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The principles of conservation spelled out in the first law on preservation for the whole of India — the Ancient Monuments Preservation Act of 1904 — were indicators of the ways in which conservation policy was made in colonial India: determined by the state, and heavily influenced by principles of preservation derived from Europe, based on a specifically colonial understanding of India's history and heritage, and of the ‘guardianship’ role of the colonial state. Yet attempts to implement pre-colonial religious structures could have unforeseen results, as local, indigenous religious groups began to utilize the opportunities for funding opened up by the new Act and succeeded in using the provisions of the Act in ways that best suited their own interests. This chapter looks closely at the interface between preservation policy and practice in colonial India in the late nineteenth/early twentieth centuries, and calls into question colonial hegemony as an explanatory framework for understanding a complex process of cultural practice.

Indigenous Australian economic practices and aspirations emphasise economic activity’s cultural context and purpose; practices and aspirations that routinely differ from Australian public policy’s instinctive assimilationist presumption. For example, indigenous actors’ repeated attention to trans-generational well-being shows that economic development is understood as part of a complex policy domain closely intertwined with social stability, employment, health and educational opportunities. Culture can explain economic activity’s purpose. It is also preliminary to effective schooling which is, in turn, a determinant of indigenous access to labour markets, utilisation of land rights for material purposes and access to the middle class which can be an important constituent of equal citizenship and participatory parity.

Located about 1500 miles northeast of the Philippines and 1500 miles southwest of Japan, the Mariana Islands lie astride the north equatorial trade-wind that crosses from the Americas to East Asia. It’s the Islands’ location that led to contact between the Spanish and the indigenous Chamorro people in 1521. Their initial contact was followed by more than a century of intermittent trade and cultural interaction, culminating in a Jesuit-inspired colonization by the late seventeenth century. As a result of their homeland’s geostrategic location, the Chamorros became the first Pacific Island people to experience sustained Western contact, especially Christian conversion and European colonization. The Spanish-Chamorro interaction during this continuum offers a unique example of early modern colonialism in the Asia-Pacific region, since it reflects the cross-cultural encounter of imperial objectives and indigenous agency that generated an ethnogenesis and recreated the Chamorro society, culture, and identity.

This book explores the social construction of World War II memories in the Mariana Islands, and the degree to which remembrance is informed by the politics of colonialism, indigenous cultural agency, and commemoration. Building on the extant ethnographies of war in the Pacific region, the book considers how the interconnections among war, memory, and history resonate among indigenous Chamorros on the one hand and Americans and Japanese on the other. It argues that the complexity of contemporary intra-island relationships across the Marianas can be fully grasped only through an appreciation of the varied and conflicting ways in which different groups of Chamorros experienced World War II. It also examines colonial and indigenous constructions of culture in the twentieth century, with particular emphasis on how colonial loyalties affect intra- and cross-cultural relationships and memories of the war in the Mariana Islands. Finally, it discusses colonial and indigenous efforts to develop “loyalty” and “liberation” as concepts of social control, collective identity, and national belonging.

This concluding chapter summarizes the key themes explored in the social history of World War II, and in particular raises questions about the future of commemorative activities in the Mariana Islands given the changing politics of colonialism and indigenous cultural agency. To address these issues, the chapter looks at the life and death of Father Jesus Baza Dueñas, a Chamorro priest who worked in Japanese-occupied Guam. By sharing the story of Father Dueñas, it shows that the politics of colonialism, indigenous cultural agency, and commemoration continue to inform the meaning and direction of public memories. It also demonstrates that Chamorros, along with Americans and Japanese, actively and consciously make “history,” as much as “history” makes them.

This chapter examines the impact of World War II in the Mariana Islands, with particular emphasis on the motives and consequences of American and Japanese wartime colonial policies and indigenous cultural politics on notions of loyalty and liberation among the Chamorros in both Guam and the Northern Marianas. After discussing American and Japanese wartime invasion and occupational policies in Guam and the Northern Mariana Islands, the chapter shows that the agent/victim dichotomy is “not mutually exclusive categories but contextually signified roles.” It considers indigenous cultural agency in terms of everyday survival in the Mariana Islands, set against the grain of American and Japanese colonialisms. Even though World War II was declared over in 1945, the chapter suggests that “the meaning and the memory of the war would never end” for Pacific Islanders or for other survivors and veterans. It argues that the war deepened the intracultural divisions among Chamorros, especially in the contexts of colonial loyalties in the Mariana archipelago.

This chapter argues that ‘Iolani Palace underscores the critical and conditional relationships between local subjectivity, indigenous agency, and global dynamics in the production of visual and spatial cultural forms. Addressing the inadequacy of interpreting colonial architectural production and cultural change as simply reactive rather than active and deliberate responses to historical and colonial processes, this chapter suggests that through the designated functions and purposeful location of his palace, as well as its design, embellishment, and technological innovation, Kalākaua projected his vision of himself as both an internationally recognized ruler (to counter colonial threats to Hawaiian sovereignty) and an exalted political and religious authority in Hawaiian terms (to address political divisions internal to the Native Hawaiian chiefly community). In ‘Iolani Palace, he fashioned a modern Hawaiian space and structure.