Linguistics Department Seminar Wednesday

The Linguistics Department's seminar series is hosting a special talk this week that will touch on issues we have discussed in terms of language maintenance and revitalization.


Ideologies in the Maori Language Revitalisation Movement

Wednesday, March 11

Jeanette King (University of Canterbury)


Time: 12:30-1:45 PM
Place: Biomedical Auditorium (T208)


The main impetus behind the last twenty years' Maori language revitalisation comes from a large cohort of second language speaking adults. These adults form the bulk of the teaching and parenting groups striving to raise a generation of first language speakers. This seminar will contrast the experiences of these speakers and aspects of the history of the revitalisation of the Maori language with rhetoric produced by national and tribal language planners in New Zealand. While linguists and language planners tend to focus almost exclusively on the revitalisation of the Maori language, the personal focus of second language learning adults reminds us that Maori people are also being revitalised. These differences in focus have important implications for language promotion.

Hawaiian Language Revitalization Benefit

Support the revitalization of the Hawaiian Language and Culture at the KULIA ROOTS FEST this SATURDAY, FEBRUARY 28 at ANDREWS AMPHITHEATER from 5:30-11:00PM.

The concert will feature various bands including INNA VISION from Maui, AIPOHAKU from Hawai'i, OOKLAH THE MOC from O'ahu and ROOTZ UNDERGROUND from Kingston, Jamaica in their very first appearance to Hawai'i!


$10 tickets may be purchased with a validated UH MANOA ID and $15 tickets are available for the GENERAL PUBLIC at the following locations:


UH Manoa Campus Center
Buti Groove
Ecosystems
Aikane Kai
Hungry Ear
Barefoot League

Tickets will also be available at the door.


Proceeds are to benefit KAWAIHUELANI CENTER FOR HAWAIIAN LANGUAGE.

*additional concert info may be found at http://www.myspace.com/kuliarootsfest.

Pan Pacific Nation at Marks Garage [March 3-28]

PAN PACIFIC NATION is a new exhibition of contemporary Pacific art running from March 3rd to March 28th at the Arts at Marks Garage, 1159 Nu’uanu Avenue, Honolulu, Hawaii.

Artists include: Maile Andrade, Leanne Lupelele Clayton, Noelle Kahanu, Leilani Kake, Lily Laita, Janet Lilo, Carl Pao, Siliga David Setoga, Ema Tavola, Angela Tiatia and Filipe Tohi

Inspired by King David Kalakaua’s vision of a Federation of Pacific Island nations, the participating artists respond to the complexities, contradictions and power dynamics at stake in the notion of a “pan pacific.” Their pieces ask what it means to think about the affinities and unities of Oceania. What did it mean in 1885 when Kalakaua initiated his call for a Pacific Island Federation? What did it mean in 1976, when Albert Wendt called for a “New Oceania” in the journal Mana, or when ‘Epeli Hau’ofa wrote “Our Sea of Islands” in 1994?

What does it mean, given our current political, economic, environmental and cultural seascape, at the present moment? The pieces included in the show offer multilayered responses; they celebrate a continued and hopeful identification of Pacific Island peoples that share a strong genealogical history and geographic kinship, while also offering ambivalent considerations that uncover the subtle and specific localized histories involved in any strategic collective social identification.

Special Events:

Panel Discussion: Urban Pacific Art in Aotearoa New Zealand
Mark’s Garage, March 4th, 6pm
The panel includes Ema Tavola, Leilani Kake and Giles Peterson

Ema Tavola, Leilani Kake and Giles Peterson are visiting from South Auckland, New Zealand. Ema Tavola is a visual artist and curator at Fresh Gallery Otara working as the Pacific Arts Coordinator for Manukau City Council. Leilani Kake is an independent artist and Giles Peterson lectures at Whitecliffe College of Arts and Design.

Mission Houses Museum exhibit on Hawaiian orthography

The Mission Houses Museum has recently opened an exhibit about missionary work on the development of the Hawaiian orthography. The exhibit runs until June 15.

Event: Electronic Pathways for Samoan Heritage Students

Thursday, February 26,
11:30am-12:20pm
UHM Moore Hall 155A

Denise Ah Sue (Farrington High School), Stephen Tschudi (NFLRC), and
Samoan project team members

Come learn about an online project that has brought students from UH Manoa, American Samoa Community College, and Farrington High School together to rap online about what "Fa'asamoa" (the Samoan way) means to students in different places, and also about how Samoan heritage students can successfully make their way from high school into higher education.

Based on the well-known Cultura model developed at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Electronic Pathways provides a model for cultural exchange among geographically separated groups of students as well as an example of outreach by students in higher education to their youngercounterparts in high school.

The program is cosponsored by the UHM Department of Indo-Pacific Languages and Literatures, the National Foreign Language
Resource Center, and the Center for Pacific Islands Studies.

9th Annual Mary Kawena Pukui Performing Arts Festival

February 8, 2009
10:00 a.m. to 4:00 p.m.
Great Lawn, Bishop Museum
$3 reduced admission for Hawai'i residents and military with ID

Storytellers from Alaska, Mississippi, Massachusetts, and Hawai‘i will gather at Bishop Museum on Sunday, February 8, 2009 to perform at the 9th Annual Mary Kawena Pukui Performing Arts Festival. This year’s theme is “The Way to the Heart: Changing Food, Foodways, and Culture.”

The Pukui festival is a celebration of native cultures through the ancient arts of storytelling and dance. There will be several stages featuring Hawaiian storytellers, stories for keiki, dance performances, kalo practitioners, and more. Event goers will also have the opportunity to watch a special performance led by the dynamic Tau Dance Theatre Artistic Director Peter Rockford Espiritu.

Tomorrow: Treaty of Waitangi Partnership Initiatives: Successes and Challenges

Professor Mason Durie
Professor of Maori Research and Development and Deputy Vice-Chancellor (Maori)
Massey University

Date: 6 February 2009
Time: 12:30 - 1:30 pm
Place: EWC Burns Hall 3118

In Aotearoa New Zealand, February 6, Waitangi Day, is the day set aside to commemorate the signing of the Treaty of Waitangi on 6 February 1840. The University of Hawai'i at Manoa is honored to be able to mark the wide-ranging importance and impact of the Treaty of Waitangi for Maori and non-Maori in Aotearoa with a presentation by Professor Mason Durie, one of the foremost commentators on Maori self determination and developments under the treaty.

Professor Durie (Ngati Kauwhata, Ngati Raukawa, Rangitane) is Professor of Maori Research and Development and Deputy Vice-Chancellor (Maori) at Massey University in Palmerston North, Aoteatoa New Zealand. Trained in psychiatry, his work centers on Maori development, health, and social policy. He has written widely about the roles and processes for Treaty of Waitangi settlements and Treaty of Waitangi Tribunal claims. Nga Kahui Pou Launching Maori Futures, published by Huia Publishers, contains a series of his addresses, focusing on contemporary Maori development and the advancement of Maori into the twenty-first century.

This presentation is cosponsored by the EWC Pacific Islands Development Program, the Hawai`inuiakea School of Hawaiian Knowledge, and the Maori Language and Culture Program. For information, please call the Center for Pacific Islands Studies, 956-7700.

Special Pacific lecture this week

This upcoming lecture is related to our ongoing discussions about biology, identity, language, and the how and why Science is, and has been, interested in some of the questions pursued. If you can, please attend.

By Warwick Anderson, University of Sydney
Thursday, 5 February 2009, 12:00-1:30pm
Center for Korean Studies (CKS) Conference Room
1881 East-West Road, UH-Manoa

The attitudes of Australian biologists, anthropologists, and historians toward race mixing in the early-twentieth century should be viewed in relation to the investigations of Indigenous depopulation and miscegenation taking place in the Pacific, in Hawai`i especially. Those Australian scientists committed to national or continental white racial ideals--Cecil Cook and Norman B. Tindale among them--remained resistant to the lessons of the Pacific, favoring "half-caste" absorption and disappearance. Other scholars such as Stephen Roberts and A. P. Elkin took the Oceanic approach, coming to value and harness racial hybridity. This talk shows how much of Australian racial thought drifted in from the Pacific.

Warwick H. Anderson holds an appointment as Professorial Research Fellow in the Department of History and the Center for Values, Ethics, and the Law in Medicine at the University of Sydney. Before moving to Sydney, Dr. Anderson was Robert Turell Professor of Medical History and Population Health, Professor of the History of Science, and Chair of the Department of Medical History and Bioethics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. His latest book is The Collectors of Lost Souls: Kuru, Moral Peril, and the Creation of Value in Science (Johns Hopkins, 2008). He also authored two award-winning books: Colonial Pathologies: American Tropical Medicine, Race, and Hygiene in the Philippines (Duke; 2006) and The Cultivation of Whiteness: Science, Health and Racial Destiny in Australia (Melbourne,2002).

1st International Conference on Language Documentation & Conservation

This is an excellent opportunity to learn more about some of the topics in this class, especially language documentation and conservation and there will a number of presentations about languages in the Pacific, including one by me.

The 1st International Conference on Language Documentation and Conservation (ICLDC) will be held at the Hawaii Imin International Conference Center, on the east side of the University of Hawai‘i at Manoa campus, from March 12th-14th, 2009. There will also be an optional opportunity to visit Hilo, on the Big Island of Hawai'i, in an extension of the conference that will focus on the Hawaiian language revitalization program, March 16th-17th.

There will be over 150 presentations from Australia, Cameroon, Canada, Chile, Egypt, French Polynesia, FSM, Germany, Indonesia, Japan, Mexico, Nepal, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, the Philippines, Russia, Senegal, the Solomon Islands, Taiwan, Tokelau, the UK, and the USA.

For more information or to find out how you can attend, ask me in class.