From where we stand: Pacific oral research

Abstract

It is a rare opportunity for three Pacific Indigenous scholars to gather and discuss Pacific Indigenous oral research methodologies at length. Often, we are weighed down by the bureaucracy of our institutions or working on projects to drive social change. The opportunity for the three of us to gather and engage in a talanoa about how it is that we as Pacific Indigenous academics create and participate in opportunities for oral Pacific Indigenous research was a welcome one. Our talanoa conversations are captured and woven throughout this article. What follows below is a written form of this talanoa—a form that draws on what we shared in our in-person (face-to-face) online talanoa and through our writing up of it for this article.

Introduction

Oral methodologies are a key practice in Indigenous research methods (Archibald, 2008; Chilisa, 2019; Kovach, 2021). Through an exploration of how it is that we as Pacific researchers conduct oral research, there is a strengthening of relationships. Like all rich talanoa – discussed in detail further in the text – the stories that were woven by this exercise created patterns adjacent to the initial purpose of gathering, and there is little to be found in this article about how we do research. Instead, this article explores a slightly deeper, more nuanced approach to how we do research; this is not a tickbox paper or an attempt to produce a step-by-step guide that standardised research practices and institutions crave (Naepi et al., 2017). Instead, this article offers researchers some provocations to consider before engaging in oral Pacific research.

Oralities are the thoughts and expressions communicated verbally by people or groups of people in a society. Pacific Indigenous orality is grounded in relational understanding and appreciation, associated with specific oral traditions, histories, mythologies and creation stories which intimately and intricately tie human subjectivities to place, material and spiritual worlds (Sanga et al., 2021). Pacific Indigenous orality has various aspects, often linked to songs, chants, stories and poetry. Indigenous knowledge and practices are inherently embedded in and through these songs, chants, stories and poetry, through methods used to “create, produce, perform, transform, transmit/diffuse, and safeguard Indigenous knowledge” (Nfah-Abbenyi, 2011, p. 3). Tok stori, bwebwenato, yarning, and talanoa are some examples of oral methods used by Solomon Islanders, Marshallese, Aboriginals, and other groups of Pacific Indigenous peoples in their oral research. Although Pacific Indigenous oralities are deeper, wider and more diverse than the scope of this academic paper, we disclose here that the specific Pacific Indigenous oralities we expressly unfold in this article are predominantly from Fijian, Tongan and Samoan worldviews.

Central to the provocations we seek to raise is a conception of land as kin; the idea that land is us, that we are land, and that our origins, genealogies and destinies are intimately intertwined. This conception is evidenced in Indigenous Polynesian languages. For example, the concept of fonua as land can also refer to the afterbirth or placenta in Lea Faka-Tonga (Tongan language). The word fanua in Gagana Samoa (Samoan language) is also the word for land and placenta, and palapala and eleele are the words used to describe both a woman’s menstrual blood, and earth or dirt (Tui Atua, 2018c). In this sense, land as fonua, fanua or vanua is conceived as something that gives and connects life. The land is also the place upon which we return after death. Fonualoto in Tongan means tomb or grave site. In Fijian epistemologies, the vanua is the place from which all knowledge comes (Nabobo-Baba, 2008). You cannot engage in a quest for knowledge without the inclusion of the vanua. Similarly, the fonua in Tongan epistemologies symbolises the intimate connections between the animate and inanimate and the living and non-living. And, in Samoan Indigenous oral histories, Pulotu is the resting place of human souls, the place we journey to upon death, the interface between the physical and spiritual realms and a place known throughout all of Polynesia (Tui Atua, 2018b).

As researchers of Fijian, Tongan and Samoan ancestries and ethnicities, our Indigenous knowledge bases call for recognition that land is kin and that whenever we “talk story” or do oral research about things Pacific, Indigenous or Fijian, Samoan or Tongan in Aotearoa New Zealand, we remember these links. Even when we travel and stay upon the land of others, our languages, rituals and protocols travel with us; they remind us of our connections to place and to each other.

From a worlded Indigenous perspective, the interconnections between entities in the world are defined and understood beyond the realm of social interactions or relations. They require moving understanding into the “beyond,” into what Māori philosopher Carl Mika (2017) describes as the co-existence of the human and more-than-human world, and into the purpose of an “Indigenous philosophy of worldedness,” an appreciation of “the constitution of the self by the world and vice versa” (p. 34). Through our Pacific Indigenous languages and lenses, we see metaphysical, genealogical, interdependent connections between peoples, selves and their natural and spiritual worlds, all of which are inextricably linked and consequential. It is from this interdependent, worlded, Aotearoa-based Pacific conception of place, land, and relational positioning that we talanoa in this article, that we come together, at this time, in this space, to share, speak and story our thoughts and experiences of Pacific Indigenous oral research in Aotearoa New Zealand.

We therefore hold this talanoa on the land of our Pacific cousins, the tangata whenua (Indigenous Māori peoples) of Aotearoa New Zealand (Te Punga Somerville, 2012). As Pacific Indigenous researchers, we are of the wider Te Moana nui a Kiwa and Vei-mua-na (Pacific Ocean and its Pacific Islands) but residing in Aotearoa, and we come into this conversation from different lands, with different cultural and historical lenses.

My fonua or placenta is in the village of Alofi, the capital of Niue. My parents however, ground their connections to Tonga. Now, I live with my wife and son in Te Atatu, located in the west of Tāmaki Makaurau (Auckland City). Talanoa on this whenua or fonua hasn’t brought me any closer to securing a specific identity or belonging. I’m actually okay with this. My fluid identities cause me to appreciate places, relying on my understanding of vā-relations to guide and strengthen me wherever I am.

My forebears are proud Samoans. My pute (umbilical cord) was planted (I’m told) in the kitchen area of my mother’s family land, in her village of Saoluafata in Samoa. Her father tells us of his ancestors in Niuatoputapu in Tonga, and this is kept alive today because he named our Aunt “Niua” and because my Aunts tell us stories. My parents brought my siblings and I to Aotearoa New Zealand in the early 1970s in search of opportunities to improve our life chances. I too live in Tāmaki Makaurau but I yearn for the day I can return home.

My engagement with talanoa and my engagement with Fijian knowledge is formed in Mount Wellington, which is really different to somebody, my cousins or my mum, whose grounding in these huge ontological concepts was at a river side, the Wainamala river, it is how they get passed down and how we learn about these things that changes how we understand them. My daughters’ butona are buried in Mt Wellington under some hibiscus, my mother’s is buried under a young (at the time) coconut tree outside her taitai’s house, and I think I share this to give some context as to how traditions travel with us but shift slightly.

Although it is becoming increasingly common for people to engage in written talanoa in academic articles (Baice et al., 2021; Naepi, 2019; Thomsen et al., 2021), this article seeks to avoid as much as possible the “de-sensitising” effects that “written talanoa” can sometimes engender, where the ability to actively and fully “read” with our sensory capacities can be limited. Instead, we weave words from our oral talanoa and present them as prompts for “sense-sensing” (as opposed to sense-making) in the manner promoted by Ahenakew (2016). In doing this, we implicitly demonstrate a “sense of being,” an ontological approach if you like, that invites readers to feel and imagine through our language, words and their expression and organisation on the written page, a way of talking about orality that seeks not to constrain or define meaning—to make meaning—but instead to recognise and encourage meaning’s sensory capacities and potentialities.

In critiquing the “square-headed Cartesian subject,” Ahenakew (2016) points out that this subject “thinks therefore he is” and has a “relationship with the world [that] is mediated by her or his cognitive repertoire of meanings, rather than by her or his senses” (pp. 334–335). He argues that decoloniality requires more movement “away from sense-making to sense-sensing” (Ahenakew, 2016, pp. 336–337). We encourage you to practise sense-sensing as you read our talanoa of the talanoa method and to unshackle your minds from the urge to do “sense-making” (to bring a cognitive lens) to what we say and instead to allow yourself to see, play and feel the unspoken, unwritten, written within, said within, possibilities of our written words. This can be foreign, confusing and jarring, particularly where or when there is no explanation or previous experience of doing so, but we do this intentionally to open our minds to the ever-present potentialities of reading, like listening, by “sense-sensing.”

[We are] taking the time to do that introductory, laying the ground, laying the spirit, of the conversation, [which] is not often available or taken up.

With this in mind, we hold space now for you (the reader) to reflect, as we do:

On what vanua you read this on?

On whose fonua you stand on now?

On which fanua your ancestors stand on?

On which vanua you seek to return to?

We hold this space for you and ourselves. It is tapu (sacred, spiritual) space; relational and uncertain space; space that invites us to trust ourselves and our senses, others and their senses, and to recognise that we bring with us to our reading and our listening our prior knowledge and skills. And that it is okay not to have the same interpretations or readings, or to know the words or to not feel a connection to them at this time. We encourage “slow reading” and re-reading (Buchanan, 2015). This sensing dimension to knowing is ironically too often left out of our research analyses or not actively played with – without need for clarity of purpose or end goals – when we explore our practices and reasons for doing Pacific Indigenous oral research or writing up Indigenous scholarship.

Vanua/fanua/fonua/whenua: from where do we speak?

Today we, as peoples of Moana nui a Kiwa, consume and make knowledge on land that is often not where our ancestors are. Gegeo (2001) offers an opportunity to consider how our Indigeneity travels with us as Pacific peoples in Aotearoa, and we wish to be clear that we write this as Indigenous Pacific peoples who are part of the transnational diaspora. As Pacific peoples living in transnational diasporic communities, we weave and make knowledge on others’ lands, seeking to make what we say noa (accessible, speakable) in the belief that such knowledge will be of value to our peoples and to the doing of life in general. We examine, engage, critique, question, talanoa about what it means to consume knowledge and do oral research on these lands. Knowing from where we speak is a tough question for many Pacific Indigenous researchers in Aotearoa New Zealand not schooled in their Indigenous languages and protocols. In a constantly changing world, finding that place to stand is always an evolving or fluid exercise, a “work in progress,” and that is okay. Identity politics is always present and challenging, no matter where you live or how old you are.

it is so critical that we recentre our Indigenous world views in ways that are unapologetic, in ways that [recognise that], yes, I might not have perfect [Pacific Indigenous language skills] according to you, you know, which is a basis of my Indigenous world view but I am [Pacific] . . . and so I will begin from this platform and encourage engagement [of those like me] and do my own homework, and think about the importance of critiquing and creating open spaces, so that our concepts and our values can breathe in our worlds and live and flourish in this present moment moving forward

In the diaspora, where we stand is intimately linked to our knowledge of or relationship with our families (nuclear and extended) and their heritages, their genealogical connections to place and people, and their whakapapa/gafa/hohoko for family lineages. It is from these positions, positionalities and standpoints, that our approach to Talanoa gains direction and perspective. In Samoan, this is referred to as tulaga vae (literally “where the feet stand”) (Tui Atua, 2018a), and in Tongan, it is known as tu’ufonua. It is in that tulaga vae space that, for Samoans, one stands and finds maluāpapa (Samoan: shelter, strength). These concepts resonate with the Indigenous Māori terms whakapapa (Māori: genealogy, lineage, connections, especially connections to land as of right) and tūrangawaewae (Māori: “a place to stand on as of right”) (Benton et al., 2013).

tulaga vae, which is similar to the Māori [concept] “tūrangawaewae” . . . and you can hear the Polynesian . . . linguistic [links] coming through tulaga and turanga, and vae and waewae . . . and you can speak to the Tongan and to the Fijian variance of that. But what it [tulaga vae] means is a place to stand, the ground from which you stand . . . and often that concept, the imagery that [it invokes] . . . it is about the importance of groundedness and understanding your connections—your stance is not mediated by shoes, its feet that is bare touching the earth, connecting to our kin, our ancestors.

Finding our connections gives us a place to stand, to speak and talanoa that is right, in balance, harmonious (Māori: tika; Hawaiian: pono; Samoan: agatonu, lagimalie). Our Fijian, Samoan, Tongan and Māori language terms reveal an ancient connection between us. To be right, these connections are to be respected, not exploited for selfish gain. There are multiple migrations of Pacific peoples to Aotearoa; two are of significance to this article. The first is the story of Pacific wayfinders, who intentionally navigated the world’s largest ocean through Fiji, onto Eastern Polynesia and then down to Aotearoa. It is these wayfinders who provide a permanent ancestral link between us as tangata o te moana nui a kiwi and tangata whenua of Aotearoa (Te Punga Somerville, 2012). Our links are not just present in the sounds of how our ancestors named and verbalised land but also in their understandings and treatment of land as us (Ka‘ili, 2017; Tui Atua, 2018a, 2018b).

So, these words [vanua/fanua/fonua/whenua], they carry so much of our frameworks of knowledge, and our, our wisdoms [that have] evolved and it is so important to be able to bring them to the table as we continue to try and navigate the relationship between the past, the present and the future.

In exploring where we stand in relation to the talanoa research method, we explore our relationships to land and to each other. Before we delve into this, let us first explain what we mean by “talanoa.”

Talanoa

One of the more common oral Pacific Indigenous research methods in Aotearoa New Zealand today is the Talanoa. Recalling a call to recognise that our research methods are built on cultural practices (Suaalii-Sauni & Fulu-Aiolupotea, 2014), it is important that we outline talanoa as a cultural practice first. Talanoa as a cultural practice is present within Pacific Island cultures (Naepi, 2019; Prescott, 2008), with each island/community having their own nuances and practices around the sharing of stories while building relationships. For instance, within a Fijian context, there can be formal and instrumental talanoa (veivosaki) and more informal talanoa. The type of talanoa being engaged in can inform what rituals or practices are necessary. Talanoa can differentiate depending on who is involved, and the type of talanoa informs what practices and language are necessary (Farrelly & Nabobo-Baba, 2014).

Talanoa is a versatile and adaptable practice, considerate of time and space and feelings. Although its modes of expression, naming practices, protocols, grammar and communication reflect cultural knowledge, ideas and stories Indigenous to one’s place of origin and ancestry, talanoa is also conducive to new places/spaces in which one travels to or is positioned in for whatever reason (Fa‘avae et al., 2016). If we consider talanoa as a way in which Indigenous Pacific people seek to not only transmit knowledge but also make sense of their subjectivities in relation to others—for example, the animate (perceived as living or sentient, i.e., humans, animals) and the perceived inanimate (perceived lifeless, not living or insentient, i.e., rocks, land, house), then the talanoa’s functions and features in practice are diverse and multiple. What is core to all talanoa research is, however, relationships formed through recognition of a connection or relationship, a vā, between all things, animate or inanimate (Suaalii-Sauni, 2017). Mika (2017) sees this as a deep relational view that is part of an “Indigenous worlded philosophy.” This deep relational understanding of talanoa locates it not only as a method or methodology that enables orality, but orality in its transmission functions that shapes “talanoa becoming” in whenua outside of Indigenous Pacific homelands.

As talanoa practice finds meaning and location in research contexts across the Pacific diaspora, especially among its Polynesian educators and researchers in Aotearoa, Australia and United States, it simultaneously provides these educators and researchers with countermeasures to disrupt and (re)frame the dominant research culture’s (mis)readings of methods and/or methodologies such as the talanoa, and of itself as a dominant homogenising force. Without this disruption and reframing, mainstream Eurocentric oral and narrative methods, acknowledged and privileged in the Euro-Western academy’s university oral research traditions, will continue to sideline, subsume and/or appropriate what they deem as cognitively incomprehensible or comprehensible from methods like the talanoa (Fa‘avae et al., 2022). It is worthy to note though, that, the benefit of naming and locating talanoa as a valued research method emerges from within research contexts in the Pacific Indigenous moana (ocean). This provides a “tulaga vae,” a standpoint or positioning from which to call out colonising research agendas and to have them replaced with research cultures that actively nurtures increasing new or different ideas, conceptions, practices and approaches to research.

Talanoa’s value is evident but not limited to its capacity to ignite mana moana and to mobilise and connect Indigenous Pacific scholars and communities around the world (Fa‘avae et al., 2022). This capacity is, as Linda Tuhiwai Smith has said, critical to building community among Pacific researchers: “Building research community is a big part of building research capacity and research culture . . . It can be conceptualised as simply a group with whom a Pacific researcher can share conversations about their ideas and research activities” (Smith, 2004, pp. 8–9).

The art of talanoa is [what] our orators often are very, very fluent in, and [are] very expressive in the way that they perform talanoa and its linguistic derivatives (i.e., talatalanoa, talanoaga, tālanga, etc). [It] looks very different across different shared spaces . . . [It is through the] shared space, that’s how we contextualize the [different] kinds of talanoa. . . what is shared, what is expressed, what is represented, the words, emotions, all of those are specific to that [shared] context, and shared talanoa.

Fa‘avae et al. (2016) find that the coupling in Tongan of “tala,” meaning “to inform, tell, relate and command, as well as to ask or apply” (also noted in Vaioleti, 2006, p. 23) and “noa,” “of any kind, ordinary, nothing in particular, purely imaginary or void” (Vaioleti, 2006) to form talanoa, was:

I believe, strategic and purposeful. What we often forget is that Indigenous Pacific concepts like talanoa and its languaging have evolved, shaped over time by people across villages, islands, and generations. We also need to consider how such words were framed pre-Christian times and the mutations over time to suit the lives of clans, i.e., kāinga or extended families. Such linguistic contextual socialisation processes can be perceived as the robust testing of ideas/theory, undergoing constant testing/implementation over time. Melenaite Taumoefolau reminds us of these changes. The coupling of tala-noa reminds me of the persistent tension in education and research between theory and practice when one is ignored over the other. Classroom teachers as professionals overemphasise practice, thus neglecting the significance of philosophy and theory in shaping what they do (their practice) in classroom teaching and learning. In a similar way, the same analysis can be applied to “tala-noa.” Some believe that a Tongan researcher can easily employ the talanoa method with other Tongans. Yet, the flaw in that particular theorisation is the assumption that other social identifiers such as to’utangata (age, generation), gender, social class, village affiliations, school affiliations have little impact on whether the researcher is fit or ready at that point in time to employ talanoa with diverse Tongan people. (Fa‘avae et al., 2016).

Like Fijian and Tongan conceptions of talanoa, there are many different kinds of “talanoa” in Samoan spaces, and different words are used to describe these various kinds. For example, more formal, serious group or community conversations are usually referred to as faafaletui. Talanoa as a verb is about talking, from ordinary talking or conversing to gossiping and talking nonsense, in pairs or as a group. Talanoa is what you do when you want to have an informal and perhaps more private conversation. Talanoaga is the noun of talanoa. Interestingly, the word talatalanoa, which is the longer version of the word talanoa, can be linked to the words tatala and nonoa, which refer to the notions of tying or binding – either noanoa or nonoa – and untying or unbinding (talatala or tatala). New words often emerge in oral Samoan as a result of combining or shortening words or phrases. Talanoa is perhaps one such word; a combination of talking, storying or sharing conversation (tala, tautala) and of opening up opportunities for conversation (talatala; tatala) and, where necessary or desirable, closing, binding and/or protecting that conversation (noanoa; nonoa). This gives the imagination wings to explore the interconnections between old and new grounds and between old and new words for making, sensing, being, becoming, seeing, doing communication and meaning.

In their analysis of talanoa and faafaletui from a Samoan lens, Suaalii-Sauni and Fulu-Aiolupotea (2014) articulated the nuanced and culturally specific meaning associated with the practices of seeing and doing talanoa and faafaletui. Even though talanoa and faafaletui as research methods are rooted in Samoan linguistic and cultural practices, the ways in which they are implemented by Samoan people outside of Samoa or outside of the research world, for what purpose, and the seriousness and openness of their talanoa or faafaletui engagements, can help determine which of the two can be utilised appropriately at that point in time with those particular communities. The openness of the talanoa practice in particular can arguably be determined in our cross-fertilised Polynesian understandings of the noa-space—as an ordinary and imaginary space, a metaphysical and physical space through which relational vā occurs. This suggests that when a Tongan person engages with another who is initially unfamiliar to them, as they engage in the noa-space and find points of “balance, equilibrium” (Tecun et al., 2018, p. 159) and connection, their relational vā grows and strengthens. Alternatively, the absence of a recognition of vā can result in transitory and closed talanoa. Author 2 shares:

Tala is storying, [is] to story, to tell, to talk and “noa” [in Tongan] . . . language [that] refers to nothing or something [or ordinary] . . . before I engage in . . . with people in the space, if I don’t have a relationship then there is, the noa, the point where I start to try and figure out what, how am I gonna make this nothing, you know, this space of non-intimacy or no connection [into] something that would be of value . . . so it is very much dependent on the people in that space” . . . And then we don’t just, we find connections . . . it could be in ancestors who have gone, it could be [people or places or things we know in common], and we highlighted some of those things earlier . . . So the noa space is very much dependent on the people within that [talanoa at that time] and then the stories will start to form itself and once the connections are made visible, and realized, that’s when the stories and the, the real rich intimate talanoa takes place.

So too can the absence of cultural knowledge lead to misreadings of the practicalities or sensitivities associated with certain talanoa.

So, for example, . . . I have [existing] connections [with you both, as my sisters and mentors], and so I want to honor and acknowledge that, because [its important] in the Tongan culture. If a guy meets a girl and they have no connections, that kind of talanoa is very much a worrying one for parents [laughter], and the elders, because it is not a kind of talanoa that they would willingly allow their daughters to get into. And so, we have to acknowledge [and appreciate] that, when people come in, it does take a bit of time to sort of ground yourself and make the connections which is very, very important . . . And so, we’re trying to contextualize the talanoa in research discourses [so] we don’t lose the essence of it, to contextualize how we grapple with it within the confinements of research, you know, processes and all those thing[s].

This tracing of talanoa and its component parts “tala” and “noa” through to where it is that we stand with it as Pacific Indigenous researchers in Aotearoa New Zealand today gives nuanced insight into the point that it is a cultural practice but one that connects profoundly with professional goals that see it move beyond and differentiated from the interview (Prescott, 2008). Talanoa pushes contemporary understanding of research knowledge building and practice out by recognising the paradigms that Pacific vā and community relationship building stand on and their centrality to Pacific Indigenous oral research.

Talanoa: to make knowledge on somebody else’s whenua within a colonial institution

Knowledge production – or knowledge making and knowledge sensing – is an inevitable tradition among societies. However, coloniality has imposed assimilative conditions on the subaltern through processes and methods that have always favoured imperial nations. Aotearoa whenua today continues to be tainted by colonial traditions embedded through modernity and its promise of salvation by conversion, civilisation, innovation, progress, development and more (Mignolo & Walsh, 2018). Universities and research institutions embody modernity and its globalised processes, emphasising new research innovation as valued knowledge production. The search for research innovation within modern colonial institutions such as universities is not free from dominant Eurocentric patterns of knowledge production (Leenen-Young et al., 2021).

So, what does it mean to make knowledge on somebody else’s whenua? Māori, the Indigenous of Aotearoa whenua, share ancestral ties with other Pacific Indigenous societies in the moana. Tapu is a concept grounded in Māori, Fijian, Samoan and Tongan epistemologies, often linked to sacrilegious practices. In Lea faka-Tonga, “tapu” is defined as “forbidden” as well as “sacred or holy” (Churchward, 2015, p. 457). Although there are ancestral connections between Māori and other Indigenous Pacific cultures within Moana nui a Kiwa, “tapu” is a shared concept that reminds us of Pacific Indigenous “worlded” obligations to each other, where these obligations are defined by shared ancestral worldviews and understandings of vā or va, noa, tika, agatonu, vinaka, lagimalie or langimālie, that is, of what is right and balanced (Suaalii-Sauni, 2017). Acknowledging tapu is also acknowledging noa, the tapu and noa of land, of being on land, and of creating and affirming knowledge from different lands. Author 3 shares:

But there is a linkage between the Māori conceptualization of noa (that is, to make a space that was [for example, tapu] ordinary and the different Polynesian meanings of noa in talanoa . . . [In research to] move from a, a sacred place to an ordinary space, a space that you can engage openly [in], and conduct yourselves in ways that would [otherwise] be frowned upon [and/or considered] inappropriate [if it were considered] a tapu space, this is needed . . . I really like that concept of noa for talanoa because often there are tapu subjects or [even] subjects considered taboo or too sacred to engage in, [like sex], that having a concept like noa gives access to.

Within colonial institutions, the architectures of academic practice and education persistently privilege Euro-Western thinking, seeing and doing. Doing talanoa research in these academic spaces means having to paradoxically educate the Western academy – and society at large – using tools designed to colonise new knowledge considered too different or subversive, that without intervention will do just that. Grounded in Eurocentric thinking, seeing, and doing, these tools limit, through universalising and standardising technologies and classifications, the possibilities of pre-European contact relationalities between Māori and Pacific peoples in Aotearoa. Institutional architectures can turn relational exercises into tickbox procedures that exist to protect the institution but do little to build genuine tika (Māori: right, correct) relationality (Naepi et al., 2017). If we remain trapped within the confines of the institutional architecture, the relationship between Māori and Pacific when making knowledge can quickly become transactional in nature as opposed to a building of knowledge through deep relationships and community that honours history, culture and the land. This is the line we walk when we produce knowledge on others’ whenua from within colonial institutions; tipping too far into the relational or vā space risks being misunderstood by the institutions that determine what knowledge is valuable, but tipping too far to the other side risks tokenising ancestral and tika relationships. Author 1 reflects:

And, and I think that that’s sort of the two tensions we’ve got is, is that talanoa has enabled us to bring our knowledge into the academy but, and being a tool enabling us to do that, we’ve taken something away from it, the institutions have taken something away or as individuals our training and how we think about knowledge and how we think about gathering knowledge is changing how we interact with our own concepts and our own ideas of how knowledge is made and how do we interrupt that process?

The dilemma is personal and professional. Making knowledge on someone else’s whenua is not an individual exercise. Neither is it restricted to temporal or designated learning spaces. It is living, spiritual, all-encompassing and depends on our deep relationships and conversations, held over time and in different spaces, with each other. What is it that restricts the formation, increase and deepening of these relationships?

It was in our literature and within how we do the work and, and knowledge in Fiji is tied deeply to the vanua, so our land its deeply tied to the knowledge so how can you do a talanoa without talking about vanua or talking about the vanua from which you’re standing or talking from. You can’t, because you can’t make knowledge without it. And so how do we, for me talanoa is like this mix of where are we and what do we bring? So where do we sit or stand when we make the knowledge? And what relationships [are] in that space [when] we’re making the knowledge?

Not only do we make and create knowledge on another’s whenua, but we are also doing this from within a settler colonial university environment. Critiquing these layers to meaning-making and sense-sensing as Pacific Indigenous people in Aotearoa is increasingly important for understanding.

And I think in terms of recentreing our work we are constantly having to do that in the university space and to come up with these tools that are able to engage a political process and build on the scholarship because the scholastic work also has taken up a particular method platform that we are constantly challenging, having to put languaging into this space. But we’re doing it in a measured way, we’re doing it in ways that are learned from history that engages in the science of what we do, both Indigenous science and other sciences and we’re saying, okay, how do we understand the dynamics of this, this platform, the space, so that we can take from the baskets that we need to take, take from in order to shape our articulation in ways that can move in this center the colonial unconscious vices that are present in order to be able to give our concepts and our ways of doing life and keep moving.

Our reflections on what it means to make knowledge on this whenua as Pacific Indigenous peoples are informed by our own experiences. They will not and cannot speak to all experiences, but they can reflect learnings, tension points and drivers for claiming space and empowering talanoa from wherever we stand.

So, in terms of our oral history and being able to, to center ourselves in scholarship, in social bureaucracy based on that scholarship in everyday living as Indigenous scholars we have to expect some of the reality and talk through some of those realities. And, the realities for me are about critical thinking, what does critical thinking mean and how do we language that? How do we teach in a way that honours our concepts of talanoa, tapu, noa, our concepts of relationality, our concepts of sacredness of knowledge, of bringing that sacredness and those knowledge to different spaces to which those knowledges, in their initial or the, the traditional iterations or practices seem foreign to the kind of spaces in which we are employing them. We need to think about what, or how it is that we are mobilizing those values.

To build something else that we can all stand on and feel confident. I’m not confident, currently if I stand on the university’s ground. I don’t think I’m willing to stand on the university and say this is where I make knowledge from if that makes sense? I’m not willing to say that the university has done enough to deserve me to stand on their ground and say this is where I make knowledge from. I don’t think the university has done enough to nurture its own land and to recognize its own land for us to stand as Pacific scholars and say this is where we will make knowledge from.

And the duty in that sense . . . there’s a spiritual element of being, being in the place, there’s a reason why you are there [in the academy], you were chosen [given a tofi, a duty] in terms of the forces that be in the universe to be there. And so, to do that you carry out the work that you need to do as a university scholar to be able to do the best for your people.

Conclusion

Oral Pacific research walks the line between the need for institutional understanding but also relationality. An example of this is the authorship—institutionally, being first author is understood to be about who did what, but the first author here has been designated for the author who initiated our coming together—here our authorship order reflects relationality, not intellectual work. What remains to be seen are the ongoing ramifications of a decision to choose to put relationality ahead of monocultural institutional norms; after all, we are researchers within institutions whose worth is determined by dominant monocultural assumptions of authorship and authorship order as opposed to generous and generative multicultural relational interconnections. It is in highlighting this instance of choosing relationality that we aim to show how it is that in our everyday interactions as Pacific Indigenous researchers on somebody else’s whenua, dominant monocultural institutional decisions about authorship can directly or indirectly impact or create narrowly defined either–or conditions for valuing the institutional over the relational.

I think both of you have touched on for me what it [Pacific Indigenous research] is about; our research is relational, And so even though you could be a really caring person but when you’re under pressure to get something done and done by this date, you know, with everything else that you have on top of it, doing relationship in that way and that respectful caring generous way, can be really challenging . . . And, so in the Academy, particularly those who are not, not of that training or value systems will only be able to see that there are these challenges and how are you going to be able to do this, it is not realistic right? And so the, impetus for a critique would be because they don’t understand the importance of relationship and how it would work, they want some kind of formulated framework that will allow them to tick off that they have acknowledged that this will happen at this time and that therefore they can hold you to account if you don’t do it at that time and because there’s no relationship between you and that person whose doing the ticking off.

At this point as a reader, you may be wondering how we got from oral Pacific research methodologies to decisions about institutions or relationality; we got there because any type of Pacific oral method that is conducted in connection with an institution like a university will involve these choices. Pacific oral traditions value worlded Indigenous connections, a relationality that grounds our interconnections with each other as well as the whenua and other entities in the world; these values are not reflected in the institutions that we do our everyday work in on this whenua/fonua/fanua/vanua, so it is in our everyday that we have to make the decision—relationality and, or, institution?

Many of our graduate students are trying to construct and produce knowledge that is fundamentally grounded and where we stand and our relationships we bring from a screen because we can’t meet [laughs], we can’t, and it is changing how we construct knowledge. So, it is not even what doing the research does to us when we try to bring it into the academy, but our current situation is, is completely blowing out of the water how we do this and how we think about it.