Past Ecotones

Climate change impacts, including sea-level rise, ocean acidification, coral bleaching, and extreme weather, are becoming increasingly severe, particularly for Indigenous populations who contribute the least to the rapidly changing climate but are disproportionately affected by it. These impacts, which threaten Indigenous livelihoods and cultures, are compounded by colonial forces such as militarization and the nuclear legacy. Pasifika artists wield their ancestral knowledges in the form of visual art to amplify their stories of climate change impacts and advocate for solutions that center demilitarization, Indigenous sovereignty, and traditional knowledge. This talk explores Pacific Islander climate action and art activism (artivism) at the global, regional, and local levels as practices of inagofli‘e, a Chamoru cultural concept of love and care that translates to “really seeing each other.”

The last half century has seen a dramatic shift occur in Western academia and practice around the recognition of Indigenous Knowledge (IK). We see examples of this shift in the adoption of IK in health management programs or the granting of legal personhood to mountains and rivers.
However multiple critiques have emerged around this shift seeing it as often still being situated within specific socio-technical power structures which continue to be extractive in practice. Investigating these ideas through examples drawn from my empirical design work I propose different ways in which we might be able to explore bringing different knowledges and knowledge traditions together in a way that provides value for multiple stakeholder groups but maintains the dignity and integrity of these different traditions and knowledges.

People of Olio have long made their lives in the coastal zone of Kupang Bay. The wetlands that encircle bay waters are a source of sustenance and kinship, as well as a place of connection. However, in the last three decades national initiatives have catalyzed widespread conversion of these wetlands into property for commercial salt production. This talk considers how different modes of knowing shape the physical landscape as well as more-than-human relations within it. Thinking with human foragers, molluscs, and vegetal life, Dr. Gillian Bogart shows intertidal mudflats as a vibrant multi-species assemblage. She describes some of the ways that this muddy world-in-the-making offers possibilities to step away from forms of state governance that have come to permeate everyday life. Dr. Gillian Bogart joins the Department of Asian Studies from UC Santa Cruz, bringing innovative scholarship on the more-than-human worlds of Southeast Asia. This Ecotone will be hosted at Moore Hall 319, from 12:00 PM to 1:30 PM. Lunch will be provided, so please be sure to register for this event! We hope to see you there!

This research explores contestations around what constitutes just and fair governance of climate adaptation in iTaukei coastal communities in Fiji, particularly among communities resisting relocation or drawing on alternative, non–State-centric forms of relocation. The talk features stories from two village sites in Tailevu and Nadroga-Navosa that highlight the complex, place-based governance systems that intersect with postcolonial struggles for Indigenous marine rights amid tourism, development, and climate change.

Claudia will also reflect more broadly on her journey as a PhD researcher, including her ongoing journey to decolonize my own research, learning from the Vanua, untangling positionality as a kaivailagi woman conducting research in Fijian Indigenous communities, and my journey of approaching research relationally, including through being in and with the ocean.

This talk explores the contemporary revitalization of tapa (barkcloth) in the Society Islands, weaving together ancestral knowledge, material practices, genealogy, and cosmology.

Hinatea Colombani and Moeava Meder are Tahitian artist-researchers and cultural entrepreneurs working as a duo at the intersection of artistic creation, academic research, and cultural transmission.

Together, they cofounded the ʻArioi Cultural Center and present their work internationally through exhibitions, workshops, and collaborations with museums, universities, and Pacific communities.

Chiao-Wen Chiang’s research reconceptualizes the singing practices of the Yami/Tao people of Taiwan. Instead of simply seeing these practices as repositories of Indigenous knowledge, they are viewed as dynamic processes of relationship-making that continuously generate and transform knowledge. By highlighting the musical relationship-weaving among humans and other-than-human beings, this work offers a critical examination of colonial narratives surrounding the term “environment” and the processes of knowledge production.

On the island of Mitiaro, dive into a case study at the nexus of fisheries science and Cook Islands traditional ecological knowledge and practice. With a scientific background and jumping into the realm of culture, linguistics and worldviews, this talk provides insight into Dr. Vavia’s experience of learning by unlearning, and juggling the complex dynamics that can shape Pacific Island fisheries.

Growing interest in Pacific issues has meant a surge in Pacific research across the globe. Sadly, some research on Pacific people has been done without Pacific knowledge, wisdom and culture. As Pacific researchers, we understand the importance of outputs that interweave our ancestral and cultural wisdom, whilst centring and privileging our people’s narratives. Through the birth of our Moanaroa Pacific Research group, we explore the importance of a research collective which decolonises and re indigenises research as we know it.

Dr. Ron Vave is an iTaukei (indigenous Fijian) Assistant Professor in the Department of Pacific Islands Studies. His talk brings together archival research and interviews to investigate culturally protected water body (CPWB) practices in Fiji. CPWBs are primarily considered a ceremonial and food provisioning service, but they also contribute to biodiversity conservation. Dr. Vave's work provides insights on how to improve alignment between contemporary conservation practices and traditional ones and argues for the inclusion of CPWBs in conservation planning to enhance social and ecological resilience.

The concept of “co-species invasion” points to the role of non-human species in colonial, neocolonial, and settler occupation. Thinking with Manitoba Metis scholar Zoe Todd’s “Critical Indigenous Fish Philosophy,” this talk shows how introduced fish remake landscapes for settler projects.

In the city of Sorong, in Indonesian Papua, new infrastructure has destroyed the local hydrology, replacing it with deoxygenated, sediment-filled drains, sinks, and canals. Introduced fish flourish in such waters while also themselves enacting an almost complete replacement of native freshwater fauna. In promoting invasive species as “food security,” the government justifies the infrastructure-driven destruction of the Indigenous landscape and its replacement with a settler property regime. This talk, based on research performed together with Hatib Kadir, tells the story through fish. The talk also continues experiments with a more-than-human anthropology with nonhuman protagonists.

Much of the land question centers on the past for the claim of the present, but ideas of inheritance connect past and present to future. To inherit weaves together a generational process of care that operates around release and receipt through a framework of rights and responsibility. In this presentation, Assistant Professor Micah Fisher extends theories about property and the commons, along with the powers and mechanisms of access and exclusion, to examine land from a geographic, temporal, and intersectional vantage point. Reflecting on more than a decade of initiatives to claim Indigenous land rights recognition in the middle hills of Sulawesi, Micah describes the mosaic tapestry of how a plantation and a forest came to be, and how small farmer livelihoods continue to persist. Each plantation, forest, and small farm revolve around the persuasions of land and all it represents. Each connects legacy, improvement, and possibility.

The 1930 anti-Filipino race riots in Watsonville, California, are often considered a watershed moment in Filipino-American history. The five days of rioting across the Pajaro Valley by hundreds of white vigilantes that culminated in the murder of Fermin Tobera, a Filipino farmworker, have long informed, if not overshadowed, what we know of the historical Filipino enclave that was Watsonville and the number of Filipino communities that called it home. In 2021, descendants of the first wave of Filipino migrants to settle in the valley partnered with researchers at UC-Santa Cruz to form Watsonville is in the Heart (WIITH), a community-initiated, student-engaged research initiative that aims to document and uplift stories of life, labor, and migration through oral history interviewing, digital archiving, curriculum development, and exhibition curation.

In this sharing, WIITH team leaders discuss the initiative’s core research principles and methods. WIITH operates on a model of co-creation, inspired by oral history practice, and of student-engaged experiential learning. The speakers will highlight two projects: 1) a digital map documenting the 1930 riots and Filipino community formation over the twentieth century; and 2) Saritaan, a recently launched partnership between WIITH and Pangasinan Polytechnic College in Lingayen, Philippines, to investigate the history of migrant-sending communities from the Ilocos region, the top labor-sending region in the Philippines in the early twentieth century. These projects bridge Asian and Asian American studies and intervene in literature long bifurcated by area studies versus diaspora concerns.

Conservation ethics has been guided by three ethical paradigms: preservationism, resourcism and harmonization. This talk will place these ethical paradigms in discussion with ethical paradigms of environmental justice to envision what would a decolonial conservation ethics look like. A talk by Dr. Celia Bardwell.

In his new book, Mele on the Mauna, Joseph Keola Donaghy explores the role of music in building solidarity, inspiration, and activism in the most contentious confrontations about protecting Maunakea. Join us to learn more about Dr. Donaghy’s work bridging Indigenous Hawaiian and western academic concepts to illuminate the power of music.

Dr. Tammy Tabe is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Pacific Islands Studies (DPIS), University of Hawaiʻi, Mānoa. She is a Solomon Islander of I-Kiribati and Tuvaluan descent. Her work investigates the forced relocation and displacement of Pacific Islands communities and people during the colonial period, and its impacts on people’s way of life, cultures and identities; and how they these forced movements inform discussions, decision-making, and policies governing climate migration, displacement, and justice in the Pacific Islands region. Dr. Tabe holds a BA and a Postgraduate Diploma from the University of the South Pacific, MA from the University of Hawaiʻi, Mānoa, and PhD from the University of Bergen. She is a researcher, educator, mentor, and daughter of Oceania.