Pacific studies

• They announced the way forward as the “Blue Pacific – Our Sea of Islands, Our Livelihoods, Our Oceania”.
• It’s a revealing example of how the study of the Pacific and the practice of Pacific politics often intersect.
• Rapidly, the Blue Pacific – a story about a place – had become a new place.
• Regional organisations connected through the Blue Pacific, and it became a cornerstone of diplomatic and national language.

New names, old stories

• Holding together the new movement – which was launched at a moment of considerable difficulty for the region – was an old story.
• The Forum leaders and others around it explicitly referred to the Blue Pacific as a narrative.
• As the Samoan Prime Minister put it, “[t]he Blue Pacific provides a new narrative for Pacific Regionalism and how the Forum engages with the world”.

The Indo-Pacific as geopolitical construct

• The Indo-Pacific is now a geopolitical construct said to encompass the Indian Ocean, the South China Sea, and shifting, unspecified parts of the Pacific Ocean.
• In other words, it both marginalises and co-opts the Indigenous Pacific of which I write.
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  Australia has long viewed the Pacific as a place of threats that must be contained.
• Such is the power of this particular narrative and construct that it is central to many of the most vital geopolitical discourses and activities globally.

An unequal ocean

• Though there is a vibrancy to Indigenous traditions and narration, they do not have the same access and circulation; the Pacific remains an unequal ocean.
• In very few areas is this not apparent, but I wish to draw attention to one specific way in which the colonial, and particularly the decolonising experience, shaped the unequal oceanscapes of the present: mobility.
• The terms and conditions of formal decolonisation – what I think of as the decolonising bargain – was a bargain struck in profoundly unequal times and in unequal ways, where much of the power lay with former colonial rulers and international players.

‘New blackbirds’

• The Pacific diaspora, so deeply conditioned by the decolonising bargain, has not mattered equally to Pacific nations recently.
• In smaller islands and nations these opportunities have seen mobility on remarkable scales; Niue is perhaps the most striking.
• Since the 1970s the number of Niueans in Niue has declined by around two-thirds, falling from over 5,000 to less than 2,000.
• As elsewhere in the former (or, as some might contend, currently) colonised world, the visible benefits of colonialism are not readily evident.

Mobility and sovereignty

• In each of these places, Indigenous Pacific migrants experience outcomes that more closely match their Indigenous neighbours than those of Pākehā/Papālagi/white populations.
• There are also other costs that these Indigenous Pacific people confront — paid in language, culture, well-being, identity, independence and sovereignty.
• The transnational dimensions wrought by those Indigenous folks afforded mobility are profound.
• As Epeli Hau‘ofa so powerfully put it, these Pacific peoples can craft lives that resonate with the mobility of the ancestors.
• But the majority of Pacific peoples do not have access to transnational mobility.

Damon Salesa does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.