Browse

Since the advent of European settlement, indigenous Australians have been subject to continual change and entrenched inequality. This has been their shared experience even as regional histories have diverged. These essays address the lives of indigenous Australians through a focus on the person. Various contexts are described including family and community groups, regional diaspora and inter-racial relations, along with a striking range of experience, from indigenous heavy metal gangs and rebellious, forthright women to the social dynamics of childhood and the effects of long-term unemployment. Issues are discussed against a backdrop of different regions including the remote north, the desert center, and the densely populated southeast of Australia.Convinced that accounts of indigenous Australians must become more dynamic and diverse, People and Change traces the development of Australianist ethnography as a tool for understanding personhood and places this research in a comparative and theoretical perspective. The collection provides new and nuanced insights on the past, the present and likely trajectories of indigenous Australians today.

This book examines issues of environmentalism and indigeneity in Northern Australia through the controversy surrounding the Wild Rivers Act 2005 (Qld). Like much of the north, one terrain of the Act – the massive Cape York Peninsula – has long been constructed as a ‘wild’ space, whether as terra nullius, a zone of legal exception or a biodiverse wilderness region in need of conservation. The past two decades, however, have seen two major changes in the political and social composition of the region, the first being the legal recognition of geographically extensive Indigenous land rights and the creation of a corporate infrastructure to govern them. The second is that the peninsula has been the centre of national debates regarding the market integration and social normalisation of Indigenous people, becoming the locale for intensive reform of some ‘Indigenous’ policy. Ironically, the Queensland government’s own attempts to ‘settle’ land use through the Actbrought out the tensions within the region’s present political formation. This book takes an interdisciplinary approach to the examination of how and why the controversy occurred and what it indicates about present imaginaries of the governance and potentiality of Indigenous lands and waters. It shows that historically embedded forms of ‘wildness’ continue to shape debates about Northern Australia’s future, debates in which economic and social development are often confused and conceptualised as beneficent transformations. Ultimately, Wild Articulations contends that close consideration of this event provides insights into the future dilemmas of development and conservation in remote Australia.

The book highlights the historic and groundbreaking work by doctors, researchers, and healthcare providers to improve the health and well-being of Native Hawaiians. Through program descriptions, essays, personal reflections and research the authors share insights in medical education, clinical care, and community engagement. Mauli means life, heart, spirit, our essential nature. Ola means well-being, healthy. “Ho’i hou ka mauli ola” or bring back the state of vibrant health is the primary objective and the collective professional and personal commitment of the contributors. Most authors are affiliated with the Department of Native Hawaiian Health in the John A. Burns School of Medicine at the University of Hawai'i and represent varied disciplines, strategies, and innovative projects at work to find solutions to health problems, cures to diseases, improvements to the quality of healthcare available to the Hawaiian and Pacific communities, and efforts to grow new doctors and researchers.

This is a biography of Ta’isi O. F. Nelson, the Sāmoan nationalist leader who fought New Zealand, the British Empire and the League of Nations between the world wars. It is a richly layered history that weaves a personal and Pacific history with one that illuminates the global crisis of empire after World War One. Ta’isi’s story weaves Sweden with deep histories of Sāmoa that in the late nineteenth century became deeply inflected with colonial machinations of Germany, Britain, New Zealand and the U. S.. After Sāmoa was made a mandate of the League of Nations in 1921, the workings and aspirations of that newly minted form of world government came to bear on the island nation and Ta’isi and his fellow Sāmoan tested the League’s powers through their relentless non-violent campaign for justice. Ta’isi was Sāmoa’s leading businessman who was blamed for the on-going agitation in Sāmoa; for his trouble he was subjected to two periods of exile, humiliation and a concerted campaign intent on his financial ruin. Using many new sources, this book tells Ta’isi’s untold story, providing fresh and intriguing new aspects to the global story of indigenous resistance in the twentieth century.

Facing the Spears of Change takes a close look at the extraordinary life of John Papa ʻĪʻī. Over the years, ʻĪʻī faced many personal and political changes and challenges in rapid succession, which he skillfully parried or grasped firmly and then used to fend off other attacks. He began serving in the household of Kamehameha I as an attendant in 1810, when he was ten. As an attendant, ʻĪʻī was highly familiar with the inner workings of the royal household. He went on to become an influential statesman, privy to the shifting modes of governance adopted by the Hawaiian kingdom. ʻĪʻī’s intelligence and his good standing with those he served resulted in a great degree of influence with the Hawaiian government, with his fellow Hawaiians, and with the missionaries residing in the Hawaiian Islands. At the end of his life, he also became a memoirist and biographer, who published accounts of key events in his own life and in the lives of others during the sixty years that he served his kings, his nation, and his people. As a privileged spectator and key participant, his accounts of aliʻi (nobles) and his insights into early nineteenth-century Hawaiian cultural-religious practices are unsurpassed.

Like a human tsunami, World War II brought two million American servicemen to the South Pacific where they left a human legacy of some thousands of children. Mothers’ Darlings traces the intimate relationships that existed in the wartime South Pacific between U.S. servicemen and Indigenous women, and considers the fate of the resulting children. The American military command carefully managed intimate relationships in the Pacific Theater, applying U.S. immigration law based on race on Pacific peoples of color in order to prevent marriage “across the color line.” For Indigenous women and their American servicemen sweethearts, legal marriage was impossible, giving rise to a generation of children known as “G.I. Babies.” Among these Pacific war children, one thing common to almost all is the longing to know more about their American father. Mothers’ Darlings traces these children’s stories of loss, emotion, longing, and identity, and of lives lived in the shadow of global war.

Bayonets in Paradise recounts the extraordinary story of how the army imposed rigid and absolute control on the total population of Hawaii during World War II. Declared immediately after the Pearl Harbor attack, martial law was all-inclusive, bringing under army rule every aspect of the Territory of Hawaiʻi's laws and governmental institutions. The result was a protracted crisis in civil liberties, as the army subjected more than 400,000 civilians—citizens and alien residents alike—to sweeping, intrusive social and economic regulations and to enforcement of army orders in provost courts with no semblance of due process. Army rule in Hawai`i lasted until late 1944—making it the longest period in which an American civilian population has ever been governed under martial law. The army brass invoked the imperatives of security and “military necessity” to perpetuate its regime of censorship, curfews, forced work assignments, and arbitrary “justice” in the military courts. The authors provide a rich analysis of the legal challenges to martial law that culminated in Duncan v. Kahanamoku, a remarkable case in which the U.S. Supreme Court finally heard argument on the martial law regime—and ruled in 1946 that provost court justice and the military’s usurpation of the civilian government had been illegal. Based largely on archival sources, this comprehensive, authoritative study places the long-neglected and largely unknown history of martial law in Hawaiʻi in the larger context of America's ongoing struggle between the defense of constitutional liberties and the exercise of emergency powers.

This book is about domination and resistance in the Pacific during the Cold War. In the race against the Soviet Union for nuclear supremacy, the United States tested a vast array of nuclear bombs and missiles in the Marshall Islands while at the same time conducting research on the effects of human exposure to radioactive fallout. Although these military and human experiments reinforced the American strategy of deterrence, they also led to the displacement of several atoll communities, serious health conditions in the Marshallese, and widespread ecological degradation. Confronted with these troubling consequences, the Marshall Islanders utilized a variety of political and legal tactics, including lawsuits, demonstrations, and negotiations, to draw attention to their plight in Washington and the United Nations. In response to these acts of resistance, the US strengthened its strategic interests in the Marshalls under the Compact of Free Association, but granted the islanders greater political autonomy, financial assistance, and a mechanism to settle nuclear claims. In the post-Cold War period, however, Washington failed to provide adequate compensation to the people of the Marshall Islands for the extensive health and environmental damages caused by the American testing programs.

What can we learn about postcolonial history, culture, people, and processes of change in analyzing differences between how people imagined their nation might sound, and how it actually came to sound? The music and activity of a band in the largest nation in Melanesia, Papua New Guinea is explored; a band called Sanguma. Sanguma heard an imagined future and performed it during a critical time socially and politically for the region. This is a kind of hearing akin to the forward looking definition of “vision”—a hearing of the future. This book explores complex, international, cosmopolitan experiences in the circa-Independence environment in Papua New Guinea and draws on ideas expressed by a number of Melanesian intellectuals who were central in recognizing, raising, and nurturing Melanesian values and institutions towards a new era of independence. Hearing the Future contributes to social theory exploring the role of music in articulating identity, social concerns, political concerns, in a rapidly changing environment as people navigated a move from living in a colony of Australia to forging an independent nation in the late twentieth century.

Isles of Amnesia chronicles the ecological and human history of these islands, enlivened with his first-hand experiences of eradication efforts to restore atoll ecosystems and maximize native biodiversity. Each chapter focuses on an individual island or island group, revealing how each location has its own particular story, secret past, or ecological lesson to be shared. Taken as a whole, the region has played a unique role in American history, with the remoteness of the islands having served the needs of whalers and guano miners in the 1800s and, in later years, that of military secret projects, missile launching, chemical weapon incinerations, and air bases. Rauzon further explores the creation of the National Marine Monuments and what their protection means to a changing ocean, and presents original research about the US military’s Pacific Project and germ warfare testing. Illustrated with over seventy historical photographs and original drawings, this much-needed work tells the fascinating story of America’s forgotten Pacific islands.