Sister Islands: Contemplating Pacific Nationalism
Noelle M.K.Y. Kahanu

Pan-Pacific Nation was born out of a piece I submitted for an exhibition at the ARTS at Marks Garage in 2007 on Alternate Urban Futures. Entitled “Kalākaua’s Dream: A Confederation of Pacific Nations,” excerpts from it are interspersed throughout this essay.

King Kalākaua believed in a unified Oceania – in a Pacific federation of international states with the Kingdom of Hawai‘i as its leader. He sought to protect his fellow Pacific Islanders from foreign control and to promote self-governance and independence. He was not alone. The Legislature, in 1883, adopted a resolution protesting the colonization of Pacific peoples:

“Whereas His Hawaiian Majesty’s Government being informed that certain Sovereign and Colonial States propose to annex various Islands and Archipelagoes of Polynesia, does hereby solemnly protest against such projects of annexation, as unjust to a simple and ignorant people, and subversive in their case of those conditions for favorable national development, which have been so happily accorded to the Hawaiian Nation. … And his Hawaiian Majesty’s Government … makes earnest appeal to the Governments of great and enlightened States, that they will recognize the inalienable rights of the several native communities of Polynesia to enjoy opportunities for progress and self-government, and will guarantee to them the same favorable opportunities which have made Hawaii prosperous and happy, and which incite her national spirit to lift up a voice among the Nations in behalf of sister island and groups of Polynesia.”

Being a Hawaiian today is fraught with complexity. With our Ali‘i Trusts and state and federal benefits constantly in danger of being dismantled on the basis of being race-based, we are told that nation-within-a-nation status is the answer. To be “Native American”, to have a status akin to federally-recognized Indian tribes, afford us protections and ensures the continuing validity of Native Hawaiian programs. But what does it mean to abandon our genealogical past in favor of a political future? After all, Native American, by definition, describes a people in relation to the United States of America. It is not a reflection of a people, in and of themselves.

Kalākaua sought to intervene on behalf of the native peoples in the annexation of the islands of Micronesia, the Marshall Islands, Gilbert Islands, and Eastern Caroline. In 1885, he appointed a minister to travel to Europe on a reconnaissance mission – “to ascertain whether Hawai‘i may not be recognized as eligible to take a leading part in a more complete political organization of Central Polynesia…”

Hawai‘i‘s roots reach not towards the Americas, but across the great expanse of Moana Nui Ākea, towards our ancestral Kahiki. Towards Tahiti, the Marquesas, Samoa, Tonga, Aotearoa. But King Kalākaua’s dream was also based on politics. On his trip around the World, he encountered kingdoms whose great domains were separated by oceans and huge mountain chains, yet governed by a single ruler. While Kalākaua desire to protect his sister islands might have been genuine, it nonetheless also manifested a paternalistic attitude that sought to elevate his own political standing.

Kalākaua also interceded in a brewing civil conflict in Samoa. A treaty was negotiated, whereby King Malietoa of Samoa agreed “to bind [himself] to enter into a political Confederation with His Majesty Kalakaua” and pledged to “conform to whatever measures may hereafter by adopted by His Majesty Kalakaua and be mutually agreed upon to promote and carry into effect this political Confederation, and to maintain it now and forever.” Ratified by Kalākaua in March of 1887, the treaty was met with outrage and contempt by the United States, Germany, and Great Britain. Germany, who threatened to go to war with the Kingdom of Hawai‘i over the matter, ultimately forcibly deposed Malietoa, banished him from his homeland, and placed their own designee upon the throne.

But ultimately, Kalākaua’s dream mattered not. World Powers would not tolerate an upstart, much less a family of upstarts. Western history today depicts Kalākaua as being wastefully grandiose, both politically and economically, yet scholars fail to take into consideration the deliberate ways in which he was made to fail.

It was terribly prophetic, for just as Malietoa’s dream of Samoan independence ended, so too did Kalākaua’s, as American businessmen forced upon him the “Bayonet Constitution” in July of 1887. With the new Cabinet came the dismantling of his domestic and foreign policies, including his vision for a Confederation of independent Pacific Nations. Less than six years later, his sister, Queen Lili‘uokalani, would be overthrown by these same agents, in concert with the armed forces of the United States.

So what does it mean today, in 2009, to reflect on Pan Pacific Nationhood? There is a palpable and painful irony in Kalākaua once viewing the Kingdom of Hawai‘i as being in a position of strength, power, and leadership. Instead we were overthrown, colonized, and subsumed. It is for these very reasons that today, we must not define ourselves in relation to the colonizer. We must retrieve the collective ancestral memory of what we once were – a proud Kingdom. Our fate will not be determined by Congress or the courtroom – rather, our destiny lies in the mud of the kalo field and the damp forests of the uplands. It is in the fertility of our minds and bodies that our Nation will be reborn.

More than a century later, the dream survives, as Hawaiian voyaging canoes traverse the Pacific, renewing our cultural connections. Now more than ever, our futures are as interwoven as our past as we seek to ensure our vitality and sustainability against the rising tides of global climate change and cultural homogeneity.

Kalākaua’s dream, enchanting as it is, remains as elusive in practice as it is in concept. Instead, we meet on the pā, the platform, he alo a he alo, face to face as equals. We recite our respective mo‘okuauhau, our genealogies, out of respect, and in the hopes of identifying common ancestors, but we must respect and encourage our cultural and historical differences. None is more learned than the other. Instead, we move together, a collection of sister nations, riding the same ocean currents beneath the same rising moon.

Spaces of Relatedness

By Jaimey Hamilton

For this exhibition we asked a selection of Pacific Island artists to contemplate the affinities and unities, as well as the fraught histories, associated with the notion of “pan-pacific.” The initial inspiration for the show was Hawai’ian King David Kalakaua’s attempt to establish a Confederation of Pacific Island Nations in the1880s. The title, “Pan-Pacific Nation,” plays on the language of such late nineteenth century alliances, including Pan-Africanism. These terms expressed optimism in the strength of regional solidarity against colonialism, sometimes at the risk of losing other complicated contemporary cultural identities or suppressing other expressions of imperialism and racism. Kalakaua’s vision of a united Pacific was very much part of this zeitgeist. But his vision is part of a much, much longer history of seeing the islands as a connected whole. In fact, in the last century the strength of a Pacific identification has resonated even more deeply: most significantly in 1976, when Albert Wendt called for a “New Oceania” in the journal Mana and in 1994 when Epeli Hau’ofa wrote “Our Sea of Islands.” Now, at this present moment, people of this region find themselves asking more and more, what the value of a notion of the Pacific might mean to our current political, economic, environmental, and cultural seascape.

The pieces included in the show offer multilayered responses to the way that the Pacific as a cultural space has been continually re-imagined. In thinking about who does this “re-imagining” and for what purposes, the artists in this show address how a Pacific identification can speak to political, cultural, and ecological struggles still very much with us today. They celebrate a continued and hopeful identification of Pacific Island peoples that share a strong genealogical history and geographic kinship, while also offering ambivalent considerations that uncover the subtle and specific localized histories involved in any strategic collective social identification.

Va

Many of the pieces in the show draw on an indigenous Polynesian concept of va. Though roughly translated as “space,” it is more than a simple notion of geography. Conveyed in ancestral chants, embedded in materials, and embodied in the peoples that inhabit the islands, va can be partly described as genealogical “locatedness.” TIME or the temporal rhythms of past and present are integrated with the physical, psychic, and social SPACES of Pacific cultures. In some Maori whakapapa, for instance, genealogy is described as a dispersal of canoes and different iwi (people, bones) attached to different places.

The paintings of Tongan artist Sopolemalama Filipe Tohi draw upon this Polynesian concept of va. His geometric shapes refer to the patterns of sennit/coconut lavalava lashings used in canoe building. The motifs act as expressions of migration in which a relationship between people and sea are metaphorically bound together. In translating the lashings into an oil painting on canvas, Tohi also creates a layered commentary on the parallels between the ancient migration of his ancestors and his own present day position as part of a Tongan diaspora living in New Zealand. Like many contemporary Pacific Island artists, he works in a continuum of creative expression that combines his knowledge of customary forms within a Western style art market.

Ema Tavola’s customized wearable textile assemblage also reinterprets notions of indigenous space. Her sulu vakataga, a Fijian formal wrap-around garment used in the post-contact era, describes the ways that our spatial and cultural connectedness have been transformed by globalization. It is loosely inspired by the Cook Island technique of Tivaevae quilting, in itself an expression of the community that constructs the textile together. In her piece, Regionalisim, she created a patchwork of mass-produced hibiscus prints that represent the present day Exclusive Economic Zones in the Pacific Ocean. These zones float on top of her camouflage fabric, which materializes the connection between the economy and military presence throughout the Pacific region. The piece is a complex layering of customary fiber arts (in which family and local relationships are reaffirmed) with references to exploitative global labor markets (in which these same family connections are increasingly lost).

Escape Routes

Tavola’s rendering of the arbitrary zones or boundaries that are now drawn across the Pacific Ocean are part of a much longer history of the region’s geographic politics. When nautical distances between the islands began to be drawn up by cartographers, an indigenous sense of space, as conceived in material and social relationships, came into conflict with the newly charted and carved out territories. A map attributed to Tapaia, a man from the island of Ra’iatea who joined the Endevour when Captain Cook left Tahiti in July of 1769, suggests just how quickly the trajectories of local trade and ancestral mythology became a part of a larger geographic and colonial space. As Tapaia described the other islands and their relative positions, Captain Cook and Joseph Banks transcribed his knowledge into longitudinal and latitudinal space. Not so long after, the anthropological and cultural boundaries of Polynesia, Micronesia, and Melanesia were drawn. Important ports and strategically located island groups dually noted. By the nineteenth century the territory of the Pacific was thoroughly graphed. “Oceania,” as a collection of exotic island cultures replete with treasure, became a construct of the European imagination. As Victor Levasseur described it on his 1838 map, Oceania was the “fifth part of the world,” with lush landscapes “rich in gold, silver, lead, and copper,” and composed of societies with “absolute and barbarous” governments.

Nanette Lela’ulu’s painting Lost in Transit counteracts such exotic notions that continue to this day. Her realistic style, which references both a European “master-style” of painting and kitsch velvet tourist paintings, shows a young figure holding an uprooted tree and walking on the parched earth while looking back towards the viewer. The fantasy of the Pacific as the lost paradise of Western culture is replaced by this melancholic image of population displacement.

Carl Pao’s “possible aboriginal Hawai’ian artifacts” draw more specifically on anthropological rhetoric. As a fictional future archeologist of his “Post-Historic Museum,” he proffers “evidence” to support the idea of a pre-existing Pan-Pacific Nation before Kalakaua’s proposal. He declares his images are on-board emergency manuals akin to those of in-flight brochures, complete with easy to read instructions of how to safely evacuate canoes. He explains that the paper-like material of his “artifacts” are from Japan, the ink from the continent of America, the design from Hawai‘i, the shellac sealant from Southeast Asia, and some found carving fragments composed of “super condensed tofu product” from China or Japan. The faux naive style of his glyphs represent an odd future past in which our contemporary notions of universal communication and current modes of transportation are put into question. His complex and witty prints asks us to perhaps think of more plausible “escape routes” if Oceania as a whole is to continue to be a living culture rather than an inexplicable past.

Symbols of Pacific Confederations

It is in the context of exploration, colonization, and occupation -- in which European epistemologies were mapped onto indigenous relationships -- that King David Kalakaua’s strategic notion of a confederation of sovereign Pacific islands is most interesting. His investment in the ideals of nationalist representative governments and regional coalitions was a way to use European constructs of national autonomy as a defense against those same powers. Kalakaua, along with his key diplomatic advisors and envoys, generated a number of different ways to represent Hawai’i as a sovereign power. Official documents, flags, seals, and crests (such as the Royal Order of the Star of Oceania), were made, sometimes without the extensive historical knowledge of Euro-American customs, but with a definite understanding of how important these flourishes were in representing power and reestablishing the independence of Oceania from European and American interests.

Lily Laita’s expressive painting, After Westminster (a reference to the Fijian coup of 2000) conveys the weight that such cultural symbols still have today as expressions of both cultural solidarity and abuse of power. In her painting, the Maori taiaha, the Samoan to’oto, and the British crown vie with each other for space. The clash of cultures is palpable in the passages of color, which both create a sense of struggle and of renewed energy. With the statement “democracy is a foreign fl(p)ower” scrawled at the top, this unstretched canvas acts as a “flag” to the complicated ambivalences of national sovereignty.

Maile Andrade’s Woven History of an Notion (a nice verbal pun playing off the words “ocean,” “notion,” and even “nation”) represents the complicated diplomacy of Kalakaua’s Confederation. Onto aluminum strips Andrade has stamped portions of the letters that were written by Premier Gibson on behalf of Kalakaua. Gibson’s letters were meant to intercede in European and American imperialist ambitions across the Pacific islands, including Samoa and the Carolines. But they also indicate how a number of Hawai’i’s politicians were also interested in solidifying a leadership position in the islands. In sum, the statements, all made between 1870-1885, vacillate in their representation of Hawai’i (and Kalakaua) as a protector of other island nations and of Hawai’i as a sovereign power on par with its European colonizers. Andrade chose to weave these conversations – which appear, disappear, and recombine in new ways -- into a Polynesian basket form. As a whole, it references the fraught contradictions and unclear motivations of Kalakaua’s actual orchestration of a coalition of sovereign Pacific Islands. The time and space of history take material form in this basket. And the strands of that history are significantly left untucked, curling out and tangling with each other.

With the occupation of many of the Pacific Islands by Euro-American powers, as well as the loss of Hawai’ian sovereignty, the optimism of a Pacific Island Confederation in a European style was lost. This sense of mourning is most striking in Noelle Kahanu’s Mai Poina (‘Ahu'ula) and E Koko Mai (Kahili), both constructed in memory of Queen Lili’uokalani. Kahanu’s ‘Ahu’ula (cape) in particular references the ribbons that Queen Lili’uokalani was said to have given to her supporters. They were inscribed with the words Mai Poina Oe Ia’u – Do Not Forget about Me. As the ribbons replace the traditional netting structure and yellow feathers of this royal regalia, Kahanu’s reconstruction acts as a potent reminder to a proud kingdom lost to the forces of colonization. But it is also a symbolic rallying point for thinking about possible futures of Hawai’i through the strength of this great matriarch.

Liquid Capital

This pivotal moment in Hawai’i’s history, speaks to the many many analogous, but very specific political forces that have shaped the present day cultures of the Pacific. In fact, over the past century, reviving and sustaining local island cultures were at times seen as more important than reaffirming a regional Oceanic identity. Simultaneously, a notion of the Pacific has been increasingly absorbed into global delineations of power and economic relationships. Notions of the “Pacific Rim,” or “Asian-Pacific,” have become more prominent, and the Pacific seems to be more and more often represented as an exploitable medium rather than a genealogically coherent place. As Christopher Connery notes, it is “capital’s element… Movable capital is liquid capital.”

Leanne Lupelele Clayton represents this strange liquidity in her poly-saturated nation of plastic Lavalava puddles. Her islands of mass-produced island print covered in clear acrylic proliferate across the wall of the gallery like some self-perpetuating force. Like Tavola’s piece, the fabric references our current commodification of an “island identity.”

As the process of globalization threatens to homogenize specific island cultures and traditions, many young artists have responded with their own culture jamming tactics. Siliga David Setoga’s series of postcards titled Pan Pacific Brand - Landscapes and Portraits comments on the dangers of identifying with a notion of “pan-pacific” as the construction of a generic identity and landscape. His simple graphics of black, white and red correspond to the generic processed foods available on supermarket shelves from Hawai’i to Samoa. As a Samoan selling his art in local markets in the contemporary urban culture of South Auckland, he sees the power of his pieces in the way they mimic and infiltrate global market structures and unsettle the logic of standardization.

Similarly, Janet Lilo’s appropriation of profile pictures from the online networking site of Bebo (similar to myspace or facebook) also comments on the complicated construction of Pacific identities as they meet hip-hop street culture, global constructions of gender, and online fantasy.

The tensions inherent in the history of an exploitable oceanic body are also richly allegorized in Angela Tiatia’s silent, slow motion, single shot video, See, 2008. In this video, a woman’s mouth is forced open by two male fingers to reveal an eye (a real fish-eye). As the fingers pull away, the eye confronts the viewer. The lips blink and the eye sweeps back and forth to take full-view of its surroundings, including the viewer. This is a Pacific response to Luis Buñeul and Salvador Dali’s Un Chien Andalou. As in the French film, Tiatia’s video loop represents a never-ending tension, in which no single force triumphs. The images suggest that beyond our conflicts, we can perhaps gain some perspective on the catastrophic as well as the emergent forces of a new Pacific.

Oceania is Us

If the waters of the Pacific have been exploited in the development of global trade -- as a body in which the interpenetration of cultures and the forces of influence, contact, and integration are happening on a global scale -- it also holds the islands together in a concept of unity. A different image of the fluidity and boundlessness of the ocean is offered by Epeli Hau’ofa, who sadly, just died this year. Instead of isolated islands in the sea, he incited us to imagine a vast expanding indigenous space.

“Oceania is humanity rising from the depths of brine…. Oceania is us. We are the sea, we are the ocean, we must wake up to this ancient truth and together use it to overturn all hegemonic views that aim ultimately to confine us again, physically and psychologically, in the tiny spaces which we have resisted accepting as our sole appointed space, and from which we have recently liberated ourselves.”

His strategic Oceanic identification has raised important questions in recent years. What is the balance between acting upon a notion of the Pacific as a self-sustaining system, a region rich in its own resources and traditions, and recognizing its inextricable role as part of the globe? How do we promote a regional unity while also being realistic about how, for instance, the ecology of the islands is effected by supranational and supra-continental issues of pollution, fishing, global travel, etc? The balance, perhaps is in seeing that a strategic identification can help to define concrete local or regional responses to global issues that would otherwise be too daunting.

Leilani Kake’s pursuit of documentary footage for her increasingly recognized videos does just this. She pictures a new Pacific by capturing it in concrete personal and community events. Waiata In the Kingdom of Tonga is her most recent film, which follows twelve South Auckland, Otahuhu college music students of Samoan, Tongan, Maori, Cook Island and Nuiean heritage to the Kingdom of Tonga, where they perform for six schools around the capital of Nuku’alofa. In this video, relationships among the young people of the islands are established through beat, rhythm, and duration. In the most tangible of gestures of arms held out we see possibilities of connection and embrace. Her film suggests that Oceania is still very powerfully conceived through the notion of va, particularly in the sense that Samoan poet and educator Albert Wendt described it:

“Va is the space between, the betweenness, not empty space, not space that separates, but space that relates, that holds separate entities and things together in the Unity-that-is-all, that space that is context, giving meaning to things.”

Posted by Jaimey Hamilton at 7:47 PM 0 comments
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