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British and French missions and colonization were closely related. The pace of Christianization varied, for Pacific Islanders and Aborigines were not just passive recipients, but actively sought advantages from conversion and formed adjustment cults. As migration increased, settler churches were formed. Lay participation was stronger than in their homelands. Resistance to the principle of establishment was considerable, though government subsidies to churches were important in certain Australian colonies.

This chapter chronicles and examines the effects of tobacco use—primarily cigarette smoking—on the health and socioeconomic well-being of Pacific Islanders. The “smoking diseases” were prominent in their contribution to these discrepancies, notably cancer mortality and cardiovascular disease mortality, which were the major contributor to ethnic differences in life expectancy. In particular, lung cancer featured increasingly among Pacific males—but not Pacific females. Between 1990 and 2005, smoking prevalence by Pacific Islander adults fluctuated around a mean of 32 to 33 percent, but of concern was an increase in smoking by Pacific Islander women from 22.6 percent in 1996 to 27.3 percent in 2006.

This chapter investigates Iosepa in public memory. It describes the restoration of the abandoned town site and the cemetery at Iosepa, as well as the commemorative activities at the centennial celebration in 1989. The research is based on interviews with attendees and records from the Iosepa Historical Society, the organization that oversaw all commemorative and restoration activities. The chapter also examines the ways that contemporary Pacific Islander communities have used the narrative of Iosepa as a historical metaphor for their lived experiences in the diaspora, using religious language and historical analogy to connect with the larger narratives of pioneering and Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints history in the Salt Lake Valley.

This chapter describes the impact of social injustice on the health of racial and ethnic minorities, the roots and underlying issues of this social injustice, specific implications of social injustice for racial and ethnic minorities, and an agenda of what needs to be done. This agenda includes ensuring cultural confidence among health professionals and institutions, increasing recruitment and retention of minority youth into health professions, attending to clear health communication to address health literacy problems, reducing poverty and addressing factors that create poverty, addressing racial discrimination, and performing research.

This chapter suggests that the bikini bathing suit manifests both a celebration and a forgetting of the nuclear power that strategically and materially marginalizes and erases the living history of Pacific Islanders. By analyzing militarist, nuclear, and touristic discourses on Bikini Atoll, Marshall Islands, it demonstrates the feminization and sexualization of nuclear colonialism while elaborating how empires have been engendered through the deformation and violation of Pacific Islander bodies. It describes the bikini bathing suit as a testament to the recurring tourist trivialization of Pacific Islanders’ experience and existence. By drawing attention to a sexualized and supposedly depoliticized female body, the bikini distracts from the colonial and highly political origins of its name. The sexist dynamic the bikini performs—objectification through excessive visibility—inverts the colonial dynamics that have occurred during nuclear testing in the Pacific, that is, objectification by rendering invisible.

Missionary expansion and consolidation continued, with French and German missions joining British ones in Melanesia and Papua New Guinea. Aboriginal missions were recommenced in Northern Australia. Hundreds of Pacific Islanders were a vital part of this missionary expansion, demonstrating the strength of their churches. Colonial denominations reflected the energies and tensions of their parent bodies in their response to urbanization, doctorial and intellectual challenges, as well as the constant pressures of settlement expansion

There is a profound lack of awareness among younger generations about Japan’s prewar engagement with the Pacific Islands, let alone other colonial sites, yet arguably, this amnesia is not a spontaneous phenomenon. Forgetting about Micronesia and erasing it from the Japanese mass consciousness was a project in which both Japanese and American postwar forces were complicit. Focusing on stories of Japanese amnesia and selective memory in the Marshall Islands, this chapter explores the Marshallese notion of “closing the sea,” how U.S. power has long been a mediating factor in why Japanese forget their Pacific past, and also why Marshall Islanders remember it.

Above all, early meetings between islanders and Europeans in the Pacific were maritime encounters that frequently included inter-group violence. A tendency toward violence is noteworthy because many societies in Oceania had pre-existing seaborne connections with other islands involving trade, raiding-warfare, and marriage, with a particular maritime activity implicit in the type of craft and nature of the crew involved. This chaper explores the maritime systems of Pacific Islanders and how these influenced islander responses to Western ships and crew. It uses ethnohitorical data to reconstruct Pacific Islanders’ voyaging spheres, and explain how several Pacific Islander societies in Oceania read the crew composition and voyage purpose of European arrivals from features of their vessels. This indogenous-centered perspective reveals how cross-cultural misunderstandings contributed to an early tier of violent social relations.

This chapter discusses the geography, demography, and culture of New Zealand; the arrival of the Maori; the arrival of Europeans; the European settlement of New Zealand; the origins of the early European settlers; the late nineteenth century; New Zealand in the early twentieth century; Maori in the twentieth century; socioeconomic class; the anti-nuclear policy; New Zealand in the twenty-first century; population distribution; the Maori language in New Zealand; Pacific Islanders in New Zealand; the Asian population in New Zealand; and relations with Australia.

This chapter explains when and how humans reached the Pacific Basin and spread across it. When humans first encountered the Pacific Ocean, the available indications are that they did not think much of it, perceiving it as a barrier rather than an opportunity. It took perhaps 10,000 years of intermittent contact with the ocean for the relationship to change significantly and for the first coastal-dwelling humans in the Pacific to come to depend on marine foods. This change may have taken place initially when humans from southern China moved south into Southeast Asia. As people began to make more use of ocean foods, they naturally became more adept at interacting with the ocean. They devised innovative techniques for collecting marine foods, developing the technology and vessels to enable them to venture increasingly farther offshore in search of foods from deeper waters.

This chapter aims to address self-fashioning and the body through an analysis of patterns on cloth and clothing brought into the region by Europeans. Taking Melanesia as the focal point, it traces the divergent perceptions of cloth and clothing as a form of newly introduced material, from a missionary and local perspective, as it circulated through nineteenth-century trade networks. It explores its appropriation and, in some cases, its radical transformation into forms that strike connections with existing pattern systems. By examining the promises that new materials brought to the region, the chapter advances the proposition that the adoption of cloth and clothing in Melanesia was central to “being modern” and led to the creation of a new religious being that brought old ideas into the new. In short, while the preceding chapters have examined indigenous patterns, the concern here is how foreign patterns carried by cloth and clothing played an instrumental role in engaging Pacific Islanders and helping them shape changing social relations.

This chapter considers the myriad cases presented during the symposium “Changing Contexts—Shifting Meanings: Transformations of Cultural Traditions in Oceania”, sponsored by the Honolulu Academy of Arts from February 23–26, 2006. It gathers these cases into some kind of order and highlights the themes of historical importance and explanatory value that the historian might gently encourage his colleagues to remember. It discusses a so-called political economy of cultural transformation, which refers to the transformative potency of material conditions of power imposed upon Pacific Island cultures, largely from outside, but also from within through the disparities of power and resources within Oceanic communities. Between the conflicting priorities of these processes, Oceanians formed their cultural practices in their efforts at cultural preservation as well as in transformation and transculturation.

By the middle of the eighteenth century, and as European colonialism became a dominating political force, the naked body had come to represent the savagery and backwardness of colonized and colonisable peoples. Whether depicted as noble savages attuned to the natural world or as wild peoples beyond the remit of civilization, to Britons the state of nakedness increasingly signified distance from civilization and reason. This chapter explores that linkage, firstly through eighteenth-century British representations of Native Americans and Pacific Islanders, and then through an examination of British discourse concerning dance, where an explicit and often alarmed sexualization of the state of undress was paramount well into the twentieth century. This essay proposes, above all, that nakedness is not a simple description nor a state of being but a contested historical marker with very particular and peculiar ties to the generation of ideas regarding the British self and the foreign or colonial other in the British imperial context.

This chapter combines an ethnohistory of encounters between Pacific Islanders and European voyagers with the history of the unstable idea of “race” by correlating voyagers' racial terminology with their experience of particular indigenous people. It focuses on contacts, from the time of Duperrey's expedition of 1823, between French seamen and the Pacific Islanders of Tahiti and New Ireland. It considers local initiatives, actions, and demeanors—condensed as agency—as refracted through varied genres, modes, or media of travelers' representations. It interprets encounters situationally, not as a general clash of reified cultures but as ambiguous intersections of multiple indigenous and foreign agencies that were usually at cross-purposes but not necessarily opposed. It suggests that behavioral changes among the Pacific Islanders resulted from old codes and norms having to come to terms with new possibilities arising in a context of change.

In the 1860s European pearling masters employed Pacific Islanders and Aboriginal peoples as laborers. With allegations of kidnapping, however, protection laws were put in place, forcing them to look for new sources of labor. British explorers had already demonstrated that the Netherlands East Indies was within easy reach of the pearling ports. The Dutch colonial government did not object to Australians recruiting from the islands around Timor. Large-scale recruitment followed and Indonesian workers were established along the north coast of Australia. A Malaytown developed on Thursday Island; Roebourne Bay saw its "Malay" population expand from 100 in 1870 to nearly 1,000 by 1875. The exploitation of Indonesian labor was set against stories of ruthless Malay pirates, while racial understandings promulgated by Alfred Russel Wallace, were used to justify the idea of Indonesians as innately suitable to become cheap labor in this dangerous maritime profession.

This chapter examines the creation and contestation of Japanese commemorations of World War II in the Mariana Islands. As an archipelago colonized by Japan and the United States, the Mariana Islands have become a site through which war memories have developed in distinct and shared ways. With respect to Japanese commemorations, the analysis demonstrates why and how they inform and are informed by Chamorro and American remembrances of the war in the Mariana Islands. By analyzing government, media, and tourist accounts of the war from the 1960s to the present, I thus show how we can gain an understanding and appreciation for the complex ways by which Japanese of various generations reckon with a violent past.