List of Abstracts Keynote Speakers: Sex Trafficking and Global Governance Professor Sally Engle Merry, Director Programme on Law and Society, New York University. The Pacific has long been home to mobile populations, from the early voyaging Polynesians to Asian immigrants to plantations to Europeans, Americans, and Australians who were derelicts off ships and owners of plantations and shipping. These waves of immigrants held very different legal statuses from each other, shaping their opportunities and modes of living. This paper argues that the nature of legal status has important implications for the immigrant experience and the society that is formed, comparing Hawai‘i and Fiji. It then considers a contemporary form of movement: travel for sex work. Some is voluntary, some coerced, and most a combination of both. After examining current efforts to regulate and prevent sex work, the paper concludes that sex trafficking shares some features with earlier patterns of movement. Consequently, it will prove difficult to prevent. In many cases, those who move have a desire for travel as well as the search for escape from a bad family or economic situation. The legal status of trafficked victims shapes their long‐term life situation as it does for other migrants Beyond the eye of the law: post‐colonial demography in Australia Professor John Taylor, Director of the Centre for Aboriginal Economic Policy Research at the Australian National University. A sub‐disciplinary endeavour has emerged in postcolonial Australia that, for want of a better term, has become referred to as ‘indigenous demography’, mostly as a form of applied demography. This arises as part of the State project of distributive social justice which seeks to make legible the needs of particular groups, in this instance indigenous Australians. Demography is central to this project with its focus on quantum and the calibration of change. However, the tools of conventional demography fail to account for the intercultural world in which many indigenous people exist and operate. This is because the categories and contexts deployed are uncritically those of the mainstream and invariably not reflective of indigenous social structures or life projects. There is a disconnect, often, between a burgeoning statistical archive that claims to portray indigenous social conditions, on the one hand, and the actual lived reality, on the other. This emerges most readily in regard to population mobility. This paper outlines attempts by the State to portray this mobility and demonstrates how, as a consequence, indigenous people’s mobility proceeds largely unrecorded. Panel Participants Villages, Cities and Shifting Ocean In Between, Dr Teena Brown Pulu, Auckland University of Technology My Father’s rural village, Kolonga in Tonga, has shifted overseas. Twelve hundred at home, over five thousand village affiliates now congregate in Los Angeles, Auckland and Sydney. The past four Tonga censuses signal Kolonga has shrunk in size. By contrast, village clans resettled in Pacific Rim cities are expanding by birth rates. Four generations of Kolonga families have emerged as Tongan Americans, Tongan New Zealanders and Tongan Australians. That is, Tongan by ancestral descent and American, New Zealander or Australian by natural citizenship (Brown Pulu 2002, 2009). In these new villages – Long Beach City, South Auckland, Glendenning: the urban landscape of Pacific Islanders – what of our Kolonga kinfolk who arrive and stay without citizenship, residency, or legal status? Cities embody and cover us in places where our peoples reside. There is a sense of safety in numbers. In diaspora, emotional ties to an origin homeland convert into allegiance among village kin, the loyalty of concealing and protecting our own from the law’s gaze and judgement. How do minority communities on limited incomes, with restricted access to State resources, knowledge, and power, assist their own to stay despite overstaying their officially designated time here? My paper unfolds travelling tales of Tongan transnational life. For Kolonga overstayers in South Auckland, what kinds of survival strategies for navigating safe passage in hostile terrain are exchanged across ocean from Tonga the homeland, from Los Angeles and Sydney the bigger settlements, to us? In turn, how is such information made sense of, and tried out, in Auckland’s changing ‘ethnoscape?’ (Appadurai 1996). The Institutionalisation of Mobile Peoples in Oceania to 1910. Associate Professor Catharine Coleborne, University of Waikato A range of welfare, medical and legal institutions was quickly established in the Australasian colonies by the mid to late nineteenth century. Immigrants, the sick, the mentally ill, the impoverished, the Indigenous, and the wayward were segregated and housed in different institutional spaces. This web or system of institutions has been only partially described and explored by social and legal historians, and the ways that colonists created institutional solutions for these increasingly mobile peoples during the period of intense colonisation warrants further investigation. As spaces defined in part through the laws of the day – or the absence of a poor law – institutions commanded a ‘legal’ authority. Just how, and why, such institutions kept mobile peoples under the ‘eye of the Law’ is the subject of this article. An historical moment or history repeating itself?: the Northern Territory Intervention and the regulation and control of Indigenous Australians, Dr Deidre Howard Wagner, University of Sydney and Ben Kelly, University of New South Wales The various state and territory protection laws and regulations, such as the Victorian Aboriginal Protection Act 1869, resulted in the literal removal of Aboriginal people from their traditional land; different tribes were placed together and institutionalized in centralised reserves that were effectively penitentiaries, which achieved the spatial division and separation of Aborigines and whites. A disciplinary type of system dealt with the problem of exclusion that functioned to modify the biological destiny of the Aborigine limiting multiplication of a hybrid population. This regulated and controlled environment produced a dependent population whose affairs and every decision were managed by state appointed Aboriginal protection officers and administrators. Whiteness was enshrined in law and policy. Again, one hundred and thirty years on, the Northern Territory Intervention a juridical combination of laws and regulations, in the form of five interrelated Northern Territory Emergency Response laws, have brought about a binary type of division in Australian society. Once more, Indigenous peoples have been regulated and controlled and more recently displaced under the Northern Territory Growth Town policy. Whiteness has again been enshrined in law and policy. The paper engages with the work of Foucault and more recent governmentality and whiteness scholarship to draw parallels between the legal and disciplinary mechanisms used to displace and regulate Indigenous Australians under the Victorian Aboriginal Protection Act 1869 and associated policies and practices with the five interrelated Northern Territory Emergency Response laws passed by the Australian federal government in 2007 and associated policies and practices. “Wandering Lands: the Complex Coexistence of Customary Movement and Private Property in Hawaiian Law and Politics”, Assistant Professor, Laura Lehua Yim, San Francisco State University.
This paper explores the complex constructions of land in 19th and 20th century Hawaiian legal cases that address the literal mobility of persons and animals over lands in the Hawaiian archipelago. The essay focuses on two cases, one from Hawai`i Kingdom law – Oni v. Meek (1858) – and another from State of Hawai`i law – Public Access Shoreline Hawaii [PASH] v. Hawaii Planning Commission (1995). Oni v. Meek adjudicated a conflict over the confiscation of Oni’s horse by Meek, the lessee of a piece of land which was owned by a konohiki chief Ha`alelea. Oni claimed his horse was wrongly seized because he maintained a traditional maka`āinana relationship with Ha`alelea, which included a customary right of pasturage on Ha`alelea’s land. Meek contended the leased land excluded Oni’s maka`āinana right to pasturage; thus the horse was a wandering stray, within his rights to confiscate. This paper analyzes the Oni court’s delineation of what is and is not customary maka`āinana usage of land, who retains or loses what rights to move about on that land, and what the changing relationship between a common kanaka and a chief is with the advent of private property. This paper illuminates the reframing of Oni as precedent in the “colonial” State of Hawai`i PASH decision, a case that clarifies the rights of persons in late 20th century Hawai`i to move freely (or not) over private property to access shore areas. Close attention to Oni and PASH allows us to see the robust life and potential efficacy of “custom” in Hawaiian jurisprudence, the production of a native common law tradition and “Hawaiian national usage.” This paper concludes considering legal and political strategies for addressing current challenges of displacement in the Hawaiian islands through an analytic and practical re‐engagement of place, genealogy, and belonging within (or despite) property ownership. ‘Immigrants’, ‘natives’ and the ‘double régime’ in New Caledonia, Dr Adrian Muckle, Victoria University of Wellington From 1887 to 1946 the indigénat provided French administrators with measures to streamline the government and summary repression of persons defined as indigènes (natives). The category of indigène/native included not just Kanak, the indigenous people of New Caledonia, but also groups of indentured and immigrant labourers from Asia and other parts of Oceania. This paper explores the relationship between the separate but often overlapping regimes designed to police or control “natives” and “immigrant” labourers in New Caledonia during the era of the indigénat. It thereby engages with the following symposium themes: the legal construction of mobile peoples; colonial laws, policies and regulations relating to immigration/mobile peoples; the shaping of nations in and through mobile populations; and indentured labour movement in the Pacific region. While this research is still in‐progress, especial attention may be given to the proposition that an incipient colonial definition of the native/indigène in New Caledonia as a person of Melanesian, Polynesian or mixed race must be understood in the context of the development of the labour/immigration régimes as well as the different ways in which the indigénat was experienced between New Caledonia’s mainland and its dependencies, the Loyalty Islands. Portable Jurisdiction for Mobile People: Supreme Court of New South Wales’ Assertion of Jurisdiction over British Citizens in Aotearoa/New Zealand, Wayne Rumbles, University of Waikato Usually the jurisdiction of the courts and especially the criminal jurisdiction is tied to place, it exercises its power on those people who are ‘in place’ and therefore fall within the physical jurisdiction. Mobile peoples if they fell under the power of the courts, were dealt with as they passed through a jurisdiction. However for a period in the mid nineteenth century prior to the signing of the Treaty of Waitangi the jurisdiction of Supreme Court of New South Wales was extended to include British citizens in New Zealand, without asserting physical jurisdiction over ‘place.’ Edward Doyle in 1837 tried to use this selective jurisdiction to escape liability for stealing from a dwelling house and threatening to kill the owner, by claiming he was a native of New Bedford, in America. The court was unconvinced and was determined “to remove from the mind[s] of lawless ruffians a delusion that by distance they were secure from the visitation of justice “ This paper will analyse cases between 1826 and 1839 where the Supreme Court (NSW) asserted (if somewhat self‐consciously) its jurisdiction over the mobile British citizens in Aotearoa/New Zealand. Not only do these cases demonstrate desire to assert some power and control over a disorderly pre‐colony; the cases also help paint a rich picture of the era and include: o
o
o
o
o
o
o
Piracy Escaped Convicts Homicide including killing of aborigines (Maori) Discipline on ships ‐‐False imprisonment Trespass to goods – shooting of pigs Imprisonment for debts Aggravated robbery Colonial Pasts and Indigenous Presence(ts): An Historical Examination of U.S. Military Imperialism in the Pacific, Kirisitina G. Sailiata, University of Michigan I examine how in the aftermath of World War II and the ongoing decolonization movements in the Pacific, US military imperialism continued to expand rather than contract. By the mid‐
twentieth century, “colonialism” was an obsolete and unviable political formation within global politics, further evidenced by United Nations efforts with the Decolonization Committee formed in 1962. In this same historical moment, the US military expanded its reach culminating in the now over seven hundred military installations across the nation and abroad. This paper examines how modern military formations draw upon the legacies of former imperial models. Samoans are disproportionately overrepresented in military enlistment and hold one of the highest death rates per capita in the U.S. during the current war and occupation in Iraq. The U.S. military structures circuits of diasporic movements and settlements, substantially bolsters the American Samoan economy, and purportedly fulfills Samoan cultural traditions of warriorhood and service. As anti‐immigration measures increase government propaganda and accusations of "terrorism" abound, the military further becomes a vehicles through which 'good' immigration and citizenry is produced. In this paper, I connect military expansion policies, legal constructions of sovereignty and citizenship, and race relations within the military. The Pacific is an important military cornerstone for US global hegemony, and while the relationship between increased militarization and decolonization has been made within political science and legal studies scholarship, I bring these connections to bear within the context of Native and Pacific Studies. Mobility and Civilisation in the Pacific to 1910 Professor Nan Seuffert, University of Waikato In the nineteenth century in the Pacific groups of mobile people were often constructed and defined through complex dynamics of law, policy, politics, struggle and resistance. This paper investigates the construction of the concept of ‘mobility’ and mobile peoples in context during the nineteenth century, exploring relationships with ‘civilisation’, ‘stability’, ‘transcience’ and other concepts.