Katerina Teaiwa and Keith Camacho, who entered the MA program at the same time, became close friends: our boisterous discussions regularly spilled out of the classroom and off to a beach, a basketball court, or Mānoa Gardens. Just as important as academic faculty, though, my peers at CPIS and at the East West Center (EWC) were a huge part of my learning. The materials and discussions in that NEH seminar were wonderfully rich, and I still have the two massive binders of readings that were part of my work to compile. As I was wrapping up my MA, I served as Geoff White and Vili Hereniko’s assistant for their National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) Summer Seminar for Higher Education Faculty on the theme of representation in the Pacific. I also took courses with Vilsoni Hereniko and historians David Hanlon and David Chappell texts and pedagogical practices from those classes have influenced my thinking and my teaching. They allowed me a great deal of freedom with the style and tone of my thesis as a result, that writing is probably livelier and more creative than a lot of what I’ve done since. My thesis committee was comprised of Terence Wesley-Smith, Caroline Sinavaiana-Gabbard and Geoffrey White, all of whom were supportive, kind and wise.
I completed my MA at the Center for Pacific Islands Studies (CPIS) in the mid-late 1990s. Given the venue for our conversation, I’ll start with some familiar places and names. Recitation of genealogy is always contextual. In the end, relationships are all we’ve got, and I count on my relationships to hold me to account. As someone who has chosen to live and work mostly amongst communities that I was not born to and cannot claim literal genealogical kinship with, I am intensely conscious of the need to maintain humility and acknowledge those to whom I owe so much. I’ve benefitted from truly extraordinary professors, supervisors, and mentors, as well as inspirational texts, but, at every stage, deep learning has always also come from fellow students as well as people and contexts outside of classes. But her space-making for the expansiveness of intellectual genealogies in Pacific Studies also serves as a helpful preface to the rest of my responses to this and subsequent questions, because key figures in my intellectual genealogy come from both within and beyond Pacific Studies, within and beyond the region-and, importantly, within and beyond classrooms. True empowerment for her was being able to hold everybody to account.Īs you can guess from this opener, Teresia-the person who gave me my first permanent academic appointment, my friend and colleague for fifteen years at Victoria-is a central post supporting my house of ideas. Teresia articulated a model for critical empowerment in Pacific Studies that held staunchly to both a sense of intellectual sovereignty-being able to draw inspiration and tools from a wide array of sources-and an imperative of responsibility to critique regimes of exploitation and violence, whether they were non-indigenous or Indigenous in origin (Teaiwa 2010). Students’ responses often discuss well-known Pacific scholars and intellectuals, but they also include what my late colleague and our program’s founder, Teresia Teaiwa, termed “the ancestors we get to choose” (Teaiwa 2014): people not of Pacific descent whose work has been formative, valuable, or inspirational to them. Intellectual genealogies are a recurrent theme in our Pacific Studies program at Victoria University of Wellington: from the first undergraduate course, PASI 101, to the honors seminar, students are prompted to think about who their “intellectual kin” are.
Could you please share with us the importance relationships had in your academic journey ? Who mentored you and who played an important role in shaping your scholarship and academic genealogy?ĪPRIL K HENDERSON (AKH): Thank you for the invitation-and what a great way to begin. In some sense the field of Pacific Studies is about relationships, the connections we make, the networks we foster over time and the communities we are a part of that lift us up. I imagine some of the same tensions and stakes around relationality could be identified and engaged in the realm of academia. For instance, in your article “The I and the We: Individuality, Collectivity, and Samoan Artistic Responses to Cultural Change” (Henderson 2016 316-345), relationality is a key leitmotiv.
MILILANI GANIVET (MG): We are so glad you agreed to this interview! Your work has been an inspiration to many of our students and emerging colleagues.
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