An Indigenous Ocean: Pacific Essays

by Damon Salesa

The Pacific’s ‘Indigenous times’ are not just smaller sections of larger histories, but dimensions of their own.

Histories of our Pacific world are richly rendered in these essays by Damon Salesa. From the first Indigenous civilisations that flourished in Oceania to the colonial encounters of the nineteenth century, and on to the complex contemporary relationships between New Zealand and the Pacific, Salesa offers new perspectives on this vast ocean – its people, its cultures, its pasts and its future.

Spanning a wide range of topics, from race and migration to Pacific studies and empire, these essays demonstrate Salesa’s remarkable scholarship. Bridging the gap between academic disciplines and cultural traditions, Salesa locates Pacific peoples always at the centre of their stories. An Indigenous Ocean is a pivotal contribution to understanding the history and culture of Oceania.

Genres: Nonfiction, History

Kindle Edition

First published November 6, 2023

Reviews

[Malcolm · Rating 5 out of 5]

It has now been nearly 35 years since the Tongan historian Epeli Hau’ofa’s field-transforming essay ‘Our Sea of Islands’ insisted we rethink the way we view the Pacific Ocean not as islands in the sea but as a sea of islands, and in doing so gave profound impetus to the slow but emerging shift from an imperial view of Oceania to one more grounded in Indigenous outlooks. In the intervening years there has been a profound shift the scholarship dealing with Oceania, marked especially by a rise in Indigenous voices, as may be seen in the recent two volume Cambridge History of the Pacific Ocean . This shift, however, still comes up against powerful colonial and imperial views, and confronts the interests of the powerful geo-political interests contesting the Pacific, economically, politically, diplomatically, and militarily. Among the historians making a major contribution to this recasting of the Pacific, at least in the South Pacific – we’d be foolish to reduce 1/3 of the Earth’s surface to a single socio-cultural space – is Damon Salesa. This excellent collection of essays shows why.

The collection shows Salesa’s range, as he moves across questions of Pacific ways of seeing and being and of New Zealand’s colonial relations with place in the Pacific before stepping back to take both a wider view of questions of race and colonisation in Pacific settings, narrowing that view to then hone in on Sāmoa, before then exploring a range of Samoan engagements with colonialism. One thing that struck me throughout is the way Salesa’s voice can shift: some papers are rigorously academic, but in other places he is aware he has a wider audience and while the voice and tone shift accordingly, the rigour does not.

One of the recent strands in Pacific history I enjoy is the growing body of work exploring voyaging and settlement, and the unpacking of a set of navigation techniques that put to shame the ‘modern scientific’ approaches developed in Europe. Salesa engages with those questions here, partly in discussing the costs of colonialism and the loss of traditional knowledges, including many of those navigation techniques, but also in building an image of seaways and an image of Pacific/Oceanic peoples as migratory (the Samoan art critic Lana Lopesi develops a similar analysis in False Divides ) disrupting a vision of Pacific, or in this case Samoan, peoples as static in a largely unchanging social world.

This issue change runs through many of the essays. As do many other Indigenous (and other) scholars, Salesa stresses a view from within the Indigenous world, showing modification and adaptation of colonial and imperial ways to Pacific, in this case principally Samoan ways, undermining the residual fatal impact vision Indigenous-colonialism encounters that seems hard for many to shake off. As part of this there are several insightful essays dealing with Samoan engagements with the colonial world, may it be as entrepreneurs, or recasting forms of Christianity, or making sense of popular forms of cinema and the place of the cowboy movie in vā’a Sāmoa.

I had read some of these before, but far from all of them, and it was a delight to revisit some. Even so, as with all collections of essays complied from other sources, coherence is an issue (and I know as an editor that even with the tightest of framing that can be a challenge). The structuring into four sections helps, and there is a valuable integrative overview provided by the Introduction. This is not, however, a significant weakness, making this a compelling and valuable contribution to a growing field of Pacific-centric Pacific studies, making clear how important Hau’ofa’s essay has been in recasting and reshaping how we make sense of that mass of water that extends half way round the world.

[Jeffrey Schuster · Rating 4 out of 5]

bit of a slog at times but some interesting insights if you are willing to push through the heavy academic language style.