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“We Are Our History”: Reviewing the History of Education in Hawaiʻi and Oceania

Part of: 60th Anniversary Forum

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 November 2020

Derek Taira
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Extract

There is a “world of difference,” anthropologist Epeli Hauʻofa argued, “between viewing the Pacific as ‘islands in a far sea’ and as ‘a sea of islands.’” The distinction between both perspectives, he explained, is exemplified in the two names used for the region: Pacific Islands and Oceania. The former represents a colonial vision produced by white “continental men” emphasizing the smallness and remoteness of “dry surfaces in a vast ocean far from centers of power.” This understanding has produced and sustained an “economistic and geographic deterministic view” emphasizing Pacific Island nations as “too small, too poor, and too isolated” to take care of themselves. The latter, in contrast, denotes a grand space inhabited by brave and resourceful people whose myths, legends, oral traditions, and cosmologies reveal how they did not conceive of themselves in such “microscopic proportions.” Rather, Oceanic peoples have for over two millennia viewed the sea as a “large world” where peoples, goods, and cultures moved and mingled unhindered by fixed national boundaries.

Keywords

History of education in Oceaniahistory of education in Hawai’isettler colonialismhistory of Indigenous educationPacific World
Type
60th Anniversary HEQ Forum
Information
History of Education Quarterly , Volume 60 , Issue 4 , November 2020 , pp. 632 - 643
Copyright
Copyright © 2020 History of Education Society

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