Challenge the Horizon Pacific Research Symposium

Our talanoa in Kāinga Nukunukumotu, Tonga. Rising Stories, Mana Pacific Consultants. Photo Credit: Joshua Savieti

Black Power on Campus: The University of Papua New Guinea and the Rise of Pacific Literature

Dr. Maebh Long – Senior Lecturer in English & Writing Studies, School of Arts.

In the 1960s and 1970s, the staff and students of two newly founded universities in the Pacific Islands helped foster a golden age of Oceanian literature. At the University of Papua New Guinea and the University of the South Pacific, bold experiments in curriculum design recentered literary studies around a Pacific modernity. At UPNG this change in curriculum was matched by a vibrant Black Power group who blended political activism with creative writing. My talk reveals the connections between the Niuginian Black Power movement at UPNG and the burst of literary creativity that strove to write a modern, independent Niugini into being.

Divergent Secularities in the Ra Christian State sedition trial in Fiji in 2017

Dr. Thomas (Tom) White – Teaching Fellow, History, ALPS

In 2014, seventeen Indigenous Fijian elders from Ra Province – retired civil servants, teachers, pastors, chiefs, engineers and nurses – together proclaimed their secession from the Fijian state. From Fiji’s historically ‘rebellious’ interior, the group renounced Fiji’s ‘secular state’ 2013 Constitution, anointed cabinet ministers with oil, and signed documents declaring Ra as a separate and sovereign Christian state. Copies were then sent to the International Criminal Court, the UN and the Queen of England. The secessionists claimed the 2013 constitutional reforms imposed by Fiji’s Prime Minister and 2006 coup-leader, Commodore Bainimarama, threatened Indigenous Fijians with ‘cultural genocide.’ Upon hearing of the separatists – along with their sister movement in Nadroga-Navosa – Bainimarama declared ‘they are enemies of the state and enemies of the Fijian people... we are going to track them down and bring them to justice!’ Drawing on personal observations of the Ra elders’ prosecution for sedition in Fiji’s High Court in 2017, this paper explains how the final judgement hinged on the semantic indeterminacies of Christian nationalism and secularism in Fiji. The paper then concludes by considering how pre-Contact conceptual oppositions, such as that between ‘land’ and ‘sea’ may contour Fijians’ different receptions of the religion/secular dual in Fijian law and society.

Whose Sea of Islands? Colonialism, Aqua Nullius, and Oceanian Water Relationality

Dr. Nathan Rew – Lecturer, Te Pua Wananga ki te Ao, Faculty of Māori and Indigenous Studies.

This paper introduces the legal and philosophical framework of aqua nullius as an implicit but key logic in the Doctrine of Discovery. Building on the works of Ruru and Miller (2022) this paper proposes an 11th legal dimension to the Doctrine in the form of aqua nullius. Where aqua nullius is defined then as the fundamental logic by which colonial violence dispossesses Indigenous Oceanian peoples of our relationships to the ocean. In demonstrating how colonialism has come to frame the oceans as an extra-legal space, this paper explores first, the consequences of this logic and how it links our struggles, before asking what it might take for us to challenge, rupture, and overcome these colonial discourses in the struggle for a new Oceania. Ultimately, this paper asks us to interrogate what it might means to be a Sea of Islands, what might we have to overcome, and how we might begin to do enact these ways of relating to each other and our shared ocean.

The Cross-cultural Application of Laws: Examples from the Pacific

Dr. Unaisi Narawa– Lecturer, Te Piringa, Faculty of Law.

Contemporary national legal systems should never be presumed to be the prototype of law, especially in the case of Pacific jurisdictions. Legal pluralism is understood to be the co-existence of state law and customary law, and in some cases religious law. Literature thus far has focused on the application of that customary law to the particular group of people who created it. What is rarely explored is the cross-cultural application of those laws. This paper examines how the customary laws of one Indigenous group can be applied to another group of people, Indigenous or not Indigenous. This will be demonstrated with case examples from Fiji and Solomon Islands.