Reposted from Empowering Pacific Islander Communities (EPIC):
Centering Tongan Fonua: Indigenous Feminisms and Protecting the Sacred
Speaker: Fuifuilupe Niumeitolu
Tuesday, December 8th @11am
The Pacific Islands nation, Tonga, currently holds the global record of the highest conversion rates into the U.S-based Mormon Church in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Following the Tongan and Indigenous cultural practices of oral traditions and storytelling, this presentation centers my own Tongan female body, my fonua, as a Tongan Feminist archive to tell stories or to participate in what First Nations scholar Leanne Simpson terms as the “narrative imagination” to examine the twentieth-century spatiality of the “Tongan Mormon Family.” Considering what Ohlone/ Costanoan-Esselen writer Deborah Miranda terms as the “genealogy of violence,” I examine the desires of U.S. setter colonialism, U.S. empire, and the histories of the U.S. military occupation of Tonga during WWII and their “white terror,” a racialized violence aimed to produce colonial systems of family, gender, and sexualities against the bodies of Tongan women and girls. Correspondingly, the scope of “white terror,” I will argue, is inextricably tied to the expropriation of the Tongan natural world—the fonua (land) to the Moana (ocean)—spatialities and Tongan cosmologies that are delineated as Feminine and located at the core of what we define as the Sacred.
This presentation concludes with a turn to Tongan migrations navigated by the Mormon Church to the U.S., and to Huichin, the occupied and unceded Lisjan, Ohlone land also known as the East Bay, California. This land currently hosts one of the largest Tongan communities in the U.S. outside of Hawaiʻi. I examine the local campaign here in Huichin, led by Lisjan Ohlone leader Corrina Gould to rematriate the land and to protect the West Berkeley Shellmound. I argue that as Tongan “arrivants” on occupied Lisjan Ohone land—our embodiment of the Tongan methodology of tauhi va (cultivating genealogies of relationalities)—asks us to stand with the Indigenous and original stewards of the land in their work to rematriate and to protect the Sacred in order to “find our way back home” to our own respective fonua.
Fuifuilupe Niumeitolu is a Tongan/Pacific Islander scholar and storyteller. She received her doctorate from the Comparative Ethnic Studies Department at UC Berkeley in 2019 and is currently a Lecturer in the Department of Gender and Women’s Studies at UC Berkeley. She is working on two book manuscripts; The Mana of the Tongan Everyday: Tongan Grief and Mourning, Patriarchal Violence, and Remembering Va and a collection of creative non-fiction titled, Looking For Hine Nui Te Po: Searching for Our Mother. Her research and storytelling examines the normalization of violence against women in Tongan families and communities.
Event details:
https://berkeley.zoom.us/j/98268415530
Meeting ID: 982 6841 5530
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