Our Sea of Islands
In “Our Sea of Islands,” Epeli Hauʻofa challenges dominant geopolitical and economic narratives that depict Pacific Island nations as small, isolated, and inherently dependent. Drawing on historical, cultural, and contemporary social realities, Hauʻofa argues that such representations are products of colonial and neocolonial frameworks that confine Oceania within artificially bounded national economies and deficit-based development paradigms. Reframing the region as “a sea of islands” rather than “islands in a far sea,” he advances a holistic and relational understanding of Oceania grounded in mobility, kinship networks, reciprocity, and transnational circulation.
Hauʻofa highlights the enduring cultural logics of oceanic exchange and the contemporary expansion of Pacific communities across Australia, New Zealand, North America, and beyond, contending that these movements constitute forms of autonomy rather than dependency. By foregrounding grassroots agency and the expansive spatial imaginaries embedded in Oceanic cosmologies, the essay calls for a reconceptualization of Pacific identity, sovereignty, and resourcefulness. Ultimately, Hauʻofa positions Oceania not as marginal or deficient, but as vast, interconnected, and central to global ecological and political futures.
Reflection
15 February 2026
Emma-leigh Theobald
"Smallness is a state of mind"
"Belittlement in whatever guise, if internalized for long, and transmitted across generations, may lead to moral paralysis, to apathy, and to the kind of fatalism that we can see among our fellow human beings who have been herded and confined to reservations or internment camps.”
"There is a world of difference between viewing the Pacific as ‘islands in a far sea’ and as ‘a sea of islands".
“Ordinary Pacific people depend for their daily existence much, much more on themselves and their kin, wherever they may be, than on anyone’s largesse.”
""The world of Oceania is neither tiny nor deficient in resources.It was so only as a condition of the colonial confinement that lasted less than a century in a history of millennia."
“Oceania is vast, Oceania is expanding, Oceania is hospitable and generous, Oceania is humanity rising from the depths of brine and regions of fire deeper still, Oceania is us.”
'"Economists do not take account of the social centrality of the ancient practice of reciprocity, the core of all oceanic cultures."
"Oceania is vast, Oceania is expanding, Oceania is hospitable and generous, Oceania is humanity rising from the depths of brine and regions of fire deeper still, Oceania is us. We are the sea, we are the ocean, we must wake up to this ancient truth and together use it too verturn all hegemonic views that aim ultimately to confine us again, physically and psychologically, in the tiny spaces that we have resisted accepting as our sole appointed places, and from which we have recently liberated ourselves. We must not allow anyone to belittle us again, and take away our freedom"
“There is a world of difference,” Hauʻofa writes, “between viewing the Pacific as ‘islands in a far sea’ and as ‘a sea of islands.’”
That line has stayed with me for years. 'Our Sea of Islands' reminded me that Oceania is vast — and “smallness” is produced: intellectually, politically, and psychologically.
Hauʻofa begins by confronting that academic and consultancy experts often overlook grassroots realities because they do not fit prevailing models of development. That observation feels as relevant now as it was when he first delivered this lecture. Entire frameworks of policy and scholarship are built upon assumptions of dependency, vulnerability, and deficit. When lived experience contradicts those models, it is often dismissed rather than allowed to challenge the framework itself.
He is unsparing in identifying how views held by dominant powers shape the self-image of those deemed subordinate. Belittlement, he argues, is not incidental — it is integral to systems of dominance. When people are repeatedly described as small, isolated, incapable of autonomy, those descriptions do not remain external. They seep inward. They shape expectation. They structure possibility.
The condemnation of Oceanic cultures as “savage” and “barbaric,” the colonial language that infantilised populations, the economic framing that renders island states perpetually dependent — these are not isolated moments. They form a genealogy of diminishment. “Smallness,” as Hauʻofa insists, is a state of mind — but it is a state of mind cultivated through centuries of narrative discipline.
What strikes me most is his own moment of reckoning. He realised that by teaching his students about the supposed limitations imposed by their countries’ absolute size — and the inevitability of dependency — he was reproducing neocolonial logic. His question is devastating in its simplicity: Is this not what neocolonialism is all about? To make people believe they have no choice but to depend?
That line lingers because the claim that Polynesia and Micronesia are “too small” is presented as geographic fact. Yet Hauʻofa exposes it as a narrow, economistic determinism that ignores cultural history, mobility, reciprocity, and what he calls “world enlargement” — the daily expansion of Oceania carried out by ordinary people moving across the ocean, across borders drawn only recently across waters that were once boundless.
Nineteenth-century imperialism contracted Oceania. It transformed a sea of islands into administratively bounded micro-states. But contraction was not natural — it was imposed. And the danger, Hauʻofa warns, is not only physical confinement but psychological confinement. His reference to the Marshall Islands — communities subjected to nuclear and missile testing — underscores this point. Confinement can become mental. A people can be made to believe that their world is small.
Reading this through my own research lens — particularly on nuclear history in the Pacific — that warning feels urgent. Regions described as remote, marginal, strategically useful, or environmentally fragile become easier to test upon, militarise, and manage. A geography of smallness enables a politics of expendability.
Hauʻofa insists that Oceania is neither tiny nor deficient in resources. That reciprocity — so often invisible to economists — is central to Oceanic life. That mobility is not dependency but continuity. That the ocean is not empty space but connective tissue, archive, livelihood, and future. This difference in framing is epistemic. It is political. It is existential.
His closing declaration — that Oceania is vast, expanding, hospitable, generous — reads not as sentiment, but as refusal. A refusal to accept confinement. A refusal to internalise diminishment. A refusal to allow external narratives to define scale or worth.
For me, Our Sea of Islands is a reminder that sovereignty begins in imagination. Before borders are redrawn, before policy shifts, before environmental regimes are negotiated — scale must be reclaimed.
Because if smallness can be produced, it can also be undone.