Anna Dziedzic 2.1 Identity and belonging Oceania is an extraordinarily diverse region of different peoples, histories and cultures. Almost a quarter of all languages – nearly 1,500 – are spoken in Oceania.2 Each language indicates a distinctive culture with its own norms and values that govern community life. Generalising across such diversity is difficult, but Indigenous peoples of Oceania share in common worldviews built on deep connections between people, community and land. 3 Ties to community, village, tribe or family continue to generate a different, and at times stronger, sense of identity and belonging than those to a much more recently created a nation-state. Indigenous understandings of belonging can be at least accommodated in citizenship laws, albeit incompletely within the parameters of legislative language. Oceania is also a region characterised by migration and the movement of peoples. For centuries, people, skills, products and knowledge crisscrossed what Epeli Hau’ofa evocatively framed as a ‘sea of islands’.4 Movement continued during colonisation as peoples travelled within and outside the region to work, trade, and share knowledge. Some movements were the result of colonial exploitation, such as the practice of ‘blackbirding’, in which Islanders were taken from their homes to work on plantations in Australia and other parts of the Pacific; or the recruitment of Indians to labour in the British colony of Fiji.5 Movement continues today, as Pacific diasporas maintain connections between their island homes and their places and communities of residence.6 This movement of peoples has implications for how citizenship and belonging are understood at a local, national and regional level. 2.2 Colonisation, decolonisation and nation building Oceania was deeply affected by colonisation. Immediately prior to their independence, Fiji, Solomon Islands, Kiribati and Tuvalu were British colonies. Vanuatu was a British-French condominium. Nauru and New Guinea were administered by Australia, and Samoa by New Zealand as League of Nations mandated territories and then United Nations trust territories. The Federated States of Micronesia, the Marshall Islands and Palau were all parts of the Trust Territory of the Pacific, administered by the United States. Tonga was never formally colonised but was a British protectorate from 1900 to 1970. The twelve states became independent in the period of decolonisation over the 1960s to 1980s. The nine Commonwealth member states (Fiji, Kiribati, Nauru, Papua New Guinea, Samoa, Solomon Islands, Tonga, Tuvalu and Vanuatu) negotiated with their colonial administrators to become fully independent states, sometimes after an interim period of selfgovernment. The Federated States of Micronesia, the Marshall Islands and Palau entered into arrangements of ‘free association’ with the United States, providing the United States with 2 Darrell Tryon, ‘Linguistic Encounter and Responses in the South Pacific’ in Serge Tcherkézoff, Darrell Tryon and Margaret Jolly (eds), Oceanic Encounters: Exchange, Desire, Violence (ANU Press 2009) 37. 3 For insight into the connection of place and people see Epeli Hau’ofa, ‘Pasts to Remember’ in Robert Borofsky (ed), Remembrance of Pacific Pasts: An Invitation to Remake History (University of Hawaii Press 2000) 468–9. 4 Epeli Hau’ofa, ‘Our Sea of Islands’ in Epeli Hau’ofa, Eric Waddell and Vijay Naidu (eds), A New Oceania: Rediscovering our Sea of Islands (University of the South Pacific in association with Beake House 1993). 5 For a discussion of these and other transnational movements across the Pacific see Tracey Banivanua-Mar, Decolonisation and the Pacific: Indigenous Globalisation and the Ends of Empire (Cambridge University Press 2016) ch 1. 6 Sa’iliemanu Lilomaiava-Doktor, ‘Beyond “Migration”: Samoan Population Movement (Malaga) and the Geography of Social Space (Vā)’ (2009) 21 Contemporary Pacific 1. 2 RSCAS/GLOBALCIT-Comp 2020/1- © 2020 Author