Decolonization in Oceania Online Syllabus:
A Resource for Learners and Educators
This syllabus project compiles resources about decolonization in Guåhan, Hawai‘i, and the Pacific at large for students, educators, community members, and allies. We hope that these selected materials can nurture ongoing efforts to learn, teach, and organize around overlapping and intersectional issues throughout the Pacific. It is organized around six main themes—Decolonization, Demilitarization, Environmental Justice, Gender and Sexuality, Healing/Health/Wellness, Oceanic Relationalities—with grounding paragraphs authored by different members of the Decolonization in Oceania project team. These introductory segments are accompanied by relevant “Learning Lists,” which contain a broad range of recommended learning materials such as open-access and for-purchase primary and secondary, academic and public-facing resources. The resources cover a wide range of formats and genres, including books, articles, podcasts, videos, documentaries, talks, poems, and recommendations for other online educational databases.
Project Origins
The Decolonization in Oceania Project emerged from conversations between Kevin Escudero and Makana Kushi, the project co-leads. As the son of a Bolivian immigrant father and Vietnamese/Cambodian refugee mother who was re-settled in the United States through circuits of U.S. empire, including Guåhan, Kevin was interested in learning more about Guåhan’s ongoing decolonization movement and the potential role that settlers of color might play in aiding those efforts. Kevin invited Makana, a mentee who was researching family histories of ʻŌiwi activism and Asian exclusion for her dissertation research on land use on Hawaiʻi Island, to join the project and add comparative perspectives about Hawaiʻi.
Given their overlapping interests, Kevin and Makana decided to develop a project looking at processes of decolonization and Indigenous resurgence in Oceania today with a particular focus on Guåhan and Hawai’i. To do so, they convened an eight person advisory board consisting of four community leaders from Guåhan and four from Hawai’i to advise the project. Kevin and Makana met multiple times with the project’s advisory board members who at the end of their terms expressed an interest in opportunities to connect further with one another to continue exploring their shared interests and commitments. To this end, Kevin and Makana began planning an in-person gathering, to strengthen critical alliances between CHamorus and Kānaka ʻŌiwi, Låguas yan Gåni (the Mariana Islands) and Hawai‘i, Indigenous peoples and allies to advance decolonization. Project fellow and doctoral research assistant Ha’åni Lucia Falo San Nicolas, a CHamoru and Samoan doctoral student in the Indigenous Politics program at the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa, then joined the project team.
In February 2023 (somewhat delayed due to the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic), advisory board member Noʻeau Peralto, Haley Kailiehu, and the staff of Hui Mālama i ke Ala ʻŪlili (huiMAU) hosted two advisory board members, Victoria Lola Leon Guerrero and Zita Pangelinan, from Guåhan, along with Kevin, Makana, and Ha’åni in Pau‘auilo. A co-authored article recounting the experiences of participants during the visit to huiMAU was published in 2024 and can be accessed here.
Following the gathering and a series of discussions with the advisory board around what outcomes of the project might be useful for them and the communities that they work with, we chose to develop an online, educational resource for use by activists, community members, and students invested in issues of decolonization and Indigenous resurgence in Oceania today. From 2020 to 2022, the project hosted three undergraduate student fellows from Brown University—Kalikoonāmaukūpuna “Kaliko” Kalāhiki, Annabelle Liu, and Arianna “Ari” Lunow-Luke—whose feedback helped develop the project format and whose work will soon appear in the “Blogs and Student Work” section of the site. The project also commissioned digital art pieces and web design services from Kānaka ʻŌiwi creatives. Lastly, students from Kevin’s fall 2023 course at Brown, “Native Pacific Islander Movements for Decolonization,” assisted with the development of the project’s forthcoming supplemental educational materials regarding ongoing decolonization movements in Guåhan and Hawai’i.
On Oceana, Guåhan and Hawaiʻi
“Oceania is vast, Oceania is expanding, Oceania is hospitable and generous, Oceania is humanity rising from the depths of brine and regions of fire deeper still, Oceania is us.”
The Pacific Ocean is the largest body of water on earth. It carries within it thousands of islands that are home to Indigenous peoples, languages, and cultures. In the face of globalization, climate change, and increased militarization, these Indigenous communities, their knowledge, and their cultural practices remain steadfast. State-imposed boundaries and colonial logics of containment have accomplished, to an extent, the separation of our islands, whether it be geographically, politically, or by any other means. Yet, as Tongan and Fijian scholar Epeli Hau‘ofa reminds us, our people and homelands are not divided by the ocean but are instead “a sea of islands.”
Låguas yan Gåni are said to be the islands first inhabited in the Pacific, their lands and waters stewarded by CHamorus, the Indigenous peoples of the archipelago. In Guåhan, the largest and southernmost island, CHamorus experienced Spanish colonialism beginning in the mid-1500s, a U.S. naval administration following the Spanish-American War of 1898, Japanese occupation during World War II, and now American territorial status. Guåhan has experienced over 500 years of colonization. A profound amount of time, yet CHamorus continue to thrive. CHamoru efforts to contest colonization were present during the Spanish and Japanese eras, and continue today. In recent decades, these efforts have been spearheaded by grassroots community-based organizations including the People’s Alliance for Responsible Alternatives and the People’s Alliance for Dignified Alternatives (PARA-PADA), the Organization of People for Indigenous Rights (OPI-R), and Nasion Chamoru among others. The CHamoru language, history, and culture continue to be taught and shared across generations.
Kānaka ʻŌiwi (Native Hawaiians) are among the youngest Pacific Island peoples, having settled in the Hawaiian Islands just around 1,000 years ago. From their previous homes in the western Pacific, Kānaka brought with them essential “canoe plants,” cultural traditions, and linguistic roots that tie them to the rest of their Pacific relatives. Over the course of several hundred years they cultivated the distinctive cultural practices, language, and agriculture, agroforestry, and aquacultures in relation to Hawaiʻi’s unique ʻāina (land, that which feeds) that defined them as Kānaka ʻŌiwi. The colonization of Hawaiʻi began in the late 18th century, taking the forms of disease-wrought depopulation, cultural genocide, environmental destruction via a succession of extractive capitalist industries and militarization, and sustains itself as the occupying American state of Hawaiʻi. Today, Kānaka ʻŌiwi contest legal and everyday forms of occupation and settler colonialism with restorative and resurgent practices of ea (life, breath, sovereignty).
Learn How Indigenous Communities Continue to Contest Imperial Rule Today
Oceania is a region in which many Indigenous communities were and continue to be subjected to American, British, French, Spanish, German, and Japanese colonial rule, and at times, the rule of multiple imperial regimes (Matsuda 2012). As part of the empire-building project, particularly in the U.S. context, the expansion of the military’s reach has been part and parcel of the colonial process (Nebolon 2017; Shigematsu and Camacho 2010; Lutz 2009; Sand et. al. 2016; Vine 2009, 2020). Indigenous communities have contested these forms of imperial rule and continue to do so today (Mar 2016; Na’puti and Bevacqua 2015; Na’puti and Rohrer 2017; Shigematsu and Camacho 2010). This activism has also been supported by members of the region’s non-Indigenous communities, as seen in the efforts of groups such as Filipinos for Guåhan and the Fanohge Coalition in Guåhan and activist scholars writing about Asian settler colonialism in Hawai’i.
