Indigenous Diasporas and Dislocations

Charles D. Thompson Jr., Graham Harvey, Graham Harvey

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351928007
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theologie & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

Indigenous religions are now present not only in their places of origin but globally. They are significant parts of the pluralism and diversity of the contemporary world, especially when their performance enriches and/or challenges host populations. Indigenous Diasporas and Dislocations engages with examples of communities with different experiences, expectations and evaluations of diaspora life. It contributes significantly to debates about indigenous cultures and religions, and to understandings of identity and alterity in late or post-modernity. This book promises to enrich understanding of indigenity, and of the globalized world in which indigenous people play diverse roles.

PART 1
(RE)FORMING IDENTITIES AND CONNECTIONS

Chapter 1
Native Thoughts: A Pacific Studies Take on Cultural Studies and Diaspora

Teresia K. Teaiwa

For thousands of years, the Pacific Ocean has been criss-crossed by the exploratory drives and competing aims of diverse peoples. On a global capitalist map of significance, Oceania’s economic and politico-strategic value is derived from its between-Asia-and-America-ness (Connery, 1994). Amidst the high-powered Asia–America routes there are persistent circuits of production, exchange, consumption and identification linking Pacific Islands together and to places beyond. Oceanian natives have become enigmatic figures in this traffic: not at all bound by isolation, smallness or poverty, they have at times unassumingly kept pace, most times trailed behind, but with surprising frequency outwitted – if not outstripped – their competitors in the race which has been modernity. I think here of the 16th-century Chamorros shot dead by Spanish explorers for not understanding the notion of private property, and the 21st-century outer island Micronesians still living without electricity or running water but suffering from diabetes; 19th-century Fijians who cannibalized missionaries, and 21st-century Christian hymn-singing Fijians, some of whom protested a hostage crisis and the rest who condoned it. I imagine intrepid 18th-century Oceanian voyagers on Euro-American ships; 19th-century indentured labourers sweating on sugar, cotton and copra plantations; 20th-century nongovernmental organization representatives collecting fat per diems for shopping sprees during the international meetings they were sponsored to attend, and 21st-century atoll-dwelling Cook Islanders, I-Kiribati and Tuvaluans who fear the disappearance of their islands as sea levels rise due to global warming. I think of bewildered Papua New Guinean highlanders making first contact with whites in the 1930s, and their bold parliamentarians in the 1990s who told the World Bank in so many words to get stuffed. I recall Native Hawaiians offering gifts to Pele, the goddess of fire, as an expression of aloha ‘aina, and I picture Solomon Island villagers who chose money and got ecological devastation for the ruthless logging of their forests by Malaysian companies.

These are only a few examples of Pacific peoples’ historical and contemporary negotiations of modernity. Whilst it is important to be wary of generalizations, it becomes evident that Pacific peoples are often caught between being idealized and cynically dismissed for both their competence and incompetence under modernity’s terms and conditions – conditions, it must be stressed, that are not entirely of their own making. As an analytical tool for investigating the cultural, political and economic challenges raised by modernity in Oceania, I have chosen to use ‘the Native’ as a term. In many ways my project strives for what Paul Gilroy cogently laid out as a strategy for intervening on racist discourses, flawed counter-discourses of ‘race’, and conceptions of culture that fix people in ethnic and racial groups (Gilroy, 1991). Focusing on the national culture of post-World War Two England, Gilroy identifies the discursive processes by which ‘the Black’ consistently gets framed as the problem and victim of modernity. The power of racism is its ahistoricism – an ahistoricism shared by the exoticism that has pervaded popular understandings of Oceania. But exoticism differs significantly from racism in its relationship to the logic of modernity: racism locates a Black Briton – especially as a worker or labourer – in a racial and functional hierarchy within modern society, while exoticism figures an African tribal chief – the Native – as somehow outside of or external to the present, a bizarre historical survival, a discrepancy in modernity’s cultural accounting system. While Gilroy brings Blacks back into history by tracing their dynamic cultural, political and intellectual criss-crossings of the Atlantic (Gilroy, 1993, 1991), my challenge is to assert both the contemporaneity and historicity of Oceanian or Pacific identities. The bulk of my work over the last ten years has engaged broad historical, cultural and political trends in post-World War Two Oceania (Teaiwa, 1994, 1999, 2001). Three concepts – the Native, militarism and tourism – formed the framework for my engagements, and sustained discussions of these three concepts together are rare (see Kahn, 2000; Ferguson and Turnbull, 1999). The concept of ‘articulations’, which comes from Cultural Studies, provided the links for thinking about the Native, militarism and tourism together in my PhD dissertation (Teaiwa, 2001). The thesis was that the Native is a critical cultural and political category in contemporary Oceania that is compellingly articulated with the histories of militarism and tourism in the region. Native scholars like Durutalo (1992) from Fiji and Trask (1993) from Hawaii have called for thorough investigations of militarism and tourism. My dissertation extended their proposals to argue that militarism and tourism are best understood not as discrete institutions or industries, but, like the Native, as a complex set of cultural and political ensembles. Militarism and tourism as such are part of a wider network of articulations that create the fundamentally modern tensions between work and leisure, which shape the Native as a social and cultural category. Adapting an approach modelled by James Clifford (1997a) in his discussion of diasporas, the dissertation described the Native not in terms of essential features, but in relation to what it is not. The contours of the Native were thus outlined in relation to colonizing, traveller, nationalist, immigrant, diasporic, postcolonial, worker/labourer subjectivities. Militarism and tourism provided the ambivalent joints of articulation between the Native and others, sometimes requiring the Native to become other, and at other times demanding that the Native become more native – that is, not colonizer, traveller and so on. In identifying some of the articulations of militarism and tourism with the Native, the dissertation sought also to illustrate the possibilities for disarticulating and rearticulating critical cultural and political and economic relations for the Native in contemporary Oceania. This essay presents work from my PhD dissertation as a contribution to this timely anthology with the unexpected title Indigenous Diasporas and Dislocations.

native n 1 person born in a place, country, etc. and associated with it by birth: a ~ of London/Wales/India/Kenya 2 such a person as distinguished from immigrants, residents, visitors, tourists, etc. from other countries, usu. when the race to which he belongs is different in culture: the first meetings between Captain Cook and the ~s (= the aboriginal inhabitants) of Australia. adj 1 associated with the place and circumstances of one’s birth: your ~ land/place. 2 of ~s: ~ customs

North Europeans produce other peoples (for themselves) as ‘natives – reductive, incomplete beings suffering from the inability to have become what Europeans already are, or to have made themselves into what Europeans intend them to be (Pratt, 1992, p. 152).

According to Stewart Firth in The Cambridge History of the Pacific Islanders, the Native is one of the few original products of colonialism: ‘The colonisers’ most significant ideological achievement was the invention of the Native, a category embracing all non-Europeans’ (Firth, 1997, p. 262). The Native has thus historically existed in Asia, Australia, Oceania, the Americas and Africa; and in spite of significant cultural specificities and differences among them, a generic identity was extracted from or imposed on all of these groups by their (also various) colonizers. The relationship between the colonizer and the Native is a hierarchical one in which the colonizer is dominant and the Native submissive. Firth elaborates on this hierarchical relationship:

In missions that depended on Islander evangelists, Europeans were missionaries but Islanders were ‘native teachers’ or ‘native evangelists’ barred from positions of ultimate responsibility. Pride in one’s own kind was a source of solidarity for Europeans. Whites expected each other to keep social distance from the Native to uphold ‘white prestige’. Almost all Europeans believed themselves superior in intelligence, character and ability, and thought nothing was worse than Going Native. (Firth, 1997, p. 262)

The Native exemplified all that was less than what was understood by Europeans to be ‘civilized’, and even those natives who converted to or mimicked European ways could never fully become or be accepted as Europeans. Thus, in the above scenario, Europeans were missionaries, but non-Europeans engaged in the same tasks had to be distinguished by the use of adjectives: native teachers and native evangelists had their work marked as different from that of Europeans. However, as Firth notes later, colonialism was not the sole preserve of Europeans. Describing Japanese attitudes towards Micronesians during the interwar period when Japan was administering former German territories, Firth notes a naval officer’s observation that:

Theirs is a life of dissipation: eating, dancing, and carnal pleasure absorb their waking hours. For these reasons they have not escaped the common traits of tropic peoples: lewd customs, barbarity, laziness and debauchery. (Firth, 1997, p. 263)

While the Native is undoubtedly a heavily racialized category, the objects and subjects of the racializing discourse are constituted relative to their socio-historical and cultural context. If colonialism was the instrument of modernization and progress, the Native was – like the ‘hick’, the country bumpkin or the paysanne – a relic. In the evolutionary logic of colonialism, the Native’s destiny was cultural, if not genetic, extinction. Currently, in an age toying with the idea of naming itself post-modern, the Native has the misfortune of being not-even-modern. But the Native has survived – it is the enduring subject of ways of being which resist extinction, and challenge the terms of ‘progress’. The term ‘native’ is occasionally used synonymously with other terms of contemporary currency such as ‘indigenous’, ‘Fourth World’ or ‘First Nations’.¹ The contemporary use of these terms points to a grim reality – colonialism is not extinct, and demonstrates a disturbing suppleness as it reinvents itself in neo-colonialism and what James Clifford calls post-neo-colonialism (Clifford, 1997a, 2001). If, as Firth stated, the Native is a product of colonialism, then the Native cannot be extinguished until colonialism itself is extinct. Indigenous, Fourth World and First Nations people live under colonial conditions: that is, they are not sovereign peoples, and their subjectivities are often powerfully forged in opposition to their colonial others. However, as I use the term here, the Native refers to a less self-consciously assumed identity, one that is constructed as an ‘other’ not just by colonialism, but by Third World national bourgeoisies (Fanon, 1963), diaspora and postcolonial theorists (Hall, 1990; Spivak, 1990). Although the counter-hegemonic discourses of Indigenous, Fourth World and First Nations peoples have contributed much to understanding the effects of colonialism, they often do not account for the complexity of the Native experience. Even if colonialism were solely responsible for producing the Native, without the Native there would have been no Third World nationalist, no postcolonial subject; in some cases, whole diasporas would not exist if it had not been for the Native.² The Native is crucial to Third World nationalists, postcolonial and diasporic subjects: in some instances in idealized opposition to a colonial oppressor, and in others as a degraded counterpoint to a desired modern subjectivity.

Although she prefers to use the term ‘indigenous’, Maori scholar Linda Tuhiwai Smith usefully maps out the Native’s complex articulations with other subjectivities. She argues that the categories of colonizer and colonized:

. . . are not just a simple opposition but consist of several relations, some more clearly oppositional than others. Unlocking one set of relations most often requires unlocking and unsettling the different constituent parts of other relations. The binary of colonizer/ colonized does not take into account, for example, the development of different layerings that have occurred within each group and across the two groups. (Smith, 1999, p. 27)

Smith goes on to outline the process by which:

Millions of indigenous peoples were ripped from their lands over several generations and shipped into slavery. The lands they went to as slaves were lands already taken from another group of indigenous peoples . . . Other indigenous peoples were transported to various outposts in the same way as interesting plants and animals were reclimatized, in order to fulfil labor requirements. Hence there are large populations in some places of non-indigenous groups, also victims of colonialism, whose primary relationship and allegiance is often to the imperial power rather than to the colonized people of the place to which they themselves have been brought. (Smith, 1999, p. 27)

Smith points here to the forced and historically painful transformations of some natives into labourers and immigrants, and the resulting alienation...