The Historiographic Critique of Indigenous Seafaring: A Tribute to Epeli Hau'ofa

Epeli Hau'ofa, the late Tongan anthropologist, satirist, sage, and determined slacker, was a trailblazer if not the leading visionary in the field of Pacific Islands Studies. In an age of decolonization and post-colonization, when anthropologists and historians rediscovered each other's spheres to commence a mutual love fest upon matters of Pacific cultural pasts, Hau'ofa quit academia and wrote mischievous tales of Islander rear-ends. When Pacific Studies began to give the politics of narratology a serious shake, he opened a center for Oceanian arts on the fringe of the campus of a fledgling regional university in an island nation that had itself fallen seriously into the fringes of international and, some say, academic, respectability. In these, and other ways -- mentorship and love come to mind -- Hau'ofa built and sustained an oeuvre that provoked a rethinking and redoing of the study of Pacific cultural and political pasts and presents. Of many that comprise his writing, two critical threads interweave in this paper to offer a tribute to Hau?ofa: 1) oceanic ecologies and epistemologies to inform the narrativization of indigenous cultural pasts in the Pacific, and 2) systematic and whimsical ways of confronting the high seriousness of political statecraft and academic disciplinarity. Thus, and in memory of Epeli Hau?ofa, this paper seeks to answer the question, how do the tropics and its seafaring cultures inform the reconceptualization of Islander pasts such as to contest political and intellectual systems that continue to dominate their telling?