencement of the First World War, New Zealand military forces took control of Western Samoa, which had been under German colonial administration since 1900. From December 1920, in accordance with the provisions of the charter of the League of Nations established post-war to foster international security, New Zealand administered Western Samoa as a “Class C Mandate”. This paper draws on records in the League of Nations Archive in Geneva to examine interactions between the League’s Permanent Mandates Commission (PMC) and the New Zealand government concerning the administration of these islands.  Far from delivering perfunctory oversight of annual reports submitted by the “Mandatory Power” (ie, New Zealand), the Commission scrutinized all aspects of New Zealand’s administration of Western Samoa’s government and society. Indeed, under this close scrutiny New Zealand’s attitude toward its responsibilities under the Mandate seems to have become increasingly diligent. The accountability mechanisms developed by the Permanent Mandates Commission can be regarded as an early step in the emergence of international governance.

Alma Karlin from Celje, Slovenia, travelled the Western Pacific Islands  from 1919 on, as part of her tour roudn the world. In 1924 she spent Christmas in Fiji, continued to New Caledonia, went to the Solomon Islands, the New Hebrides (Santa Cruz Islands, Efate, Malaita) and Bougainville, New Britain (Territory of Papua and NEw Guinea) and proceeded to Dutch New Guinea. On her typewriting machine "Erika" she created reports which she sent to Europe for publishing. With the money she earned from his, she could continue her travel. Karlin is one of the early Western single travelling women in the Pacific Islands.

This is an advance preview of sections of my principal anthropological study/monograph of personhood, environment and climate change in the Torres Islands. This is the extended version in Spanish, of which a more compact version in English is currently in preparation for submission to an academic publisher.

This presentation describes the fascinating life of Amelia Earhart, her achievements, her attempted round the world flight with navigator Fred Noonan, the disappearance, the original search efforts, and the various disappearance theories (including the Marshall islands theory and the "crashed and sank" theory and why these both have a low probability).  The briefing then describes the efforts of TIGHAR (The International Group for Historic Aircraft Recovery) to test the hypothesis that Earhart/Noonan landed and survived for a time on Nikumaroro atoll (ex-Gardner Island) in what is now the Republic of Kiribati in the South Pacific.  The evidence for this hypothesis is presented, and the various expeditions to Niku described, including a detailed review of the 2017 TIGHAR/National Geographic expedition.  The briefing was given to the private Cosmos Club, a distinguished club which has had three Presidents and numerous Nobel prize winners as its members.

The media portrayed Sogavare, four times Prime Minister of Solomon Islands, as a Pacific bogeyman, dragging the islands further into China’s orbit. At 67 years of age Sogavare remains very fit and is a commanding charismatic figure. He is not ignorant of the risks he is taking in moving closer to China. However, is this well-educated teetotaller martial arts expert and seasoned politician, really in control of what is happening? While we try to double-guess the motivations of the governments of China and Solomon Islands, two points are missing. The first is detailed analysis of the character and political track record of Manasseh Sogavare, and his relationship with China and Australia. While we don’t have a final copy of the security pact with China, should we believe Sogavare’s denials about a possible military base?  The leaked draft certainly included scope for China to move in troops and police, to establish port facilities for Chinese ships, help defend infrastructure, and safeguard ethnic Chinese in Solomon Islands (some of whom are PRC citizens).

I will also discuss the site for a hypothetical Chinese base, suggesting that perhaps we are misled in our thinking around what constitutes a base, as there already are two large Chinese corporate bases close to Honiara, while two more are looming, at Yandina and possibly at Tulagi.

Die Kulturregion Ozeanien – untergliedert in Melanesien, Polynesien und Mikronesien – ist aufgrund der ethnischen, kulturellen und sprachlichen Vielfalt ihrer Bewohner weltweit einzigartig und stellt wegen ihrer Ausmaße und geographischen Extreme eine Region der Superlative dar. Die indigenen Bevöl-kerungen dieser Inselwelt mussten in Prozessen der Akkulturation und Transkulturation in den vergangenen 200 Jahren ihren Bezug zu Status, Tradition, Alltag und Berufsleben unaufhörlich neu definieren.
Diesen Kulturwandel wie auch die politischen Entwicklun- gen der einzelnen Staaten veranschaulicht der Autor exemplarisch anhand der Darstellung von lokalen sozialen Strukturen, Kulten und Ritualen, religiösen Vorstellungen, Aspekten der materiellen Kultur, Weltbild und Wertvorstellungen. Viele Illustrationen, eine umfangreiche Bibliographie, eine Chronologie der euro- päischen Entdeckungsgeschichte und ein Register vervollständigen das Bild.

This paper explores the historiography of Hawaiian mobility in the 19th century, with reference to mobilities that took place through Kānaka Maoli engagements as servants for the Hudson’s Bay Company of London. In recharting Hawaiian mobilities to the Pacific Northwest, it considers how Kānaka Maoli histories were intertwined with trans-Pacific networks of commerce and a broader Pacific world of aspirational mobility, extractive marine-based industries, and ultimately, a land-based fur trade centered initially at Fort Astoria. It discusses how Hawaiian engagements with the HBC in the Pacific Northwest were formative for their eventual incorporation into the colonial settler world of British Columbia, and examines their displacement from Oregon Territory in the wake of the 1846 boundary settlement. It incorporates themes of intimacy, encounter and hierarchy as key sites for locating Hawaiian social histories along the Northwest Coast. Finally, the Hawaiian presence in British Columbia is traced with attention to community formation and land acquisition. Whether or not they fit within a broader category of pioneer-settlers, the “Kanakas” displaced to the Northwest Coast were for a time first positioned along what historian Adele Perry has termed the “ragged margins” of empire.

Una de las claves en la historia de Rapa Nui entre fines del siglo XIX y en el siglo XX es el problema de la propiedad de la tierra. Entre 1916 y 1917 se suscitó un conflicto entre el Estado chileno y la Compañía Explotadora de Isla de Pascua con el intento de esta última de inscribir las tierras ante el conservador de Bienes Raíces. La respuesta del Estado fue la liquidación de la concesión a la Compañía para trabajar en Pascua y el envío de una comisión para estudiar los derechos reales que esta última poseía sobre la Isla. La Comunidad rapanui, a través de su capacidad de negociación formó una alianza con el gobierno para restarle poder a la porfiada Compañía. Sin embargo, el resultado contribuyó a aumentar significativamente el poder estatal, sin diferencia inmediata en el ejercicio de derechos por parte de la Comunidad rapanui.

¿cómo entender el pasado compartido de las sociedades propias del Oceáno Pacífico y aquellas (euroamericanas) que intruyeron en los espacios oceánicos desde el siglo XVI desde puntos de vista que coloquen en su justa dimensión tanto a los europeos como a los isleños? ¿Cómo aproximarse a perspectivas en donde los isleños no resulten meros agentes pasivos para la ‘narrativa maestra’ de la historia euroamericana de descubrimiento del Pacífico? Para poder responder a estas preguntas esta ponencia ofrece maneras de reflexionar críticamente sobre las dimensiones geográficas, históricas y humanas del Océano Pacífico, y a partir de estas referentes propone otras maneras de historiar y representar los espacios y los tiempos oceánicos, para pasar luego a los conceptos y usos del pasado de sus habitantes actuales, con especial referencia a las primeras intrusiones ibéricas en las islas de Melanesia insular.

Drawing from decades of study and practice in traditional seafaring from the Central Carolines and Guam in Micronesia, this essay rethinks the category of "island" and "islandness" and the larger set of colonial spatialities, subjectivities, and aesthetics associated with them.

This paper explores the pivotal status of mountain spaces in the 19th-century imaginary of wild peoples and black races in island Oceania. It adopts the notion of 'heterotopia'in order to examine how arrangements of human difference and spatial alterity were productively ...

The article highlights the achievments of Austrian explorers, travellers, and scientists who did research and travel the Pacific Islands from the 17th to the 20th century. This is the introductory chapter of the book "Österreicher in der Südsee" ("Austrians in the South Seas").

Final revised draft of paper originally presented at the two Association of Social Anthropology of Oceania (ASAO) meetings held in 2014 and 2015. Currently under review for publication in a collective volume on the social life of rivers in Oceania.

This paper discusses the expansion of Oceania through a Marshallese indigenous lens as a focal point. It explains that decolonizing methodologies allows reclaiming of space for mental liberation and reassurement of constitutional rights. It highlights similar occurrences of decolonization practices meeting resistance in the 21 century all while strengthening the human right argument that no human deserves any less than their fellow human brothers and sisters. It argues that an indigenous imagery can only be viewed through an indigenous lens where the researches’ level of purity is retained and unfiltered. It nevertheless argues that Marshallese ethnolinguistics reveal the same cultural practices in America, Judeo-Christianity, and Oceania thus dictating the reality that “we are the same not withstanding one stays here and one there (Bedbedjin Bedbedjen, Bedbedjinma wot Kwe)”. It further explains the importance in these similarities and how Marshallese spirituality predates introduce...

During the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, epidemics ravaged
South Pacific islands after contact with Westerners. With no existing
immunity to introduced diseases, consequent death tolls on these remote
islands were catastrophic. During that period, a succession of significant
Anglo-Western writers visited the South Pacific region: Herman Melville,
Robert Louis Stevenson, Louis Becke, Jack London, and Fredrick O’Brien.
In a remarkable literary conjunction, they each successively visited the
Marquesas Islands, which became for them a microcosm of the
epidemiological disaster they were witnessing across the Pacific. Instead of
the tropical Eden they expected, these writers experienced and wrote about
a tainted paradise corrupted and fatally ravaged by contact with Western
societies. Even though these writers were looking through the prism of
Social Darwinism and extinction discourse, they were all nevertheless
appalled at the situation, and their writing is witness to their anguish. Unlike
the typical Victorian-era traveller described by Mary Louise Pratt as the
“seeing-man”, who remained distanced in their writing from the environment
around them, this group wrote with the authority of personal felt experience,
bearing witness to the horrific impact of Western society on the physical and
mental health of Pacific Island populations. The literary voice of this
collection of writers continues to be not only a clear and powerful witness of
the past, but also a warning to the present about the impact of ‘civilisation’
on Pacific Island peoples and cultures

This paper examines American physical anthropologist Harry
Shapiro’s anthropometric fieldwork on Pitcairn Island in 1934–
1935 to argue for hospitality as a vital subject of and analytic
framework for histories of anthropological fieldwork. Attention to
hospitality as a historically situated mode by which locals
engaged their guests makes visible the larger structures and
contexts in which fieldwork took place. Specific hospitable forms
emerged on Pitcairn Island as the result of iterative encounter
with outside investigators, including sailors and agents of the
colonial state. When Shapiro arrived as part of an American
Museum of Natural History expedition in 1934, his investigation
was accommodated and managed through an already elaborated
script, shepherding him through a process of arrival, lodging,
sightseeing, and sentimentalized departure. That script made
possible the collection of anthropometric measurements and the
gathering of genealogical data understood as forms of ‘gossip’.
However, hospitality on Pitcairn also emerged as a practice for
negotiating incommensurability and alterity, especially as
investigator and subject understood in different ways the
meanings and relative secrecy of the knowledge they coproduced.
Ultimately, Shapiro’s ambivalent approach to the status
of race as a scientific category was shaped by his encounter with
Pitcairn’s local hospitable forms.

Guåhan’s history of Spanish colonization and inflicted genocide, Japanese occupancy, and American militarization poses profound effects on CHamoru land, rights, physical health, and language survival. These include instances of “celebration colonialism” such as Liberation Day, in which CHamorus celebrate the date that the United States dropped 124 tons of bombs on Guåhan to liberate them from the Japanese ([lukao] 44). Through an analysis of his 2017 anthology from unincorporated territory: [lukao], this essay examines how Dr. Craig Santos Perez casts light on the complex inheritance of native CHamorus via an intimate portrait of diasporic CHamoru identity. Furthermore, I argue that Perez’s view of Pacific Islands as an interconnected unit — in the same vein as Tongan-Fijian writer Epeli Hau’ofa’s idea of a “sea of islands” — furthers the anthology’s alternate function as an inclusive call for justice on behalf of all transpacific peoples affected by American militarization and colo...

Solomon Islands had a population of approximately 515,870 people in the latest national census in 2009, with an annual population growth rate of 2.3 per cent. Melanesians accounted for 80 per cent of its population, with Polynesians, Micronesians, Chinese, Europeans and others making up the remaining 20 per cent.1 The country was granted independence in 1978 but nation-building has been an uphill climb due to political events further consolidating people within their own geographical and language wantok groupings (i.e. closely linked people speaking the same language). Some wantok groups have called for political autonomy, and civil uprisings from 1998 to 2003, exemplifying national fragmentation, led to regional intervention to return law and order to the country. The country still needs to strengthen national consciousness and unity after more than 100 years of colonial rule and more than three decades as an independent state.

As the popular saying goes, it was ‘his way or the highway’. Any quibbles? Yes: the book does not have an index, which makes the search for relevant sections or issues in a hurry difficult. But this is a minor fault. Michael Green has written a valuable book. His account will ring true to anyone who has followed recent events in Fiji closely. The book will have a long shelf life. It is a great pity that Michael died so prematurely.