Pacific Worlds, Immobile Natives: Epeli Hau‘ofa’s Theorisation of Oceania as Mobile Indigeneity

Recent years have seen the proliferation of regional or global histories centred on the Pacific. These studies construe the Pacific Ocean as a global geopolitical and commercial crossroads – an internally heterogeneous, hybrid, and mobile space, but with its islands and peoples discursively constructed as static checkpoints in the global ambitions of European (and secondarily, East Asian) empires – and, owing to this, have often been met with lukewarm reception from within the Pacific itself. We argue that this portrayal is partly attributable to latent hegemonic conceptions of Indigeneity, defined foremost by attachment to ancestral land and Indigenous cultural continuity over time, at the expense of contending with notions of mobility and transculturation at the core of Pacific Indigeneity. Drawing on the works of celebrated Tongan thinker Epeli Hau‘ofa, this essay traces how he and his contemporaries and successors developed notions of ‘mobile Indigeneity,’ whereby place-based attachments core to articulations of Pacific Indigeneity are reconciled with mobility and cultural change. Concluding with a series of concrete recommendations, we aim to push historians to more deeply engage with context-specific articulations of Pacific Indigeneity to provide a richer framework and orientation within which to situate the flows and exchanges that characterise the region.