This course examines the historical, political, and cultural
spaces and places of the indigenous Pacific. Such spaces and places range from the
marked and gendered boundaries of powerful male and female gods in Hawaiian cosmologies
and origin stories, and the 17th c. guma uritao (“bachelor homes”), which Chamorro
women of the Mariana Islands frequented and which Spanish Catholic missionaries
condemned, to the New Zealand marae (“gathering place”) and whare (“meeting house”),
an architectural marvel admired for its elaborate wood carvings that embody Maori
genealogy. To attend to these native spaces and places, we will compare and contrast
early and more recent Euro‐American missionary, scientific, and colonial accounts
with a variety of sources produced by native Pacific Islanders. We will explore
how indigenous poetry, film, and forms of mapping explicitly challenge conventional
representations.
