1. Home Currents, Part 1: The Center for Pacific Islands Studies

[BLANK_AUDIO] Welcome to Ocean Air Currents, a podcast series from the Center for Pacific Island Studies at the University of Hawaii at Manoa. [MUSIC] We bring you voices, stories, and talonoa with Chris crossing currents between the past, present and future that flows deep in the cross oceania and beyond. Aloha, my carco, Maloy Lele, Kona Maori, and many other Pacific Island greetings. This episode is called Home Currents, Part One, and takes you on a journey of stories about our home, the Center for Pacific Island Studies, or CEPIS. In 2025, CEPIS will celebrate its 75th year anniversary. The past seven decades will field with wonderful memories, stories, experiences, and achievements. CEPIS mission is to bring together people and resources to promote an understanding of the Pacific Islands and issues of concern to Pacific Islanders. The Center partners with the Department of Pacific Island Studies, which offers MA and BA degrees in Pacific Island Studies. In these first two episodes, we hear the stories and experiences of three people who have worked and studied at the Center. They are Emeritus Professor Terrence Wesley Smith, Professor Katarina Teiawa from the Australian National University, and Professor Alexander Moyer, who is the current CEPIS director. Katarina and Alex are both alumni of the Center's MA program. To help us navigate home currents, I am Tassissio Kabutoulaka from the Center for Pacific Island Studies, and I am Kenji Katoldo, an MA student and graduate assistant at CEPIS. Our first guest today is Terrence Wesley Smith, who served as professor in the Center for Pacific Island Studies at D.H. Manoa for nearly four decades. He was the Center Director and Graduate Chair for eight years, an editor for the Center's Journal, the contemporary Pacific, from 2008 to 2015. Terrence, welcome to Oceania Currents. Can you tell us about the history of CEPIS and the discipline of Pacific Islands to this? Sure, and it's great to be back and good to talk about CEPIS and its history. The history starts as a program, right? So in 1950, University of Hawaii decided to authorize an MA in Pacific Island Studies, and that started in 1950. The first graduate didn't come till 1960, I believe, but things really started to move when the University hard a full-time professor, which was Robert C. Keist, to organize things, and it was really his work that led the formation of an actual center. So for many years, we were both a program and a center, but the center, I think, is formalized in the 1980s and becomes part of something called Shaps, School for Hawaiian, Asian, and Pacific Studies. So it's put together with a lot of other centers and stand-alone unit called Shaps. But why did the University see a program in Pacific Studies? It's important at that particular time. I think there was a longer history of people doing Pacific-related topics, but through the disciplines. So if you look at the Library collection, there's a lot of older theses that had to do with parts of the Pacific. And then, but a lot of the impetus was the ability to get money from the federal government, because after World War II, the federal government was very keen on uping the knowledge about other regions and countries for Americans. So they began to make money available. So the University was positioned well to compete for that money. And the center, what initially, what was its task? It was mostly driven by the federal grants that funded a lot of the activity. And the main impulse there was to educate Americans about foreign places. So a lot of the activities, where a lot of the money was put into language development so that UH became a big center of Pacific Island language teaching and learning. Also, outreach was a big early focus and remains so. So C.P.S. has had an outreach coordinator for a long long time and the idea being to disseminate information about the region to the general public. So that brings us to this idea of area studies, which became important in the US in the post-second World War period. Can you talk a little bit about how Pacific Studies has a discipline in marriage and how it has evolved over time? Yeah, the history of area studies is interesting because in the Western University, most campuses are organized around disciplines. And area studies stand out as something different. They're not disciplined based. They're based on the idea of some area of the world, which for an intellectual point of view is a very strange concept. So, but the impulse to organize around areas essentially came from this, what I've called a pragmatic approach, which was US interests in learning about foreign places, as somebody once said, learning about your friends and about your enemies. And so that provided a general umbrella for organizing around an area. And that is, that was the prevailing model for many years and in many area studies programs, it remains the model and the impulse. For us in Pacific Island studies, we started to feel uncomfortable with that model because it seemed to me and others, my colleagues, that what we were doing was producing knowledge for the United States foreign policy. And so it came down to the idea that we were furthering essentially a colonial project. That this production of knowledge was an extension of a colonial desire to control. So talk a little bit about Pacific studies as a discipline and how it is different from or similar to other areas studies like in a Korean study, so Southeast Asian studies and so forth. I think one of the differences is that we have thought about these issues and confronted them and built them into how we do things at sea piss. And I really think that's unusual. I'm not aware of other programs in Asian studies, for example, where they take that take a lot of time to discuss with their students why they're doing what they're doing and how it might be done better. It's very much again a pragmatic instrumental approach to learning. And I think so our program I think was distinguished by actually thinking through some of those issues and having our students think through the issues as well so that they could rationalize why they were doing what they were doing, who it was for. And in other words to explore this nexus between knowledge and power. And I don't think that other areas studies programs have really done that or not to the extent that we've done it. They're more interested in the fact that they can get funding and they can fund programs university-based programs and produce reports and scholarship. I assume our student population has changed over the decades and increasingly we see a lot of Pacific Island students whether they're coming from other Pacific Island source students in the diaspora. How has that influenced the discipline, the program? I think it's had a huge influence. Initially the program was set up the students in the program in the early years. were mostly people who were heading for a career in the foreign service or who had been Peace Corps and had some Pacific experience. When I shortly after I joined the program in the mid-80s, we had a huge demographic shift and we had a lot of people coming into the programs who were of Hawaiian ancestry. And that reflected the fact that Hawaiian studies was flourishing on the campus. Students were being produced at the BA level, but they didn't yet have an MA in Hawaiian studies, so it's sort of default to us. And it had a huge impact on us because those students were fired up, they were committed, they were on a mission. And us in the program, we couldn't ignore that. It was a pressure to do things differently, to think differently about what we were doing. Professor Terrence, do you bring, I guess, comparing Pacific studies to some of the other areas studies in terms of their critical reflection on power and knowledge production? I would love to hear your thoughts on Pacific studies as a way of approaching, say, Pacific history that's distinct from Pacific history as a discipline. Between the disciplines that have engaged with the Pacific and Pacific studies as an engagement, what you see there. Yeah, it's an interesting nexus because our program by default or Pacific studies by default is interdisciplinary. And it's always, area studies has always said we're interdisciplinary because we're not in any one discipline. But the question of what interdisciplinary means is something that we still grapple with. How does that translate into how a graduate student goes about constructing a PhD or a MA project? And it's still very unclear. But I think the fundamental difference is that in history, the primary loyalty and commitment of people historians is to the discipline of history. So the discipline of history is their milieu. And what you do within that is supposed to contribute to the discipline of history. That's how you're going to be judged. In Pacific studies, our primary commitment is to Pacific islands and islanders. That's the central focus. Does it empower? Does it not empower one of the situations from that perspective? And that's a huge difference. It doesn't mean that you can't marry that too. But it's a different starting point and reminder along the way for a person doing research is why am I doing this? And I think that's a significant difference. But people like David Hanlon and Monica Labbriola now and others in the history, they're working with some of the same ideas. So it's not as if you can't do what we're doing in the discipline. It's just it's a different context. You've written a lot about Pacific studies as a discipline. And I think you know your work is still very influential in both our classroom as well as broader discussions. And I wonder if you could reflect as a person who has worked as a professor in Pacific islands studies and has led the program for many years. I think it's been life changing for me. I didn't, you know, it was not a career journey that I would have ever imagined. I sort of stumbled into it by a series of decisions. First of all, I got interested in the Pacific in New Zealand. I was a new arrival in New Zealand, went back to university, was determined to learn all I could about the region. And that took me to focus on actually on Papua New Guinea. And then I had an East West Center opportunity that was too good to turn down to come here and do my PhD work. And that launched me into a whole different world than I would have anticipated. And even when I was doing my PhD here focused on Boganville, the island of Boganville and the impact of the giant Panguna mine there. And I was grappling with issues of development and under development and inequality and decolonization. I still didn't, I could imagine myself possibly being in a political science department. But the opportunity came up to work in Pacific Island studies because Bob Keist had one of the positions. And he and I'd worked together on stuff. And so it was sort of an opportunity again, I couldn't turn down. But it was very confronting after I settled in. You know, how could I make sense of this? Especially with all these currents on the campus. You know, an outsider teaching Pacific Island studies. And I was forced to confront that whether I liked it or not. And so my way of dealing with that really was to explore and see how the program could adapt to accommodate the new currents that were so important. And to be committed to that. And so intellectually it was challenging but hugely satisfying to that feeling of being part of something that's critical, that's important and working with students who felt the same way. Thank you very much Professor Terence Wesslissmith for taking the time to have conversation with us. CEPIS graduates are found in different professions and in different parts of the world. They are in academia, government organizations, NGOs, community work and others. Our second guest, Katharina Teoa, is a CEPIS alumna and now professor at the Australian National University in Canberra. Thank you so much for having me on this inaugural podcast. It's very exciting. And yeah, I look forward to seeing what kinds of stories and discussions emerge from your conversations with those of us who have long and deep connections to the Center for Pacific Island studies at UH Manua. So yes, I am a graduate and I was a student at CEPIS from 1996 to 1999. It's quite a while ago. But I had just come out of Santa Clara University where I did my undergraduate in combined sciences which basically meant I did all kinds of things and couldn't figure out what my major was after going through four years at Santa Clara University. But my elder sister recommended I apply to the Center for Pacific Island studies because she was doing a master's in history or she had just completed a master's in history at UH Manua and she had been noticing the important teaching about the region that was going on at the master's level at CEPIS. So I applied and was accepted and I remember thinking that the kind of application that I wrote to CEPIS was something like I had never written before and something that I had never been given an opportunity to write about before. And I think even writing that essay which was about being banabin coming from Fiji, being part of a minority community there and trying to understand my grandparents who had come from Kitebaz, from Banaba and Sabitawaya, just writing that essay and then being accepted into the program with a tuition waiver opened a door to thinking about what it meant to be a Pacific Islander with this kind of history, this kind of history of displacement and not living in a country that you were indigenous to. It opened up that door and I have to say nothing was the same ever again after that. So it was absolutely critical to to my career, but I think also just to my growth in development as a human, just as a normal person, a Pacific Islander who came from a family of girls who were always keen and interested in academics because our parents were teachers and were passionate about education, but not really having the kind of education that connected to who we were as people, who we were as a community or as a Akitibas or BanaBenz living in Fiji as Micronesians living in a Melanesian and Polynesian context. There were so many gaps in our education that CEPIS was absolutely formative in shaping everything I did after that period. So I was, you know, I think I was 21 when I started at CEPIS and nothing was ever the same again. Yeah, so it was pretty critical. And to you, what exactly is Pacific Studies? Well, the kind of Pacific Islands Studies we were doing in the mid to late 1990s and the kinds of Pacific Studies that exist today. There are some similarities and there are quite a lot of differences. I think UH Manoa had a very interdisciplinary approach and maybe a more thematic kind of approach that allowed for us to do a little bit of everything, you know, a bit of politics, a bit of history, a bit of anthropology, a bit of cultural studies, a bit of geography, and the center of everything we were doing was the Pacific, the center of everything we were doing was Fiji or Samoa or Akitibas or Tonga or FSM or Marshall Islands. And so just that approach alone that put the region and islands and countries within the region at the center was in and of itself a different approach than what you would get if you were doing an anthropology class or a history class or a political science class or a geography class or any other field where the purpose was to teach you theories and methods of the field and the discipline rather than focus on your and an engagement with place. And so Pacific Studies for me was important because it put our region and our islands front and center. So that was the first really, really important thing for me. I mean, it just changed my whole way of thinking about everything from the local to the national to the regional to the global. If you put the Pacific at the center, your whole framework, your whole methodological toolbox, your values, your ethics, everything is transformed. So you're not here to reproduce what the great thinkers of anthropology going back to who knows when have been thinking and doing you're not here, you're not slotting yourself into their genealogies of thought. You're here to study, learn about, appreciate and be humbled in the face of an extremely complex oceanic region. So that was the kind of specifics that kind of blew my mind and then we were able to drill down to who we were depending on what kind of thesis topic we were focusing on. So for example, I chose something that was more in in banabin history. So I chose banabin history to focus on and I, you know, my thesis panel was how Nanike Trask, David Hanlon, Terrence Wesley Smith, and so while I was learning about this broader context of regional dynamics, regional histories and things like development. For example, I was able through my own thesis topic to go into uncovering and unpacking and learning more about, in this case, mainly the colonial histories behind banabin phosphate mining, the extraction of phosphate and the displacement of people from banabin to Fiji in 1945. So it was like I had a really diverse and interesting toolbox to think about this history and the broader Pacific that toolbox was interdisciplinary and then it was also quite island focused, regional focused and and and really gave space to indigenous approaches and ways of thinking and knowing and being as well. There was also a bit of a space opened up for the arts, but that wasn't fully articulated or fully engaged at the time that I was doing my masters. It was really mainly, you know, like the classical social science and humanities fields and the arts were kind of peripheral, but there was still this kind of possibility that was given for, well, if you have to think about this through the arts, we can do that, we can do that too except we're not experts on Pacific arts. So, you know, we mainly had political scientists, development experts, historians and anthropologists in Pacific Island studies at the time, most of whom were not Pacific Islanders themselves were not indigenous to the Pacific. And yet they were quite, they were not gatekeepers. I think I think this is a very important thing is that the the vibe of a lot of the professors that we had at the time was not to shut down and close up the possibilities of different ways of doing Pacific studies. It was they had their own limitations of their understanding and approaches to the Pacific, but they opened the space for students to actually come up with their own approaches and open up the whole field drawing upon their own experiences as Pacific Islanders. And there was a lot of pressure for that coming from Kanaka Maoli from Indigenous Hawaiians who were pushing that in their own spaces like in Hawaiian studies. And so there was quite a momentum in Indigenous studies around the region that then helped Pacific studies open up to Pacific Islanders centered ways of knowing and being and learning and doing especially in terms of teaching and research. So all of that stuff was happening in the 1990s and and Terrence always says that our cohort at that time became this very special cohort that then went on to like grow and progress Pacific studies in other ways all across you know the region Australia, Altearoa, New Zealand, the United States, etc. It was like we were that generation that was so hungry for this and then thought to ourselves oh well we know some other ways of doing this. So we'll just go and keep keep working at it and and it became our careers. But I don't think at the time that people like myself, April Henderson, Alex Moira, Keith Kamacho, like I don't think we were sitting there going oh we're going to be academics. I think probably none of us except maybe Alex thought there'd be academics maybe Keith. But we were just so deeply engaged. We were so deeply engaged with what we were learning. We were pushing back. We were critiquing. We were asking questions. We were enjoying what we were learning. It was so relevant to our lives that we then continued with it to the PhD level and beyond. So I would say it was it was that empowering. It was that complex. It was that challenging and it was that interesting and exciting to be doing Pacific Island studies at that time. We'll return to our conversation with Katarina Teiwa to hear about the Pacific studies program she founded at ANU in our next episode. Right now though we want to introduce our third guest to carry our story of seepiths up to the present. Alex and the Moira is the current director of the Center for Pacific Island studies and the first seepiths alum to become director. He is also the current graduate chair for the Department of Pacific Island studies. I wonder if you could talk a little bit about your experiences as a MA in Pacific Island study student and particularly as somebody coming from outside of the Pacific or somebody who is not of Pacific descent. Mahalo Tara and Kenji for the opportunity to be here and thanks so much for your work in this initiative. It's such a pleasure to join you this morning and to extend this conversation. I joined the MA program in Pacific Studies in the middle of the 1990s. So interesting. Tempest fugitive time flies like an arrow and so swiftly the river of time flows. It's interesting to be asked to look back at that earlier moment. But when I came to see this, the time it was only the center for the studies, of course. When I came to see this in 1996, the space of Pacific studies was a very different space. The unit at the time was directed by Bob Keist and also consisted of Vilsoni Heraniko and Terence Wesley Smith as the sort of core faculty along with the Publications Initiative. And those three colleagues who were in the process of I think transitioning from an earlier model of Pacific studies to I think we tend to think of these days as the Benoa School of Pacific Studies. Terence had just published his famous now 1995 piece, helping us all rethink Pacific studies, identifying the prior pragmatic and laboratory rationales famously and as old currents and highlighting or framing the opportunity to engage in a new kind of scholarship, something that we, you know, he called empowerment and that I think we've all been inspired by and organized by in the decades since as a student in 1996 here in an MA cohort that included Katita and April Henderson and Keith Kamacho and other wonderful colleagues who were here on campus at the time and Hatori Lola Bautista, others who are still part of our Pacific Studies community. It was a vital time and a fertile time but was just a few years, one might remember after the OEV documentary Acts of War, it was the era of Clinton, of course, and the apology or at least acknowledgement of US occupation of Hawaii. It was an era in the wake of the final official decolonial actions in the North Pacific for the former TTPI. So as a student, I would say, you know, for me, there are a couple of things that linger in my memory. It was an unsettling period. There was unsettlement happening for all of us, I think, because of the politics of place here in Hawaii where UH Mono was located, it was an exciting period because of that same unsettlement when things become fluid again, when things become open, when things become visible change can happen. So I remember being inspired and motivated by the sense of possibility and change that goes with, I think, Terence's work and the work of others in that period. I think all of us are moving through the world and these curious and complicated paths. So how we fall into one disciplinary space or one interdisciplinary space where another can be quite challenging to reconstruct over time. For me, I think it was a series of accidents, the opportunity, the privilege of visiting communities in Fiji in the wake of some of the earlier coups in the early 90s, the accident of life of finding myself pulled to Hawaii by my person, the person I'm still married to all these years later. The encounter with Pacific Studies, Heroniko, Kaist, Wesley Smith, the opportunity to study with them as part of discovering that complexity and richness in diversity of the world, but also the, perhaps one of the hard stories of Pacific Studies, the fact that the region has been so misrepresented, so poorly understood outside of the region, where all stories are home. That encounter with my own, I think, unknowingness or the possibility of representation of re-knowing was inspiring for me, definitely a stronghold of Pacific Studies. So you were the first MA in Pacific Island Studies alum to become in a director of the Center, now acting chair of the department. Can you talk a little bit about that, Jenny, from being student, now you are the director of the Center for Pacific Island Studies? Thanks so much for this question, Tara. Weirdly enough that I had been on this journey only became visible a few weeks ago when Dr. Katie Taiwa was here visiting in preparation for her wonderful, wonderful exhibition at the Bishop Museum called Project Bonobent. She's like, you know, you're the first of our graduates to become director, and I said, really, is that true? And evidently it is, it is true. I don't know how it happened. You know, it's a, I'm for any of our listeners who are thinking about their own career paths or journeys either behind them or before them, pro-laptically. It's a curious thing to discover that life is not always a series of choices that are obvious to you at the time. I could not have known or imagined that I would ever have the opportunity or privilege of returning to see this home place. I could never have imagined that I would ever have the opportunity to serve for a term as director and looking forward to with my term as over seeing who takes on that responsibility next. I do see it as a form of service, and I think that was part of my journey, the sort of what can I do to return all that I've received from Pacific Studies. And knowing that in fact, I've received so much that I could never return at all. So as part of my journey, that service orientation and carrying the weight so I can carry during my time has certainly been part of my story here at the center. But I couldn't have known when I went off with my Pacific Studies MA that I would ever have an opportunity to return back to Mano. And I didn't. It wasn't a journey I navigated or planned when an opportunity to return home to why emerged and became possible. Even that, I'm not sure I had a sense that what responsibilities would be mine. I knew I would have responsibilities. But this particular honor or privilege has been unexpected in my career path. And, you know, if we could spend a bit of time talking about what the center and the departments do for our listeners just so that they know what are the things that we do. Oh my gosh, this is a great question. And it's so interesting. A moment ago, I was chatting about the origin of Pacific Studies here at UH Mano in 1950. We had a slightly different name at the time, but the unit that eventually became the center for Pacific Island Studies is rooted nearly 75 years ago. Our first MA, Dr. Marion Carly, she became a doctor afterwards. Of course, our first MA 1960, many MAs sense. In 1973, the center we believe became a for the very first time a recipient of federal research funds under Title VI as a Title VI national resource center for the Pacific Island. So we've been in NRC for almost 50 years as well, extraordinary. Extraordinary history. The center has produced thousands of MAs in Pacific Studies, many of whom have gone on to distinguished roles in governance, management of natural resources, political roles or lives across the region, doctoral degrees and professorships at universities across Oceania, Australia, the United States, Europe, even in the United States. Europe, even in Stasia, we've we've this distinguished history as the center for Pacific Island Studies, which always had both an MA program, a research program and an outreach or community service program, including our significant publication series since since the dawn of time with the occasional papers and Southseas books, which eventually became the Pacific Islands Modigraft Series. And in beginning in 1988, 89, the contemporary Pacific are field leading Journal of Pacific Studies with shots out to Oceania and Topcha and the JPS and all of our other colleagues and their wonderful journals too, just a little biased. But for all of these years, CEPIS was the home for all of the primary initiatives here at our University, our educational initiatives as professors, our publications initiatives, our research initiatives and our community outreach initiatives. During the pandemic in a fairly large reorganization here at UH Manoa, for reasons that are probably would be difficult to scrutinize and difficult to unpack. The University identified several units that had tenure homes for professors that were not located inside departments. They noticed there were several units that had essentially departments without being departments. An academic department is typically responsible for the educational successes and challenges and helping our students navigate the challenges of their educational paths and a BA, M-A or doctoral program or certificate program and so on. So the University reorganized our center with its long and distinguished history as both a center for Pacific Island Studies and an affiliated department of Pacific Island Studies. And today we have some of us belong to two different units. So we have now a department which like any academic department is responsible for providing courses, it's home to a tenured or tenure track faculty, has responsibilities to direct student education and the success of our M-A-B-A and graduate certificate programs. very, very straightforward standard academic role. And what's what's distinct about the department is the department's departments of responsibilities, it's Kuleana, are very limited or bounded by those educational missions, the standard missions of an academic department. The center still exists, it's alive and well. I think it's for the most part thriving in many of its domains. And the center is now quite crisply the home for our collective research initiatives and our community outreach initiatives. So it's a really, as well as our publication initiatives and so on. So it's a really, actually, it was a hard line as you know, as you know, and Kenji, in my sense, it was a hard transition in our first years. But from where I sit today, it's been a helpful transition. And obviously I can't speak for all of us or all of our colleagues in this. But you know, the fact that now we have a department that just, you know, here's the student assessment, here's the success indicators for your academic programs, here's the need to hire lecturers for the lectureships, here's course enrollments and registration issues and undergraduate and graduate advising. All of those roles and tasks in the department are now very crisply visible on an org chart for the university. We receive actually funding supports from the university that we did not use to receive now that we are a department. So that budgetary difference is real and is helpful and is just, it's taken a few years, but it's getting ever more crisp. And maybe this is not so interesting to listen out there in the, in the podcast verse, the podverse, or I don't know if we're, if we're part of the Pacific Studies verse, pack verse, like the Marvel verse or something or the extended Pacific Studies universe, we'll have to come up with some, some labeling here. But the department is so well-bounded. I think that's helping us identify what changes we might need to make in our BA programming and our graduate programming, because the world is, the world is moved motion. It's a fluid world and there are new issues and new concerns alongside the profound grounded concerns of our students with respect to this region of care. And the center, meanwhile, is continuing much as it always has. Again, it's the centering. It's the center for our publications, our collaborative research goals, our community service goals. So one thing that's really quite special, I think, here, it's not unique at this university and it's not unique at every university. But it is distinctive everywhere. You find it. Those of us who have the privilege to work in both the department and the center, we have an official outlet for some of our, some of our care, our sense of responsibility, our sense of service. So the center provides a space of service for us, for our communities, communities beyond the walls of the university, especially, whereas the department is really quite specifically responsible for what happens inside the academy. As a center, we are engaged in supporting colleagues across the region, publications, initiatives for pedagogical materials, for instance, that'll be used in classrooms in Oshania and the continent in Europe. At the center, we can support local artists. We just had a round table on Monday this week. What a privilege of micronision artists working in several media in partnership with the library. At the center, we can support library collections. Things that a department would rarely ever be directly involved in here. At the center, here's a classic thing for us. We look for grant supports that allow us to directly support our library. They handled a specific library collection, our incredible colleagues there, so that we maintain, we help maintain, so that we, UH Manoa, and then we, the center, help maintain through our partnership with the library, the world's finest collection of Oshania, facing materials and so on. So the center is this really quite distinctive unit. Most of us in the academy have a sense of how departments work, but centers and units like this are our special. And it's such a privilege to see the chance to build an academic life between these two goals, our individual goals as educators and scholars with our own scholarly passions and interests. But at the same time, and officially, in parallel, are our responsibilities to care for the people around us, for the world around us, for the well-being of Oshania and its peoples and places. Thank you very much, Professor Alex Moya, for joining us. And for giving time to share your experiences and knowledge with us. Oh gosh, Tara, Kenji, thank you so much. For all that you're doing for our center, our community. Aloha. A quick correction shared by Alex after our interview. He had said "Steepus awarded its first MA in 1960," but it was actually a few years earlier than that in 1956. To close today's episode, we returned to Terrence, who shared his reflection about changes he has observed in the field. I was at a conference at the Australian National University in April this year, was convened by my former student, Katarina Tewa. And it was an extraordinary event. You appeared, of course, remotely. It was an extraordinary event just looking out at an assembled large audience, almost all of whom were Pacific Islanders or Indigenous Australians. And it was just visually a massive shift, because when I wrote the paper "Rethinking Pacific Island Studies," I finished that when I was on "Sepatical Eve at A&U in the mid-90s." And part of my duties as a visiting scholar was to do a presentation. And I did a presentation of that paper, "Rethinking Pacific Island Studies," where I talked about the pragmatic and the laboratory and the empowerment. And it was an audience of white people who were thoroughly unimpressed. And the questions were very, they weren't friendly, they weren't supportive. And to go back to that same venue and see the shift over 30 something years is amazing. So I'm really optimistic. There's a whole generation of people out there who are committed to the ideas that came to the foreback then. And it also struck me that a belly-how of who was very instrumental in providing impulse for this movement, he would be surprised and hopefully delighted to see what's happened in the last one. Oceania Currence is produced by the Center for Pacific Island Studies, with support from the United States National Resources Center. A big foiexia to John Talkeve for composing and performing the theme music. Cizu Usmasi Vandija Krasostimo for designing our logo. Our thanks to the Cepat staff for supporting this project. Director Alexander Moyer, Outreach Director Foli Fallsgraph, and Academic Support Jennifer Mercado. Special gratitude to the Center for Language and Technology for the use of their recording studio. In particular Robert Wong, Nicky Neymie, and Director Julio Rodriguez. We are your hosts, the Cizius Cabuto Laca and Kenji Katoldo. I will. I will. I will. In our next episode, Home Currents Part 2, we continue our conversations with Terence Carti and Alex about the voyages of Pacific Studies and the many forms it has taken in its different locations. [BLANK_AUDIO]