View From Honolulu
Real Sovereignty
A Dawning Sense Of Confidence Points To A New Era
It’s sometimes the small things in a magazine that will tip you off to a new trend or to hidden connections. There’s a short item in our People Briefs section about three Islanders who have been given grants for their video projects. And this connects to our page 27 story about two young Samoans who spent part of last summer learning to produce and edit digital media. University of Hawaii professor Vilsoni Hereniko once mentioned to me that there are plenty of documentaries about Pacific Islanders made by people from Europe, North America or Australia, but very few done by Islanders themselves. This is changing though, as Islanders like Hereniko start telling Island stories in Island ways. It’s a cultural sovereignty trend. It’s the decolonization of media.
Another piece in this issue, our cover story about the dawn of Palau Air, is related to another kind of sovereignty—Island-grown commerce. Palau businessman Alan Seid is starting his own airline. It’s an outrageously risky project. But it just might work. As our aviation package points out, the people of the North Pacific—actually, people everywhere in the Pacific—are often at the mercy of airlines owned and managed elsewhere. Although there’s a sad history of Island governments running national airlines, Seid’s project has the air of commercial sovereignty about it. This is private enterprise undertaken by local business people. This might also be thought of as the decolonization of commerce.
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For many years the Trust Territory of the Pacific administered most of the Islands of the Micronesian North Pacific. Though the TT bureaucracy had many good and talented expat administrators, the region was also littered with cranky, condescending expat experts who knew what was best for Islanders. For many of the years of the first Compact of Free Association, expats still held key roles in many Island governments.
But this has changed also. A new generation of Islanders has taken over the mechanisms of government power in Micronesia. Three pieces in this issue demonstrate this climate change in governance. Publisher Floyd Takeuchi’s analysis piece on page 24 looks at the increasing sophistication of Island governments in the realm of foreign policy and what might be called “handling Washington.” Contributing Editor Giff Johnson’s account of the Compact II agreements on page 10 and Takeuchi’s interview with U.S. negotiator Albert Short on page 33 both allude to the expertise and technical skills of the negotiators representing the Marshall Islands and the Federated States of Micronesia. This is another step in sovereignty, another decolonization.
Two stories in this issue—Lilinoe Andrews’ account of Hawaiian teens doing environmental projects in Tahiti and Caroline Yacoe’s piece about Melanesian dancers performing for Polynesian and pakea/haole audiences in Hawaii and the U.S. mainland—both point to what a deep sense of cultural sovereignty can produce: great performance art, practical science and the confident exchange of ideas and skills. Increasingly, Pacific Islanders are learning from each other, intead of learning only at universities in the U.S., New Zealand or Australia. There’s a trend here. We’re in a new era that shows itself in dozens of large and small ways. This is a time of new skills and of sovereignty for real.
