Continued political maneuvering, public budget mismanagement, and population decline dominated public discourse in the Cook Islands from

"I Am the River, and the River Is Me," the afterword to this special issue, weaves together a series of creative experiments across the Pacific that seek to displace old, outmoded dichotomies and reclaim Oceanic ways of living in Oceanic worlds. Across Oceania, many modernist assumptions are being disputed, as Huhana Smith describes for Aotearoa New Zealand, Michael Mel for Mogei people in Papua New Guinea, and Nicholas Evans for Nen-speaking people in southern New Guinea. In the past, "just-so" stories about animism, anthropomorphism, totemism, and the like in Oceania proliferated in which these divisions survived unchallenged, even when describing living worlds in which they do not apply. Such ontological refusals have impoverished our understandings, as Chris Ballard recounts for the Kuwei eruption in Vanuatu, and when local people adopt them, they fundamentally disrupt their ways of living, as Deborah Gewertz and Frederick Errington describe for Chambri in Papua New Guinea. An ontological uprising is occurring across Oceania as ancestral ways of relational thinking are being reasserted, as Myjolynne Kim explores in her account of women in Chuuk and elsewhere in Micronesia. As the Pacific Ocean is being ravaged by pollution and rubbish, overfishing, rising seas, dying coral reefs, and drowning islands, alternative ways of thinking about relations among people and between people and other life-forms are urgently needed. Scholarly inquiry should be part of this enterprise, and as this special issue demonstrates, in Oceania—and fortunately for us all—such work is already underway.

Papua New Guinea James Stiefvater (bio) After the 2017 general elections dominated the headlines, the major event to capture the spotlight in Papua New Guinea (PNG) in 2018 was the country’s hosting of the quadrennial summit of the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation (apec). Indeed, the apec meetings garnered large amounts of attention within Papua New Guinea while also attracting international scrutiny into the country’s role as host as well as conditions across the country generally. The apec meetings led to a fresh look into Papua New Guinea by foreign media outlets and acted as a microcosm of international relationships between China and other powers. To a certain degree, Chinese relations with Pacific Island states were on display, but events showing tensions between China and the United States became the main talking points as they were scrutinized by analysts and journalists from across the globe. While the critically important apec summit and related events raised many issues, many other significant happenings highlighted internal challenges to governance, including emergency responses to natural disasters in the form of earthquake relief and resettlement of victims of volcanic activity, continuing strife in the wake of the 2017 elections, accusations of corruption at various levels, upticks in various diseases, devolution of powers to provinces via an as-yet-undefined form of special autonomy, preparation for the referendum on Bougainville, land and development projects, and the long-standing saga of those seeking asylum in Australia but waylaid on Manus Island for the sixth year. Among the many challenges to face the people and government of Papua New Guinea, perhaps none had a broader reach than the handful of natural disasters that affected citizens from almost all regions in one form or another. The largest and most destructive of these was the magnitude 7.5 earthquake that struck in February and wrought devastation across the interior. The Highlands region was especially hard hit, as subsequent landslides buried homes and villages, cut off access roads, and damaged airstrips in many communities already considered isolated. Equally dangerous [End Page 544] to the initial quake were the numerous aftershocks that continued to shake the mountainous regions for at least a month. The destructive effects of the tremors were not limited to just the areas that felt them; sedimentation due to landslides muddied drinking water and damaged or killed food sources in downstream communities, especially those in Gulf Province. Census information for the area is hard to collect, making an exact death toll difficult to extrapolate, but most estimates show a loss of life of at least 180 individuals. Offers of aid and relief from international sources came quickly, with Australia and New Zealand leading the charge. In a show of solidarity, young people in Indonesia’s colonial provinces in West New Guinea took up a collection, but the organizers were promptly arrested. The logistics of distributing aid relief across the breadth of destruction—which spanned the Hela, Southern Highlands, Western, Enga, and West Sepik provinces—would present a challenge to any nation, but by August, Emergency Controller Bill Hamblin told Radio New Zealand’s Johnny Blades in an interview that efforts had started to transition from relief to recovery (rnz 2018f). Also posing a challenge to those in disaster response positions were volcanic eruptions on the islands of Kadovar and Manam, both situated on the northern coast. Eruptions on both islands necessitated large-scale evacuations and brought promises from the government for permanent resettlement of residents. Such events on Manam are not new, with a large portion of the population having been resettled after several eruptions in the past, including a 2004 event that led to the displacement of more than nine thousand people. In the aftermath of the 2018 eruption, delayed responses from the government appear to have created an atmosphere of mistrust as residents waited for assistance. Local chief Paul Maburau told reporters that “it’s all talk and no action,” citing that the government had set aside us$922,000 for the resettlement of the islanders but that ‘“no one seems to know where the money has gone” (rnz 2018e). Although the general elections were completed in 2017, controversy regarding their final outcomes continued in 2018...

Timor-Leste Michael Leach (bio) From 25 January, when the president announced an early election for 12 May, it was clear that 2018 would prove an eventful political year in Timor-Leste. The May election followed a nine-month fretilin-led minority government, which proved unable to steer its program and budget through Parliament because the opposition parties formed a majority bloc a month after the government was installed (fretilin is the acronym for one of Timor-Leste’s major political parties, the Revolutionary Front for an Independent East Timor). The election brought the Xanana Gusmão–led Alliance for Change and Progress (amp) coalition back into office. Having returned to power, the new government soon found itself mired in a standoff over ministerial appointments with the president, fretilin’s Francisco Guterres, in the first genuine experience of cohabitation under Timor-Leste’s semi-presidential system. The year also saw a historic agreement between Timor-Leste and Australia that fixed maritime boundaries at the median line in the Timor Sea (Leach 2018), ending a long-running dispute between the two nations. The year was capped off by the government outlining its bold vision for resource sovereignty, and its plan to purchase a majority share in the Greater Sunrise joint venture, to advance its ambitious goal of downstream processing oil and gas on the East Timorese south coast. The July 2017 election saw the opposition fretilin party emerge narrowly ahead of the National Congress for Timorese Reconstruction (cnrt) in terms of seats but unable to establish the alliances necessary to form a majority. With no alternative majority coalition then being proposed, in September President Guterres appointed the first minority government in Timor-Leste’s short constitutional history: a thirty-seat minority coalition with the Democratic Party. But events moved rapidly, and a political standoff emerged in October when three opposition parties—the cnrt, the Popular Liberation Party (plp), and Enrich the National Unity of the Sons of Timor (khunto), together controlling thirty-five of Parliament’s sixty-five seats—rejected the government’s program. Having failed to pass a budget rectification measure needed to fund new programs, the state reverted to a duo-decimal system based on a monthly allocation of one-twelfth of the previous year’s budget. The extended use of this reserve budget system lasted until a new budget was passed in September 2018, and it depressed the national economy, which remains heavily reliant [End Page 563] on government-led expenditures. Rather than installing the opposition amp coalition as the government, President Guterres instead announced a new election, with the fretilin– Democratic Party executive acting as a caretaker government in the meantime. Meanwhile, in the realm of international relations, maritime boundary negotiations with Australia continued under the aegis of a United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (unclos) compulsory conciliation process, which was triggered by Timor-Leste. Following twelve months of negotiations that saw “confidence-building measures” enacted—including the termination of the Certain Maritime Arrangements in the Timor Sea treaty, which purported to delay maritime boundary determination for fifty years, and Timor-Leste’s cessation of a separate espionage case against Australia—Timor-Leste and Australia jointly declared that they had reached an agreement on “central aspects” of a maritime-boundary determination in late 2017 (Permanent Court of Arbitration 2017). Once ratified by both parties, the agreement, which was finally revealed on 6 March 2018 (Permanent Court of Arbitration 2018), will create permanent maritime boundaries and revised resource-sharing arrangements in the yet-to-be-developed Greater Sunrise oil and gas field. Timor-Leste secured a median-line boundary in the Timor Gap, creating a permanent maritime boundary for the first time. The median-line boundary will place 100 percent of the existing Joint Petroleum Development Area in Timor-Leste’s waters, where current treaties divided the revenue 90 to 10 in its favor. As these fields are nearing the end of their life, far more financially significant is the renegotiated revenue split over the as-yet-untapped Greater Sunrise field, worth in excess of us$40 billion, which straddles the eastern lateral (or side) boundary of the Joint Petroleum Development Area. The renegotiated agreement...

Billions of people around the globe are well-acquainted with SpongeBob Squarepants and the antics of the title character and his friends on Bikini Bottom. By the same token, there is an absence of public discourse about the whitewashing of violent American military activities through SpongeBob’s occupation and reclaiming of the bottom of Bikini Atoll’s lagoon. SpongeBob Squarepants and his friends play a role in normalizing the settler colonial takings of Indigenous lands while erasing the ancestral Bikinian people from their nonfictional homeland. This article exposes the complicity of popular culture in maintaining American military hegemonies in Oceania while amplifying the enduring indigeneity (Kauanui 2016) of the Marshallese people, who maintain deeply spiritual and historical connections to land—even land they cannot occupy due to residual radiation contamination from US nuclear weapons testing—through a range of cultural practices, including language, song, and weaving. This article also considers the gendered violence of nuclear colonialism and the resilience of Marshallese women.

In March 1979, Tuvalu’s government newspaper began an ongoing discussion of Tuvalu’s Asian diplomacy, highlighting the rapid development of relationships with East Asian nations like Taiwan shortly after Tuvalu’s independence in 1978. Contemporaneously, the Taiwan government began reporting on early diplomatic forays into Pacific nations, including Tuvalu. These newspaper and government reports are frequently characterized by a narrative style that suggests the complexities of Pacific-Asia relationships at the time and that provides a foundation from which more recent discourse on Tuvalu-Taiwan relations can be contextualized. In this paper, I adopt a Pacific studies rationale, articulation theory, and discourse analysis. I examine official Tuvaluan and Taiwanese narratives from the 1970s and 1980s to demonstrate how early diplomacy was determined not by official maneuvering but by preexisting trans-local connections. Subsequently, in analyzing Tuvaluan and Taiwanese leadership statements from 2000 to the present, I sketch how, more recently, Tuvalu and Taiwan have used each other to shape their national identities. However, I also highlight connections to earlier narratives, especially tension in Tuvaluan discourse due to fisheries conflicts with Taiwan and preoccupation in Taiwanese discourse regarding whether Taiwan is superior to Tuvalu. Finally, I demonstrate how articulations between early narratives and more recent discourse foreground Tuvaluan and Pacific agency and complicate assumed Asia-Pacific power hierarchies.

Marshall Islands Monica C Labriola For the Republic of the Marshall Islands (RMI), the period under review saw the passing of a number of public servants, community members, and advocates, including several trailblazers in nuclear and climate activism, advocacy, and scholarship. Tony deBrum devoted his life's work to the advancement of the Marshall Islands and to procuring nuclear and climate justice for Marshall Islanders. After serving on the Congress of Micronesia and the Marshall Islands' first Constitutional Convention in the 1970s, deBrum played a key role in securing independence from the Trust Territory of the Pacific Islands and in the negotiations that resulted in the RMI's first Compact of Free Association (cofa) with the United States in 1986 (Walsh and Heine 2011). His government posts spanned decades and included senator for Mājro and Kuwajleen atolls, minister of finance and foreign affairs, ambassador to the United Nations, and RMI climate ambassador (mij, 1 Sept 2017). DeBrum was a staunch advocate for justice for the survivors of the aftermath of sixty-seven nuclear tests conducted by the United States on Pikinni and Ānewetak atolls. He sought to secure a world free of nuclear weapons and in 2014 filed a lawsuit on behalf of the RMI aimed at forcing the world's nuclear powers to reengage in nuclear disarmament talks (mij, 1 Sept 2017). DeBrum was also a leader in the movement to reverse the effects of climate change and was instrumental in the passage of the Paris Agreement of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. In addition to being nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize, deBrum was the recipient of several awards including the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation Distinguished Peace Leadership Award in 2012 and a posthumous Lifetime Achievement Award from the government of Germany in 2017 (mij, 25 Aug, 3 Nov 2017). Weeks before deBrum's passing in late August 2017, the Marshall Islands lost sitting Naṃdik Atoll Senator and Minister Mattlan (Matt) Zackhras. Prior to his service as President Hilda Heine's minister in assistance, Zackhras's portfolio during his four terms in office included the ministries of public works and of resources and development. Zackhras was instrumental in securing funding for local [End Page 170] and national sustainable development projects and was recognized for his work promoting sustainable black pearl farming, the formation of the Namdrik [Naṃdik] Copra Cooperative, and the RMI's first virgin coconut oil processing operation (mij, 11 Aug 2017). In a November 2017 special election, Naṃdik voters opted to keep Zackhras's Nitijeḷā (Parliament) seat in the family by electing his brother Wisely Zackhras to succeed him (mij, 17 Nov 2017). The RMI also lost three longtime nuclear advocates during this period. Lemeyo Abon was one of the last surviving ri-Roñḷap (ri- means person/people of/from) to have lived through the fallout of the Castle Bravo hydrogen bomb test on Pikinni Atoll on 1 March 1954. Abon recounted her experiences in books, films, newspaper articles, and a statement to the United Nations Human Rights Council in 2012; she died in February 2018. A resident of the Marshall Islands for almost fifty years, Bill Graham devoted much of his career to seeking justice and compensation for the survivors of US nuclear testing. Graham served as public advocate for the RMI Nuclear Claims Tribunal for more than twenty years and had recently been appointed to the newly established RMI National Nuclear Commission. Graham died in Honolulu on 1 March 2018, the sixty-fourth anniversary of the Castle Bravo test (mij, 9 March 2018). Nuclear scholar and advocate Dr Robert (Bob) Kiste passed away on 28 November 2017. In addition to publishing The Bikinians: A Study in Forced Migration in 1974 and working as a consultant for the Micronesian Legal Service Corporation in the 1970s, Kiste inspired scores of Pacific Islands scholars as a professor and director of the Center for Pacific Islands Studies from 1978 to 2002 (Lal 2004). Among the many other traditional leaders and prominent community members who died during this period were Mājro aḷap (lineage head) Newi Nathan; Kuwajleen aḷap and Constitutional Convention delegate Stephen "Kodri" Dribo; and Castle Bravo...

Reviewed by: Crossing Spaces Myjolynne Marie Kim Crossing Spaces. Documentary film short. dvd, 18 minutes, color, 2018. Languages: English and some Chuukese, Pohnpeian, and Marshallese. Directed and produced by Lola Quan Bautista. Distributed by Breadfruit Educational Productions. Available for purchase from https://breadfruiteducational.com/shop/. University license, us$100; community license us$25.00; contact Breadfruit Educational Productions for individual licensing. Crossing Spaces is a collection of three short documentaries produced and directed by Chamoru scholar Lola Quan Bautista. Filmed on O‘ahu, Hawai‘i, it follows the educational journeys of three Micronesian women: Nanette Fritz from Chuuk, Yoana Amond from Pohnpei, and Chimako Anitok from the Marshall Islands. Through the distinct voices and experiences of these three women, Bautista offers a rare glimpse into the complex realities and challenges of an ethnic group that remains largely stigmatized and misunderstood in Hawai‘i. In doing so, she illuminates gender paradoxes and unfolds compelling narratives of racism, poverty, and gender expectations that the women experience. As an educational narrative, this film presents three Micronesian women at different crossroads in their lives, negotiating spaces for a better education while remaining grounded in their identity and cultural values of family, sharing, and respect in order to improve their lives, their families, and Island communities. The documentary series begins with Nanette, a single mother and student at Kapi‘olani Community College who aspires to be a teacher. Nanette was raised by her grandparents, who influenced her faith in God and her aspirations to go to school. Despite her family struggles and the stigma of being a single Chuukese mother, she feels God has bigger plans for her. Empowered through her faith and higher education, as well as through the encouragement of a community support group for single mothers, Nanette finds a way to achieve her dreams and follow her calling to serve and support her community. The second documentary short features Yoana Amond from Pohnpei and opens with her introducing urohs, or embroidered skirts, to her students in a classroom. Similar to Nanette, although older, Yoana explains that she was a full-time mother, grandmother, volunteer, and worker when she returned to school. She recently completed an associate’s degree at Kapi‘olani Community College and is interested in earning her bachelor’s degree in special education at the University of Hawai‘i–Mānoa before returning to her home island to serve its communities. Her story emphasizes the important role of women as managers, providers, and supporters of their families. In her own words, “women [are] really important for the family, and we can do certain things that men cannot do it, and we are the supporter for the family always.” She acknowledges that women do all the work, from employment outside of the home to taking care of children and the household. Interestingly, Yoana is inspired by the story of Queen Lili‘uokalani, the last queen and monarch of Hawai‘i, who was overthrown by the US government. [End Page 594] She describes the queen as a leader who fought for her islands. She is also fascinated with the stories behind and associated with the Queen’s Quilt, which to her represents the value of sharing and working together through material culture. With this in mind, she volunteers in her community to share lei making with other women. Interestingly, the Hawaiian quilt and Pohnpeian urohs reflect the early interactions and relationships between Micronesians and Hawaiians through the Christian missions in the nineteenth century. The third story presents Chimako Anitok from the Marshall Islands. At the age of three, Chimako moved to Hawai‘i with her family for medical reasons. The youngest of the three women featured, Chimako is a freshman at Brigham Young University majoring in social work and minoring in mathematics. Her story illustrates the role of daughters in a Marshallese household. As a young Marshallese woman, Chimako describes women as sacred because they hold the primary responsibility of helping their families. She also identifies herself as a second mom because, like her mother, she is always helping her family. However, this responsibility comes with more restrictions compared to what young men or sons experience; unlike girls, boys are allowed more...

Reviewed by: Sinuous Objects: Revaluing Women's Wealth in the Contemporary Pacific ed. by Anna-Karina Hermkens and Katherine Lepani Marion Cadora Sinuous Objects: Revaluing Women's Wealth in the Contemporary Pacific, edited by Anna-Karina Hermkens and Katherine Lepani. Acton, act: Australian National University Press, 2017. isbn paper, 978-176046-133-1, e-book 978-1-76046-134-8; xxix + 292 pages, images, references, abbreviations, glossary. Paper, a$58.00; e-book free download. Sinuous Objects: Revaluing Women's Wealth in the Contemporary Pacific debates ideas about women's wealth, value, and exchange of textiles in the Pacific. Edited by Anna-Karina Hermkens and Katherine Lepani, the constituent chapters draw on ethnographic [End Page 564] material from the Trobriand Islands and Oro Province in Papua New Guinea, from Tonga, and from diasporic Tongans and Cook Islanders living in Aotearoa/New Zealand, focusing on issues of colonization, conversion to Christianity, and local economic dynamics and the globalization of capital flows. According to the editors, they "aim for a critical intervention into anthropological theories of value, exchange, and local economies by exploring and comparing local gendered processes of production and consumption, and the value attributed to women's work" (17). The authors discuss the insights of previous anthropologists, such as Annette Weiner's idea of universal "womanness" in her 1976 study of female contribution to kula traditions in Trobriand Islands (Women of Value, Men of Renown) and Marilyn Strathern's 1981 study of net bags in Mt Hagen, Papua New Guinea ("Culture in a Net Bag" [Man 16:665–688]), which argues that the bags were neither exclusively female nor male objects but "conjoint products" and "gendered relationally" (264). The contributing authors revisit these earlier works that inspired researchers to focus on the gendered dimension of materiality, productivity, and exchange. The volume is organized into three clusters of essays. In the first cluster, focused on Trobriand Islands, Papua New Guinea, Katherine Lepani and Michelle MacCarthy look at doba (bundles of dried banana leaves and banana fiber skirts) made by Trobriand women for sagali (mortuary distributions) with questions about sustainability, changing values, and new materiality. The second cluster of essays focuses on Collingwood Bay, Oro Province, Papua New Guinea, with Anna-Karina Hermkens, Elizabeth Bonshek, and Elisabetta Gnecchi-Ruscone each looking at the concept of "wealth" in relation to gift and commodity economies. The third cluster, consisting of the final three chapters in the collection explores the endurance and efficacy of cultural values in Tonga and among the Pacific diaspora in Aotearoa/New Zealand with essays by Fanny Wonu Veys, Ping-Ann Addo, and Jane Horan. The chapters are interspersed with three poems by Katherine Lepani, Tessa Miller, and Emelihter Kihleng. In the epilogue, Margaret Jolly offers a brief history of Weiner's and Strathern's debates on gender studies in Papua New Guinea, inserting the eight chapters of this volume into a larger conversation regarding studies of gender and value in the Pacific. The clustered essays offer thought-provoking juxtapositions and understandings of material culture. The essays by McCarthy and Lepani highlight the changes in material forms of doba in the sagali mourning ceremonies. Lepani stresses that doba (now including both Indigenous and introduced cloth) must be seen as "fresh" and thus must not be hoarded or reused, which she says requires never-ending work (72). While Lepani argues that in relation to Christian values, doba and sagali remain culturally vital for maternity and matrilineal regeneration and in the wider Trobriand economy, McCarthy focuses her analysis on villages that have been "doing away with doba" for the last two decades. Together the pairing of these essays [End Page 565] shows the complexities of negotiating traditions and modernity but also how individual Trobrianders see sagali traditions as either complementary or anti thetical to their Christian values. Similarly, the juxtaposition of Hermkens's and Bonshek's studies presents an interesting comparative study about the commodification of Maisin bark cloth and Wanigela pots in Oro. Hermkens discusses how Maisin bark cloth has become a global commodity and ethnic art form in the international market, where it was first circulated and popularized by missionaries in the 1930s and then by Greenpeace workers in the 1990s...

In this essay, we describe our recent three-year project to increase the discoverability and accessibility of the Pacific-language materials in the Pacific Collection at the University of Hawai'i at Mānoa Hamilton Library by improving and making consistent the descriptive metadata in the catalog, using standards accepted by both library science and linguistic science.