Above: “Men in an Outrigger Canoe Headed for Shore” (detail), Arman Tateos Manookian (Armenian, 1904-1931), c. 1929. Oil on canvas. Photo my own, taken of the work at the Honolulu Academy of Arts, August 2014.
Histories & Cultures of the Pacific Islands
Pacific History provides an opportunity to explore a variety of beautiful Polynesian, Melanesian, and Micronesian cultures, distinct, diverse, and spread out across a vast ocean, but closely interrelated. The islands of Hawaiʻi, Rapa Nui (Easter Island), Tahiti, Tonga, Aotearoa (New Zealand), Samoa, Fiji, Kanaky (New Caledonia), and beyond each have their own vibrant, fascinating, and important histories to tell, and distinctive contemporary problems that they face. The study of their histories and cultures presents opportunities to broaden our horizons — and, for students of Pacific descent, to explore or deepen their understandings of their own heritage — gaining new perspectives and understandings about our world, including diverse notions of how community, identity, culture, and spirituality, as well as art and craft, tradition and modernity, and humanity’s relationships with nature and with one another can be understood.
The numerous islands of the Pacific were first populated by indigenous islander peoples who explored, settled, traveled, and traded across immense distances, navigating through keen observation of the natural world around them. Settling a diverse range of islands – large and small; tropical and temperate; some mountainous and some low atolls – across a vast ocean, their societies developed from closely related origins into a great diversity of different kingdoms, chiefdoms, and other societies, each with their own interrelated but vibrantly distinct political, material, spiritual, and performance cultures. Through traditions of storytelling, dance, and song, they maintain networks of knowledge about the physical and spiritual worlds, and through use of the materials available to them locally or through trade produce structures, clothing, and objects not only of practical use but of deep cultural and spiritual meaning.
The earliest Europeans to cross the Pacific used the ocean chiefly as a conduit, carrying trade goods and wealth between Asia and the Americas, linking disparate parts of their empire, and proselytizing while they did so. In the 18th-19th centuries, Europeans and Americans brought new forms of imperialism and colonialism to the Pacific, intertwined with new forms of scientific understandings, capitalism, and racism. They also brought devastating diseases, violence, exploitation, religious proselytism, and destructive notions of what constituted primitivism and modernity. Encounters between Europeans and islanders generally shared many features with comparable developments the world over, from Turtle Island (North America) to Africa and Australia. But in exploring the differences in these events from one island group to the next, and between the Pacific overall and other parts of the world, we find a rich diversity and complexity which provides an opportunity for challenging, questioning, and complicating what we might have thought we understood about these ideologies and developments.
Some islands were seized and made the territory of Western powers fairly early in this period; others signed treaties, entering into colonial relationships with some expectation of partnership and fair treatment from the colonial powers, while others still managed to retain independence and gain recognition as sovereign powers unto themselves, even establishing embassies around the world. Some islands saw extensive European settlement and the displacement of the Native peoples, while others did not. Some island peoples converted to Christianity en masse, while others did not. Some islands became hubs for trade, whaling, or blackbirding (slavery / human trafficking). Some became the objects of wars between Western powers over resources such as guano. Some islands became the sites of intensive and exploitative agricultural plantations or mining operations serving to benefit imperial governments, while others were exploited by independent capitalists. Some peoples were subjected explicitly to an inferior position as “colonial subjects,” while others lost their lands and self-determination to Enlightenment notions of freedom and equality and to simple demographic disparities which allowed settler majorities to simply outvote decimated Native populations. Settlers came not only from the West, but also from places like China, Korea, Japan, Okinawa, the Philippines, and India. Pacific Island peoples emigrated, too, forming notable diaspora communities around the world.
Many islands became battlefields in World War II. Some remained highly-militarized outposts of Western powers through the Cold War, and some remain so today. Some islands have been entirely depopulated or even destroyed because of nuclear weapon testing, and others continue to deal with the repercussions from such tests and other forms of environmental damage. Many islands struggle today with the impacts of climate change, and many may disappear in coming years due to sea level rise; these Pacific nations are among the chief epicenters in the world of the ongoing climate crisis and the concordant refugee crisis.
Some Pacific Island nations are today independent UN member states, while others remain under a variety of other statuses, from US states and territories to states in “free association” with other countries, to overseas territories of France, the United Kingdom, Chile, Ecuador, or Australia, to Indonesian provinces, to islands administered as part of Japanese prefectures. Pacific peoples continue today to celebrate and practice historical cultural traditions and to develop new ones, and to cultivate local identity and Pacific pride, even as they struggle with the impacts of tourism and other political, economic, and social challenges.
Pacific History provides a vital opportunity to explore how themes such as democracy, freedom, and equality; nationalism and race; empire and colonialism; and modernity and tradition played out and continue to play out in this sizable portion of the world. By comparing the character of British, French, German, Spanish, Japanese, and American colonialism in the Pacific, and examining events and developments from whaling and "exploration" to the rise and fall of the Native kingdoms, to World War, nuclear testing, and climate change, we can learn valuable knowledge for better understanding the experiences and perspectives of our Pacific Islander neighbors as well as gaining new perspectives on our own communities, countries, and world.
Below: Aliʻiōlani Hale, the former administrative and legislative center of the Hawaiian Kingdom. A decidedly modern but distinctively Hawaiian structure completed by the Hawaiian Kingdom in 1874. And a statue of King Kamehameha I, commissioned in 1878. Photo my own.
