{"word_count": 1526, "character_count": 11171}
Emma Powell is a Pacific Studies doctoral student at Victoria University of  Wellington (VUW) in New Zealand. She holds Bachelors degrees in Public  Policy (BCA) and English Literature (BA Hons 1st) from VUW and completed  a Master of Arts degree in English Literature from the  University of Auckland.  On the coastof Oaxaca, the indigenous Chontal people of Huamelula celebrate the San Pedro Festival.They have moved across a portion of Mexico’s coast, a rim of a watery continentcalled the Pacific Ocean. Part of their story is the arrival of Pirates bywayof this Oceanic highway. At other edges of this continent, there arecommunities traversing well-travelled roots through islands. As those paths areworn with generations of insistent footsteps, these moving peoples carve deepmarks into soils from the Cook Islands to New Zealand, Auckland to Brisbane, toSamoa and Tonga and back again. At another time, Japanese medical professionalsexpand onto larger landed continents to the East, and West to archipelagos andnew Americas, bringing with them their entrepreneurial spirit and a concurrent,imperial project. Such stories continue with descendants of these Japanese ancestors,visible and articulated anew in places such as Hawai’i. There, renewed expressionsof self-determination are chanted to and danced beneath Mauna Kea by ‘ōiwi andactivist allies alike, on those archipelagoes at the top of a colonialtriangle. Criss-crossing these spaces and times, scientists and ancestors shapedby nuclear colonialism in the Pacific are found speaking in the loaded silenceof archival bunkers; there is a genealogy waiting to be pulled into thenow-time. In 1976, Albert Wendt wrote his seminal essay,“Towards a New Oceania.”. Like Epeli Hau’ofa’s “Our Sea of Islands”, the essayhas been oft-quoted by scholars writing about the Pacific region. So vast, sofabulously varied a scatter of islands, nations, cultures, mythologies andmyths, so dazzling a creature, Oceania deserves more than an attempt at mundanefact; only the imagination in free flight can hope – if not to contain her – tograsp some of her shape, plummage and pain. Group CFor many, the reproduction of this quote is almostannoyingly familiar. And yet, the work of “Group C” during the TransregionalAcademy’s “History of Migrant Knowledges” has been testament to the shiftingunderstandings, disciplinary approaches and emergent genealogies that make upour various Pacifics. Indeed, diverse topics, methodological styles and imaginariesof the region encouraged productive tensions and new learnings. The group’send-of-week reflections identified the prominence of interdisciplinary practiceacross a number of the participants’ respective projects; the potential ofgenealogies and genealogical method; the diverse and nuanced nature ofdifferent empires and; the importance of positionality and reflexivity in understandingsof ourselves as researchers and the place we understand as the (Trans)Pacific. On day one, Ruth Faleolo described her mixed-methodsapproach in examinations of Samoan and Tongan migrants crossing from NewZealand to Australia. Candid and insightful, Faleolo’s descriptions of herresearch to-date revealed a curious new development: e-Talanoa – a mutualknowledge-sharing and knowledge-forming practice wherein Faleolo undertookextended conversations with research participants via digitial, social-mediaplatforms. In arguing for culturally responsive and respectful engagement with Pasifikapeoples, Faleolo described how social-media platforms such as Facebook Messengerand Facetime were not only able to fold great geographic distances between theresearcher and subject, but also enabled observation of, and admission to,moments often inaccessible. What does the interviewee share as they foldlaundry, ride the bus to work, drop the children at school, while communicatingsimultaneously with the researcher through their cellphone? These kinds of intimacies in the work done with, andabout, indigenous Pacific people necessarily implicates the researcher;knowledge-forming takes place through mutual and collective enterprise. Withinindigenous Pacific epistemological and methodological practice, the researcheraccepts that they are never truly objective given their kuleana (orresponsibility) to the work and thus, the people and places their work affects.Karin Louise Hermes’ narration of Kānaka Maoli and allied resistance andactivism through the arts and demonstrations for and at Mauna Kea, on theisland of Hawai’i, reminded us of this. As a former Filipino-German student atthe University of Hawai’i at Mānoa, Hermes discussed her personal involvementwith the resistance movement and the various forums and spaces where she hadspoken and published about the construction of a 30-metre telescope atop one ofthe Hawaiian peoples’ most sacred mountains. Her paper, dubbed an experimentalpiece, braided narrative and personal reflection to powerfully illustrate thepotential of (her) solidarity to the Kānaka Maoli cause. It not only highlighteddeep recognition between researcher and subject, but in it’s own way, fulfiled kuleana.Throughout the week, concepts of relation andrecognition intersected with the thematic discussions of the wider Academy. Theseconcepts bookended Group C’s discussions: Emma Powell presented on genealogicalmethod (‘akapapa’anga) in the Cook Islands context on the afternoon of day one,and Talei Luscia Mangioni’s description of the government-military-researchcomplex undergirding the broader historical narrative of the Nuclear Free andIndependent Pacific (NFIP) movement, ended the schedule of presentations. Muchlike Hermes and Faleolo, Powell’s use of story to begin her highly conceptualdiscussion of genealogical method as a tool of scale, became both anillustrative example and a reflexive marker. Powell recounted how hergrandmother had gathered her placenta from an Auckland hospital andsubsequently buried it on land purchased when her grandparents first migratedto New Zealand. She went on to explain how such acts demonstrate the differentscales of geography, mobility, and relatedness being invoked by Cook IslandsMāori people in contrast to economic and development models of diaspora. LikeFaleolo, Powell proposed that in order to truly understand how Māori areunderstanding and moving through their worlds, researchers must have cognisanceof culturally appropriate scales. In large part, Powell’s genealogical methodhinged on alternative spatial and temporal scales. Powell proposed that as hergrandmother planted her placenta in a foreign land (New Zealand), the CookIslands Māori world became enlarged. Mangioni proposed a similar, latticed network ofrelatedness between people and place. In her multisited research, she describedher embodied tracing of NFIP genealogies through haunting across her ownacademic orbit. Using the nuclear science programme of the University ofCalifornia, Berkeley campus as a beginning reference point, Mangioni traced keyhistorical intersections between American actors in the development of nuclearscience and her own institution, the Australian National University (ANU). Offeringa walk-story of foundation stones and university archives, she reflected on thenotion of situated knowledges within Western academic contexts and questionedthe power relations between science, area studies of the Pacific and state.From here, she acknowledged activist kin and teacher, Vanessa Griffen and,along with her beautifully considered survey of literatures in her paper,Mangioni sketched a network of spatial and temporal intersections across theregion, made visible through the tracing of NFIP’s genealogy through creativeresistance. Such multisitedness reminds us that,depending on where you and your work are located, the region is redrawnmultiply, with various historical, cultural and social geographies. WhileFaleolo, Hermes, Powell and Mangioni offered compelling work largely located inthe island-Pacific and parts of the South Pacific Rim (New Zealand, Australia),Danny Zborover and Wei-Ti Chen reminded the group that the Transpacific isindeed “So vast [and] so fabulously varied”. At the annual San Pedro festivitiesin Huamelula, Zborover described costumed festival participants assuming theroles of pechelingues (pirates), negros (The Black Ones), turcos (Turks) andothers. Through collaborative endeavour at the Insitute for Field Research(California), Zborover explained how the research had revealed that aspects ofthe festival – the aforementioned characters being cases in point – representedmuch older Chontal histories of colonialism, mobility and globalisation. The recurrenceof pirates and piracy in Indigenous-European and particularly, Chontal history,reminded us of how arrivals and departures are imposed by the Pacific; how itsometimes frames landed and coastal peoples as expectant hosts, andsimultaneously asks those at the edges of its watery body to step onto itssurface, and see what might be within, and at, its other sides.The Pacific Ocean thus becomes a highway, a connectingrather than separating body. Like Faleolo’s migrating, Trans-Tasman Pasifika community,and the transnational trajectories of Hermes’ own personal narrative, an entrepreneurialspirit has long motivated Japanese medical professonals to pursue opportunitiesin the far parts of empire. Chen’s discussion of the Taiwanese and Japaneseexpansionist project decentres the prominence of state power in Taiwanese and,in particular, Japanese history, showing that Japanese medical professionalmigrants were exercising agency at the height of imperialism, independent ofstate machinations. The trajectories of this community extended from Japan toChina, Korea, Hawai‘i and North America, and the legacies of those migrantcommunities continute at, and through, those locations. Chen’s persuasivediscussion is testament to her exhaustive work in the archive and her defthandling and analysis of the material and bureaucratic record. Similarly,Zborover’s archealogical expertise in concert with the interdisciplinaryexpertise of his team, and Mangioni’s incisive examination of diverse archivalmaterials, shows us that “Histories of Migrant Knowledges” are indeed,Transpacific. The broader framing of the Transregional Academy “Histories of Migrant Knowledges” created space in the intersection of each project of the group and allowed every member to properly listen, read, and offer generous critique and comment. In this safe and encouraging space, new directions for each paper were reconsidered and discussions were used as springboards for pondering how critiques and comments might develop, potentially shaping respective methodologies and projects anew. In the ebb and flow of contemplating relatedness and relation, the significance of positionalities in individual framings of the Pacific became clear. Of what Pacific do you speak? And in acknowledging how foundational these positionalities are, the week closed with a launching of imaginations in free flight, in the hope that even if it is not possible to “contain” the Pacific, perhaps the group’s works will “grasp some of her shape, plummage and pain”. 