Pathway of the Birds: The Voyaging Achievements of Māori and Their Polynesian Ancestors by Andrew Crowe (review)

Abstract

a pedagogical consideration. In the Pacific Islands region, students bring personal experiences and family histories to the classroom, and often with considerable emotion. History is manifest in the surrounding landscapes and seascapes and in the artifacts and ongoing influences of colonial pasts. Students from beyond the region might be able to tap into this more intimate and personal educational environment through exchanges, winter-quarter visits, videoconferencing, and online forums with Pacific schools. The sweep of this primer also elicits a historiographical comment. A broadstroke Pacific Worlds approach risks losing sight of islands’ own histories. Despite the author’s efforts, it is difficult to keep the islands at the center of a “truly transpacific Pacific” (85). The different islands of the region did not experience these larger regional movements equally or at the same time. Moreover, it’s important to ask how different Island peoples actually understood and made sense of these contacts with the larger region. This, in turn, raises the question of historicities, or the culturally specific ways that different Island peoples make their history. A Pacific histories course should include this critical topic as well as a more extensive consideration of the concept of indigeneity. Students might also be alerted to the politics of history making in settler colonies where the harshness of colonial rule is often elided in favor of false narratives of reconciliation. It is also helpful to keep in mind Teresia Teaiwa’s distinction between the Pacific and Oceania; the Pacific is a term that reflects external orderings and understandings, while Oceania speaks to the fluid, rich, vibrant world envisioned by the Tongan scholar Epeli Hau‘ofa—a world whose parameters were not the bordering rims of continental bodies but more immediately and specifically the seas, shores, and skies of the islands called Melanesia, Micronesia, and Polynesia. A Primer for Teaching Pacific Histories outlines a course with a rich, welcome, and innovative historical perspective on the broader Pacific region. Such an approach also needs to acknowledge the complexities and specificities of Island histories.