Angela Wanhalla

Ryan Tucker Jones

More than any other locale, the Pacific Ocean has been the meeting place between humans and whales. From Indigenous Pacific peoples who built lives and cosmologies around whales, to Euro-American whalers who descended upon the Pacific during the nineteenth century, and to the new forms of human-cetacean partnerships that have emerged from the late twentieth century, the relationship between these two species has been central to the ocean’s history. Across Species and Cultures: Whales, Humans, and Pacific Worlds offers for the first time a critical, wide-ranging geographical and temporal look at the varieties of whale histories in the Pacific. The essay contributors, hailing from around the Pacific, present a wealth of fascinating stories while breaking new methodological ground in environmental history, women’s history, animal studies, and Indigenous ontologies. In the process they reveal previously hidden aspects of the story of Pacific whaling, including the contributions of Indigenous people to capitalist whaling, the industry’s exceptionally far-reaching spread, and its overlooked second life as a global, industrial slaughter in the twentieth century. While pointing to striking continuities in whaling histories around the Pacific, Across Species and Cultures also reveals deep tensions: between environmentalists and Indigenous peoples, between ideas and realities, and between the North and South Pacific. The book delves in unprecedented ways into the lives and histories of whales themselves. Despite the worst ravages of commercial and industrial whaling, whales survived two centuries of mass killing in the Pacific. Their perseverance continues to nourish many human communities around and in the Pacific Ocean where they are hunted as commodities, regarded as signs of wealth and power, act as providers and protectors, but are also ancestors, providing a bridge between human and nonhuman worlds.

Whales, Humans, and Pacific Worlds

Across Species and Cultures

Angela McCarthy

Jacqueline Leckie

In contrast to much scholarship on cross-cultural encounters, which focuses primarily on contact between indigenous peoples and ’settlers’ or ’sojourners’, this book is concerned with migrant aspects of this phenomenon – whether migrant-migrant or migrant-host encounters – bringing together studies from a variety of perspectives on cross-cultural encounters, their past, and their resonances across the contemporary Asia-Pacific region. Organised thematically into sections focusing on ’imperial encounters’ of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, ’identities’ in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, and ’contemporary citizenship’ and the ways in which this is complicated by mobility and cross-cultural encounters, the volume presents studies of New Zealand, Singapore, Australia, Vanuatu, Mauritius and China to highlight key themes of mobility, intimacies, ethnicity and ’race’, heritage and diaspora, through rich evidence such as photographs, census data, the arts and interviews. Demonstrating the importance of multidisciplinary ways of looking at migrant cross-cultural encounters through blending historical and social science methodologies from a range of disciplinary backgrounds, Migrant Cross-Cultural Encounters in Asia and the Pacific will appeal to anthropologists, sociologists, cultural geographers and historians with interests in migration, mobility and cross-cultural encounters.

Migrant Cross-Cultural Encounters in Asia and the Pacific

In/visible Sight is a fascinating exploration of a little-known part of our history: the lives of part-Māori, part-Pākehā New Zealanders in the nineteenth century. Focussing on interracial intimacy between Ngāi Tahu and Pākehā settlers, it explores how intermarriage played a key role in shaping colonial encounters. As Ngāi Tahu sought to fight the alienation of their land and protect their natural resources, marriage practices and kinship networks became an increasingly important way to control interaction with Pākehā. The book also explores the contradictions and ambiguities of mixed-descent lives, offering new insights into New Zealand’s colonial past.

The Mixed-Descent Families of Southern New Zealand

In/visible Sight

Lachy Paterson

During the nineteenth century, Maori women produced letters and memoirs, wrote off to newspapers and commissioners, appeared before commissions of enquiry, gave evidence in court cases, and went to the Native Land Court to assert their rights. He Reo Wahine is a bold new introduction to the experience of Maori women in colonial New Zealand through Maori women's own words - the speeches and evidence, letters and testimonies that they left in the archive. Drawing from over 500 texts in both English and te reo Maori written by Maori women themselves, or expressing their words in the first person, He Reo Wahine explores the range and diversity of Maori women's concerns and interests, the many ways in which they engaged with colonial institutions, as well as their understanding and use of the law, legal documents, and the court system. The book both collects those sources - providing readers with substantial excerpts from letters, petitions, submissions and other document - and interprets them. Eight chapters group texts across key themes: land sales, war, land confiscation and compensation, politics, petitions, legal encounters, religion and other private matters. Beside a large scholarship on New Zealand women's history, the historical literature on Maori women is remarkably thin. This book changes that by utilising the colonial archives to explore the feelings, thoughts and experiences of Maori women - and their relationships to the wider world.

Maori Women's Voices from the Nineteenth Century

He Reo Wahine

Judith A. Bennett

Over the course of World War II, two million American military personnel occupied bases throughout the South Pacific, leaving behind a human legacy of at least 4,000 children born to indigenous mothers. Based on interviews conducted with many of these American-indigenous children and several of the surviving mothers, Mothers’ Darlings of the South Pacific explores the intimate relationships that existed between untold numbers of U.S. servicemen and indigenous women during the war and considers the fate of their mixed-race children. These relationships developed in the major U.S. bases of the South Pacific Command, from Bora Bora in the east across to Solomon Islands in the west, and from the Gilbert Islands in the north to New Zealand, in the southernmost region of the Pacific. The American military command carefully managed interpersonal encounters between the sexes, applying race-based U.S. immigration law on Pacific peoples to prevent marriage “across the color line.” For indigenous women and their American servicemen sweethearts, legal marriage was impossible; giving rise to a generation of fatherless children, most of whom grew up wanting to know more about their American lineage. Mothers’ Darlings of the South Pacific traces these children’s stories of loss, emotion, longing, and identity—and of lives lived in the shadow of global war. Each chapter discusses the context of the particular island societies and shows how this often determined the ways intimate relationships developed and were accommodated during the war years and beyond. Oral histories reveal what the records of colonial governments and the military have largely ignored, providing a perspective on the effects of the U.S. occupation that until now has been disregarded by Pacific war historians. The richness of this book will appeal to those interested the Pacific, World War II, as well as intimacy, family, race relations, colonialism, identity, and the legal structures of U.S. immigration.

Angela Wanhalla

About

Books

Join the club