Indigenous Peoples, Heritage and Landscape in the Asia Pacific:

Knowledge Co-production, Policy Change and Empowerment

Panel 6: Pacific Histories

Date: October 21/22, 2020, 7PM LA/10 AM Taiwan/Manila

TRANSCRIPTS

Dr. Stephen Acabado: Okay, um, good evening everyone or good afternoon, good morning wherever you are! Welcome to Panel 6 of the webinar series �Indigenous Peoples� Heritage and Landscape in the Asia-Pacific: Knowledge Co-production, Policy Change and Empowerment�.

Before we start and introduce the panel, we would like to acknowledge that as a land-grant institution, the Department of Anthropology Center for Southeast Asian Studies and Asia Pacific Center at UCLA acknowledges Gabrielino-Tongva peoples as the traditional caretakers of Tovangar (the Los Angeles basin and So. Channel Islands). As a land grant institution, we pay our respects to the Honuukvetam (Ancestors), 'Ahiihirom (Elders), and Eyoohiinkem (our relatives/relations) past, present and emerging. We are grateful for the support of the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research through the webinars and the Future of Anthropology Grant, the Henry Luce Foundation, the New England University First People's Rights Center, the National ChengChi University Center for Taiwan Philippines Indigenous Knowledge Local Knowledge and Sustainable Studies or CTPILS, the UCLA Cotsen Institute of Archaeology, and the UCLA Asia Pacific Center, the UCLA Department of Anthropology, UCLA Center for Southeast Asian Studies, University of Hawaii at Manoa Center for Southeast Asian Studies, Ifugao State University, the Partido State University and the Save the Ifugao Terraces Movement, our co-hosts of this webinar series.

The, um, Panel 6, uh, focuses on the Pacific region and as we know, it's a vast region that you can fit all of the continents inside including Greenland. Um, the region is diverse culturally, historically, geographically and so we hope that this panel will provide us with, um, knowledge about the Pacific. Um, my colleague and friend, Professor Da-wei Kuan and the co-convener of this webinar series will introduce the panel.

Dr. Da-wei Kuan: Yes, thank you Stephen. It's my honor to introduce you, uh, the panel. The history and identity of Pacific Islanders has been drastically explained by a European-centered narrative because of a century of colonization. Archaeological work and community stories are helping to rethink this narrative through Pacific historiography. Descendants and local communities embody knowledge and belief systems that are often critically important to heritage preservation of places and monuments. Not only are traditional methods and native techniques relevant to conservation practices but also the social and spiritual meaning of a place is unique to the indigenous cultures and, perhaps, known only to its practitioners. Using examples from the Solomon Islands, Easter Island and Pohnpei, the panel discus how community stories are helping to regain what was lost because of colonial imposition. This panel highlights that collaboration among local indigenous and international stakeholders is a space for inclusive co-production of knowledge for a better appreciation of history. So I would like to have Maddie to introduce our panelists and moderator. Maddie?

Maddie: Thank you, Professor Daya! It's my pleasure today to introduce to you our four panelists and our moderator. So our first panelist is Dr. Tarcisius Kabutaulaka. He is an Associate Professor and Chair/Director of the Department of Pacific Islands Studies (DPIS) at the University of Hawai�i at M.noa (UHM). Kabutaulaka is a political scientist with research interests on geopolitics, international interventions, regionalism, governance, natural resources and economic

development and political developments in Oceania. He has published extensively on China in the Pacific Islands, the Solomon Islands civil unrest and the Australian-led regional intervention, the forestry industry in Solomon Islands, and on governance issues in the Pacific Islands. He is the co-editor (with Greg Fry) of Intervention and State-building in the Pacific: The Legitimacy of �Cooperative Intervention�(Manchester University Press, 2008). Kabutaulaka is the editor of the Pacific Islands Monograph Series (PIMS) and a member of the editorial board of The Contemporary Pacific. He has a PhD from the Australian National University and undergraduate and MA degrees from the University of the South Pacific (USP). He joined UHM in 2009. Prior to that, he was a research fellow at the East-West Center�s Pacific Islands Development Program and previously taught at USP. Kabutaulaka is from Solomon Islands.

Our second panelist today is Dr. John A. Peterson. Dr. Peterson is an anthropological archaeologist specializing in historical ecology and landscape studies. He has worked in the American Southwest, Texas, northern Mexico, China, Congo-Brazzaville, Ecuador, and, currently, in the Philippines. Peterson has worked with environmental justice projects in the US borderlands of the Lower Rio Grande Valley of El Paso, on archaeological surveys for tribal groups, and community archaeology projects including the restoration of the historical Socorro Mission in Socorro, Texas, where he organized funding and collaboration with at-risk students of the Texas criminal justice system, the Meadows Foundation, and Cornerstones, Inc. a non-profit organization engaged in adobe restoration. In the Philippines he has conducted community archaeology programs through the University of San Carlos Department of Anthropology, Sociology and History community mapping and heritage preservation program, and has worked extensively on heritage programs with the Freely Associated States of Micronesia in Pohnpei, Yap, the Marianas and also in Guam. He has served on the State of Texas State Board of Review, the State of Hawai�i Historic Preservation Board, the Guam Historical Preservation Board, and landmark commissions in San Elizario, El Paso, and Socorro, Texas. Peterson is currently President of the International Committee for Archaeological Heritage Management, a scientific committee of ICOMOS in support of the World Heritage program. He is a visiting professor at the University of San Carlos and an affiliate faculty with the Department of Anthropology, University of Hawai�i.

Our third panelist is Dr. Britton Shepherdson. He is a Senior Lecturer at Northern Arizona University and a Pacific Island archaeologist with 20+ years of experience researching sustainability in human-environment interactions on Easter Island. He is the Founder and Director of Terevaka Archaeological Outreach (TAO) a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization dedicated to collaborative and educational work with the island�s youth. After 17 years, more than 200 island students have graduated from TAO, taking on numerous research/conservation projects and co-authoring 15 manuscripts published in academic journals. Shepardson is currently contracted by the National Council of Monuments of Chile to develop the island�s first comprehensive monitoring/intervention plan for archaeological heritage within the island�s National Park zone. The project represents a collaborative effort between the National Council of Monuments, the island�s Council of Elders, the Technical Secretary of Easter Island Heritage, the Padre Sebasti�n Englert Anthropological Museum, and Ma�u Henua (the indigenous body of park administrators).

Our fourth panel member today is Beno Atan who was born and raised on Easter Island, the most remote island in the Pacific Ocean. Beno got a degree in Computer Science and tried to work in that job but was always drawn to the outdoors. Several years ago he got hooked into working as a tour guide at an ultra-luxury hotel chain on Easter Island. There he learned how to create experiences for travelers by not only teaching them about the sites but also actively getting them out into the wilderness (trekking, diving, mountain biking). He became so good that he was put into an administrative position as exploration manager. Though it was a promotion, it

pulled him away from being outdoors, so he left the position and left the island in order to continue to grow professionally.

After working as the Director of Expedition Development, Metropolitan Touring asked him to lead the whole area, and today he is Regional Director of Research & Development, based in Quito, Ecuador. He still travels all around Central and South America looking for opportunities to build exploration lodges and develop expedition cruises. In addition, he has developed software to analyze locations based on the terrain, cultural diversity, and other factors to advise the company on whether a tour is viable. He is most passionate about the work that he does because it promotes environmental conservation and cultural awareness (he was involved in developing the experience of Mashpi Lodge that serves to conserve land around it.) He has also gained a huge appreciation for how experiences in nature entice an emotional and life changing response from his travelers.

Beno admits that the hardest part of his life is being on the road all the time and being away from home. He returns to Easter Island for big holidays and special occasions. He knows he will go home one day, but he knows this work opportunity only comes around once in a lifetime.

Our moderator today is Jason Troop. Jason is Professor and Chair at the Department of Anthropology, University of California, Los Angeles where he specializes in the fields of medical and psychological anthropology. Dr. Throop has conducted extensive ethnographic research on human subjectivity, empathy, morality, and suffering in cultural context. Spending more than 19 months engaged in ethnographic research on the cultural and moral configuration of experiences of pain and suffering in Yap (Waqab), an island located in the Western Pacific Ocean, Dr. Throop has sought to explore how Yapese orientations to suffering can inform a number of ongoing debates in philosophy and social theory broadly defined. He is the author of the book Suffering and Sentiment: Exploring the Vicissitudes of Experience and Pain in Yap (2010, University of California Press), and co-editor of Toward an Anthropology of the Will (2010, Stanford University Press) and The Anthropology of Empathy: Experiencing the Lives of Others in Pacific Societies (2011, Berghahn Press).

And so with that I would like to turn the floor over to our moderator, Dr. Jason, um, to carry on our discussion concerning Pacific Histories.

Dr. Jason Throop: Thank you, Maddie and, uh, thank you, uh, to everybody for being here. Um, I feel really honored, uh, to be part of this discussion and I�m really excited to see where it goes. Um, I think for anyone who's, who has spent significant time in the Pacific working, living, being part of communities in the Pacific, it, um, becomes clear quite quickly that land, landscape is living, it's part of communities, it's, there's intergenerational connections, there's complex relations that happen, uh, with land and landscapes. So it's, I�m really excited to hear, um, from everyone here, you know, their experience, um, doing the work they do, uh, in Pacific landscapes, very, very excited for this invitation. Um, so I guess I�ll just, um, ask each of the participants to begin by just saying something very briefly about their work, I mean we've had, um, kind of a formal introduction and I�m hoping there's going to be a more informal conversation. Because of that, if you don't mind, I'm just going to use first names, uh, call me Jason and, uh, I�ll call you by your first names if that's okay. Um, so maybe, uh, we'll just go around and, uh, people can say a few words about what they do, um, and I'll start with, uh, Tara, do you want to start?

Dr. Tarcisius Kabutaulaka: Thank you Jason, uh, and, first, you know, I�d like to take the opportunity to join others in thanking the organizers for inviting me and having me on this panel. I must say that after I said yes to, uh, to Buboy, I was wondering what is a political scientist doing

on this panel and what do I know about this stuff? And so as you heard from the introduction, much of my work nowadays focuses on geopolitics particularly Chinese engagements with the Pacific Islands. Uh, but what I�m going to be talking about today are things that I�ve been thinking about and talking to others about and we're organizing a panel for the Pacific History Association Conference which was supposed to happen this year in Fiji but because of the pandemic, uh, won't happen until next year so that's what the work is working towards, so yeah.

Dr. Throop: Thank you so much! Um, maybe next we could hear from Beno?

Beno Atan: Of course! Hello everyone, kind of like I have the same, same, wondering of Tarcisius, uh, what am I doing in a panel like this, um, but thank, you thank, you for inviting me. Um, as Maddie was saying, I'm born and raised in Easter Island, small community, just 5 000 people, a very remote island, very famous. I got drawn to tourism and today, I just travel through all Central South America looking for opportunities of how to develop new opportunities for tourism but in a way that how you go, to have it, the places- they need to have a huge amount of, um, potential to create conservation and show value to the communities and everything around it. So, for example, when I travel and I go to look for a place, uh, if there's no any community that could be, uh, affected in a positive way, we might not gonna select that property. If there's nothing that we can preserve, it is not enough land to create awareness on the biodiversity of the place, uh, we might not gonna select that place and you and, and�I don't know very briefly but that's what I do you kind of like travel a lot, a lot, live in a backpack but looking for these opportunities it's, um, it's a huge, obviously, investment but you need to be very, um, to have a very good eye to how to find the right place to create shared value with the communities.

Dr. Throop: Thank you so much! Uh, John, do you want to say a few words?

Dr. John Peterson: Yes, thank you and if it's okay I want to show a few images here, uh, share screen. I want to talk a little bit about, uh, the World Heritage, the World, uh, the Heritage Site of Nan Madol in Pohnpei in the, uh, basically in the center or of Western or the Western Pacific. Uh, this is the site, it's quite a huge array of monumental structures. On Pohnpei here you can see how it, uh, actually is located in the southeastern portion and this one of the central ceremonial areas of Nan Dawas kind of gives you a sense of the incredible structures at this site. One of the things that's ironic about this though is that even though the community has been very proud to share this with the rest of the world as part of their cultural and historical identity, it has a kind of a black history and this site in Pohnpei, for example, was thought to have been one of the earliest structures and here a, uh, supposedly an early chief of the saddle or dynasty was buried. The, one, of the earliest archaeologists to work on this site, uh, dug up the grave and, uh, on his way from Pohnpei, he died of a heart attack suddenly and then on another occasion, a shipload of artifacts leaving Nan Madol, uh, had a shipwreck near the Marshall Islands and lost all the artifacts. So there is in the Pohnpeian sense� this is not necessarily something that they want to see preserved because it, it's emblematic of a very, uh, almost evil part of their history. But at the same time, uh, the structure is beginning to decay and so when it was inscribed on the World Heritage list it also was listed as one of the endangered monuments. So what I would like to share later in this discussion, uh, if you're interested is the, some of those issues which the western experts with ICOMOS are being sensitive about but nonetheless kind of have a different idea about preserving the monument whereas the local people have many indigenous ways of resolving these conservation issues, uh, with very low impact and there's a kind of a conflict emerging about that. So, uh, with that in mind, I just wanted to introduce you to the site because the pictures tell quite a bit about the, about the conflict going on there. Thanks! Stop sharing.

Dr. Throop: Wonderful! Thank you. Uh, Britton, would you like to go next?

Dr. Britton Shepardson: Sure, um, yeah start off by again, just thanking the session organizers. Um, this is a real privilege and I kind of feel like I�m out of my league here considering the other panelists� experience. Um, thanks Jason for moderating! Try not to get too rowdy here, make life easy for you. Um, I started about 20 years ago as a research archaeologist dedicated to work on Easter Island and, um, it was it was a very immediate and emotional connection I had with the island, just fell in love in my first trip there. Um, and I noticed right away that at that time, I was one of just really a handful of gringos living for a long period of time on the island and it didn't take me long to realize that local people on the island were far more concerned with whether I was going to be at the discotech on a Friday night or at my soccer game on a Sunday afternoon than any of the research I was conducting on the island. And, um, to me that was a, that presented a real disconnect of what the goals were of say, the National Science Foundation and the University of Hawaii at the time versus what the local interests were, um, in seeing archaeologists working on their island. Um, and so my, while I started off looking at topics like monumentality, territoriality and even colonization in Easter Island, my attention quickly shifted to developing educational outreach opportunities for local students on Easter Island particularly high school age. And it's now become a, it's kind of taken on, a life of its own- Teravaka Archaeological Outreach. It is a formal, not-for-profit, uh, program and, um, I was lucky enough to meet Beno about 10 years ago on the island and, um, through many conversations with Beno, um, learning a lot about, um, how to speak the language of the tourism industry and how to get buy-in from some of the private sector on Easter Island and, um, designing really engaging educational curriculum, um, for both local and indigenous students on the island. So I'm happy to say that, uh, we, we've got more momentum than ever at this point and, um, hopefully even expanding into additional locations in South America in the near future.

Dr. Throop: Wonderful! Okay, well I think we're already in it, you know. We're already starting to answer some of the questions we had, um, in our first, um, kind of segment. We have four segments lined up with different thematics and the first one is, is thinking about how we define engaged scholarship and engaged work and I think we're what, some of these questions have been sort of answered already but I think it's worth, uh, moving through them. Um, so I think just to step out, you know, in a, in a more distant way, you know, I just wanted to ask the panelists- and anyone can start first- just to reflect on, um, how you would define, uh, engaged, uh, scholarship or engaged research is. Do, how do you think about engagement, um, as a scholar, um, as somebody or as somebody who's trying to produce knowledge, however that knowledge is being used?

Dr. Kabutaulaka: If I may Jason, very quickly, and others can... Uh, you know, I think a lot of the discussions of engagement- and we've seen it in the previous panels as well- focuses on engagement between scholars and communities and that's important. It's important that we have that engagement, actually a partnership, partnership between local communities so that, that scholarship doesn't end with the university scholar coming in but continues within the community afterwards. But what I�m also interested in- and I think John has alluded to this- is that engagement is not only between people but also between scholars and landscapes and seascapes and thinking of landscapes as not only a side for research and for scholarship but a partner in this scholarship. And I think that's important for Pacific Islands for a number of reasons and one of which is that a lot of our histories and stories or if we take away the word history and just use the word stories- a lot of our stories are inscribed onto these landscapes and seascapes. And so viewing landscapes as partner in scholarship, I think, is important.

Dr. Shepardson: I would add for me, you know, the, in, the trial-and-error process or the course of learning. Engaged scholarship for me, I've come to understand, is necessarily letting go of some of the more, I guess, selfish or personal research, research interests I once had as an

archaeologist and opening my mind to contemporary concerns of the local community, potential obstacles in efforts such as sustainable development and reformulating my research questions based on, um, like I say letting go of my original academic interests a little more.

Dr. Throop: Thank you! Anyone else want to speak to that question? I was going to say, um, one thing that I experienced, um, and I think others have as well working in the Pacific- and I really agree with Tara's point, you know, about the land being one of the central relations in the seascapes relation- is how you get pulled in, you get it's uh� I think the one view of engagement, uh, that gets put out there is it's, the scholar who's initiating the engagement but my experience is, was the opposite. I mean I was engaged but I mean really pulling me in it was the community telling me, you know, this is this is how we want you to be, how you should be, and also continuing those relations. It's not like you work somewhere like, Yap, and then leave. You, you're constantly, it's a life, it's a lifelong commitment to real relationships so I thank everybody who's taught me that over the years, uh, so I just wanted to add that at that point.

Dr. Kabutaulaka: And if very quickly, if I may add, Jason and, uh, after this I�ll shut up and let the other panelists contribute. But if I may add and that also speaks to methodology and how you go about doing it uh� And we are trained, I come from a small village on the western coast of Guadalcanal in Solomon Highlands, uh, and I went to university and I'm trained to go out and gather knowledge, to go out and gather information as part of that scholarly approach. But over the years, I think you know, going out and gathering is important but it is equally important particularly in Pacific societies to wait for knowledge to come to you. And so research methodology that involves waiting and that process of waiting is the process of building relationships that you talk about, that it comes only after you have built that relationship, after you have proven that you can engage and be part of the community.

Dr. Throop: Yeah that really resonates strongly with my experience thank, you so much. Um, so why don't we move on to the second, um, question and I think what we were just, uh, discussing in terms of relations and sort of these living relations between people in communities and land and seascapes and orientations. We talked about history, stories. So this question is about you know, in what way do you see, uh, community, the community stories empowering Pacific communities and I also, as I�m gonna inject this myself, um, is stories the right term? Uh because it seems like so much of this is about experience and lived realities. It's not just a story, someone's telling about the land. Sure, it's related, um, but there's also these very strong connections that I think exceed the story, um. So let's, I'll just open it up there and anyone who wants to jump in please do�. But stories are okay too. So we can talk about stories and empowerment.

Dr. Peterson: Well, I don't want to tell any tales out of school but you may have the same experience on it. But a lot of times when you, when you talk to the Pohnpeians, you get, uh, you don't get the whole story and they're kind of proud of this. This is their way of communicating that they'll tell you a lot but they'll leave some important things out. You have to hear the story told many different times before. You begin to hear different versions and different parts of it that were kind of excluded to begin with, and they think it's funny when like consultants drop in, out of the sky all over the Pacific and, of course, are the immediate experts on everything and I think Pacific Islanders find it kind of amusing that they can tell their stories in this way and then the, if the people aren't long-term participants and aren't respectful listeners, they really won't get that point. Do you feel, did you see that and you have too?

Dr. Throop: Definitely, I mean secrecy is, uh, essential, uh, to how people think about their position in relation to land and a whole bunch of things so, um, what gets told to whom and how much I mean that I love this concept of waiting. Wait that, you have to wait for knowledge and

even then, it might not come, you know, if you haven't, if you haven't shown yourself to be the right kind of person to receive it. Um, uh, so yeah in that sense there's definitely power involved, um, because it's not just giving, not just giving these stories to anybody, um, uh, yeah, I definitely right�

Dr. Kabutaulaka: If, if, if, I may jump in again Jason, you know, storytelling is not only about the storyteller. It is about the listener as well and the listener and participant is as equally important in the process of telling story as the storyteller is. And every time a story is told, it's never the same as when it was previously told, uh, and you're absolutely right like, take for instance, my stories about my family's rights to land. Those are not stories that we go around telling everybody because there is power associated to it, associated with it, uh, and this�So, so when we talk about landscapes in Pacific places and I am certain it's the same in other parts of the world as well, what we're actually talking about are stories that are written onto landscapes. So land tenure systems are actually stories that are written onto particular landscapes and whoever has monopoly over those stories therefore has rights to land. So we're not talking about land per se, but we're talking about rights over stories that are written onto different landscapes.

Dr. Throop: Yeah, thank you. Uh, Beno, I want to ask you, you know in terms of your work, um, uh, to what extent is, you know there's certainly an empowerment piece that's really central to it but also, thinking about knowledge and what's shared, what stories are told, how do you deal with that in your work?

Beno: I mean, for me, just to begin with�When we grew up in, in Easter Island there was not even a small electricity, no TVs, no nothing. You grew up with the stories that your uncles, your grandparents, your parents, everyone tells you about. So the island was divided by different tribes- every family on the island can trace their genealogy back to that tribe and each family have their own version of how, um, how the statuses were moved, how they warfare between the tribes, uh, if it was cannibalism before or not. So we grew up with this, with this very strong sense of, um, of what your family tells you, you know and you get that feeling of the stories that they tell you, you grew up with that. But then the planes started getting more often, you start seeing more gringos like Britton was saying before and, and they just come with these crazy ideas. I think Easter Island, for many years I've been working, was a trampoline for many people. They just come and listen to one story there, listen to another story over there, and they create their own view and they just go out and publish. Yeah, and I've seen and we always make fun with Britton about the Asian elephant in Easter Island moving the statues around the island. It's, I mean and then it gets more difficult when I start getting working in this hospitality industry and I started as a guide and I was like okay so should I tell the story of my family? There's the story of the tribe that I belong to or should I just say something about these archaeologists that come and they have these other different hypotheses? So it's very difficult and every time I remember when I started guiding, I usually say �Well you probably arrived to this island with many questions and you probably will leave with many more because I will give you all and you could make your own vision of what you have.� And I think it has a lot of power, obviously, but sometimes then when I got managing positions, some, sometimes travelers came in and said like, �You know I won�t...I�m very disappointed because I went out yesterday with that guy and he told me something that this other guy told me something totally different.� And I, and I got together with them and I said, �Well, they belong to different tribes, they have different oral traditions passed down generations by generations to their families,� and they start getting a better idea of the whole story but I mean it's very, it's very tricky but at the same time, you have a lot of power, yeah. If you, if you know exactly how to be a very good storyteller, it has a lot of power also.

Dr. Throop: Yeah, I think it's so fascinating, um, the, this idea that a story, I mean some idea that there could be a story, a singular story, almost like from a view from nowhere. And my experience, you know, learning from folks in Yap who I know best, you know, it's always a view from some very particular perspective and, um, it's assumed that other people will know something very different and have a different access and, um, and then it becomes a challenge. So what becomes a scholarship in the sense where there is some demand of a view, you know, some sharedness, um, in places where that's not assumed at all, uh, in fact people would think you were really, um, naive to think that there was just one view, yeah. So it's really interesting. Um, so I guess, uh, this question is again- so thinking about those, uh, way, you know, think about power and relationships and stories and the researcher or the outsiders or insider's position as somebody who's trying to engage with knowledge and bring it out of, out of a local context to do something else with it, um, I wanted you all to talk a little bit about what role do local folks in the communities play in shaping, um, the kinds of work that you do and I know some of it's come up already in different in different answers, um, but maybe just to address it explicitly would be, would be great. John?

Dr. Peterson: In my case I've learned a huge amount from people like Dr. Rufino Mauricio who�s actually a PhD in anthropology, uh, a native Pohnpeian. Uh, he knows an enormous amount about the history and culture of Pohnpei and he, for example, in one of the issues that the World Heritage Committee had, uh, about the preservation or conservation of Nan Madol was about the, uh, stonework, some of it falling out of place for a variety of reasons and, uh, Rufino and I had a lot of discussions about how there's a whole, uh, a whole ritual and chants associated with construction and that actually even when the stones are quarried, those large basalt blocks, uh, the various, the rocks that are placed in the interstices, the small gravels and things- there are names for all those and stories about all those and in order to do any kind of reconstruction of Nan Madol, it's very important to know those rituals and to know those chants and if it's not done, it's not appropriate even. Uh, some of the World Heritage mission was, �Well we should send in a recommendation to put dredges and cranes out there and muscle these things around and put them in place,� and Rufino was laughing. Well, you know, people, Pohnpeians originally put these in place, we didn't, they didn't need cranes a thousand years ago to put these stones in place. What they had was the power of ritual, the power of story, and the power of the chants so he's been a huge, uh, asset for learning and actually kind of translating a lot of these things for westerners.

Dr. Throop: Does anyone else want to speak to that?

Dr. Shepardson: Sure, I'll just, uh, my experience on Easter Island again is, um, working with some of the least experienced storytellers in the youth of the island and I think as Beno was alluding to with the rise of technology on the island, it's understandable why a lot of kids these days have very little experience using storytelling as a form of communication or entertainment or empowerment for that matter. And I've certainly adapted over the years in developing curriculum from a perspective that was focused primarily on technical archaeology research, um, analysis, um, to inc�including a component where the local kids are encouraged to document any stories or fragments of stories that they can recall as we get, uh, field experience visiting these places. And it's been great to see that, uh, you know one of the most overlooked portions of Easter Island's history, I think, is a proto-historic period where there was a severe bottleneck on the island based on slave raids and introduction of diseases and such and, you know, unfortunately I think a lot of the oral tradition was lost as a result. And for me to think that we could ever run that risk again is, uh, you know is terrifying and I think it's been really, um, interesting for me to see how these students can be, on the one hand, afraid to get into the practice of storytelling- and i think it's mostly insecurity on their part- but by the second week of

the program, they won't stop talking about every little similarity or difference between as Beno was saying, you know their family's version of the story versus another camper in the group. And um, and so for me there you know it, clearly, is an important topic and, um, it's been really nice to see that it is possible to develop a trusting environment where these inexperienced storytellers start to take up that practice again and, uh, you know, as much as possible I've tried to reassure them that it doesn't matter what your version of the story is. We want to get them all down, we want to get them documented so that we keep all of these from now on and continue the, you know, the empowering tradition.

Dr. Throop: Okay, great!

Dr. Kabutaulaka: Just, um, just to add very quickly, Jason. I think, uh, you know, I think, uh, Britton is absolutely right and the others as well, uh, that there is always a danger to a single story. Uh, as Chimamanda, the Nigerian novelist, said that, you know, one of the biggest dangers that we have in the world is we try to create single stories. Uh, there is, there is beauty in multiple stories. Uh, and, to, you know, for the work that I'm doing particularly, uh, trying to put together this panel for, uh, the Pacific History Association Conference and if I may very quickly go back to a little bit on the Pacific history thing�So we all know that James Davidson at an inaugural lecture at the Australian National University in 1949 came up with the idea that there is a need to tell Pacific Island histories. Uh, history is that the focus in Pacific Island is so what he called Island-centered and Islander-oriented history and that sounded really wonderful but the next question is how do you do it? How do you go about telling histories that are Pacific Islands-centered and Islander-oriented? And it means, you know, exploring different ways of telling about the past or remembering and engaging with the past and Pacific Islander ways of thinking, about that relationship, that perhaps is not lineal, it's not a lineal relationship. But in a lot of Pacific Island places, the engagement with the past is often secular, that people engage and deal with, and remember the past in different ways. That the past is never really the past- it is also with us today. And one of the things that we wanted to explore for this, uh, panel that we are organizing is how is the past remembered and told through names and particularly names of places and names of people and how those stories are inscribed onto landscapes and how they are often sometimes erased, uh, either intentionally or unintentionally. And if we look at the Pacific Islands, you know, you have places like Solomon Islands where I come from, for instance, because a guy called �lvaro de Menda�a thought that he had found King Solomon's, the source of King Solomon's gold. We haven't found it yet so we're still looking for it but he named the place Solomon Islands and then you have Cook Islands which, Cook, Captain Cook never went there but they named those places. And so we are exploring the fact that the process of naming is not just a process of identifying but also a process of claiming ownership over places and writing one story over it. Uh, and here in Hawaii for instance, one of the most popular places is Pearl Harbor. Uh, so what's what does Pearl Harbor mean? And what kind of stories are told to tourists when they come to Pearl Harbor? Pearl harbor, the name is Pu.u Loa which actually means something completely different so you see, the militarization of a landscape and the tourism industry, so the militourism, uh, story written on to that particular landscape. So I, so that's what we're trying to do, to look at different Pacific places and see what names can tell us and also names of people. So the naming of Pacific islanders after their father is something very recent. People giving different names and every name has a story. So we remember the past through the living.

Dr. Throop: There's so much there, uh, and I want to respond too but I, I'm also conscious we need to move on. I would love to keep talking at some point about the, you know, and I think this is actually related to this question but, you know, needing things like passports and, um, you know, in Yap we're talking about a, you know, complex set of matrilineal clans that are negotiated over land, over multiple generations and there is no last name. Um, but with a passport, people

need to put in a last name and it becomes, oh, what's the last name, it�s the father's name so you get people using the father's Yapese name as their last name and it's totally confusing, it has nothing to do with how relations are reckoned, um, and it's very difficult but so.

Uh, we're transitioning into block two, uh, and you've already done it for us so thank you, that's perfect. Um, we wanna start talking about the �power of landscape�, um, and, uh, one question I didn't get to ask at the end of the last block had to do with kind of major problems and issues facing the communities you work with and how that informs your work but I think you can have that in the background as you think about, uh, this first question for the power landscape which again, we've talked about in different ways but I think it's great to make it thematic is thinking about �What institutions, both formal and informal, produce, reproduce and control the material and cultural resources and narratives in your research area?� So, you know, my example, the passport is one example of how things get transformed and different institutions become grafted onto local practices but the floor is open so anything that, that you could speak to.

Dr. Kabutaulaka: Since everybody's really quiet, I'll start us off and, you know, others can chime in. I, you know, I often ask my students at UH Manoa in terms of land so the University is a very important, but also very powerful institution. And we walk around UH Manoa and take for granted that the names and stories that are written on to that particular place, uh, and sometimes we assume that they have already, always been there. So you know, I find the old maps of Manoa�so mapping itself is problematic and we can go on and talk about that another time. But I often ask the students, okay, so we, when we go for our lectures, we go to Saunders, Moore Hall to Kendall, all these buildings around campus. And these are not just buildings but they are stories of a particular individual, mostly men, mostly dead and I asked them what's the story that was here prior to this place being what it is and so asking the students to look for where the streams were, what the names of different places and compass were, and then we write those stories and then write these other stories about Saunders and all these other great people and we layered it onto those other stories to see the different layers of stories that have existed in this one sport on campus.

Dr. Throop: Any of the archaeologists want to speak to the layering of stories? Yeah, go John.

Dr. Peterson: Jason, I could say something about governance and relationship, power.

Dr. Throop: Yeah�

Dr. Peterson: In the Federated States of Micronesia, uh, of course that's a sort of a, that's a, it's a national entity, uh, the state of Pohnpei is a part of the federated state of Micronesia as is Yap, another state. Then there are localities, but the other thing, along with this sort of formal, very western style governance unit, there's also a traditional authority in Pohnpei. Uh, basically, um, it goes all the way back to the Saudeleur, to the groups that, the dynasty that was controlling them at all and in fact it was the breaking up of the, of that dynasty that led to them being distributed around the island as separate, uh, paramount chieftains. And each one of these paramount chiefdoms has what's called a Nahnmwarki who's a, literally the paramount chief, was absolute power within that community within that district. So one of the frustrations that World Heritage Center had, I think, looking at this system was well, you've got one guy out there, I mean, and he's not, oh, he's not educated and, oh, my goodness, he's going to be running everything, you know. There was a lot of discomfort, I think, at viewing this traditional, uh, authority system and yet it is the fundamental, uh, governance unit, uh, for traditional society in, uh, in Pohnpei. So there has to be some way of dealing with, you know, the western consciousness of this versus the internal consciousness. The Nahnmwarki has absolutely, has to be respected in that

community and has to be given a priority, um, and it actually goes to the fact that Nan Madol is a living landscape like Tara was saying earlier. The landscape and Nan Madol itself as a, as a dynastic center is no longer, has the same function but it's still very much a living landscape and it's the Nahnmwarki who's really in touch with that and able to broker that to the rest of the community. So it's essential that the paramount chieftains and the traditional governments be really central to this whole process, I think.

Dr. Throop: I want to ask if it's okay and then we'll go back to you Britton but I wanted to ask Beno when you're going into kind of new communities and, um, trying to think about possibilities in those communities, how do you, yeah, how do you think about these other, um, these corridors of power within them or how do they become visible to you and how do you navigate them?

Beno: Yeah, um, I don't know. I was recently, well not recently because of the Covid right, but at the beginning of the year in, um, in a village in Colombia where non-foreigners are allowed to go there, right. And my first thought is like, if we're gonna go to visit, it's because I want to know the heritage but I will probably will never bring anybody to this place, right, but I will know, I want to know the heritage and what's out there, what the, what their needs or what they how, how they live and they're very high up in the mountains. Um, this is the Caribbean Ocean in Colombia but there are, in La Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta, the Kogui community and I don't know, it's every, everywhere, where I go and we try, I always because I'm from an indigenous community, I always try to look for, to learn and to see more, uh, and we were allowed to go but just to the school which is next to the village. And because the Foundation let us go and talk to the teachers and to see the kids and it's impressive how the needs of my community- a while ago- you can see the same needs that they're very close in many other locations like the end, they're obviously, they're in danger and they're so fragile that, you, I was wondering myself the night before, should we really go, it will not disturb them? And, but at the same time, I wanted to learn a little bit about the heritage. I think, uh, having these foundations like, uh, like the one that Britton have in Easter Island, it's one of the main channels to, how to communicate with the, with the community, um, and it's so easy to, uh, steer them in the wrong way. I mean when I, go there the first problem that they have is trash because they're so hot in the mountain and they like Coca-Cola and they want some French fries and they wonder like all these things but they don't know how to bring all of that down and you can see the huge problematic that they have there- it was just trash and how, um, how they can steer in the wrong way. They just came down to the, to the village, to these towns just to trade things, to keep buying the same things that they don't know what to do with, the plastic up there. Um, I think having these type of, uh, foundations, uh, or not, uh, how do you call it? NGOs, uh, um, non-profit organizations they help them to steer in the right way if not the indigenous community is so easy to get into alcoholism and to all of these things with the trash and things like that. Um, and it�s sad, I mean I work in tourism but I know how much the tourism, uh, damaged the planet. All the companies that we have here, we are carbon neutral and we have a huge portion of land to be able to mitigate all the carbon that we generate but at the same time we wanted to be able to help and impact in the right way with the, with the, with all the communities, yeah.

Dr. Throop: Thank you! Uh, Britton, did you want to add something, or?

Dr. Shepardson: I was, when you when you asked what the, if the archaeologist wanted to chime in on the, the layering of stories and, um, kind of in response to some of what Tarcisius was, uh, speaking to, I thought, well my response as an archaeologist is, we got a lot of work to do. Um, and specifically you know, my work on Easter Island has overlapped a significant amount with the tourism industry and, um, you know when I, when I juxtapose, um, the layering of the story that I've been let in on in Easter Island by these different families and different generations and

different time periods, you realize how rich and complex this layering is and you're at the same time as an archaeologist that interacts regularly with the tourism industry, you're working with clients who have the attention span for, you know, one tweet at a time and so I think it's, there's a lot of work to be done and it falls on archaeologists, anthropologists in the tourism industry to contin� You know, one of, I think, my goals is to continue to try to stretch the mind or the, um, the tolerance of, uh, travelers, um, to allow these, the layering of stories and such to be more complex than a simple soundbite or, um, you know, a punchline they can go home with. Um, so yeah, my response was like, yeah, holy cow! This is, there's a lot of work to be done and there's a disconnect between the reality of the complexity of the cultures that travelers like to visit, um, and that archaeologists like to study, um, and the threshold, I guess, that, uh, that the pop culture or foreign cultures are willing to take in, um, in there, you know, minimal experiences with some of uh these exotic cultures, right.

Dr. Throop: Yeah, yeah, uh, I'm going to try to combine a few questions here because I know we're, the discussion is so rich, um, we're probably getting close to the end section too. So I wanted to, um, thinking about within local communities that there are, you know, different channels of power and people have different access to certain types of knowledge and some people have control over that knowledge and other people don't. Um, I was wondering if you could all reflect a little bit upon how people in the communities themselves think about this kind of differential access to knowledge or power, how they navigate it, um, in their day-to-day lives? And then also maybe thinking on the community level, uh, if there's different factions, you know, um, really drastically different perspectives that are held by more than one person, about what the history is or what you know what the stories are or who should have access to what, um, how do local people deal with that? How do you deal with it? Do you see something parallel between the way that you have to deal with it and how local people have to deal with it or are there differences because of your positionality? And you can take on any piece of those- I've just actually combined three questions so, uh, there's a lot in there and go for whichever piece sounds answerable.

Dr. Kabutaulaka: Again, since everybody's quiet, I'll start and, you know, hopefully, um, my colleagues will think of something and then talk about it. One of the challenges for me is, you know, uh taking stories that exist in a particular context, the community stories that are negotiable, that are dynamic, and then writing those stories down, making them become static and permanent. Uh, and when I was doing my PhD at the Australian National University, I got bored of writing a PhD dissertation so I wrote my grandfather's story, his biography while writing my PhD as a way of getting away from the PhD and telling stories that I had grown up with, uh, and i was very proud when I published it and I thought it was a wonderful thing. But as we all know, the story of individuals is often the stories of entire communities because our stories are interwoven with each other and so what I, when I publish it nowadays, when people talk about these stories, they would hold it up as the authority, that it's written in this biography. And that made me sad in a way because I had taken one individual story and written it and it had taken prominence in a way that I did not expect and in in a certain way, it's taken away that negotiation for stories, uh, for, you know, dynamism, for telling different kinds of stories. So that's one, you know, one experience that I had. The other thing is that, in a lot of Pacific Island places- and I can speak particularly of Melanesia and especially Solomon Islands- is that when it comes to land issues, there are many competing stories. Uh and people you know tell this so, so land disputes or disputes over land are basically story competitions, people telling their different versions of stories that link them to that particular place. But the process of registration which governments have pushed throughout the Pacific Islands region, what it does is it takes away that competition, that negotiation that takes place and registers a particular story that, if you disagree with you have to go to court. The only avenue of disputing or disagreeing with that story is through the court system, a system that many people are not familiar with or if they are familiar, do not have the money to engage with.

And so you know when telling people stories, those are some of the things that I�m often conscious about.

Dr. Throop: Thank you. Anyone else like to speak to this? John?

Dr. Peterson: Well Britton and Tara both touched on this but the audience for the stories may dictate some of, some of what is addressed. Uh, for example, if you're doing an interpretation for tourists, uh, there may be different stories that are told but ultimately, I think it should be the local community and the local culture that does the telling of the stories. You know, as archaeologists will go work some places like Pohnpei or Easter Island or whatever and our big questions are, ah, what was the migration stream of people that came to this island and who are they culturally affiliated with? Was this the Austronesian stream from Taiwan? Etc., etc.�And those are things that professionally sort of, sort of, uh, dominate the thinking of Western archaeologists. But if you go into a lot of communities, they don't really resonate with those stories. It doesn't mean too much to them. Uh, it seems to me much more meaningful to tell tourists visiting some of these sites the local stories like both Britton and Tarcisius are saying. Uh, the local stories are going to be a lot more meaningful and they're going to connect a lot more with that landscape and they may actually have unanticipated, uh, spins on some of those other dominant western models of migration. For example, no one's really sure of the different periods of people coming to or through Pohnpei, where they came from originally. Maybe the Solomon Islands? It's not really sure. Was there people traveling back from the Polynesian outliers? Very likely, we're going to try to get a project going where we're working with, with, uh, villagers in various places where there are archaeological sites to help us understand what those sites mean to them and how they might compare to places like Samoa or the Solomons or whatever. So I think those stories really need to be brought out as the most important thing that can be used to interpret these landscapes to tourists, for example. Forget about the periods and the, and the streams and this and that. It's not of much interest to the locals, I think, and it's probably the wrong message to give the tourists.

Dr. Throop: Okay so, uh, the time is going way too fast so we're gonna switch to the third, uh, kind of block of questions that are really about heritage and, uh, sort of intergenerational aspects of heritage and some other questions. So the first question, it has to do with how it is that, um, local communities, indigenous peoples who have these histories and heritages that span centuries or millennia, um, how do they think about what could and should be, um, reclaimed, uh, or transmitted to younger generations? I mean we've had bits and pieces of that discussed but really thinking about the younger generations, um, and how it, how to transmit, um, what people's what people know, um, forward in a way that lets people keep alive, um, and keep, uh, vivid those, uh, traditions, um, and how did those kind of views about intergenerational transmission and, um, the youth and their- the worlds that they're in- how does that inform the work you do? That's the question.

Britton, I know you do a lot of this work so maybe you should start.

Dr. Shepardson: Um, sure, you know, I, some of these questions are fascinating and at the same time I'm thinking I can't possibly generalize what's going on across the entire island community. Uh, and so I'm hesitant to respond based on my own informal observations, you know. Um, but I would say um, yeah, it's challenging and for me, I find, um, to keep, uh, teenagers on Easter Island engaged year after year despite me getting one year older each time. Um, I've got to stay in tune with their interests and their primary modes of communication and such. Um, and there's part of me that I realize I constantly come back to, what I think is a growing divide I observe on Easter Island which is to me is a kind of a subtle difference between preservation and conservation when it comes to heritage that I see especially with some of the, um, some

indigenous folks that have recently taken a more active role in, say, government offices, uh, heritage management positions- things like that. Um, I feel like their immediate, uh, effort or goal is to kind of �Let's take Easter Island tradition and put it in a glass bubble and seal it up and nobody can hurt it in this glass bubble.� Whereas to me, I feel like the more I can show, convince teenagers that these old traditions, these stories, the traditional knowledge, the technology is relevant today and is useful today and can provide answers to age-old questions and can be combined with modern technology. Um, I feel like for me at least in terms of laying out my goals with a non-profit, I am, I�m much more committed to trying to maintain the relevance of the information that is encapsulated in stories and, um, traditional knowledge and showing that this could be applied every day if you thought about it long enough and thought about the lessons we have to learn from it. Um, the other, um, I guess, issue I grapple with a lot again with students is simply, you know, as an outsider being the even non-sequitur excuse for them to get for these kids to go talk to a grandparent or an uncle just to, you know, light the match for a conversation that's never been had before. Um, I feel like there are, sometimes, my observations have been that there are kind of a generational disconnect where some of the elders on the island look at the identity of some of the youngsters and think �These kids aren't even Rapa Nui,� you know, �they, they're too busy with their cellphone and their,� you know, �their modern world.� Um, and I think a lot of the youngsters in, you know, from the, their perspective, they're looking at these elders thinking, �I'm not going to try to speak Rapa Nui because if I screw up one time, they are going to laugh me out of the house,� you know. And, but I think when you can provide an excuse when I can say, �Hey, let's do a project on creating a ghost database across the landscape.� All of a sudden, these students feel empowered because they have an excuse to go knock on an uncle's door as a cold call and start a conversation that, maybe both sides deep down wish they had started 20 years ago, Um, so you know that's kind of some of the main challenges I think I confront on a regular basis in initializing and formalizing a pipeline for this kind of communication and for the transmission of stories.

Dr. Throop: Beno do you want to speak to this?

Beno: Sure, um, I think it's been very challenging every year, obviously. Every time I can, I always join Britton, um with Powell, um, and I think one of the strategies they also, Britton was using is just to, I think he mentioned it but having these kind of like, role models so this is super because they're teenagers, they're the most difficult to en�to entertain or to manage. If they're younger kids, it's easier or if there's adults, obviously easier but teenagers is the ones more complicated. Um, and, but when you, when they see a role model, when they see a super expert guide and they know, have all this knowledge, uh, about the island, it�s kind of like started getting into, um, a thing of, �Oh, and my parents never told me about that!� �I've never been into that place!� And we were amazed of, okay we're gonna do a hike to this volcano and I don't know 70% of the, of the kids have never been up there. So for us, we try to, try to put, um, a different strategy on how to get them engaged with what's out there, you know, what stories out there, what are the legends, where are the tribes that they used to live there, and what�s the unique of the place, and try to get them into that, �I need to know that knowledge. I need to have that knowledge because I don't! Not even my parents probably have been there.� And the other thing is that the kids, uh, they're mixed between indigenous local Rapa Nui as myself and you have Chileans that they live there, right, and I don't know maybe like in Hawaii that you have the haoles and kind of like the same thing but you as a Rapa Nui you cannot know, I mean, you feel ashamed if a Chilean guy who is not your heritage, is not indigenous from the island, have more knowledge, or have been more times into that volcano so you kind of like join a competition to �We need to have that, this knowledge. I need to go to that volcano.� I've been so many other times there to try to keep them engaged and we, I don't know, they create so many different ways to give them and I think we succeed, we do a lot and when they leave next year, they just want to come back and they want

to come back into the program because they, they feel that they want to know more, yeah, and for us, it's, uh, it�s the best, um, reward to be able to share this knowledge into, so they can share it with, with other people back at their homes.

Dr. Kabutaulaka: The other thing Jason, and I�ll just throw this in, not that I�ve ever tried it. But just ideas, you know, the idea of, uh, storytelling and sitting around the fire and telling the story- that's not, that's not what's happening nowadays, uh, that there are different mediums of storytelling. Uh, and I think, you know, getting the young people to use the medium that they know to tell their stories, uh, to themselves and to others and I'm thinking of things like films, for instance, uh, animation telling these stories in ways that would interest and through medium that would interest the younger generation of creating games that includes stories from Pacific Island places. So those are challenges that, and kids nowadays as we all know, uh, know how to use these things. I mean my students teach me how to use Zoom and other stuff that I have no clue about so I�m sure they know the medium. It's telling them the story that they can then retell through this other medium that's important.

Dr. Throop: John, did you want to speak to this at all or should I move on to the next?

Dr. Peterson: Well, no, just briefly but I quite agree with that and there's a really dynamic film-making revival around the Pacific Islands now by Pacific Islanders. They have film festivals in Hawaii and Guam and so forth and that speaks to that, that people are really, really adept with these technologies and these storytelling modes in modern technology. I completely agree with it, um.

Dr. Throop: Um, let me move on to another question which Tara had brought up earlier but, um, just to get everyone to reflect on it a bit, um, in their own work. Um, so thinking about how state or inter�international regimes have gone about renaming and recasting the landscape, um, with names that aren't indigenous to it, um, can you reflect a little bit about how the communities themselves respond to this? Um, what kind of orientations they have to, um, ways of thinking about land property and relations to that, that are, that are coming from an elsewhere, an institution or a nation that's a foreign one, um, even if it was in the past a colonial, uh, institution in the past?

Dr. Kabutaulaka: I�ll just very quickly tell two examples so and, uh, while that's a brilliant idea, it's more complicated than we sometimes think. Uh, and the first example is the Cook Islands. So there is an ongoing discussion in the Cook Islands to rename the country and get rid of Captain Cook from their story and give it a name from within, from the local name. The problem is which local name are we going to give to the country? Uh, is it going to be Rarotonga? If it is Rarotonga, then people in the Outer Islands of the Cook Islands do not agree because they are not part of Rarotonga. So there's that competition going on, uh, and discussion. I�m sure our friends from there will one day resolve that issue but as of now, not yet. And the second is there is a proposal in the Solomon Islands, uh, to re�to re-inscribe the local names for places within the capital city on Honiara so, you know, because we are a former British colony, a lot of the names for Honiara are connected to the British monarch. We have Prince Philip Road, uh, and those kinds of things. and so they're talking about re-inscribing the old names onto these places but those names belong to people from Guadalcanal where Honiara is located. But Honiara is no longer just a Guadalcanal place, it is the capital city with people from all over the country, uh, and so are we trying to reclaim it as a Guadalcanal place? Or how do we include these other folks from the many islands of the Solomons who now call Honiara home? And so there are those kinds of complications, uh, but the discussions are taking place and I think that's, uh, that's the beauty of it, is having that discussion.

Beno: Yeah, I'm very happy to hear that. Well, I think this was last year. Um, not just because Jacob Roggeveen, this Dutch, arrived to this remote Polynesian island on an Easter Sunday and the name of Easter Island is the right name for the, for the island, right? Um and I don't know if was it last year, the year before they, they already filed, the President already signed it and filed it to the Congress and to change the official name from Easter Island to Rapa Nui which is the, well it's used for the three things. I mean, I'm Rapa Nui, I speak it, Rapa Nui, and I'm from Rapa Nui, right. There's no difficulty and everybody will agree there that, that that's the right name. Um, and I think it's a huge impact to the community to be able to feel that, uh, power of being called with the right name. In Spanish, um, uh, if I'm from Isla de Pascua, when I went to the mainland to study, they call me, �Ah, you are a pasquense.� And, and I got into university, I got into so many fights because, um, they called me pasquense They're not, they didn't call me Rapa Nui, right. And, and when you're from Rapa Nui, that feeling of being from that island, um, even though I carry a Chilean passport, it's like asking anybody, anybody from Barcelona if they're Spanish or if they're from Pais Vasco. Uh, so I'm very happy for that, this is the case I hope that the Congress do everything that they have to do because I would love to see a map with the name Rapa Nui instead of Easter Island on my wall.

Dr. Kabutaulaka: Uh, just, just to add on to that. So in Aotearoa, New Zealand, you will notice that a lot of places have two names. So that's an, and (inaudible) they have a local Maori name as well as the given English name and to a certain extent, that is an acknowledgement of the different layers of history that exist, uh, an acknowledgement that yes, there are Maori names but there are also other names as well. And that discussion came up in our discussions about renaming Honiara. That is it possible to have multiple names for the same place?

Dr. Throop: It's, it's such a, yeah, it really is a complicated discussion.

Beno: Sorry�

Dr. Throop: Yeah, go ahead, Beno.

Beno: Sorry, Jason. The other thing that I want to see now that, that was said about Aotearoa is that every time I travel to any of the Pacific Islands, uh, and they ask me where you're from. If I say Rapa Nui- �Oh, Rapa Nui! You're from Rapa Nui, oh!�- like everywhere in Aotearoa or in any island of Hawaii and Tahiti and everywhere. But if you travel to the other side, if you say Rapa Nui, it's like �Where is that?�, right, and if I, sometimes, I have been in the States and �Easter, Easter Island? I thought everybody died there! I mean, they cut all the trees and then�� right. So it's a, if you go this way, you say, �Rapa Nui�, if you go this way you say �Easter Island.� �Oh, the statues, the heads! Yeah, I saw the movie on the museum�� and stuff.

Dr. Throop: Okay, I�m getting notifications, um, that we got about 15 minutes before we do a question and answer and we have another whole section to talk about and some very interesting stuff in it. Um, so now block four, we're going to just talk about overall landscapes. Let me see if I can synthesize a few things here um� Okay, um, okay so I think, I think we can make a connection, uh, between the discussion we've been having about naming and place-making and, um, local and foreign institutions and how they, how they kind of wrestle with, um, how to think landscape and place and belonging and property and things like that. Um, so with the theme of engagement in the background, um, can you say a little bit about, um, both- how local perspectives on the landscape and relations to it and, I mean I always hesitate to use a word like ownership, um, because it's very complicated, many places in the Pacific, what you could mean by ownership, um, about ownership so how does that affect, um, your research activity you know

the kinds of where you can go, where you can't go, the questions you can ask, you can't ask? Um, and uh, and then allied with that, you know, how do you think your own research may have, um, helped, uh, folks in the community to realize their own efforts to try to regain control and management of their land if it's been displaced or taken away by other institutions or other nations? Britton?

Dr. Shepardson: Yeah, I would say, um, you know, I have two kind of very different answers to those two questions. Um, what I�ve seen on Easter Island pretty consistently for the last 20 years I've tried to conduct work there, is that it has become more and more and more complicated, um, to get any sort of formal permission to, um, conduct even non-invasive research with local students for the sake of education, really, rather than research. Um, and it's, and I would say especially in the last five years, it's almost- and Beno might know more about this than I do- but I feel like there has been this furious rush to fence in every parcel across the island as it is repatriated to families. Whereas most of the landscape used to be not that- many people wanted to walk around as much as I did, but I could walk in any direction as long as I wanted without seeing a fence and now, um, just like I said, in the last five to ten years, this has become a hot issue of the ownership of these parcelas. Um, and for me, it's really an unfortunate one because I can no longer lead all the excursions for local students, um, but two, because it really has changed the landscape, um, you know, the viewscape in any particular area to see barbed wire fences in every direction. Um, in terms of how my work, uh, had a, an impact on any of this, I suspect it had very little but I will tell you, um, about 15 years ago, I happened to conduct a geospatial analysis of statues that for a very long time, inland statues were assumed to have been abandoned in transport as part of this purported catastrophic collapse in prehistoric Rapa Nui. I was actually able to show through statistical analyses that many, if not all of these inland statue locations lined up quite nicely with territorial boundaries associated with families or socio-political divisions in the historic period. And as soon as I presented some of that work in the local museum, I will tell you that I had like two or three invitations from families to attend barbecues, um, in the next few days so they could get kind of the inside scoop on which land belonged to them. And I had to quickly, you know, step back �No, no, no, no, no! I don't even trust my research that far and it, certainly, is gonna take a lot more time.� Um, but it made me realize just how ready some of these families are to jump on an opportunity to claim land, um, and assert their rights to it and these days, to fence it in as property. So uh, I�ve definitely had personal experiences with it but, um, I don't know if these again are our generalities or not.

Dr. Throop: I�ll just say, um, briefly in my experience in Yap. Um, I mean it's, the granularity is important, you know. I mean, I think one thing Yap doesn't, I mean there's only one place that has a non-local name and that's Colonia but, uh, they also call it Donguch, you know, the small islands that were there before they filled it in. So there's not a lot of, um, tension in terms of how you name places but, um, knowing the name of a place and not like a village but let's say an estate that is about having access to it and having ownership too. So you don't, so we, I was involved in some GPS mapping and things like that and they quickly became very contentious and also, um, once names were shared, there was definitely an agreement that these, that this document should not go anywhere. It's not gonna be put on any, any map, uh, for general consumption with the other village, you know within the community so it was guarded pretty, pretty quickly. Um, and so I don't know if that helped or hindered or what it did but it was, could definitely, yeah.

Dr. Kabutaulaka: Yeah, if uh, I think there's a, there's a bigger issue at stake is, you know, the telling of stories or remembering pasts, uh, and the emergence of property rights particularly property rights as understood in today's context. Uh, and one of the things with having property rights is clearly defined entities that could be bought and sold and titles which can be transferred. Uh, in the past these, things are negotiable as I mentioned earlier on because stories are dynamic

and they change. But nowadays, when you write it down and register it and put it in the registration, it becomes a property of a particular individual or particular family. So I just want to throw that in but I wanted to raise, uh, two other issues. The first is that, you know, in some Pacific Island places, it's difficult to tell the stories onto landscapes because the landscapes have been taken elsewhere and I'm thinking of two places in particular- Banaba in what is today Kiribati and Nauru and so the stories of the landscapes of these two places are now in Aotearoa in the farms of New Zealanders or in Australia because they were taken as phosphate and sprinkled onto these places. And so I, if you, if you think about it another way, you know, Banabans could say that because our stories are written onto the farms of New Zealand and Australia we therefore have claimed over those places as well. Don't tell them that they might start doing it but so it's difficult to tell the stories when your landscape is taken away and sprinkled elsewhere in the world or when your people- like in the case of Banaba- many of our listeners will probably know that they were taken out of Banaba and put on Rabi Island in Fiji. And so it is about recreating their stories in a different place and so Banabans if you look at Katerina Teaiwa�s work, uh, on Banaban history, her book Consuming Banaba talks about how Banaba is relocated in different ways but also the reconstruction of Banaban culture on Fijian landscape, uh, and also trying to define themselves as different from Kiribati so that's the first thing. The second point is that stories on landscape are also difficult to tell when your islands disappear and so the issue of climate change and then what happens, uh, in these instances and that's not something that's happening or will happen in the future in a lot of Pacific Island places. It's something that's happening now and so the issue of stories on landscapes and disappearing landscapes.

Dr. Throop: So let�s�

Beno: I Just�Sorry Jason, I just, I just wanted to quickly add to that the, as Tara was saying before, it's not just also landscape, it's also seascape. Um, when traveling Rapa Nui, I can tell you where you should go to fish- there, if my sea is this side, right. So, territorial, territorial boundaries can be in land but it can also be in the ocean, yeah. So I just wanted to throw it in because it's very important obviously because we're Polynesians, right. So the ocean is just an extension of land.

Dr. Throop: Yeah, this is true and then you have to have fish traps that are, I mean those are those are owned, uh, to use that term loosely. Um, so I want, because we do, we're gonna have some questions, uh, that will be coming up soon. Um, I wanted to get to, um, a question and I think both that you know climate change, uh, transformations and you know the idea that we're gonna have, are having already uh climate migration. So you know, uh, in the Yap, uh, many people from the outer islands have, you know, moved to Yap proper, um, and some of that is related to directly to climate change but it'll be increasingly so. So thinking about the kind of circulation of peoples within the Pacific, um, as land disappears, it becomes differentially viable, you know, salt water getting into the tarot patches or what have you. And so thinking about that, on the one hand, and then also what we've seen over the last decade that's kind of increasing move and shift in kind of regional power, um, with China taking this very, um, strong, um, uh, hold, uh, on many communities, sometimes to the guise of tourism. Uh, so in the Yapese case it was about, um, trying to transform the island into the biggest, uh, tourist destination in the western, you know, Micronesia, um, and, um, and the kinds of ways that people are having to hold on to land or there's giving it up with leases, these 99-year leases. So thinking about these as two major, um, processes that people are facing now, that are going to directly affect people's relationship to the landscape and the kind of work that we're doing, um you could take either one or some combination but I think we could, we could kind of close off our group discussion that way before we turn to the questions.

Dr. Peterson: Um, Jason, the Chinese strategy for the region is obvious and they've been very effective historically at, uh, at spreading China and Chinese families and so forth all around the globe but with the family actually providing funds for young, for children and young adults to go out and start businesses and then that it's a, it's a part of the family business. Uh, the government has a program like this now, I understand, for family, for young people that want to go say start a grocery or another business in Micronesia or other places that the Chinese want to spread their influence and their, uh�Actually the loans are after a certain period of time the people stay in the enterprise. So they have a very effective means of doing this but then also, uh, as in terms of their brokering these things on a very, uh, on the scale of ownership and mortgage capitalism too if you will, uh, as you know a lot of times loans that are defaulted on Chinese end up taking properties, uh. They're very much involved in the Philippines now. I noticed some questions from Grace Barreto Tersoro on the question line, uh, she's probably seen this too where in rural areas that reservoirs are being built or oil exploration is being done, the Chinese have taken over large blocks of land and pretty much excluding even locals from going into them. So it's on many fronts this, the Chinese influence is more and more pervasive in the region.

Dr. Kabutaulaka: Very, very quickly, uh, Jason on the issue of tourism land leases. So you probably know that in Vanuatu, foreigners cannot own land and that's written into the Constitution at the time of independence. But foreigners can lease land and that's become problematic, uh, and on Efate in particular, the island where Port Vila is located, a lot of Efate is leased out. Uh, the Chinese actually are latecomers. It's the Australians, uh, who were there before that. And so what it's down on Efate is that it's increased, um, the�It increased land prices, it increased real estate prices in those places but also because of the length of the number of years of the lease, it means that it's virtually alienated because it's leased for, you know, 75 to 99 years and that's beyond the lifetime of most of our folks. Uh, and then the other complication is that when the lease is over, in order for land to be returned to the, what we call customary land owners, they will have to pay for the development that was done to the land. Uh, and so if you build a five-star hotel on a piece of land and then at the end of the lease say to landowners- �We're really sorry but you have to pay for the five-star hotel,� it's not going to happen. Uh, and so that's a big issue. On the issue, on the issue of of climate change and relocation, that's a major issue and I know it's happening throughout the Pacific Islands. Uh, and at the moment, a lot of the migration I think is internal- moving people from the other islands of Yap, for instance, uh, to the bigger islands or from, you know, from the outer islands of Kiribati to Tarawa which is not bigger than the other islands or Kiribati or from the outer islands of the Solomons to places like Guadalcanal and the same in other parts of the Pacific Islands. And again, central to the relocation and this internal migration is the issue of land, access to land, land that in a lot of these places, doesn't belong to the state. A lot of the land is customary owned and so the state can't just come in and say, we'll take this piece of land and we'll relocate people from this place to here. So it creates a whole lot of complicated discussions about relocations.

Dr. Throop: Okay, I was going to say that uh, Tara, it's, that's the exact same situation in Yap. I mean, it's, it's really the same lease structure and plan and, um, and the other difficulty is that, you know, people do not own in the, in Yapese communities, it's not that people own big patches of land. It's, you know, multiple little patches owned by different clans and lineages and over generation so who's signing and who has authority to sign, and what happens to others who also have claims in that land is very, very complicated and it's actually hard to know, you know, how this will, will hold up, um, and I really hope there's ways, um, in the various court cases that will no doubt emerge, um, that local views of this will be, will be upheld and that the Chinese view of what property is and�

Dr. Kabutaulaka: Um�

Dr. Throop: (Inaudible) It's hard to say. Um, I want to shift�

Dr. Kabutaulaka: If I may very quickly, uh, Jason on the issue of land�So what we're talking about a lot of times is rights to land and there are different kinds of rights- right of ownership, right of access, right to use land, and right to dispose off land, meaning to pass the title onto other people and in a lot of traditional Pacific Island societies or a lot of Pacific Island societies, traditional or whatever, is that all these rights intersect and overlap and exist at the same time and they are negotiated and so forth. What the lease process and the land registration process have done is they've taken away this complicated relationship between the different rights and privileged the right of ownership. Uh, and so when somebody, somebody signs the lease with a Chinese company or an Australian company, over time that person who is supposed to act on behalf of his or her land-owning group becomes the sole owner because of the privileging of the right of ownership.

Dr. Throop: Okay, yeah, um, it's very messy, complicated. Um, uh, let's, uh, shift to the questions because we got about, um, 15 minutes left and it'd be great to have some of the audience questions, uh, brought in. Um, uh, so I'll start with, uh, this question. Um, somebody's asking, uh, they're curious, um, what is the ratio of local Pacific Island archaeologists with international scholars? So what, how in the places where you work, um, what is this relationship between outside scholars and indigenous scholars and, um, when power is discussed in storytelling, how do local communities or groups react to stories that they do not agree with, um, from either, you know, local scholars or international scholars?

John, do you want to say something, or?

Dr. Peterson: Sure. Well, um, in the Philippines, of course, there's a lot more local archaeologists and training programs- the archaeological studies program of UP Diliman and other places. Others are starting up and so the ratio of foreign scholars to Philippine scholars is evening out quite a bit. But in places like Pohnpei and Yap, there are people in the Historic Preservation Office, uh, they may have a master's degree, rarely but occasionally maybe someone would have gone on for a PhD. Unfortunately, when they get a PhD, they get recruited off island which is really a loss to the islands but even so, there are many, many, many more archaeologists from Australia and the States, uh, flocking to the islands. Uh, reminds me of the old Gary Larson cartoon with the natives in the hut grabbing their TV and running to hide saying, �The anthropologists are coming! The anthropologists are coming!� There are many, many more I would, I'd hesitate to say a number but, uh, one to, one to, uh maybe one to ten maybe even, maybe even worse than that. Uh, but that, that may change over time as more and more people go, uh, out to get graduate degrees and these graduate degrees cater to the to the islanders like University of Hawaii Manoa has an Anthropology Department with Micronesians recruited into it. Now with Buboy at UCLA, there may be more recruitment, people from the Philippines and from, uh, Micronesia and so forth so that that seems to be changing a bit over what it was a few years ago.

Dr. Throop: Tara, did you have a point, uh, I might have cut you off as, as you were reaching for�

Dr. Kabutaulaka: No, I was, I was going to suggest that John and Britton are probably the ones most qualified to answer those questions.

Dr. Shepardson: Yeah, I mean, I can't give you exact numbers either and you know, it depends. Some of the most established, uh, indigenous archaeologists on Easter Island are not by credential but rather by praxis, you know, decades and decades of both field and administrative,

um, experience and so, I think, there's, you know, at least three I can think of off the top my head that would fall into that category in terms of credentialed archaeologists having completed some equivalent of grad school or master's degree essentially. Obviously in South America, because that opportunity doesn't exist yet on Easter Island, um, I think I know of two at this point, uh, on Easter Island. Uh, and that's in comparison to, I would say, there's got to be, any given year, at least, um, a dozen foreign archaeologists that set foot on Easter Island to conduct research and probably, um, twice that number in terms of their graduate proteges, um, to give some idea of the relationship there. I will say, however, it's, um, you know, if we talk about archaeologists doing research archaeology rather than devoted to policy conservation, administrative work with cultural resources, um, neither of those relatively young and credentialed indigenous archaeologists are involved in research archaeology, for the most part. They have government positions and, and so in that case, it's, there's a, even a much larger differential in terms of the kind of work that's going on.

Dr. Throop: Okay, um here's a question. It seems like a difficult one to answer but I�ll, I�ll put it out there. It says, um, there's an issue of Filipinos in the US, um, having difficulty in sorting and sort of categorizing themselves since they're being classified as Pacific Islander instead of Asian. Um, what's your opinion on this and can anyone answer? Thank you.

Dr. Kabutaulaka: That's a, that's a difficult one and I think I�ll go back to what we were talking about earlier on. Even the term Pacific is something that's given to us and people have used these terms, taken it and used it for different purposes- in some cases, political. So when Pacific Islanders say the Pacific, a particular place comes into mind, uh, and it goes as far as West Papua, for instance, and borders Indonesia and that's a very political definition which again is connected to colonial history as well- the establishment of regional organizations especially intergovernmental regional organizations that include certain places and exclude others. Uh, but you know, I think that it's again, it's up to people to define where the Pacific ends so or begins and, uh, it's a difficult one and I know that, you know, Filipinos, not just Filipinos but Indonesians and others often feel either included or excluded from that definition and if that's the category that the US government or whoever is using, it's interesting to see what they are, what's behind those definitions. I�m not sure that answers anything but, yeah.

Dr. Peterson: Not to be cynical but this has some repercussions for the minority Islanders or minority status of the individual and programs. So, like University of Hawaii, University of Guam where I was working as an administrator, we liked the fact that Filipinos were counted as Pacific Islanders because it increased our standing on minority, as a minority institution. And that helps the individuals as well but as far as identities are concerned, there would be some, possibly be some conflicts there, so it can work either way.

Beno: Yeah, um, and on the other hand, for example, for me, that I consider myself a Pacific Islander. A while ago, I was trying to look for a scholarship to go to, get a visa to go to Aotearoa in New Zealand, right, and there was actually one for Pacific Islanders. And when I went to look for Easter Island or Rapa Nui as a Pacific Island, um, I was considered South American because Easter Island is in Polynesia but it belongs to Chile which is in South America, right. And that's when I got, I don't know if it answers anything but it also happens in the other way where maybe that's why Britton says, like maybe just one single archaeologist that works in a government position in Easter Island but if we would have more, um, opportunities for scholarships in Hawaii or in Aotearoa by being considered Pacific Islander as Polynesians, I mean it will be a huge opportunity for us, for our community.

Dr. Throop: Okay, here's, here's another question. Um, some of the comments and insights from the panelists point to power dynamics of capitalist forces. For example, what products are promoted and sold to the communities there and the tourism industry being over-represented. So my quick question is, are there any of the pan�are any of the panelists aware of emerging locally-driven, diverse and sustainable micro-economies that can, perhaps, one day, supplant tourism?

Dr. Kabutaulaka: So if I may very quickly- and that's something that's been, uh, talked about since Covid-19 started. So there's a huuuge discussion going on in the Pacific and among Pacific Islanders and many different Zoom communities. And the discussion centers largely around the issue of alternative approaches to development for Pacific Island places and people because although Covid-19 as a health issue hasn't hit the Pacific in the way that it has other places, it's affected Pacific Island economies very badly especially the countries that are dependent on tourism like Fiji, Palau, Vanuatu and so forth. Uh, and because of an economy that's dependent on people coming in, who no longer come as a result of Covid-19, and so there's an ongoing discussion that most of which is not spearheaded by government. It's communities, groups, uh, churches, there's one, by the Pacific Islands Council of Churches, for instance, that resulted in the publication of a book called �From the Deep�. Uh, it�s available online, uh, and you can, you know you can get it for free. Um, so there's a lot of discussion on what kind of development approach is affordable and viable for Pacific Island places. I�ve been part of some of that discussion. I must say that I don't think we have found the answer, uh, as yet, but that discussion is continuing and, you know, the question is, I think, valid and important, uh, to that discussion.

Dr. Peterson: There, there's some huge opportunities in aquaculture and we were exploring some grants, for example, for, uh, fish, fish farming of MOGI (Mobil Oil Guam Incorporated), like big pens out of the sea. A lot of problems have to be resolved and solved but I think there's a lot of potential for that, the fisheries and that, there's a whole other complicated issue about who, who the fishery, the pelagic fish are, at least to and so forth but as far as being able to operate both, uh, local, uh, lagoonal systems like some people in Palau are starting or maybe ocean penning like was being proposed in the Marshall islands in Pogba, there's some huge opportunities there, really, uh, could be explored.

Dr. Throop: I�ll just gonna say quickly, with Micronesia, I mean, the looming end of the Compact of Free Association for the Federated States of Micronesia 2023 is a huge issue, um, and then so where you get to go for re�, you know, those kinds of resources to start up? These, um, alternates are becoming increasingly a problem, but we'll see what happens.

Dr. Kabutaulaka: I doubt it will end, uh, Jason. I think they are; they're already negotiating for the continuing of the compact. Uh, if the Chinese keep coming, the compact will keep going.

Dr. Throop: I, yeah, I agree.

Beno, did you wanna?

Beno: Yeah, I think, obviously, because I work in tourism industry, we've been in so many, um, conversations that, um, since we depend on travelers, my island, the whole economy of my island, it also depends on tourism. Uh, here in our company, um, we've been discussing so much about what's the new shift that the customer or the traveler, uh, it, it's looking and that make us think of, um, what are the really, uh, stakeholders for this. We, we've been saying that we have a model so fragile, there's something, like this with the Covid. Uh, it's been closed in so many places I mean, if companies are all, they're not closed totally or they're declaring bankruptcy, um, it's huge and that's it's been probably, um, helping us to our idea of how we develop, uh, the type of travel

that we want. With Covid, it just enhanced the point of view of, how do you look, of your stakeholders and when you look at the society, I mean we need to look into the environment, uh, time might change and how it's an impact. I cannot see anybody traveling soon to any of those, probably, resorts in Cancun with, I don't know, 500 rooms and stuff like that. I mean that kind of tourism, it's, it will be very difficult and what we do, it's, we build lodges with 20 rooms. Uh, we build lodges and the first department that, it's in the, in the property is the biology department where the biologists set up, uh, the place and they just started getting agreed and started doing all the projects and the success of some of our properties is that we've been discovering new species for science. I mean it's a huge, uh, reward for what we do and having just 20 rooms for people to come and to go and explore and see these places, uh, it just helps us to do the research that we're doing and to do and affect all the community, the environment around it. So, I think it's just a huge, also, opportunity of seeing again the way of how you travel and how aware are you as a club traveler, the impact that you're causing to the environment. Um, so I don't know with very fragile industry right now, and it's super sad, obviously, but at the same time so we just see this as a huge opportunity to keep doing what we're doing in the way that we, we're trying to do it the best.

Dr. Throop: All right! So that brings us to nine o'clock and I just want to thank each and every one of the panelists for this discussion. Uh, I just learned so much and, uh, I just really appreciate you taking the time and your presence and your wisdom and, uh, and so thank you so much for that and I�ll cede the Zoom floor to my good friend, Stephen.

Dr. Acabado: Thank you, everyone! So, I just wish we had more time but, um, I think we've reached the end of the panel. Um, so I, again, thank you for these enlightening discussions, there's still a lot of things to do in terms of engaging the communities that you work with. Um, but we have four more panels that will talk about how they engage the communities that they work with. So, um next week, we'll have indigenous issues which Justin Donovan is, uh, moderating. Um, and so we invite you to attend, um, next week's uh panel again. Maddie?

Maddie: Yes, thank you to our moderator and all of our panelists for participating in our sixth panel of the webinar series. Like Dr. Acabado said, we would like to promote our seventh panel which is happening same time, same place next week on the topic of indigeneity, identity, and empowerment so we'll have, like he said, Justin Donovan will be our moderator and our panelists will feature a variety of archaeologists, anthropologists, and community members to really get talking about, um, even to further our conversation on these really important topics. If you have been following along for this entire webinar, we invite you to click the link for our survey. Uh, if you fill out the survey, you can give us some feedback on, um, give us some feedback on our event- we're continuously improving based on your engagement and you can also receive an e-certificate for your participation. Um, we're always happy to have you here, to have your comments, to have your questions, and so we really appreciate any bit that you can, you know, provide to us to let us know how you're enjoying, uh, these webinars that we've been putting on. And I think that pretty much wraps up our webinar today. Um, anything else, Dr. Acabado?

Nope, so we'll see you next week at panel 7.

Dr. Acabado: Salamat, mahalo, kammagar.

Beno: Iorana.

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