Over twenty years ago, at a keynote address for the Center for Pacific Islands Studies, Konai Helu Thaman argued the importance of recognizing and including the perspectives, knowledge, and worldviews of indigenous peoples of Oceania in higher education. Just a few years prior, Linda Tuhiwai Smith provided a vocabulary to articulate the many insidious impacts of histories of colonialism in the Pacific not only on the lived experience of communities but also on the systems of research and knowledge-building created in service of colonial projects. Their work was a clear call for decolonizing research, the classroom, and the academic project more widely, and for us to figure out how to make them work for our communities.

This groundswell of decolonial work has reshaped political and economic imaginaries, inspired projects of reclamation and resurgence, and materialized curricular change. In its wake, we can ask: How do power, place, politics, and proximity shape how we teach the Pacific? What insights might be drawn from program-building successes and failures? How do we navigate connections, tensions, and even fractures in this shared project? Finally, given the contemporary moment, how much have these innovations changed the academy and what threat do they pose? Drawing on two current projects that together help to reflect on the shifting grounds of Pacific studies, this talk considers how the foundational work of the past shapes our present and how it might help us meet our futures. 

Lisa Uperesa is an interdisciplinary Pacific scholar whose teaching and research interests include movement and mobility in the Pacific and beyond; sport, gender, and community; colonialism and U.S. empire; and deep and contemporary Indigenous knowledges and embodied practices. She is Associate Professor and Morgan and Helen Chu Chair in Asian American Studies at UCLA.  Lisa also serves as the interim faculty lead supporting the Native American and Pacific Islander Bruins Rising Initiative. She is the author of the award-winning book Gridiron Capital: How American Football Became a Samoan Game (Duke University Press, 2022).