A Brief Reflection on "Our Sea of Islands"

As a starting point in researching island nations, I was directed toward the essay Our Sea of Islands, written by Tongan-Fijian anthropologist Epeli Hau'ofa and published in a 1994 issue of The Contemporary Pacific. In his writing, Hau'ofa makes note of how the Pacific Island nations have been treated as subordinates under colonialism, and then as dependents in the post-colonial era. The notion that these small nations are destined for a permanent state of dependency has been unintentionally perpetuated by social scientists working in the region, he says. Realizing his own part in enforcing this notion, Hau’ofa decided to begin challenging it. “The idea that the countries of Polynesia and Micronesia are too small, too poor, and too isolated to develop any meaningful degree of autonomy,” he writes, “is an economistic and geographic deterministic view of a very narrow kind...” (151). Failure to question this assumption, he thinks, will turn it into a self-fulfilling prophecy which would leave the islands and surrounding ocean “at the mercy of the manipulators of the global economy and "world orders" of one kind or another” (152). Hau’ofa also challenges the view of outside experts regarding the Pacific islands as “tiny confined spaces”, noting that people from continents or large islands evaluate space as a total land area. Hau’ofa cites indigenous mythologies to state that native Pacific views of the world were not limited to isolated islands, but extended across the traversed ocean, including the underworld and the heavens. Indeed, he says that the expansiveness of their mythological cosmology is reflected in the islanders’ pension for exaggeration. “Smallness is a state of mind,” he writes, driving his point home in context. He shows further evidence of these dissonant views regarding the Pacific in how it has been referred to: by European explorers as “islands in a far sea” versus the Polynesian conception of a “sea of islands”; also, the labelling of the region as “Pacific Islands” versus “Oceania”. After disputing several other Western assumptions about Pacific natives and their history, Hau’ofa concludes: “The world of Oceania is neither tiny nor deficient in resources. It was so only as a condition of the colonial confinement that lasted less than a century in a history of millennia” (156). The motivation for the islanders to move between islands and into the outside world is to recover their traditional mobility, which, along with trade and traditional alliances, was confined by imposed colonialist borders. Reading this essay reminded me of how, while looking at the situation of island nations, I must be careful not to implicitly reduce the capacity of these countries or their peoples. If one general point can be taken from this, it is that no society is a mere reactionary to circumstance, but that it (or parties within it) can take deliberate action to restore or improve a way of life.