Planting Oceania: Pacific Islander Dreaming & Resistance

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Fuifuilupe and Loa Niumeitolu are Tongan sisters born and raised in Tonga, a Pacific Island nation that neighbors Samoa and Fiji. Like many Pacific Islanders, living under the hand of the U.S. Empire, their immigration to the lands now known as the U.S. was navigated through the Mormon Church. Fuifuilupe and Loa’s Talanoa-Talk Story will be grounded in their Tongan protocols of Tauhi Vā, creating good relations and protecting the Sacred, which are knowledges that their Grandparents, Elders, community and their Fonua/Homeland instilled in them. This guidance from their ancestors led them through forty years of Indigenous Pacific Islander community organizing and activist work to resist settler colonial violence and the expropriation of Indigenous Lands and cultures.

Their Talanoa will address their lives’ work: prison abolitionism with incarcerated Pacific Islander women and men, building feminist and queer movements to resist Mormon and Christian fundamentalisms, creating movements to resist climate and environmental violence, organizing solidarities for the Free West Papua Movement here in the United States. They also look at their organizing work that upholds the key role of creativity and the arts through poetry and art events for Pacific Islanders communities. Their recent work is centered on reconnecting Pacific Islanders to the Land to create healing through their group Planting Oceania. Planting Oceania is a community organization that brings Pacific Islanders together to grow their ancestral foods and medicinal plants, like Talo, Kava, and Tì. This helps Pacific Islanders to heal from their fractured relationships of separation and disconnection from their ancestral homelands.

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