Created in 2000, the Pacific Worlds project works to portray Pacific Island communities through the words of community members themselves. The premise is that, despite climatic, linguistic, and material-culture similarities, each Pacific Island culture presents a complete and distinct worldview. And these worldviews developed in situ, through generations of interactions between the people and the environment. This kind of locally-developed human-environment knowledge is the cornerstone of what I call “indigeneity.” I contrast “indigeneity” with “modernity,” the mode of human-environment interaction based on industrial capitalism and characterized by commodification and exploitation of the environment. In this essay, I look at Indigeneity in three Pacific Island locations: Palau, Guam and the Hawaiian Islands, looking that the tensions between indigeneity and the modernity brought by waves of colonization from Europe, Asia and the United States.
