6

Decolonial Disruptions: Feminist scholarship and practice across Oceania

Margaret Jolly¹

Engendering politics in ‘Our Sea of Islands’

The conference from which this volume emerges invited us to be nimble and imaginative in conceptualising gender and politics, challenging ‘heteronormative, masculine, white political dominance’ in Australia, Asia and the Pacific and eschewing an overreliance on Euro-American models and disciplinary parochialisms. In witnessing and promoting women’s political agency in Oceania, we are confronted by pressing questions of cultural difference, reciprocal translation and historical relation—all embedded in perduring colonial relations and global geopolitics. Despite many programs and diverse schemes, women’s representation in most national parliaments and political parties across the Pacific is still parlous (see Baker 2019), whereas women have been far more significant in other political spaces: in church groups, NGOs, regional organisations and activist movements.

In this chapter, I hope to refresh our thinking and practice by celebrating feminist scholarship and practice from a decolonial Oceanic perspective, highlighting the inspiring, creative work of three women, the late Anne Nealibo Dickson-Waiko of Papua New Guinea, J. Kēhaulani Kauanui, an Indigenous Hawaiian (Kanaka Maoli) scholar, and the late Teresia Teaiwa, who traced her ancestry to Banaba, Kiribati, Fiji and Afro-America.² Their feminist scholarship and their political practice are inspirational and disrupt dominant paradigms in compelling ways.

I develop three connected arguments. First, following Patricia Hill Collins (2012), I see their scholarship as social action, as an integral part of social change, but also consider how their scholarship translated into public political practices and alternative sites of knowledge production. Second, I distil the diversity of their feminist perspectives and how that relates to their own biographies, education and life trajectories. Third, I suggest that their approaches both appropriate and disrupt the canon of Euro-American theory, developing distinctly Oceanic decolonial perspectives that have a resonance beyond the region.

Considering this trio of remarkable scholar-activists blurs the foreign ‘lines across the sea’ that have divided Oceania between the three regions of Melanesia, Polynesia and Micronesia and, rather, emphasises their ancestral and contemporary Oceanic affinities (see Hau’ofa 1994, 2008; Jolly 2007).³ Yet, in celebrating connections across this ‘sea of islands’, we must also acknowledge differences deriving from both Indigenous diversities and the differential effects of colonialism. These three women assume different positionalities, living and working in independent Pacific states (such as Papua New Guinea and Fiji) or in settler colonies (such as Hawai’i, the United States, Aotearoa New Zealand and Australia). Since their biographical trajectories profoundly influence their work, I offer brief vignettes of their lives as well as distilling their feminist scholarship and practice. I then compare their insights and situate them in broader projects of decoloniality and feminisms across borders. In conclusion, I consider how a better appreciation of their insights might inform the relationship between feminisms in Oceania and Australia.

My perspective derives from my own positionality in the settler colony of Australia, where Indigenous peoples have cared for Country for more than 65,000 years. I am of Anglo-Celtic ancestry: my mother’s family migrated from Sheffield in England, my father’s, from Glasgow in Scotland only a couple of generations ago. They were white settlers, albeit working-class families of Sydney’s Inner West living on the lands of the Wangal and Gadigal peoples of the Eora Nation. I live, own a home and work in Canberra, the national capital, now as a Professor Emerita of The Australian National University on the Country of the Ngunnawal and Ngambri peoples. As a doctoral scholar in anthropology at the University of Sydney in the 1970s, I was passionately engaged with the second-wave feminist movement and with undoing the masculinism and coloniality of that discipline. While researching in Vanuatu (then the New Hebrides), I met Grace Mera Molisa, an inspiring nationalist leader and poet, who celebrated the independence of her country in 1980 but lamented that ni-Vanuatu women were still colonised by men (for example, Molisa 1983, 1987). We engaged in rich conversations about the politics of difference between women, between what Grace perceived as the individualism of women’s liberation in Australia and the collectivist, relational values of ni-Vanuatu women (for example, Jolly 1991a, 1997b, 2005; Marsh 1998). I contended that individualism was far more characteristic of the liberal feminist stream than the socialist feminist stream in which I swam in the large second wave of feminism in Australia, which early on considered how gender intersected with class and race.⁴ But, I also acknowledge that the values of feminist collectivity⁵ that we espoused were different to Oceanic values of relationality and that we were struggling against the possessive individualism of an affluent capitalist country and a white settler colony.

Over decades since as a transdisciplinary scholar of gender and Pacific studies, I have been generously hosted in many parts of Oceania—especially Vanuatu, Fiji, Hawai’i and Aotearoa New Zealand. I have explored the gender politics of decolonisation and offered critiques of white feminists who adopt a matronising stance of ‘saving our sisters’ towards non-white women (Jolly 1991b, 1994a, 1994b, 2005; see also Abu-Lughod 2013). Although many Indigenous Australians and Oceanic peoples are supportive of decolonial alliances with white settlers like myself, there are still enormous challenges for me and those like me to forgo the presumptions of white privilege and scholarly hierarchy, to listen to and be led in projects of decolonisation by the experts—those who have intimate, personal experience of being colonised (see Moreton-Robinson 2020). The project of decolonisation is far more than the raising of the flags of new sovereign nations; it is profoundly cultural and fundamentally challenges the power of Euro-American systems of knowledge (see Banivanua Mar 2016; Lawrence, Chapter 5, this volume).⁶

Anne Nealibo Dickson-Waiko (1950–2018)

Anne was born in 1950 in Port Moresby, Papua New Guinea, a sovereign country since 1975, with more than 850 distinct sociolinguistic groups in a population currently estimated to be 9.3 million.⁷ Her father worked as an advisor for the Australian colonial administration in Port Moresby but the family came from the Milne Bay region, where matrilineality prevails and where women still have a higher status in contrast to most other parts of Papua New Guinea, which are patrilineal and far more patriarchal (see Weiner 1976 Lepani 2012; Lawrence 2018).⁸ Anne early reflected on the distinctive position of Milne Bay women and saw this as a creative creolisation of Indigenous structures and values with the early influences of Christianity, which afforded women entry into education and the professions of teaching and nursing (Kaniku 1989). Her own life trajectory exemplifies this conjunction. She was an outstanding student from her earliest years, as a boarder at the Kwato mission school,⁹ where her parents had been educated, subsequently at Port Moresby High School (unusual then for both a Papuan and a girl) and at a secondary teachers’ college in Goroka, where she again excelled and graduated as dux. With her then boyfriend and later husband, John Kaniku, she became a secondary schoolteacher and, after their first son was born, a writer of community education materials. Despite the demands of motherhood, she swiftly completed a degree in history at the University of Papua New Guinea (UPNG) in 1977 but declined a teaching fellowship there to pursue a master’s program in political science in the United States as a Fulbright scholar. Despite the tragic loss of their firstborn son while in the United States, she graduated in 1981 and returned to UPNG to teach history. Declining elevated administrative roles for the most part, she continued as an inspiring teacher and mentor for generations of students over 45 years. Her teaching had a profound effect on the many cohorts of women whom she taught at UPNG and on those such as Elizabeth Taulegebo with whom she worked on the history of World War II in Milne Bay (see Plate 6.1).¹⁰ She initiated courses on gender in Papua New Guinea, on colonialism and nationalism and South-East Asian history (Keimelo 2019). Like her second husband, John Waiko, she completed a PhD at The Australian National University, aptly titled ‘“A Woman’s Place is in the Struggle”: Feminism and Nationalism in the Philippines’ (1994). During that period, while John often remained in Papua New Guinea, Anne was a single mother to her four children.

Plate 6.1: Anne Nealibo Dickson-Waiko (right) doing research with Baloni Douglas and other women into the Battle of Milne Bay, at Bou village in Milne Bay Province, Papua New Guinea, 12 April 2017

Source: Keimelo Gima.

Dickson-Waiko’s comparative historical sensibility about gender laid the foundations of an original scholarly corpus of many published papers and reports (see Lawrence, Chapter 5, this volume). Her scholarly critiques and reflections were accompanied by a suite of activities as a feminist advocate at national, regional and global scales (see Keimelo 2019; Ritchie 2018). I focus on her scholarly creativity as it developed in a trio of three successive papers (Dickson-Waiko 2000, 2003, 2013). In the first of these she explored the relation between individual human rights and community rights, discerning gendered tensions and contradictions in the PNG state. These were grounded in the differences between ‘traditional gender constructs’ in diverse stateless polities and the character of an independent state based on Western principles (if not the reality) of democracy and liberalism. She observed that, although the founding Constitution of Papua New Guinea enshrined ideas of human rights for all, profound tensions persisted between these promised ideals and practices that regularly infringed on women’s rights, including women being used as compensation to settle tribal conflicts, forced marriages and pervasive gender violence. She observed that ‘sexual inequality is striking throughout the country, even in matrilineal societies’ (Dickson-Waiko 2000: 50). But, she argued, this was the consequence not just of precolonial kastom, but also of the ‘partial incorporation’ of women into modern state structures since 1884. Indeed, the ‘partiality’ of the white masculinist state meant women were barely incorporated at all.

Successive colonial powers in the two territories of Papua and New Guinea (Britain, Germany, Australia), whose agents were almost exclusively male, engaged Indigenous men but not women in colonial enclaves, on plantations, in mines and in towns. The protectionist policies of successive British governors Sir William MacGregor (1888–98) and Sir Hubert Murray (1908–40)¹¹ and German Governor Albert Hahl (1901–14) restricted women to villages, even requiring that domestic servants be male, known as ‘hausbois’. Although Christian missions and especially women missionaries had more everyday contact with women, during the process of state formation, women were systematically excluded. Women remained embedded as daughters, mothers and sisters, ‘representing collective clan and tribal identities’, while ‘their male compatriots have moved on to acquire individual human rights, attaining citizenship within the modern state’ (Dickson-Waiko 2000: 54–55). Dickson-Waiko suggested that colonialism entailed the introduction of novel gendered binaries between domestic and public life and between women’s productive and reproductive roles. In ‘traditional society’, women’s productive and procreative labour were both highly valued and not separated.

In her view, the colonial exclusion of women from the state and the continuing perception of women as communal rather than individual subjects¹² laid the foundation for women’s parlous representation in parliamentary politics. She noted that even in the celebrated Eight-Point Improvement Plan of the Pangu Pati, which formed both the first self-governing and then first fully independent government under Michael Somare, the equal participation of women was urged in ‘all forms of economic and social activity’, but not political activity—‘an unconscious omission or a conscious decision’ (Dickson-Waiko 2000: 55)?¹³ Although women have become more visible in local and provincial politics, they remain at best a parlous minority in the national PNG Parliament. Despite several efforts to reserve seats for women in the national parliament, none has succeeded, while votes are still often cast based on kinship and collective identity (Sepoe 2002; Baker 2019).

So, Dickson-Waiko perceived a dissonance between secular, state-based schemes for women’s empowerment—often urged or supported by the United Nations, international agencies, aid programs and NGOs—and the character of gender relations in PNG society. She observed that even middle-class educated women in Papua New Guinea were reluctant to call themselves ‘feminist’ and often depicted local gender relations as complementary rather than patriarchal (Dickson-Waiko 2000: 55). She argued that in Papua New Guinea, ‘church women’s groups are the missing link—the missing rib—of an evolving indigenous feminism’ (Dickson-Waiko 2003: 99). She did not deny the patriarchal character of most Christian denominations, their clerical hierarchies, their masculinist messages and longstanding projects of ‘domestication’ dedicated to remaking women as loyal wives and mothers (Dickson-Waiko 2013: 178; see also Wardlow 2014).¹⁴ But, she asserted, from the early work of foreign women missionaries with Indigenous women, women’s fellowships had expanded their preoccupation with domestic, welfare and spiritual concerns to embrace ‘wider social, political and human rights issues’ (Dickson-Waiko 2003: 98), including reproductive health, literacy and gender violence. She provided abundant evidence that such fellowships had become increasingly politicised. Moreover, many women were drawn into politics that transcended the local scale, at provincial, national, regional and even global levels. Women’s participation in such fellowships had proved empowering and liberating.

Dickson-Waiko (2003) also astutely highlighted the emergent class differentiation between women—too often denied with claims of ‘Melanesian egalitarianism’. The differences between women are clearly articulated in Tok Pisin (the lingua franca of Papua New Guinea) as ol grassroots mama (‘grassroots mothers’) versus ol save meri (‘women who know/are educated’), used for women of the literate, urban middle classes. Although some women in the latter category found this term repugnant, Dickson-Waiko, a save meri herself, insisted on acknowledging this difference and the realities of hard physical labour and urban precarity for many women. She recounts the extraordinary events of June 1974 (Dickson-Waiko 2003: 113) when, alongside students, teachers and public servants, women from the suburbs of Port Moresby organised through the United Church Women’s Fellowship to protest in the streets. They lamented their poor living conditions and the low wages for women who were employed. They vented anger at the wealth of not just the departing white colonisers but also their fellow Papua New Guineans, and especially the extravagance of male government ministers and their expensive overseas trips. They hurled stones, smashed windows, besieged government buildings, threatened police, invaded the airport and even shouted down chief minister Michael Somare.¹⁵

Thus, for Dickson-Waiko (2013: 193), despite national independence, ‘male hegemony prevailed before and after decolonisation’. Colonial policies were ‘brazenly gendered and racialised’, reinforcing and institutionalising women’s earlier subordinate position. Decolonisation for Papua New Guinean women meant colonisation by male compatriots (as for Grace Mera Molisa in Vanuatu). In other postcolonial states (such as the Philippines, the subject of Dickson-Waiko’s PhD thesis), feminist movements emerged as part of anticolonial nationalist movements. There was no such broad movement in Papua New Guinea before independence in 1975. Most Australian women in Papua New Guinea were more interested in promoting women’s clubs, welfare, nutrition and Girl Guides than the second-wave feminism of the West. Second-wave feminism did exert some influence on more educated urban women, but this was often seen as a foreign import grounded in Western individualism: groups such as the Women’s Action Group eschewed identification as ‘feminist’. Male public figures, poets and artists satirised ‘modern women’ as inauthentic figures of fun. Bernard Narokobi, reformist judge and influential author of The Melanesian Way (1983), though staunchly opposed to forced marriage, was part of this ‘male backlash’. Dickson-Waiko saw this as an expression of male fears of changing gender relations and a nostalgic revival of a frozen figure of a precolonial Melanesian woman.¹⁶ This culture war made it difficult for women entering national parliament; Josephine Aibaijah and Nahau Rooney were among the few in the period after independence. In its architecture and composition, it remained a ‘men’s house’, modelled on a house from the Sepik region from which women were excluded (Rosi 1991). Since independence only nine women have ever been elected to the PNG Parliament, with no woman elected in 2017 and only two women among 118 members in 2022.¹⁷

The feminism that emerged in Papua New Guinea after 1975 was ‘not spontaneous nor was it driven from below’; rather, it was ‘imposed from above by the state apparatus’ (Dickson-Waiko 2013: 192), primarily in response to pressure from the United Nations. This liberal feminist approach, though it had some supporters among urban educated women, did not have the same traction as the Indigenous feminism of women’s groups based in Christian churches. Although the PNG National Council of Women was formalised by an Act of Parliament in 1979 as an umbrella group, it morphed into an NGO rather than a formal government body. Thus, Dickson-Waiko concluded: ‘The critical link between post-colonial feminism and the nascent women’s movement in PNG was stillborn’ (2013: 192).

Despite this dismal conclusion, Dickson-Waiko sustained hope through a range of important political engagements, nationally and internationally, as a woman representative of her independent nation. This likely catalysed her sense of the disconnection between the secular state–based politics of gender equality and the grassroots ‘Indigenous feminism’ in women’s church fellowships. Dickson-Waiko represented Papua New Guinea in New York in 1995 and 2004 at sessions of the UN Commission on the Status of Women. She was president of the UPNG Women’s Association from 1998 to 2003, deputy chair of the PNG National AIDS Council (2003–06) and represented Papua New Guinea at the Special General Assembly on HIV/AIDS in 2001. Her scholarly insights were distilled not just in a series of scholarly articles but also in a suite of reports she wrote on gender for the World Bank, World Vision, the United Nations, the European Union, the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF), the Asian Development Bank and the Secretariat of the Pacific Community. She fought strongly for women’s formal political representation and was especially important in incorporating women’s representation into both provincial and local government, approved by the national Parliament in 1997.¹⁸ According to UPNG colleague Cathy Keimelo: ‘This was a turning point of women in politics. The Late Dr Anne was less of a talker and more of a doer’ (2019).

J. Kēhaulani Kauanui (1968–)

J. Kēhaulani Kauanui has a rather different decolonial perspective on her homeland of Hawai’i. This archipelago had distinct polities in the precolonial period, but its Indigenous population (Kanaka Maoli) was much more culturally and linguistically homogeneous than Papua New Guinea’s. Hawai’i was unified under King Kamehameha I in 1810 and was a sovereign constitutional monarchy for much of the nineteenth century until the overthrow of Queen Lili’ūokalani in 1893 and ultimate annexation by the United States in 1898. It became a state of the United States of America in 1959, and thus Kanaka Maoli (Indigenous Hawaiians), like Native Americans, are the original inhabitants of what has become a settler colony. Despite the ongoing struggles of Indigenous Hawaiians for sovereignty, Hawai’i remains crucial to US military influence in the Pacific, especially with the contemporary intensification of geopolitical rivalry between the United States and China.

J. Kēhaulani Kauanui is Kanaka Maoli with ties to family in Anahola (in Hawaiian Homelands Territory) on the island of Kaua’i and throughout the archipelago. She was born and raised in California and, after studying at Irving Valley College, transferred to and graduated with a BA in women’s studies from the University of California Berkeley in 1992 and then a PhD in the History of Consciousness Program at the University of California Santa Cruz, working with James Clifford, Donna Haraway and Neferti X.M. Tadiar. She has eschewed marriage and motherhood. She is currently Eric and Wendy Schmidt Chair of Indigenous Studies and Professor of Anthropology in the Effron Center for the Study of America at Princeton University (after 24 years as Professor of Anthropology and American Studies at Wesleyan University). A prolific scholar, she is the author of two books and the editor of several more volumes, together with a large corpus of essays. Her interests are wide-ranging: Hawaiian history, Indigeneity, critical race theory, feminist theory, gender and sexuality, international law, anarchism. Her scholarship is articulated with a passionate activism, promoting Kanaka Maoli and Native American alliances and anarchist solutions beyond the state and its authoritarian abuses of power.

From her large corpus, I focus on two of her books, Hawaiian Blood (Kauanui 2008) and Paradoxes of Hawaiian Sovereignty (Kauanui 2018b), and two articles that consider the intersection of race, gender and sexuality in the history of Hawai’i. Kauanui (2005) offered a critical analysis of the notorious US ‘blood quantum’ rule used to categorise Kanaka Maoli. She showed how the insistence on the ‘50 per cent blood quantum’ rule for authentic Hawaiian Indigeneity effectively alienates most Hawaiians from their land and how the search for Hawaiian ‘purity’ discriminates against the majority of Hawaiians, who are ‘mixed’. She also revealed how racialised notions inherent in US bureaucratic practices are mirrored in the politics of the Hawaiian sovereignty movement. She analysed a telling ambiguity between two claims in the sovereignty movement: one an argument for Indigenous determination under US domestic law (decolonisation protocols) and the other that Hawai’i (and not just Kanaka Maoli) has a right to self-determination under international law (de-occupation) (Kauanui 2005).

Kauanui elaborated that critical analysis in her book Hawaiian Blood, arguing that ‘blood quantum is a colonial project in the service of land alienation and dispossession’ (2008: 194). It not only secures white privilege but also generates a divisive, genocidal logic dividing Kanaka Maoli between ‘fifty percenters’ and ‘less than fifties’ and between those who are on and off-island—divisions that fracture the Hawaiian movement for sovereignty. Legislative proposals that are seen to protect Hawaiians in fact make them ‘racialised beneficiaries’ of the United States, limit full sovereignty claims in international law and extinguish land rights. Kauanui proposed an alternative vision based on relatedness, nurture and genealogy rather than race and blood—‘forms of identification that serve to connect people to one another, to place, and to land’ and to their responsibility for descendants (Kauanui 2008: 196).

In her second book, Kauanui (2018b) focused on how colonialism profoundly transformed Indigenous relations of gender and sexuality. She witnessed the confluence of America’s twin imperial interests in Hawai’i, where capitalism and Christianity were tightly conjoined (for an extended reflection, see Jolly 2024). The American families who developed lucrative sugar plantations in the nineteenth century were often kin or descendants of those who had first brought the Protestant gospel from Boston. In Kauanui’s analysis, the laws that privatised land, dispossessing and displacing most ordinary Hawaiians, while benefiting high-ranking ali’i nui such as Hawaiian royals, were mirrored by the gendered enclosures enforced by new laws of heteronormative, monogamous Christian marriage. The gender and sexual fluidity of ancient Hawai’i, embracing same-sex relations and gender-crossing, were outlawed. Paradoxically, it was high-ranking women, the royals of the Hawaiian Kingdom, who were the most prominent in promoting these new Christian ideals. This meant that women were not only subject to New England’s laws of coverture in marriage, whereby their legal personhood was eclipsed by their husbands, but also increasingly pushed out of broader political influence.

This book, again, explored the perduring tension between models of Hawaiian Indigeneity as either a ‘tribe’ or a ‘kingdom’. US Government initiatives to federally recognise Kanaka Maoli would render them a dependent, encompassed entity like Native American tribes on the continental US (thus occluding the way in which the United States illegally occupied a sovereign nation and eventually incorporated it as the fiftieth state). On the other hand, part of the Hawaiian sovereignty movement, in insisting on the illegal overthrow of the Hawaiian monarchy in the late nineteenth century, is yoked to the project of reinstating the kingdom. Kauanui’s alternative model seeks to go beyond a statist nationalism, which, in her view, disavows the salience of deeper Indigeneity in relation to land, gender and sexuality.

Core to her analysis is a feminist reclamation of the fluidity of Indigenous gender and sexuality. Although committed to queer politics, Kauanui opposed the same-sex marriage law introduced in 2013 in Hawai’i as perpetuating settler colonialism by assimilating same-sex relations to the terms of a patriarchal, proprietorial male–female marriage. She celebrates a form of relationality vis-a-vis the land and sexuality that is not proprietary, a reciprocity embracing the love (aloha) between people, the land, the ocean and more-than-human kin. Against processes that eliminate or assimilate the ‘native’, suck the land dry and extract from and pollute the oceans, she celebrates an Indigenous corporeal, cultural and spiritual presence. Her book offers a history deep with insights for the present and horizons for the future, stressing the importance of a deep decoloniality that relies not just on interrogating introduced juridical and political regimes but also reclaiming Indigenous epistemologies and ontologies against their subjugation by Euro-American regimes of knowledge.

I turn finally to Kauanui’s very first publication (1998), which poignantly evoked her own positionality. This is a sophisticated analysis of the gendered politics of the Hawaiian sovereignty movement and of the sensitive relations between Hawaiians ‘at home’ and those ‘off-island’ (like herself). It argues that diasporic Hawaiians, many of whom have left Hawai’i for reasons of economic survival, should be seen as an integral part of the complex coalition of sovereignty politics and not dismissed as dubious ‘absentees’ unless they become ‘transplants’ and ‘come home’. She discerns not just the prominence of women in some parts of the sovereignty movement (such as Ka Lāhui Hawai’i), but also the use of feminised notions of place (derived from colonial discourses and tourist images of hula girls). She also highlights gendered conceptions of familial nurture and heterosexual reproductive relations that place a particular burden on Hawaiian women to increase the ‘full-blood’ proportion of the Indigenous Hawaiian population. She offers a new view of ‘ohana (‘nurture’) that might more generously relate Hawaiians on and off-island in a political coalition less defined by a sclerotic nationalism and ultimately reliant on racialised classifications of persons or primordialist notions of ‘taro roots’. Her arguments thus brought a diasporic feminist sensibility to Hawaiian sovereignty politics.¹⁹

Kauanui has engaged a disruptive decolonial feminist presence not just in her homeland of Hawai’i, but also in the mainland United States, especially in relation to Native Americans. As well as her public engagement with sovereignty politics in Hawai’i, she has been heavily involved with the broader politics of decolonisation and Indigeneity. Her ideas have been brought to wider public audiences through radio. From 2007 to 2013, she hosted a public affairs program called Indigenous Politics: From Native New England and Beyond, which was broadcast across 12 states and syndicated by the Pacifica Radio Network. Selected interviews from that show were published in a book (Kauanui 2018c) and the full set is available online (www.indigenouspolitics.com). She has also taught and broadcast on anarchism, originally in a program called Horizontal Power Hour,²⁰ and later Anarchy On Air.²¹ Kauanui has thus established a reputation as a decolonial feminist scholar and has extended her reach as a public intellectual, heard by a broad audience in the United States and elsewhere. An interview with ‘Time Talks’ reveals the depth and breadth of her public engagement (see Kauanui 2018a, see Plate 6.2).

Plate 6.2: Portrait of J. Kēhaulani Kauanui, 2025

Source: J. Kēhaulani Kauanui.

Teresia Kieuea Teaiwa (1969–2017)

Teresia Kieuea Teaiwa was born in 1969 in Honolulu, Hawai’i, where her Afro-American mother, Joan, from Washington, DC, and her Banaban father, John, met on the campus of the University of Hawai’i at Mānoa (UHM). They moved to live in Suva, Fiji, to where people from Banaba (Ocean Island) had been forcibly displaced during World War II, settling on the island of Rabi.²² Teresia’s personal and professional connections were dispersed across many islands of Oceania and the mainland United States. Ancestrally connected to Banaba and Tabiteuea in Kiribati, she lived at various times in Suva, Washington, Honolulu, Santa Cruz and Wellington and was a regular guest in many islands across the vast expanse of Oceania. After undergraduate years at Trinity College Washington, she completed her master’s in Pacific history at UHM and went on to pursue her PhD in the History of Consciousness Program at the University of California Santa Cruz. She became a lecturer at the University of the South Pacific in Suva and, in 2000, was appointed as the inaugural program director of Pacific studies at Victoria University Wellington in Aotearoa New Zealand. There she married Sean Mallon (curator of the Pacific Collection at Te Papa Tongarewa, the National Museum of New Zealand). She bore two sons, Mānoa and Vaitoa. She died suddenly and prematurely of pancreatic cancer in March 2017. She was just forty-eight (see Plate 6.3).

Plate 6.3: Teresia K. Teaiwa in 2014 with a Marshall Islands stick chart for navigation, a gift from her mother that she used to reflect on both ancient heritage and Pacific studies pedagogy

Source: Robert Cross, used with permission.

Teresia has been widely celebrated as ‘a voracious and sensitive learner … [for] her ability to illuminate connections while demonstrating fundamental respect for the particularities of peoples, places and histories’ (Teaiwa 2021: xv–xvi). She is one of the most cited Indigenous Pacific scholars but was also an inspiring and prize-winning teacher and mentor, a charismatic speaker, a poet and playwright and an activist, who worked with women’s organisations and NGOs on issues of gender, militarism and the liberation of still-colonised territories such as West Papua. Her scholarly writing was expansive, much of it directed towards decolonising the curriculum in teaching Pacific studies and on notions of Indigeneity. I here focus on a series of essays assembled under the rubric of militarism and gender in her posthumous collection, Sweat and Salt Water (Teaiwa 2021). The title derives from her widely circulated quote: ‘We sweat and cry salt water, so we know the ocean is really in our blood’ (Teaiwa 2021: xv).²³

Her very first publication, ‘Microwomen’ (in Teaiwa 2021), focused on the relationships between US colonialism and Micronesian women activists in the Marshall Islands, Chuuk (one of the Federated States of Micronesia) and Belau (now Palau). The United States is but one of a suite of colonising powers in Micronesia including the Spanish, German and Japanese empires. Yet, since the bloody battles of World War II, American ‘liberation’ of many islands from the Japanese, the granting of the ‘Trust Territory of the Pacific islands’ to the United States by the United Nations and the subsequent nuclear explosions in the Marshall Islands, the United States is the most entrenched empire in the region. The political status of these three territories—Marshall Islands, Chuuk and Palau—differs but there is a broad commonality of experience.

So, Teaiwa suggests that pervasive male chauvinism was encouraged by a male-dominated colonial experience. White men failed to recognise women’s power in islands where both descent and land tenure were traced through mothers. They assumed that because men dominated public speaking, women’s voices were mute, when in fact they exercised influence in more subtle ways. Yet, Teaiwa analysed louder articulations of women’s voices: against pervasive alcohol abuse on Chuuk from 1976 to 1977 (they secured prohibition) and when Belau women protested nuclear testing before the US Senate and the United Nations in 1988. Marshallese women’s embodied experience of irradiation inspired women’s antinuclear activism in the region and globally. Teaiwa declared that ‘so-called cultural traditions that bind women are no longer viable in a world that has permitted male egoism to run amok in the form of neocolonialism and nuclear militarism’ (2021: 91). She suggested that the relentless force of colonialism had profoundly distorted gender roles and Micronesian men were the beneficiaries of US colonial power and were downplaying women’s relevance in political affairs. She saw Micronesian women activists as trying to balance the power ‘not only between the sexes but between nations’ (Teaiwa 2021: 106). And that meant highlighting the ‘vitally political aspects’ of what are too often diminished as domestic concerns: nutrition, health and substance abuse.

Teaiwa’s brilliant 1994 essay on bikini continued her preoccupation with gender and militarism in provocative and creative ways. She asked: ‘What does the word bikini evoke for you? A woman in a two-piece bathing suit, or a site for nuclear-weapons testing? A bikini-clad woman invigorated by solar radiation, or Bikini Islanders cancer ridden from nuclear radiation?’ (Teaiwa 2021: 110). This perverse conjunction derives from the moment in 1946 when French designer Louis Réard launched a sensational two-piece bathing suit to celebrate the Allied victory in World War II. Christened the ‘bikini’ after Bikini Atoll in the Marshall Islands, it was cast as the epitome of freedom and heterosexual release—the ‘atom bomb of fashion’. Bikini Atoll had been selected by the US military as a favoured testing site due to its remote location, its climatic stability, its small population and the crucial fact that it was under US control. The Bikinians (about 170 people), who had recently been experiencing a drought and food shortages, were persuaded to relocate to Rongerik Atoll by appeals to their sense of Christian duty. Their military governor said this was for the ‘good of mankind and to end all world wars’ (Teaiwa 2021: 112). Two nuclear tests conducted in July 1946 subjected Bikinians, many other Marshall Islanders, US personnel and the surrounding land, sea and air to radiation, with devastating, long-lasting effects. Twenty further tests in the vicinity of Bikini and Enewetak atolls were conducted between 1946 and 1958.²⁴ Teaiwa highlighted the tragic history of displacement and inept relocations, the failure of the United States to appreciate the enduring intergenerational effects of radiation on people, other species and the environment and the paltry compensation offered for the physical, emotional, social and spiritual devastation wrought on Marshallese peoples (2021: 112–13).

As well as protesting this wrong, Teaiwa (2021: 110) forensically analysed how the bikini swimsuit fitted into a longer, broader history of the eroticisation of the islands, from early European male explorers, who evoked a Pacific paradise akin to a Greek golden age, to the contemporary ‘tourist trivialisation of Pacific Islanders’ experience and existence’.²⁵ The sexualisation and objectification of the female body through ‘excessive visibility’ distract from violence and colonial power, rendering it invisible. The bikini both marginalises ‘s/pacific’ bodies and genericises female bodies. To unravel the bikini, Teaiwa used a compelling synthesis of Edward Said’s theories of Orientalism, a critical appropriation of Sigmund Freud’s analysis of the fetish in traumatic amnesia, Julia Kristeva’s ideas of women as inside/outside society and Emily Apter on the commodification of exotic others. She suggested that the bikini ‘manifests both a celebration and forgetting of nuclear power (Teaiwa 2021: 110) and ‘simultaneously transcribes and erases the dispossession of the Bikini Islanders onto millions of female bodies’ (p. 117).²⁶

Undoing these perverse conjunctions and decolonising ‘s/pacific bodies’ were for her intimately woven into women’s activism in the Pacific—against nuclear testing, for independence and sovereignty and around concerns about health, the environment, substance abuse and domestic violence. She charted the movement of the Nuclear Free and Independent Pacific from the late 1970s through the 1980s.²⁷ She acknowledged the salience of women in Christian organisations in such activism, as did Dickson-Waiko, but considered that ‘Christianity’s role in the Pacific has certainly been ambiguous’ (Teaiwa 2021: 118).

Teaiwa’s critical analysis of gender and militarism also played out in Fiji, the country where she grew up and which she loved fiercely—‘full speed, no brakes’ (2021: xv). In twin essays, she analysed both the centrality of Indigenous masculinity in Fiji’s military and the situation of women soldiers.²⁸ In ‘Articulated Cultures’ (2021: 127), Teaiwa pointed to how, although British colonial authorities had ended Indigenous warfare by the late nineteenth century, militarism thrives in Fiji. At the time of her writing, it was ‘the most militarized independent nation in the Pacific’ (Teaiwa 2021: 127), with a large army and navy, deploying forces internally and externally, in wars such as those in Iraq and in UN peacekeeping operations in the Middle East. But, she insisted, militarism extended far beyond military institutions. For her, this was materialised in the gigantic concrete replicas of Indigenous war clubs (i wau) that frame the entry to state-recognised Fijian villages along the highway from Nadi Airport to the capital, Suva. And it was palpable in how the military intervened in Fijian politics: the Sitiveni Rabuka coups of 1987, the putsch of George Speight in 2000 and, after the time of her writing, the long period of Frank Bainimarama’s rule, from 2006 to 2014 as military commander, and then as elected prime minister (2014–22), when autocratic rule persisted, the media was controlled and dissent was squashed.

Teaiwa analysed how in Fiji there was an ‘articulation’ between different cultures of military masculinity. Historically, it was manifest in ideals of self-sacrifice and loyalty to the British Crown, especially on the part of Indigenous (iTaukei) Fijian men, who dominate the military forces. Indo-Fijians, primarily working as imported, indentured labourers, were segregated from Indigenous Fijians by colonial policy and developed a far more critical stance on British colonialism. Militarism is also articulated with notions of service and respect to the Indigenous hierarchy of male chiefs on the part of a warrior class (bati), who were urged to protect the chief and his interests. Christianity, and especially Methodism, also articulated with the military: ‘[T]he institution is unquestioningly invested with an aura of Christian mission’ (Teaiwa 2021: 136). Rabuka, an ordained Methodist minister, who orchestrated the first ethno-nationalist coup of 1987, proclaimed it as a ‘mission’ from God. Militarised masculinity also pervades popular culture and sports, especially rugby, which is seen as a national game and a battle engaging predominantly Indigenous men. Players in both the codes of original rugby union and the later rugby league are portrayed as ‘warriors’ for the nation, performing Indigenous war dances before their matches. Political leaders have been tightly enmeshed with rugby—inaugural prime minister of independent Fiji, Ratu Sir Kamisese Mara, with union, Rabuka with league—and military men with both. Teaiwa asks how all these tightly articulated cultures of military masculinity might be disarticulated to value a different kind of Fijian man.²⁹

In a later essay, Teaiwa returned to this concept of ‘articulation’ and its origins in British cultural studies, in the work of Stuart Hall and others. Whereas some tended to view articulation through the image of an articulated truck or train, from which loads or carriages could be unhooked, where there is no necessary or determined connection, following Hall and Grossberg, Teaiwa argued for a connection that was more determined, through ‘lines of tendential force’. She posits an alternative image of the articulation of a limb in a human body.³⁰ Catalysed by extraordinary photographs of male military veterans who had suffered amputations but who desired to celebrate their survival, strength and sexuality, she analysed the situation of both Guam and Fiji in relation to what former US president Dwight D. Eisenhower described as the ‘military-industrial complex’ (hereinafter MIC) (see Teaiwa 2021: 167–68). In her vision, the MIC is held together not simply by mechanistic linkages but also by tendential forces analogous to those surrounding an articulated limb. Again, she wondered about disarticulation:

So if the lines of tendential force that bind Guam and Fiji, respectively, to the MIC make it impossible to simply unhook them, does this mean that disarticulation must be as violent as the severing of a limb by something like a mine blast … In Fiji and Guam, women’s and feminist groups have long maintained a commitment to seeking demilitarized solutions to their island economies’ development challenges … But the economic logic and the lure of employment and social mobility through military or militarized service is as difficult to resist in Fiji as on Guam. (Teaiwa 2021: 178)

This disturbing dystopic vision of Pacific geopolitics came from a woman who was not just a scholar but also a creative poet and playwright. She early co-authored a satirical play with Vilsoni Hereniko, Last Virgin in Paradise: A Serious Comedy (1993), and throughout her life she created poetry, which was published in book form (Teaiwa 1995) and on CDs (Teaiwa with Figiel 2000, Teaiwa 2008) and through her publishing imprint, Fiery Canoe Productions. Her poetry was often forthright, often playful and sometimes offered more-than-human perspectives—for example, that of a flying fish, which can see two horizons at once. From her adolescent years, growing up amid the heady politics of Suva, Teaiwa was passionately engaged in politics in and beyond the academy—as president of the Pacific History Association, as a participant in the Nuclear-Free and Independent Pacific movement, in several women’s organisations, publishing on her ‘Microwomen’ blog and in advocacy for West Papuan independence (Manson 2017). Her decolonial feminist scholarship and political practice were so deeply entangled as to be seamless.

Some comparative reflections

What do we see when we combine the perspectives of these three remarkable women? How might we adjudge their work as both decolonial and feminist?

They all see colonialism as profoundly changing Indigenous gender relations—diminishing the influence and political agency that women had precolonially (especially in matrilineal places) and increasing male dominance through the new regimes of masculinist state politics and modern militaries with global connections. They offer more diverse views on Christianity. Although highlighting the problematic Christian, colonial introduction of gendered domains of public and domestic life, Dickson-Waiko celebrates how Christian women’s groups offered a foundation for women’s empowerment. Kauanui, rather, sees the imposition of monogamous heterosexual marriage and ideals of a Christian home as ultimately sequestering women more firmly in family and outlawing the gender and sexual fluidity of precolonial Hawai’i. Teaiwa celebrates the Christian dimension of women’s activism against militarism and nuclear imperialism and for independence and better health and nutrition but suggests that Christianity’s impact in the Pacific has ‘certainly been ambiguous’ (2021: 118).

There are, as earlier intimated, important differences between these three scholars in how they are situated in the geopolitics of the Pacific. This is not so much because they are associated with the three conventional subregions of Melanesia (Dickson-Waiko), Polynesia (Kauanui) and Micronesia (Teaiwa), but because they are differently situated in terms of the sovereignty of states and thus different parameters for decolonisation. Anne Dickson-Waiko, born of Milne Bay parents in Port Moresby, was working and writing in the period after Papua New Guinea became a sovereign state, although clearly neocolonial influences still permeate its politics—through the corrupt regimes of the extractive industries of mining and logging and through the practices of development agencies, especially from the erstwhile colonial masta,³¹ Australia. Her activist engagement in women’s issues extended to meetings of the United Nations and reports for many development institutions as a representative of an independent nation. Kauanui, an ‘off-island’ Hawaiian, born and raised in California, firmly identifies as Kanaka Maoli but eschews the rival models of state nationalism for her homeland. Her activist politics are directed to the legitimation of Indigenous gender and sexual fluidity in her ancestral home and to coalitions of Indigenous politics with Native Americans. Through public appearances and radio broadcasts, she promotes an anarchistic vision of politics outside and beyond the state. Teaiwa, born in Honolulu and raised in Suva, had wide diasporic experience as a displaced Banaban having lived in both an independent state (Fiji) and settler colonies (the United States and Aotearoa New Zealand). Her international feminist activism was with grassroots organisations and NGOs, rather than through the state-based UN system. Significantly, all the women express doubts about the role of the state in women’s empowerment. They did not see the state as the sole engine of social change and equality but rather saw it as often inimical to women’s interests, dissonant from grassroots women’s movements and a major driver of enhancing masculinist and militarised power.

Importantly, the education of both Kauanui and Teaiwa in the United States and especially their graduate work at the prestigious History of Consciousness Program at the University of California Santa Cruz afforded access to radical scholars such as James Clifford, Donna Haraway and Angela Davis. They were significantly influenced by Euro-American theory. Teaiwa (2021: 223 ff.) expressly wrote about ‘white influences I won’t deny’, including Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Antonio Gramsci, as well as white American feminists such as Haraway and Cynthia Enloe. She regularly spoke at international feminist conferences and published in feminist journals. Kauanui did her first degree in women’s studies, publishes in feminist journals and is in conversation with white feminist anthropologists such as Sally Engle Merry and Haraway as well as Oceanic and Indigenous feminists. Teaiwa and Kauanui acknowledged their mutual influence and collaborated in publication. Given their education in the United States, they have had broader access to global networks to promote and publish their work. A generation earlier, Dickson-Waiko had graduate experience in both the United States and Australia but her work was more in tune with the empirical tone of much Pacific history and political science, although clearly influenced by the inspirational examples and analyses of feminist movements in the Philippines and beyond in what was then called the ‘Third World’.

Significantly, more so than Dickson-Waiko, Kauanui and Teaiwa wrote within a genealogy of decolonial scholarship in Pacific studies, such as the pioneering work of Epeli Hau’ofa (1994, 2008) and Linda Tuhiwai Smith (2013). As such, they expressly challenged the historically sedimented structures of colonialism and how knowledge is a crucial part of colonial subjugation. They dismantled the imaginaries and conventional portrayals of region, race, gender and sexuality and celebrated alternative Indigenous ontologies, epistemologies and methodologies in research. None of these three scholars draws on the decolonial theories emanating from Latin America and the Caribbean propounded by Arturo Escobar (1995, for example), Walter Mignolo and Catherine Walsh (2018, for example) or even the feminist scholar Maria Lugones (2021). Lugones reconceptualises the intimate relations of race and gender and shows how a colonial gender regime based on a heterosexual and hierarchical binary between men and women was naturalised in diverse colonial formations in Africa and North America (2021). Their complex analyses distilled above suggest diverse Indigenous binaries of women and men across Oceania—some more diarchical, some more hierarchical—but reveal how Euro-American colonialism everywhere created far more hierarchical and heteropatriarchal regimes of power.

Moreover, their analyses resonate beyond Oceania, beyond the Pacific. The region is too often seen as irretrievably specific, as indelibly local in relation to human universals that are typically seen as emanating from the Global North. As Teaiwa (2021: 110 ff.) has dubbed it, with characteristic wit and perspicacity, ‘s/pacific’. There are important connections between the arguments advanced by these three women and the work of those committed to decolonising feminisms and developing Indigenous feminisms in settler colonies such as the United States and Australia (for example, Arvin et al. 2013; Anderson 2021).

Dickson-Waiko, Kauanui and Teaiwa were/are arguably feminist, but there are differences in their willing embrace of the ‘f-word’. Given the way in which ‘modern’ women were lampooned in independent Papua New Guinea and second-wave feminism was portrayed as a white, foreign intrusion, Dickson-Waiko was more reticent in public about such an alignment in her home country. But, as we can see, her scholarly writing evinces a strong critique of patriarchy in Papua New Guinea—both before and after independence—and she expressly celebrates the ‘Indigenous feminism’ of grassroots women’s Christian groups. Moreover, she lamented the disconnection between this and the state-based projects of gender equality in which she herself participated, both within Papua New Guinea and beyond, in meetings of the United Nations. Kauanui and Teaiwa are more avowedly feminist but both distance themselves from state-based solutions. Kauanui critiques the autocracy of state nationalisms and increasingly advances anarchist values and political projects. Teaiwa’s feminism discerns a pervasive masculinist militarism in the formation of states across Oceania and, rather, engages feminist social movements working outside the state system. In Fiji, where she grew up, there was an early and easier embrace of the ‘f-word’, although in creating feminist coalitions, she espoused a politics of ‘fluidarity’ rather than solidarity, recognising profound differences and inequalities as well as commonalities between women.³²

Although these authors do not allude to the notion of intersectionality (as developed by Kimberlé Crenshaw 1991; Collins and Bilge 2016; and others), although they were likely aware of it, all stress how women are divided by class and by race. Kauanui’s history of Hawai’i reveals the profound differences between high-ranking and low-ranking women in the history of colonial Christianity in her ancestral archipelago. Dickson-Waiko talks directly of the emergent class differences created by colonialism and modern capitalist development in Papua New Guinea, through the gap between ol grassroots mama and ol save meri, implicating herself in that divide. Teaiwa is alert to the privileges that come with education and material wealth—between women in rural and urban Fiji, for instance—and how global inequalities structure the relations between Oceanic peoples living in the islands and Oceanic diasporas within rich countries such as the United States, Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand.

But the divisions of race loom larger for them and influence how they appraise ‘feminism’ where that carries a presumption of being ‘white’.³³ There has been a decades-long discussion of whether and how far the ‘f-word’ is embraced by women across Oceania. In an early assessment, stellar scholar and poet Selina Tusitala Marsh (1998) wondered whether feminism was a ‘maligned overstayer’ or a ‘model citizen’ in Oceania. She concluded that

for some women of the Pacific, feminism has become and is becoming a worthy seafarer and a knowledgeable traveller … [F]eminism can voyage the cultural and historical specificities of the 10,000 islands in the Pacific, travel through the veins of Pacific oppression without rendering blanket victim status and ignoring contradictions and potentially subversive strategies. (Marsh 1998: 677)

I suggest the scholarship and activist practice of Dickson-Waiko, Kauanui and Teaiwa bear witness to this prescient prophecy. Critical to its successful localisation was, Marsh argued, the acknowledgement of the predominantly collective or relational values of Oceanic peoples.

As we have seen, Dickson-Waiko sees the individualism of Western feminism³⁴ as inappropriate for the PNG context, where relational values perdure, especially for women, who, unlike men, are rarely seen as individual citizen-subjects. Kauanui celebrates the relational values of Kanaka Maoli culture, not just in living human relations but also in kinship with the cosmos, with ancestors and more-than-human kin, other species and the formations of land and ocean. In both her scholarly writing and her poetry, Teaiwa celebrates collective, ancestral values connecting humans to a wider world of kin and laments how nuclear geopolitics and the perverse conjunctions of mili-tourism have ravaged Oceania. Echoing others, all three see relational rather than individual values as fundamental to their Oceanic identity and thus divergent from hegemonic Western feminisms.

We might, then, better listen to and learn from nuanced gendered histories and decolonial feminist insights like those offered by Dickson-Waiko, Kauanui and Teaiwa. Too often Australians, including Australian feminists, have presumed they have the answers to make lives better for women in Oceania—by ensuring there are more women in parliaments and formal politics, by encouraging women’s economic empowerment through entrepreneurial programs and through redressing the pervasive problems of gender violence. All these are noble aims. But, as those critically involved in aid and development programs know so well, improving women’s lives in Oceania cannot simply follow a white, imperial script. We must eschew the perduring salvationism of white women ‘saving our sisters’—albeit from the perils of paganism, of poverty, of gender and sexual violence or, most recently, of the climate crisis (see Jolly 2019). Celebrating women’s agency and potential for political leadership in Oceania means respecting the values and priorities articulated by women themselves, in diverse and changing contexts. This entails a position of humility rather than the hubris that too often accompanies those of us from countries with greater material wealth and geopolitical influence, such as Australia. It also entails a recognition that Australian feminisms have not been so monolithically white and middle class as some histories suggest. From the 1970s, some Indigenous and migrant working women were engaged in feminist struggles in Australia and, over several decades, the influence of Black and Latina women in the United States and postcolonial scholars from Asia has profoundly shaped Australian feminist thought and practice. Today the ethos and practice of intersectionality suffuse Australian feminisms at home and hopefully are increasing in partnerships of practice with women across Oceania.

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1. 1 Heartfelt thanks to Nayahamui Rooney, Katherine Lepani, Salmah Eva-Lina Lawrence, Kalpana Ram, Jonathan Ritchie, J. Kēhaulani Kauanui and Bob Foster for comments on earlier drafts, which occasioned significant revisions. Special thanks to my co-editor Tanya Jakimow for her close reading and valuable suggestions and for the overall inspiration for this volume and exemplary collaboration in what we have dubbed our ‘dream team’. Thanks also to the anonymous reviewers for ANU Press.

2. 2 I have had professional and personal relationships with each of these three extraordinary women. My relationship with Anne Dickson-Waiko dates from her time at The Australian National University, when I was an examiner of her PhD thesis, awarded in 1994. She contributed to several conferences and edited collections in Australia, including a special issue of Oceania on women’s groups for which I wrote the epilogue (Jolly 2003). I have been a long-term admirer of her work and at times a mentor. I supported her for promotion at UPNG in the years before her death. We last had contact when she was a member of the PhD panel for her niece, Salmah Eva-Lina Lawrence. I first met J. Kēhaulani Kauanui when she was a Fulbright scholar in Māori Studies at the University of Auckland, in Aotearoa New Zealand, and invited her to Australia for the ‘Migrating Feminisms’ conference organised by Kalpana Ram and myself. This resulted in a special issue of Women’s Studies International Forum (1998), which Kalpana and Kēhaulani co-edited. I regularly reviewed her work and supported her in professional promotions. I have shared this chapter and other recent writing about her work with her while she has been recovering from a long illness. I first met Teresia Teaiwa in the 1990s around our dinner table in Canberra when she was visiting for a conference. I engaged with her essay on bikini when she was a graduate student at the University of California at Santa Cruz and contributed to a conference and subsequent volume, Native Cultural Studies on the Edge, edited by Vicente Diaz and Kauanui for The Contemporary Pacific (in 2001). I last talked with her at a regional meeting in Suva and at the Pacific History Association conference in Guam, both in 2016, and attended her funeral in Wellington in 2017. I admired her writing, teaching, creativity and empathetic activism.

3. 3 The division of these three regions dates to the French explorer and naval officer Jules-Sébastien-César Dumont d’Urville in 1832, though there were several precursors. The origin, racist character and significance of this tripartite division has been much debated. These names have been appropriated and their racist origins subverted by Pacific peoples in various ways (see Narokobi 1983; Kabutaulaka 2015).

4. 4 I thank Kalpana Ram for reminding me of the collectivist character of feminist groups with whom we were engaged in Sydney in the 1970s and 1980s and the way in which groups of migrant ‘Third World’ and Indigenous women were also part of this ‘second wave’.

5. 5 See the discussion of the collective ethos of the women’s liberation movement in the chapter by Elizabeth Reid in Women and Whitlam (Arrow 2023) and her consideration of Indigenous women such as Pat Eatock.

6. 6 To quote Banivanua Mar’s fine words: ‘Like the enrichment of the Ocean, cultures of decolonisation in the Pacific were kept alive by processes of upwelling and downwelling that resemble the exchanges of water and oxygen between the surface and the deeper currents that keep the Ocean alive. This framework of exchange, enrichment and energy, characterises the ideas linking Indigenous networks of decolonisation as they surfaced and coalesced in expressive actions of protest, artistic and literary media, or written and spoken petitions, speeches and articles’ (2016: 15).

7. 7 This estimate has been recently challenged by the United Nations Population Fund, which considers the population may be much higher, even as high as 17 million (Randall 2022).

8. 8 I am only sparsely citing a huge literature on gender in Papua New Guinea since I want to keep the focus firmly on Anne Dickson-Waiko and the period in which she was writing.

9. 9 Kwato Mission, established by Charles Abel, was, as Dickson-Waiko observed, a ‘colonial showpiece’. Young children were removed from their families and the ‘contaminating’ influence of culture—a process symbolised by children being thoroughly scrubbed on arrival (Dickson-Waiko 2013: 179). See also the analysis of Kwato and the Abel legacy by Salmah Eva-Lina Lawrence (2018), the niece of Anne Dickson-Waiko.

10. 10 I thank Jonathan Ritchie for this insight and detail.

11. 11 Murray cited the risks of both female prostitution and depopulation if women were employed as labourers (Dickson-Waiko 2013: 178).

12. 12 This relates to long debates about notions and values of personhood in Papua New Guinea, Melanesia and across Oceania. See Strathern’s (1990) formulation of ‘dividuals’, partible persons in Melanesia, versus Western individuals, and critiques of this by Wardlow (2006, 2014), Jolly (1992) and Lepani (2012). Still in Papua New Guinea and across Oceania this contrast continues to be made, including by many Pacific peoples, celebrating collective values and relationality against Western individualism.

13. 13 Though in her later paper she acknowledges that in an earlier submission to constitutional development in 1970 Pangu Pati had proposed five seats be reserved for women, 30 years before the idea of temporary special measures ‘became fashionable in the twenty-first century’ (Dickson-Waiko 2013: 182). Kathy Lepani notes that the Eight Point Improvement Plan that Somare introduced to the House of Assembly in 1973 was endorsed by the Assembly and then formed the basis for the independence Constitution’s Preamble and the National Goals and Directive (Pers. comm., 12 February 2023).

14. 14 There is a large literature on this but see Jolly and Macintyre (1989) and Choi and Jolly (2014) for syntheses and diverse perspectives.

15. 15 Dickson-Waiko (2003: 113–14) also notes how the fact that the United Church Women’s Fellowship recruited Josephine Abaijah to their cause meant that their protests were incorrectly seen as a manifestation of the Papua Besena separatist movement.

16. 16 Dickson-Waiko quotes Narokobi satirising Western dress trends: ‘The men folk chuckle at women, who paint their lips, shave their eyebrows, wear pants, put on large sunglasses and walk on high-heel shoes’ (Dickson-Waiko 2013: 186, quoting Narokobi 1983: 37). See also the writings of Laura Zimmer-Tamakoshi (1993) on this backlash and women’s responses.

17. 17 Dr Nayahamui Rooney is writing a biography of her mother, Nahau Rooney, tentatively called ‘Into the Men’s House’.

18. 18 This was through her involvement in the Review of the Organic Law on Provincial and Local Level Government led by Ben Micah from 1995.

19. 19 Her work on ancestral Oceanic same-sex relations, the effects of Christianity on sexuality and the problematic relations between Oceanic models and Western lesbian identities was similarly astute, especially in the context of debates in Hawai’i and the mainland United States about same-sex marriage.

20. 20 Horizontal Power Hour website: horizontalpowerhour.wordpress.com/.

21. 21 Anarchy On Air website: anarchyonairwesu.tumblr.com/.

22. 22 That story is told in the book by Teresia’s younger sister Katerina Teaiwa, Consuming Ocean Island (2014).

23. 23 This was first coined as an epigraph for the essay by Epeli Hau’ofa ‘The Ocean in Us’ (1998, republished in Hau’ofa 2008).

24. 24 Teaiwa notes that in 1980 the United Nations estimated that more than 200 nuclear bombs and devices had been detonated in the Pacific, by the United States in the Marshall Islands, by France at Mururoa and Fangataufa atolls in French Polynesia (Ma’ohi Nui) and by the United Kingdom on Johnston Atoll (and later at Montebello Islands, Emu Field and Maralinga in Australia; see Maclellan 2017). As she cogently points out, this does not include nuclear missiles launched into the Pacific by the United States, Soviet Union and China. Although both the United States and France agreed to suspend nuclear tests in the Pacific in 1993, nuclear-powered and armed vessels continue to patrol the ocean. And, as I write, Australia is projected to join this contingent through the AUKUS (Australia, United Kingdom, United States) alliance.

25. 25 See my dialogue with Teresia’s paper in ‘From Point Venus to Bali Ha’i’ in the volume Sites of Desire/Economies of Pleasure (Jolly 1997a).

26. 26 In a later section of the essay, she depicts these largely Eurocentric theories as ‘ornamental’ to decolonial narratives that interrupt or disrupt hegemonic colonial stories (Teaiwa 2021: 120). Yet, elsewhere, in talking about writing and teaching, she acknowledges ‘The Ancestors We Get to Choose: White Influences I Won’t Deny’ (Teaiwa 2021: 223–34), claiming not just Banaban and Pacific ancestors, teachers and scholars (including several white men), but also Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Thomas Hobbes, Antonio Gramsci and John Berger, all of whom she used in her classes.

27. 27 Talei Mangioni is currently completing a PhD in Pacific Studies at The Australian National University on the history of the Nuclear Free and Independent Pacific.

28. 28 Her second essay examining the situation of Fijian women soldiers argues that, in exploring how they make a career ‘in such an entrenched domain of men and masculinity as the military’, context matters (Teaiwa 2021: 147). She compares the experiences of women soldiers over three distinct periods—late colonial, nationalist and neocolonial—and between being employed by the British Army and the Fijian Military Forces, with different rhythms of desegregation by race and gender. The overwhelming concerns of contemporary Fijian women soldiers whom she interviewed were, like their male counterparts, economic issues and securing their livelihoods.

29. 29 Since Teaiwa’s analysis, further research on Fijian masculinities has been done by Geir Henning Presterudstuen (2019). Jope Tarai (2016) offered a compelling critique of Indigenous Fijian ideas of manhood grounded in his own experience of gender violence in a TEDx talk called ‘Re-Thinking the Fijian Man’. Romitesh Kant is exploring masculinities in Fijian politics in his PhD in Pacific Studies at The Australian National University. Rabuka was returned as Prime Minister in 2022.

30. 30 ‘The articulated limb thus provides a more appropriate illustration, an analogy of articulation’s engineering, the difficulty and trauma of disarticulation, and the literal possibilities of rearticulation. For while the basic ball and socket of a hip or shoulder joint, the hinge of a knee, or the pivot and hinge of an elbow may share the fundamental mechanics of that joint between a lorry/truck and trailer, or between the caboose and cars of a train, the ligaments, tendons, nerves and blood vessels that grow around an articulated joint make the possibility of disarticulation inevitably violent and traumatizing’ (Teaiwa 2021: 167).

31. 31 This is a Tok Pisin word for master or boss.

32. 32 Nicole George (2012) offers a fine history of feminism in Fiji. At a meeting reviewing the Australian Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade’s Pacific Women Shaping Pacific Development program held in Suva in 2016, which both Teresia Teaiwa and I attended, the differences between identification with the word ‘feminist’ by women delegates from Fiji and its rejection by those from Papua New Guinea was clear. In that year, the regional Pacific Feminist Forum was inaugurated in Suva—significantly, welcoming trans women. In November 2022, the West Papuan Feminist Forum was founded by Esther Haluk and others, which combines women’s concerns with issues of structural violence, environmental destruction and the marginalisation of Indigenous Papuans in the context of Indonesian colonial occupation.

33. 33 Sara Ahmed, in her stellar book Living a Feminist Life (2017), challenges this travelling story of feminism as an imperial gift, suggesting that she absorbed feminist values from her Pakistani aunties.

34. 34 As I observed earlier in this chapter, I do not totally accept this characterisation of Western feminism. It may be more accurate as a depiction of liberal feminism, but in other channels of ‘whitestream feminism’ there has been a celebration of relational values and collectivity in contrast to what is seen as expressly masculinist individualism. However, this is a recurring critique made by women across Oceania.