Summary

The ASU Environmental Humanities Initiative, which is now known as Humanities for the Environment (EHI’s most successful project), along with UNESCO BRIDGES Flagship Hub co-hosted the “Indigeneity in the Oceanic Commons: Reclaiming Relations from Taiwan to Hawai’i,” on Oct. 18-20, 2023, during ASU’s 2023  Humanities Week. This event brought together diverse Indigenous elders, poets, writers and scholars together with environmental humanists to reassess what it means to care for ocean commons. Participants explored how the commons are conceptualized from the perspectives of Indigenous Taiwan in relation to other Pacific island nations and oceanic cultures — whether it be terrestrial, aquatic, atmospheric or sociocultural. 

Drawing on our setting in the Salt River Valley, the symposium convened respected Indigenous elders, paddlers, surfers and poets, with policy experts, community leaders and scholars from Taiwan, Hawai’i, Guam, Arizona and California, reflecting the rich connections to be found between Pacific Islanders and the indigenous peoples and cultures here in the Southwest. Keynote and plenary presentations were offered by Paelabang Danapan (Puyuma), Senior Advisor to the President, Taiwan, and Former Minister of Council of Indigenous Peoples of Taiwan, Taiwan), Syaman Rapagnon (Tao, Taiwan), Elizabeth Deloughrey (UCLA), Dina Gilio-Whitaker (Colville Confederated Tribes, CSU, San Marcos), Clifford Kopono (School of Ocean Futures, ASU), and Hsinya Huang (National Sun Yat-Sen University).  

The Indigenizing Oceanic Commons symposium explored and elucidated some of the ways that this discipline is  epistemically delinking the conception of islandness from colonial definitions and facilitating a  generation of new meanings while acknowledging and embracing complicated histories around islands and their communities. Keynote Speaker, Elizabeth DeLoughrey’s research on the Caribbean and Pacific Island literature assumes significance within indigenous studies as it focuses on how “Indigenous writers and artists imagine their place in the wake of settler colonial histories of violence and displacement” She noted in an interview for this article, that her next project will examine “visual artists, poets, and novelists from the global south” who are addressing “how their imagination of uninhabitable spaces such as outer spaces and deep seas as places complicate the conception of humans and nonhumans.” 

ASU’s Humanities for the Environment faculty and affiliates also presented on topics such as poetic and artistic mediations of oceans, diasporic and multiethnic relations in coastal communities, ocean resource extraction, and emergent ocean industries. The symposium closed with a roundtable reflecting on the recent oceanic turn in the humanities and emergent disciplinary formations such as the blue humanities and critical ocean studies.