Work · Indigenous Philosophies
Our Sea of Islands
Essay that rejects the description of the Pacific Islands as tiny, isolated and dependent: seen from its peoples’ history of voyaging and their present networks of migration and exchange, Oceania is a “sea of islands”, not islands far out at sea.
Introduction
Hauʻofa published the essay in 1993 in “A New Oceania: Rediscovering Our Sea of Islands”, a volume he edited with Eric Waddell and Vijay Naidu at the University of the South Pacific; it was reprinted in The Contemporary Pacific in 1994. He describes how he had himself shared and taught the view of the islands as tiny, poor and isolated, and how this view, common among economists and planners, condemned Islanders to dependency and left his students with a sense of hopelessness. Against it he recalls the voyaging, trade and kinship that once linked Oceania across thousands of kilometres and the networks of migration and exchange that link it today. “Oceania” in this sense is a world of people connected with each other, not a set of small territories. The essay became a much-cited text of Pacific studies and a point of reference for Pacific art and literature.
Connections
Taken up in
- The Ocean in Us1998 · Epeli Hauʻofa
More works by Epeli Hauʻofa
- 1998The Ocean in Us
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