The Turnbull Assignment From Pedantry to Pleasure in Pacific Studies 1

Turnbull Library Record, Volume 39, 1 January 2006, Page 61

Teresia Teaiwa

The Turnbull Assignment From Pedantry to Pleasure in Pacific Studies 1

I am not a real historian. My approach to history is too personal, too theoretical, too contemporary. I have this on the reliable authority of some friends and colleagues of mine who have done the ‘hard yards’ in archives. For if an anthropologist’s rite of passage is field work, the historian’s is archival research, and I have yet to cross over. The offerings in this essay are those of an outsider and a voyeur in relation to the Turnbull collection. My work at the level of historiography with a post-World War II regional focus has not yet demanded that I engage directly with archives. My style of scholarship might seem more like a ‘guerrilla’ attack when contrasted to the methodical and meticulous practices of archival historians. But as a product of Pacific History, and as a teacher in Pacific Studies, I am deeply committed to giving my students the opportunity to experience the riches and thrills of archival research, those pleasures that I have denied or deferred for myself.

Pacific Studies, or Pacific Islands Studies, is an interdisciplinary programme of study. When the 1999 special issue on Pacific Studies of the Turnbull Library Record was released, 2 Pacific Studies was offered as a discrete course of study at only three of the eight New Zealand universities: the University of Auckland, University of Christchurch, and Victoria University of Wellington (VUW). In 1999, the University of Auckland was offering an undergraduate major in Pacific Studies,

and a year later launched its MA in Pacific Studies. The University of Christchurch through the Macmillan Brown Centre for Pacific Studies did not have a BA in Pacific Studies, but had been offering an MA in Pacific Studies for about a decade by then, and had just begun offering a PhD. VUW inaugurated its BA in Pacific Studies in 2000, and I was hired as the programme’s first lecturer. In 2003 we were able to hire a second lecturer, and this made our expansion into postgraduate teaching viable; in 2005 the university and the Committee on University Academic Programmes (CUAP) approved our offering a BA (Honours) and MA by thesis. In 2002, the University of Otago also launched a BA major in Pacific Studies. There is also an MA in Maori and Pacific Development offered at the University of Waikato, and indeed there is much to be said for not undertaking regional or interdisciplinary studies until the postgraduate stage. The Center for Pacific Islands Studies at the University of Hawai’i is recognised internationally as a premiere Pacific Studies programme, rivalled only by the Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies at the Australian National University; both of these centres focus on postgraduate or graduate research and teaching.

Developing syllabuses and curricula for Pacific Studies as an undergraduate major has been quite challenging. I have only ever enrolled in one Pacific Islands Studies course myself—and this was a seminar on the Micronesian Compact of Free Association in 1990 coordinated by Professor Bob Kiste, former Director of the Center for Pacific Islands Studies and Tony De Brum, former Marshallese congressman. My own academic background is in history—l received a BA in History from Trinity College, Washington, DC, where I read mostly American and European history, with an independent foray into the history of the May Fourth movement in China for my senior thesis—l must have been prescient because just as I was finalising my thesis draft, dramatic events were unfolding at Tiananmen Square. My MA is in History from the University of Hawai’i, and the courses I took there ranged from American Micronesia, to ethnographic history, historiography, more Chinese history, and European intellectual history. I did not write a thesis for my MA, but did a major research essay on American colonialism and Micronesian women activists. The MA led me on to a PhD, which I undertook at the University of California, Santa Cruz (UCSC), in a programme called History of Consciousness. One of the founders of the History of Consciousness programme at UCSC was a historian named Hayden White. And although I never actually took a class with Hayden, reading an essay of his titled ‘The Burden of History’ left a lasting impression on me. In the essay Hayden describes literary representations of historians as somehow detached from the present and consumed by their occupations in the archives. He refers to a character in one of the novels of Jane Austen (or was it by a Bronte?) as gaunt and drawn—unable even to enjoy the pleasures of a full and wholesome relationship with his young wife. 3 For me, the pleasures of an academic life have always been about having space, time, and

good company for intense and critical engagements with ideas and things. The pleasures of an academic life—for me—are drawn from the tautological thought that thought can enliven ... especially through communication, translation, and more dramatically if the boundaries between town and gown, the ivory tower and church turret (or skyscraper or tenement or fale) are deliberately bridged and crossed. When I was a PhD student, Hayden White’s ‘The Burden of History’ quite put me off the archives—but as I’ve said, when I became a teacher, I could not deny their importance.

My first full-time permanent job was in the History/Politics Department at the University of the South Pacific (USP). There I was given a range of teaching responsibilities (from a course on Japanese politics and a course on Chinese history, to Contemporary World History, and Women and Society), but the most logical place for exposing my students to archival work came when I was given a 100level course on the politics of Pacific history. In this course, which I taught for three years in a row, I discussed with students different disciplinary approaches to studying and analysing Pacific pasts, and we went on two field trips—one to the Fiji Museum, and the other to the National Archives of Fiji. Some of my colleagues thought there wasn’t much point taking first-year students to the National Archives since the students could not expect to undertake serious research there for several more years—and since many of our colleagues at USP did not think much of our students’ intellectual potential anyway. But if only for the diversion from weekly lectures, I persisted in organising my first field trip to the Archives. The result of that trip was electrifying. I cannot describe to you the visible effects that seeing original indenture agreements had on my students (none of whom were of IndoFijian descent). There is something magical about documents from the past. Now while I can’t say that any of my students from that particular class have gone on to do postgraduate study or have pursued independent archival research since that trip, I’m not convinced that momentary pleasures are not as important as structural life-changing ones; both types of pleasures create memories, and that’s what history is about. 4

But what is Pacific Studies about? Terence Wesley-Smith, Graduate Chair in the Center for Pacific Islands Studies at the University of Hawai’i at Manoa, happens to also be a VUW alumnus. In 1995 he published a landmark article titled ‘Rethinking Pacific Islands Studies’. 5 At that stage, Pacific Islands Studies had had an institutional history of about forty-five years at the University of Hawai’i. Wesley-Smith’s paper examined some of the rationales for Pacific Studies and common methods of research and analysis that were being applied to Pacific people and societies, and he indicated some promising directions for the future. The three main rationales and approaches for Pacific Studies that Wesley-Smith identified were pragmatic, laboratory, and empowerment. The pragmatic rationale is common to Area Studies in general; the laboratory rationale is neo-colonial,

state-driven and peculiar to anthropological and historical approaches to the small island societies of the Pacific; and the empowerment rationale has emerged out of worldwide movements for decolonising the academy. Although it is unlikely that you’ll find only one rationale at work in any given Pacific Studies programme, my main concern is with the empowerment rationale.

Wesley-Smith describes how the empowerment rationale’s indigenising agendas can take a number of forms. The three he identifies are those in which (1) indigenous scholars simply acquire competence with the tools of Western social science; (2) indigenous scholars reject the values and methodology of Western social science; and (3) as the late Edward Said advocated, genuinely universal forms of scholarship for the purpose of ‘the reintegration of all those peoples and cultures, once confined and reduced to peripheral status, with the rest of the human race’.

Rather than dissect or discuss Wesley-Smith’s categories more fully, I want to turn to some background on Pacific Studies at VUW—and hopefully it will become clear how the two correspond.

The programme in Pacific Studies at VUW was established in 2000. Part of the ‘rationale’ for the programme was the growing Pacific population in New Zealand, and in the Wellington region in particular, and a strong feeling that students of Pacific heritage at VUW would benefit from having Pacific scholarship and knowledge affirmed through Pacific Studies. In 1999, a proposal was put to CUAP, and three new core courses for a BA major in Pacific Studies were outlined. A recurring theme in the skeletal blurbs for these new courses was that writings by indigenous people of the Pacific would be read. When I arrived at VUW in 2000,1 was given course numbers, course titles, and blurbs that I had to flesh out into full courses. The Turnbull Assignment is part of a course titled PASI 201 Changing Environments (changed in 2004 to PASI 201 Comparative Histories in Polynesia). This is a comparative history of Polynesia through pre-colonial, colonial, and post-colonial conditions. Since it was first offered in 2000, the course syllabus has remained pretty much the same. I enjoy the course, and find value in its annual repetitions, but I am also looking to improve my pedagogy and keep myself motivated with the course and its material.

Field trips were integrated into the design of PASI 201 from the beginning—but because of constraints of budget and policy, our field trips are strictly local. The four local field trips on which I take the class are to the wharenui of Te Tumu te Herenga Waka Marae to see how Polynesian oral traditions (that is, histories) are memorialised in architecture and design, to the Turnbull Library, to the National Archives, and to the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa’s back-of-house Pacific collection. For Pacific Studies at VUW, making good use of these national resources at our doorstep is crucial. These field trips serve not only to inform the students of the range of environments and resources for research that are available to them; they are offered as a source of inspiration for intimately engaging with

the discipline of history. As part of their assessment for the course, students are required to turn in a short three-hundred-word field trip report on any one of the field trips taken during the trimester. The field trip reports often bear out my hope that students will have found the trips not only useful but inspiring.

The Turnbull Assignment builds on and extends from a Library Assignment that Sue Hirst, VUW’s Pacific Studies Liaison person, designed for our 100-level class, PASI 101 The Pacific Heritage. In the 100-level Library Assignment, students are asked to perform various searches and functions (like sorting) on the computerised catalogue, and they are also required to source and describe in one sentence an article from the South Pacific Commission reports held in our UN and Official Documents collection. Lor all of its pedantry, this assignment is perhaps the one students are most conscientious about, and I have had third-year students enrolled in this course who say they wish they had had similar assignments earlier on in their university careers. It may be difficult for some of you to imagine or appreciate, being so comfortable yourselves around books and libraries, but most Pacific students in New Zealand do not take easily to these things we are able to take for granted.

Most of our students are of Pacific descent (see Table 1). Most of them are firstgeneration university students. Most of them are holding down one or two jobs in addition to attempting full-time studies. In an essay titled ‘The Defining Distance’

Konai Helu Thaman describes her experience of facing disapproval from her Tongan peers at university when she would prepare to study at the library at the University of Auckland in the 1960 s. 6 In a handbook produced almost thirty years later at the same university, the same concerns and problems were still evident: Pacific students were shunning the library, and faced severe pressures from friends and family that competed and conflicted with the demands of their academic programmes. 7 We in Pacific Studies at VUW are ever grateful to Sue Hirst for helping demystify the library for our students. We are also thankful to various Collections Managers at the VUW library, for supporting our requests for purchases of Pacific books and audio-visual material. In spite of the support we receive from our library staff, VUW library remains rather impoverished in its Pacific holdings. In addition to budget constraints on acquisitions, we have the distressing problem of books going missing. And after spending two months in 2003 on research and study leave at the Macmillan Brown Centre at Canterbury, I have come to appreciate at the deepest level the value of a closed collection. Luckily for us at VUW, the Turnbull is “our” closed collection. And so, after introducing our students to the VUW library at 100-level, we bring them to the Turnbull at 200-level.

Although it is known as “the Turnbull Assignment”, students have the option of doing this assignment using sources from Archives New Zealand. The sources may be unpublished or published, but one must be about or from eastern Polynesia and the other must be about or from western Polynesia and the two sources must be comparable—they must be of similar genres, from similar time periods, or about similar topics. The students are given the following assignment: The Turnbull Assignment Select two comparable sources from either the Turnbull Library or the National Archives—one from Eastern Polynesia and one from Western Polynesia. For example, you could select children’s storybooks, constitutions, official documents, biographies, or even volumes of newspapers. Provide a full bibliographic entry and 300-400 word annotations for each of your two sources. An annotation provides a descriptive overview of the contents of a source and highlights some of its interesting points.

The assignment is due three to four weeks after the class has been taken on customised tours of the Turnbull Library and National Archives. Before our scheduled tours, usually taken in the fourth and fifth weeks of a twelve-week trimester, the staff of the Turnbull Library and National Archives are provided with copies of our course outline so that they are familiar with the assignment as well as with the objectives of the course and topics covered in it. Each year,

of course, we have a different group of students, and the size of the class has averaged around thirty-five. The goals of the Turnbull Assignment are first, to expose students to the variety of sources for Pacific research available in Wellington; second, to introduce students to the Turnbull Library collections; third, to instruct students on how to compile bibliographic information on a variety of published and unpublished sources; fourth, to give students the opportunity to learn how to annotate a bibliography; and fifth, to encourage a comparative approach to Pacific Studies among students.

This last goal of the Turnbull Assignment is directly engaged with what Terence Wesley-Smith called ‘the empowerment rationale’. Most of the students who enrol in PASI 101 The Pacific Heritage state that they have done so because ‘they want to learn more about themselves’ or their culture. I try to subvert this desire and expectation gently but firmly early on: making the point that Pacific Studies is first and foremost Pacific, and that one of the discoveries students will inevitably make in this course is that who they are and what ‘their’ culture is will need to be expanded and redefined. What I mean is that Pacific Studies cannot teach students about themselves, but it can make available to them some resources for understanding themselves and their place in the world better. My hope in PASI 101 is that students will make the connections between their own personal concerns and histories and the wider issues we discuss in the course. But it’s not until PASI 201 that I am able to directly address and challenge the desire to Team more about myself and my culture’. Because PASI 201 is defined as a comparative history of eastern and western Polynesia, the substantive assignments in the course demand students’ engagement with at least two different national histories. So while at 100level students often do assignments that reflect their particular ethnic or cultural heritage (Samoan, Tongan, Tokelauan, Niuean, and so on), at 200-level they are not allowed to focus only on ‘their own culture’ for they must choose at least one other culture or country with which to compare ‘theirs’. I have to say, though, that not all students are interested in only their own histories. Over the years I’ve had a number of Pacific students choose to do assignments that do not include their own histories or cultures at all. This has been particularly gratifying for me, because I do believe that comparative studies are an integral part of Said’s ‘reintegration of all those peoples and cultures’, as quoted previously. It may surprise you that Pacific peoples and cultures have and continue to be confined and reduced to peripheral status. And if Pacific Studies at VUW has an empowerment rationale, it is to reintegrate our peoples and cultures with the rest of the human race.

How does the Turnbull Assignment help us achieve this goal? Well, for one thing the assignment gets students walking through doors that most of them would otherwise not dare to enter on their own. I’m not sure what your user statistics reveal, but by way of comparison, if Pacific people constitute 6.25 per cent of the national population, and just under four per cent of New Zealand visitors to Te Papa

are of Pacific heritage, I’d expect that the percentage of serious Pacific users of the Turnbull Library collections would be much lower. It has long been a concern in the fields of Pacific history and scholarship that not enough Pacific people are taking up the pen and writing their own stories. Of course, writing is not the only wa> to tell one’s story, and in New Zealand we see that the arts are the most dynamic arena for Pacific people’s self-representation. Perhaps we need to see the plays ol Christchurch theatre group, Pacific Underground, such as Fresh off the Boat and Dawn Raids , as a form of historical scholarship and analysis. You certainly do nol need a degree to be able to engage in historical research. But if you are taking £ degree through our programme you have the benefit of a structured approach tc learning (albeit with a guerrilla style teacher). I’d like to turn now to some of the substance of the Turnbull Assignment. Some of the types of sources accessed by students are missionary letters (these are very popular) and journals or travel logs. From 2000 to 2003 there was nc duplication among sources selected by students. In 2003, however, the journals ol Fanny Stevenson, wife of R. L. Stevenson, were chosen as sources by two differenl students (selecting different segments of her journal to annotate). Two students chose to annotate the same letter by George Tubou 11. Recently a student accessed a handwritten letter of Queen Salote’s.

Photographs have been popular in the past. In the case of photographs I require that students source at least five photographs each from the east and west of Polynesia. One student actually found a photograph of a Fijian tattoo artist working on a naked woman who was lying across his lap. A number of students over the years have focused on representations of women in photography. Another student followed the journey of Admiral Freiberg to several islands in the Pacific —including the Cook Islands and Tokelau.

In the first four years that this assignment was set only two people have used the oral history collection at the Turnbull, both times accessing the Porirua oral histories collection to compare the experiences of migrants from different Pacific Islands. I’ll be more encouraging in future of their attention to other oral history archives such as those identified in Diane Woods’s contribution on Turnbull Library resources in the 1999 Turnbull Library Record , such as Lois Webster’s project ‘Tongans in New Zealand’, ‘The beginnings of the Pacific Islanders Congregational Church in New Zealand’, and the oral histories from the 1995 peace flotilla against nuclear testing at Moruroa among others.

Among the published sources, students in the past have chosen to annotate children’s books, collections or retellings of myths and legends. Biographies are popular—especially Queen Lili’uokalani and Queen Salote because we study them in the course. Newspaper articles also popular. Recently, a Samoan-speaking student annotated pages of a Samoan-language newspaper as part of her assignment (see box).

Overall, students responses to and assessments of the assignment have been overwhelmingly positive. Of course, there are occasionally some complaints made about the inconvenience of having to do research off-campus, and there are laments made about the time it takes to access and select sources while having to work with the Turnbull collections’ time frames. One student couldn’t believe she had to spend three days in the Turnbull Library in order to produce her eight-hundred-word annotations of two sources—the assignment is worth only ten per cent of their overall grade in the course. But I say to her ‘good on you!’ Research takes time, and starting from scratch is probably the hardest part. It’s also very disappointing when you cannot find what you’re looking for—as in the case of a student who desperately wanted to find sources on the Peruvian slave trade in Polynesia for her

assignment and couldn’t find any of the sources listed in Harry Maude’s classic history of the trade. I cannot stress enough the importance of friendly faces and a welcoming atmosphere in demystifying and humanising libraries and the process of research for Pacific students. My students have consistently commented on what a difference the Turnbull staff have made to their enjoyment of the assignment (see box below). I would like to thank all the staff of the Turnbull who have so kindly helped my students with their assignments, and especially to Janet Horncy and Averil Callisen for facilitating their initial orientation to the library.

As Friends of the Turnbull Library, you obviously have an interest in understanding how much and how the collections you support are being used. But as Friends of the Turnbull Library your concern presumably goes beyond the statistical and the economic. As friends of the Turnbull Library, you each derive some pleasure from having a special relationship with what are simultaneously vulnerable and powerful sources of knowledge about Pacific pasts. If Pacific Studies at Victoria University of Wellington isn’t exactly helping to increase the membership of the Friends of the Turnbull Library, I’d like to think that we are doing our part to lay the foundation for some deep and lasting affections among our students and graduates not only for the library but for the study and appreciation of our collective pasts in the Pacific.

In the words of one Pacific Studies student: ‘The Turnbull Library is a fountain of knowledge about Pacific Studies, and after taking this course, I am still thirsty.’

Turnbull Assignment samples 1 R. A. Derrick, ‘The Labour Traffic’, in A History of Fiji, ed. by R. A. Derrick, 3rd edn (Fiji: Government Press, 1957), pp. 167-76. A. Metraux, ‘The Tragic Story of Easter Island’, in Easter Island: A StoneAge Civilisation of the Pacific, ed. by A. Metraux, A. (Great Britain: Andre Deutsch Limited, 1957), pp. 46^-7. 2 Alison Hunt-O’Keefe, Articles of Samoan Legends, Samoan Times, 19201925. FMS-Papers-6704-05. Jock Malcolm McEwen, Cook Island Administration, Schools Department— Instruction Books, 1950-1960. MS Papers-6717-105. 3 Samoa Times, Apia, Vol. 18, no. 47, 1918, pp. 4-5. Newspaper Section. Dominion, Wellington, Monday, 25 November 1918, pp. 6-7. Newspaper Section. 4 James McLaren, Journal 1831-1838, ‘A journal of the Barque Cheviot from London’. Reference Number: qMS-1189. Samuel Swain, Journal 1831-1835, ‘Extracts from the log of the Vigilant' . Reference Number: MS-Papers-6729-4. 5 Wilhelm Heinrich Solf, Report, 1907, ‘Samoa, the people, the missions, and the Europeans’. MS-Papers-2030. Sir Thomas Mackenzie, Letters, 1899-?, 1909. Papers relating to exploring and political activity. MS-Papers-3922-1.

Pleasurable outcomes of the Turnbull Assignment For students of Pacific Studies ❖ feeling empowered to walk into and use the National Library ❖ the excitement of touching and reading original sources ❖ friendly assistance from Turnbull Library staff ❖ gaining deeper insight into how different cultures and histories relate to one another For me as teacher of Pacific Studies ❖ the excitement of reading about a wide variety of sources ❖ the satisfaction of seeing students display competence in summarising the sources ❖ the gratification of seeing students extend their interests beyond their own ethnicity or cultural group ❖ the hope that students will feel empowered to undertake either personal or professional research at the Turnbull Library after taking this course

Support the Alexander Turnbull Library through being a member of

The Friends of the Turnbull Library P O Box 12-186 Wellington, New Zealand

Turnbull Library Record 39 (2006), 61-71

a Solomon Islands; b Fiji.

References 1 This paper is based on a talk I gave to The Friends of the Turnbull Library in 2003. The text was revised and updated in 2006 for publication. 2 Anonymous, ‘Pacific Studies: Resources and Courses’, Turnbull Library Record , 32 (1999), 75-93. 3 Hayden White, Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth Century Europe (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1973). 4 As an aside: in my third (and last) class field trip to the National Archives in 1999, our group was horrified to see the deterioration of the Archives library section. The library’s windows were all open, rain was coming through the windows, and dehumidifying machines were vainly whirring away. The librarian told us that the air conditioning had broken down, and that there was not enough money in the budget to repair it. The students were outraged: rare nineteenth-century books, and precious, limited-edition, twentieth-century Fijian-language publications were moulding on the shelves. After the field trip the class collectively drafted a letter to the newly elected Prime Minister, Mahendra Chaudry, pleading for his attention to the state of affairs in the National Archives. For myself and the students, the ‘burden of history’ was not deadening or numbing, but very much enlivening (albeit enraging) us in the present. 5 Terence Wesley-Smith, ‘Rethinking Pacific Islands Studies’, Pacific Studies, 18, no. 2 (1995): 115-37. 6 Konai Thaman, ‘The Defining Distance: People, Places and Worldview’, in Mobility and Identity in the Island Pacific, ed. by Murray Chapman, a special issue of Pacific Viewpoint, 26, no. 1 (1985): 106-15. 7 Pacific Islands Students Academic Achievement Collective, Coconuts Begin with a ‘C’: Pacific Islanders at University (Auckland: The Collective, 1989).

2003 2002 2001 2000 By ethnicity NZ/European/Pakeha 3 8 3 11 New Zealand Maori 9 11 8 8 Samoan 19 7 22 27 Cook Island Maori 3 2 1 5 Niuean 3 2 0 1 Tongan 3 1 4 1 Tokelauan 1 1 5 3 Other Pacific Island 1 l a 1 2 Other ethnicity 3 5 5 By gender Female 34 28 33 38 Male 11 10 16 20

Table 1: Profile of Pacific Studies students, PASI 201, in 2003 and the preceding three years