Contemporary Moana Mobilities: Settler-Colonial Citizenship, Upward Mobility, and Transnational Pacific Identities

For Pacific people, descendants in the formidable Moana-Oceania genealogy of grand voyaging and wayfinding, journeys into new territories are not new-Pacific worlds have always been mobile. 1 According to Vicente Diaz (2011), this voyaging tradition dates back at least four thousand years, to when Austronesian seafarers with deep maritime technologies set out to settle two-thirds of the Pacific Ocean. Through their voyages, they established the Pacific region as an assemblage of interlocking navigations, migrations, and settlements (Matsuda 2011). The advent of colonialism and settler colonialism across the region significantly altered these mobilities (Lopesi 2018), closing established mobility pathways while opening others (Salesa 2018). Thus, the term "Moana mobilities" encapsulates Pacific peoples' movements across islands and national borders both in the late nineteenth century as the Westphalian state was cemented as the dominant model of nationhood and in contemporary times.