Please join us for the fourth and final event of our Spring Speaker Series, Decolonizing Migration.
RSVP below for event, or event+lunch.
Abstract
What forms of connection are possible between Indigenous people in any one Indigenous site? When Pacific people move to another Pacific place, in what ways do they affirm and extend connections with relatives, and in what ways do they reproduce structures of Indigenous oppression and elimination? How might the concept of ‘cousins,’ which pops up in so much Indigenous writing about transnational connections, contribute to how we think about Indigenous migration? This talk will ask these questions by drawing from research undertaken for my current monograph-in-process, ‘Belonging Together: Indigenous Pacific engagements with periodicals 1900-1975’ which holds Aotearoa New Zealand alongside Australia, Fiji and Hawai’i. Each of the sites is simultaneously home to specific Indigenous Pacific peoples and home to members of Pacific communities who have migrated there – largely along imperial networks – in the past two centuries. Ultimately, how can we recall and envision the ways in which Indigenous Pacific peoples (local and migrant/ diasporic) connect along and beyond the imaginaries of contemporary states and regionalisms and, perhaps, the imaginaries we have of ourselves?
Speaker bio
Professor Alice Te Punga Somerville (Māori – Te Āti Awa, Taranaki) joined the UBC Department of English Language and Literatures in 2021. She holds a joint appointment with the UBC Institute for Critical Indigenous Studies. She came to UBC from the University of Waikato in New Zealand, and has previously taught in Australia, Hawai’i and elsewhere in New Zealand. Professor Te Punga Somerville is a scholar, poet and irredentist. At its heart, her research and teaching engages texts in order to centre Indigenous expansiveness and de-centre colonialism. Her MA (Auckland) and PhD (Cornell) focused on Māori written literatures; as she sought broader contexts for thinking about the writing of her own community, she developed a twin interest and expertise in Indigenous studies and Pacific studies.
