Higher Education

Fakatapu mo e tangata‘i fonua ‘o Hawai‘i kae‘uma‘a ‘a kimoutolu katoa ka e ‘ata kia teau ke hoko atu ‘a e katoanga lea ‘o e ‘aho ni. I wish to acknowledge the presence of the spirit of the indigenous people of Hawai‘i, on whose land we happen to be meeting today, and seek their mana on this important occasion. I would also like to congratulate the Center for Pacific Islands Studies for fifty years of service and thank the organizers for invit-ing me to give a keynote on a topic that has been a preoccupation of mine for most of my working life. As you can see, my western education has not caused me to shift from a belief and reliance in the supernatural to what Nietzsche called “the will to power, ” associated with human triumph over the forces of nature. I am a Tongan woman of the commoner class, and although schooled in west-ern ways, I continue to see myself as part of an organic unity, not as a chance result of natural selection at work in a world devoid of supernat-ural guidance. I apologize in advance if I say anything that offends any of you, but since I am only a teacher who dabbles in poetry, I’ll try and weave a kakala (garland) for you today that is worthy of this special occasion. Perhaps I should first “decolonize ” my keynote by not offering to define terms, as my university education would have me do. Nevertheless, I sug-gest that the conference theme, “Decolonizing Pacific Studies, ” is part of the more general theme of decolonization, which, for me, implies an attempt to reflect critically on the nature, scope, and processes of colo-nialism in the Pacific Islands (or Oceania), particularly its impact on colo-nized people and their environments. While much has been written abou