ABSTRACT“SEE THE NATIVES”: INDIGENOUS VISUAL CULTURE AT THE 1894 CALIFORNIA MIDWINTER INTERNATIONAL EXPOSITION Christina Hellmich Though the 1894 California Midwinter International Exposition (or CMIE) in San Francisco is often considered a minor regional exposition and is typically omitted from scholarly consideration of world’s fairs, it was significant for raising the profile of the city as Western expansion came to a close, serving to promote the colonialist interests of settlers in the West. This study investigates the exhibition of Indigenous culture at CMIE, as configured through villages complete with “Natives” (Indigenous people from inside and outside US borders), putatively depicting their ways of life. The villages shaped and reinforced understandings of race and national identity and made a case for regional and global imperialism. Through the legacy of the Expo’s photographic and textual archive, we can explore some of the strategies and counterstrategies deployed at the CMIE and their resulting meanings. Like theatrical sets, the villages were conceived by their organizers as performance spaces to represent cultures—merging the authentic, the adapted, and the fabricated—to create an encounter for visitors with the desired message and financial remuneration. Examples drawn from the Native Hawaiian, Pacific Islander, Fon, and Native American villages illustrate how the imaging and spectacle of Indigenous participants were powerful tools demarcating difference and enabling the United States and European nations to define their national identities against the racial and cultural stereotypes that they created of Indigenous people. These, in turn, played a larger role in national debates about US expansion and economic imperialism. While it can be shown that performances at the CMIE were staged in hopes of cementing ideas about settler colonialism and White supremacy put forward by village managers and organizers, the displays were nonetheless subject to unanticipated mutability and expansion of viewpoints promulgated by the Indigenous participants. Through their biographies, it is possible to move beyond the generalizations and stereotypes applied to Midwinter Fair participants to reveal how they were responding to financial and political instability in their homelands and larger cultural debates to assert power over their bodies, identities, and representation at the fair.

This is an interview between the artist Jewel Block and art historian Stacy L. Kamehiro, based on their conversations between May 2018 and November 2021. Block and Kamehiro discuss some of the conceptual frameworks and creative strategies developed by the artist to chronicle the experiences of her family relocating to Southern California from American Sāmoa, and address issues of memory, place-making, and Sāmoan-American identity processes.

This special issue of Pacific Arts centers on the theme “Pacific Island Worlds: Transpacific Dis/Positions,” which was the topic of a two-day series of events held at the University of California, Santa Cruz (UCSC) in May 2018. This generative meeting explored Oceanic rootedness and mobility, grounded and expansive kinships, worlding, place-making, and colonial histories and their legacies. In important ways, it grew out of the “Native Pacific Cultural Studies on the Edge” symposium, also hosted by UCSC, nearly two decades earlier. “Pacific Island Worlds” was dedicated to the memory of Teresia Teaiwa, a graduate of UCSC’s History of Consciousness doctoral program (2001) who had passed away in 2017 and whose academic, activist, and creative work profoundly inspired Pacific studies scholars and artists around the world. Our introduction is a story of two conferences—moments, pauses, in an ongoing flow of historical, political, and intellectual activity.

This dissertation investigates how contemporary art in Oceania materializes the role of colonial history in understanding and addressing climate change. Future-centric representations and solutions to rising sea levels and dwindling biodiversity—such as apocalypse narratives and techno-fixes—allow for escapism from the root causes of ecological collapse. Colonially induced climate change in Oceania stems from the control and dispossession of Indigenous Pacific bodies and lands, urban and agricultural development, militarism, and resource extraction. This dissertation asks how contemporary art in Oceania and its diaspora helps global audiences understand the role of colonial history in these issues. Without a deeper engagement with colonialism, we risk repeating and perpetuating unequal structures of power into the future. How, then, does artistic practice make manifest the dialogic relationship between space and time in the context of climate change? By materializing the continually unfolding past on which the present and future depend, contemporary art has transformative potential for our responses to the climate crisis. The chapters investigate a range of artistic strategies, including: the use of archival photography and film to challenge historical narratives about nuclear testing in the Marshall Islands and phosphate mining in Banaba; digital media and site-specific installations that materialize alternative pasts and futures in an urbanized Hawaiʻi; and experimental films that make visible the ancestral present in the Northern Territory of Australia, resisting apocalypse narratives and ecological grief that climate change often engenders. These case studies investigate how the legacies of colonialism are contributing to climate change in site-specific, localized ways, while also identifying regional and global connections. The project contributes to the fields of climate justice, Pacific Studies, and art history by taking a sustained look at the material entanglement between ecological collapse, temporality (the passage of time), and historical consciousness (how we understand our relationships to the past). The dissertation concludes by outlining a framework for Indigenous Pacific Climate Change Studies that foregrounds the arts as a necessary mechanism by which climate justice in Oceania can be achieved.

During the mid-nineteenth century, stereoscopy became a monumentally popular and heavily studied component of British and American optical science. James Ricalton (b. 1844-1929), an American photographer and traveler, utilized stereoscopy and stereography for the production of travel cards that displayed 'non-Western' locations and peoples. This thesis examines Ricalton's deployment of stereography and shows that Ricalton's brand of stereographic practice participates in contemporaneous ideological formations concerning social Darwinism, civilizationism, and American exceptionalism. I visually analyze fifteen of Ricalton's original 100 stereographic prints from India Through the Stereoscope: A Journey through Hindustan" (1900) to show that Ricalton's orientation towards the people and places he photographs is a complex negotiation of his own masculinity, narratives of American nationhood, and dominant ideologies of nineteenth century colonial apologism. I argue that Ricalton's usage of stereoscopy and stereography forms a 'hybridized' archive that does not fit into standard photographic typologies of the nineteenth or twentieth centuries.

This essay examines the recent group exhibition SALTWATER / Interconnectivity co-curated by Katharine Losi Atafu-Mayo and Giles Peterson at the Tautai Gallery in Auckland, Aotearoa New Zealand (October 16, 2020 to January 30, 2021), including its public exhibition talks, forums, and performance activations. The exhibition was intended to embody the Moana worldview and explore questions of justice, equity, identity, and ecology through newly commissioned work by six multimedia Indigenous artists and designers from the Moana-Solwara (Oceania region): Katharine Losi Atafu-Mayo, Peter Elavera, Te Ara Minhinnick, Shawnee Tekki, Telly Tuita, and Gutiŋjarra Yunipiŋju.