UHM Center for Pacific Islands Studies | CPIS

arts & culture

2024 Celebrate Micronesia Festival

By

June 15, 2024, 09:00 am – 04:00 pm HST at Bishop Museum

Join us on Saturday, June 15, 2024 as we celebrate our Micronesian cultures and Pacific communities at the annual Celebrate Micronesia Festival at Bishop Museum!

The Festival showcases traditional and contemporary art, dance, fashion, stories, poetry, food, and music of the people and cultures of the Republic of Palau, the Commonwealth of the Northern Marianas, Guåhan (Guam), Yap, Chuuk, Pohnpei, Kosrae, Kiribati and the Republic of the Marshall Islands.

Program and ticket information forthcoming.

Download the e-booklet: Resilience & Ten Years of Celebration

Supported in part by:

  • Bernice Pauahi Bishop Museum
  • Center for Pacific Island Studies, University of Hawai’i at Mānoa
  • East-West Center
  • Hawai’i Council for the Humanities
  • National Endowment for the Humanities
  • Pacific Islands Development Program

Protecting Oceania: Philosophies of Will and Action, ‘O ka Palekana o ka Pākīpika

By

10-12 June 2024 in conjunction with the 2024 Festival of Pacific Arts & Culture (FestPAC)

Protecting Oceania is a weaving of indigenous Pasifika philosophies with activism. It will not have typical keynote addresses and breakout panels for the purpose of sharing previously written work. Instead we are asking Pasifika thinkers and those already engaged in struggle with the climate crisis, military occupation, extractivism and political inaction to act as provocateurs, to speak to specific issues or crises in which they are engaged. Issues for discussion will be developed based on the provocateurs’ talks and assigned to breakout rooms. In these breakouts, we will be invited to share our experiences, methods and tactics as we advance discourses of indigenous philosophies, where we will find new colleagues, comrades and form new alliances. Protecting Oceania activates Pasifika philosophies.

For the complete abstract contact the Center for Pacific Islands Studies at cpiscon@hawaii.edu.

Organized by:

  • Hawaiʻi Peace and Justice
  • UHM Center for Pacific Islands Studies
  • UHM Hawaiʻinuiākea School of Hawaiian Knowledge
  • EWC Pacific Islands Development Program
  • Pacific Theological College

The Festival of Pacific Arts & Culture (FestPAC) is the world’s largest celebration of indigenous Pacific Islanders. The South Pacific Commission (now The Pacific Community – SPC) launched this dynamic showcase of arts and culture in 1972 to halt the erosion of traditional practices through ongoing cultural exchange. The 13th Festival of Pacific Arts & Culture, will convene in Hawaiʻi, 6–16 June 2024. “Ho‘oulu Lāhui: Regenerating Oceania” will serve as the theme of FestPAC Hawaiʻi 2024, honoring the traditions that FestPAC exists to perpetuate with an eye toward the future.

Project Banaba | A conversation with Dr Katerina Teaiwa

By

1 November 2023, 12 noon at Moore Hall 258
Nov 4 2023 – Feb 18, 2024 at the Bishop Museum

Dr. Katerina Teaiwa is a Banaban and I-Kiribati scholar, activist, and artist whose work focuses on representations of Pacific peoples, historical and environmental justice, and the politics of mobility in relation to climate change and colonial projects. She engages many of these themes in her book Consuming Ocean Island: Stories of People and Phosphate from Banaba, a story of phosphate mining for industrial agriculture and its harmful ramifications for Banabans and their environment. She transformed her research into a multimedia exhibition titled Project Banaba that has toured Australia and Aotearoa and will be showcased at the Bishop Museum Nov 4 2023 – Feb 18, 2024.

This talk is sponsored by UH Mānoa SEED, Center for Pacific Islands Studies, and the East-West Center Pacific Islands Development Program.

Visit the Bishop Museum’s website for more information about the Project Banaba exhibition.

Wayfinding Pasifikafuturism: An Indigenous Science Fiction Vision of the Ocean in Space featuring author Gina Cole

By

12 noon at Hamilton Library 306

We can imagine the future from an Indigenous point of view. Pasifikafuturism looks to Indigenous Pasifika culture, our past, our cultural practices, our science, in the writing of science fiction. Ancestral navigational knowledge of wayfinding across the vast Pacific Ocean entity, provides an imaginative metaphor for finding our way in the present and envisioning transformative future pathways in science fiction.

This talk is presented by the Center and Department for Pacific Islands Studies with the Department of English and the Hamilton Library Pacific Collection.

Gina is a freelance writer living in Tāmaki Makaurau and joins CPIS as the Fulbright-Creative New Zealand Pacific Writer Fellow for Fall 2023. She was the inaugural Pasifika curator at the Auckland Writers Festival in 2021 and holds a PhD in creative writing from Massey University and is an Honorary Fellow in Writing at the University of Iowa. Her collection of short stories, Black Ice Matter, won Best First Book Fiction at the 2017 Ockham Book Awards. She is a science fiction nerd and when she enrolled to do a PhD in Creative Writing at Massey University, she decided to write science fiction – especially stories set in space. There is hardly any science fiction written by Pacific writers or featuring Pacific characters – Gina wanted to change that. Her latest book, Na Viro – the first in the ‘Turukawa Trilogy’ – is a work of Pasifikafuturism, a term coined in her PhD thesis. Pasifikafuturism was inspired by Afrofuturism, written by African American writers, and Indigenous Futurism written by First Nations writers from America.

2021 Cultural Animation Film Festival

By

CAFF 2021 is a free all-virtual community 4-day event that starts on October 8, 2021. See below for details.

Tuesday, October 8-11
Free tickets available at https://watch.eventive.org/caff2021

More information: http://caffest.com
Free downloadable goodies for keiki: shorturl.at/jkzOT

CAFF, the Cultural Animation Film Festival, is designed to showcase unique animated films based on our cultures, sharing stories and voices that might not otherwise be seen or heard. Our hope is that these films will shed a better light on who we are as a people. We also hope that CAFF will inspire animators both new and seasoned from around the world to create films and share their stories.

This year, for the 5th CAFF, the 2nd all-virtual event, twenty-eight judges selected 74 films out of 1,379 submissions representing over 30 cultures and countries including Hawai’i, Vietnam, Algeria, Taiwan, Albania, France, Brazil, Italy, Turkey, United States, Singapore, Switzerland, Iran, India, Jordan, Philippines, Spain, Chile, Germany, Belarus, Canada, Dorset, Israel, Jerusalem, Jordan, United Kingdom, Iran, Jamaica, Argentina, Belgium, China, Kazakhstan, South Korea, Greece, Estonia, Saudi Arabia, The Russian Federation.

CAFF 2021 promo
https://vimeo.com/manage/videos/608681512

The Center for Pacific Islands Studies is proud to be an official community partner of the Cultural Animation Film Festival since 2017.