Oceania: Revisualizing the Pacific in American Religious History
by Esiteli Hafoka
I read Retelling U.S. Religious History in the early days of my PhD program. I was fresh out of undergrad without any graduate-level training, and I was relieved that Retelling was accessible to me. I don’t say this to take away the intellectual rigor of Tweed’s important work, but the suggestion of reorientation—that decentering White, Anglo-Saxon, male interpretations of the past in favor of interpretations of the past from a variety of vantage points—felt somewhat familiar to me. I was physically affected by Tweed’s tripartite approach to this retelling— “sighting,” “citing,” and “siting,”—I mean, can one help not bobbing their head to the rhythm of this rhyme? It’s a vibe! I was immediately on board with this; I was just coming away from my undergraduate years having been entrenched in social justice calls for action to issues like increasing Pacific Islander presence at institutions of higher education. During these years, I answered social justice calls on the ground at the grassroots level. At the start of my PhD student journey—years before passing my qualifying exams and writing the dissertation—I was at ease hearing Tweed’s call to retell convinced that my mission en route to completing my PhD program was to retell Oceanic history, which has everything to do with Oceanic Religion and Religious History. Just as Tweed and the authors in the volume successfully retold (and reframed, and reoriented) American histories, I would retell (and reframe, and reorient) Oceanic[1]history to prove that the senses of White Anglo-Saxon sailing captains like James Cook, Louis Bougainville, and William Bligh could not be trusted to tell the whole story of the Pacific and her people.
Sailing continental men encountered people in the Pacific in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, and their journals and ship logs created the category of Pacific History and infused it with their own belittling and denigrating opinions of Pacific peoples. Historians of the Pacific constricted both Oceanic peoples and history to fit within imaginary boundaries, essentially slashing littoral Oceanic peoples indoctrinated by over a century of Pacific History understood themselves as “poorly endowed with resources” and “too isolated from the centers of economic growth,” as ‘Epeli Hau’ofa explains. I agree with Hau’ofa, who argued that the first step in mediating this egregious historical misunderstanding is revisualizing the Pacific as “a sea of islands” and not simply islands in a vast sea. Following this revisualizing, he asserts that a name like Oceania aggregates (in a good way) the incorrectly disaggregated categories of Polynesian, Melanesian, and Micronesian ethnicities. Moreover, Hau’ofa’s explication of [enfnote]Oceanian[/efn_note] history as cyclical and circular, as opposed to linear, bodes well with retelling (and reframing) to reorient history’s alignment with Oceanian ways of knowing and understanding.
For the future of my own scholarship, I see this retelling (and reframing, and reorienting) as reaggregating. This retelling would include reorienting anthropologist accounts of notable scholars like Edward Gifford, who detailed pre-Christian religious practices in Tonga, and Sione Latukefu, who explicated the introduction and advancement of Wesleyan Methodism in Tonga alongside the creation of the internationally recognized sovereign Kingdom of Tonga as a nation-state. The bulk of this history merely concerns missionization, religious institutionalization, and religious schism alongside biblical theology and religiosity. Further, scholars like Gifford placed Tongan religion and religiosity on the periphery rather than at the center of Tongan history; they failed to historicize the influence of religion on national and ethnic identities. For my own work, I propose thinking alongside Tongan historical narratives to highlight the various points in history that constitute the grand constellation of Tongan history through the lens of Tongan religiosity.
Regarding the future of the field of American religious history, American history, and history in general, I think Robert Borofsky, editor of the volume, Remembrance of Pacific Pasts hits the nail on the head. Borofsky invited scholars to remake Pacific history and argued that “Narratives are not simply about ‘the past’—about the content or analysis of this or that event. They constitute ways for people to think with the past.”[2]As Linda Tuhiwai Smith states in Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples, research has harmed Indigenous peoples since the Age of Empire. Tuhiwai Smith demands that scholars actively choose a decolonial approach to research—that scholars think with, and not upon, Indigenous peoples. In the same way, Borofsky asks historians and scholars to think with, and not about, the past. “With” may seem like a simple preposition, but it reorients and reframes (and retells) history in a way that provides research justice to communities who have been silenced, exterminated, and obscured in the male Anglo-Saxon telling of history.
As Borofsky also correctly identifies in the edited volume, thinking with the past can never fully represent the past in its entirety due to the selectivity and multiplicity of history. However, this limitation also daylights limitless possibilities of thinking with the past—something that Thomas Tweed asked us to think about 25 years ago.
[1] preference for the term Oceanic, rather than Pacific, is predicated upon ‘Epeli Hau’ofa’s rejection of Pacific History’s biased accounts reducing rich history in the Pacific to solely European encounters with the Pacific and her people. Hau’ofa further rejects centuries-old, narrow-minded colonial ideas of Pacific peoples inhabiting tiny, disconnected islands in an extensive sea. Instead, he provides scholars an Indigenous foundation to forefront epistemologies that emphasize connectivity rather than isolation. See “Our Sea of Islands” in The Contemporary Pacific.
[2]Remembrance of Pacific Pasts: An Invitation to Remake History,” Ed. Robert Borofsky, University of Hawaii Press (Honolulu, 2000).
Esiteli Hafoka is Lecturer in the Civic, Liberal, and Global Education Department at Stanford University. Her research introduces a novel theoretical approach, Angafakafonua as Tongan epistemology, to understand Tongan collective identity in America. Her dissertation identifies religious threads connecting 19th c. Methodist Christianity, Mormonism, Tongan Crip Gang members in Utah, and sacred education spaces to reveal the ways Tongans navigate their racial identity in America through a religious epistemology.