INDG222 [Special Topics]: Indigenous Geographies of Peace and War in the Pacific

Daniel Iwama

This undergraduate course will establish a basic understanding of the modern structures and logics of militarism and the challenges posed to them by Indigenous peoples across the Pacific broadly defined. We will focus on Indigenous perspectives from heavily militarized and archipelagic regions including Guåhan, Hawai’i, and Okinawa among others. We will also engage literatures concerning topics like land and territory which will prepare students to understand and participate in the pertinent geographical and political debates. 

We will depart from frameworks of smallness, distance, and dislocation, which typically animate non-Indigenous discourses concerning Indigenous geographies. Instead, we will be attentive to the world-making activities, geographic interconnections and relationalities at play in the work under review. What is the state of military occupation in and across the Pacific today? What are the roles of protest, blockades and contentious politics broadly defined as they relate to land-based goals that Indigenous peoples of the Pacific pursue? What are the legal frameworks limiting the possibilities of decolonization and land repossession at play? Through class materials, discussion, and a final project we will discuss tentative answers to each of these questions. Students will also have an ability to develop their academic writing, as we will practice thesis development in two separate analytical assignments. 

Pre-work [read prior to Class 1]: 1. Hau’ofa, E. (1994). Our Sea of Islands. The Contemporary Pacific, 6(1), 148–161.

Module 1: People and Place

Archipelagic connectivity; Colonial dislocation; World-making and everyday life 

Module 2: Indigeneity & Decolonization: Views from the Pacific

Poetics of decolonization; Indigenous resurgence; Aesthetics; Ecological grief; Storytelling as resistance 

Module 3: Land

Genealogical landscapes; Relational ontologies; Resource extraction; Epistemologies of place 

Module 4: Territory

Territoriality and sovereignty; Stories; Militarized displacement; Nation-building; Imperial spatiality 

Module 5: Structures of Militarism

The military base; "Operational unilateralism"; Military infrastructures; Power projection; Militarism as occupation 

Module 6: "Outposts of Empire"

Gendered impacts; Feminist resistance; Anti-base activism; Global networks of anti-imperialism

Module 7: Defense & Toxification 1

Environmental violence; Toxic legacies; PFOS/PFAS; Water sovereignty; Hidden militarized ecologies 

Module 8: Defense & Toxification 2

Environmental racism; Waste geographies; Toxic landscapes; Remediation case studies

Module 9: Resistance 1: Blockades

The blockade; Oceanic solidarity; Anti-militarism; Sacred geographies 

Module 10: Resistance 2: "Detouring" Tourism

Tourism; "De-touring"; Indigenous cartographies; Heritage; Resistance through place-making

Module 11: Land (Re)leases

Imperial land tenure; Base leasing regimes; Colonial property logics; Usufruct and dispossession