Cultural hybridity, gender, and identity: A Pacific Islander woman in the academy

In communicating with the editors of this issue, I was asked to consider in this essay what it means to be a Pacific Islander woman in the academy. In the previous drafts of this piece, I thought I had been doing that but found I tend to separate cultural and gendered notions of identity. I can speak and research, when necessary, about the spaces between Pacific Islander and academic cultural paradigms, but I found it difficult to do when addressing gender. Some of my own experiences can illustrate this gap.

I arrive on campus for the first semester of my doctoral program very pregnant, a fact I carefully withheld when corresponding with the program chair and office of graduate studies. I spend the first week bedridden per doctor's orders, but I lie there reading for the courses for which I am registered, calling my professors to let them know about my progress, and having someone record class sessions. I am able to attend school the next week, a large, uncomfortable pregnant woman trying to squeeze her girth between the chair and desk, shifting positions every few minutes to relieve back pain. My advisor tactfully suggests I drop a class and I tell her I'd rather not. Week three: I have the baby. I am back at school six days later, still periodically shifting my recovering body on the hard wood chair and furtively pumping my breasts in a toilet stall during class breaks.

I am teaching Keri Hulme's The Bone People to students in an honors literature course.1 Several of them find it an intense, sometimes painful, book to read, and they continue to focus our discussion on the child and alcohol abuse scenes. As we wrap up, I map the complex relationships of the three main characters on the board, outlining how Hulme inverts the colonizing dynamics of New Zealand history and detailing how the white character takes on the archetypal features of the Polynesian demigod Maui. The novel is, I show them, about much more than dysfunctional relationships. One woman's mouth drops and she asks me, "How do you know all of this?" This leads to a productive discussion about how one's experience leads to different ways of reading.

I am interviewing for a tenure-track position at a large, regional research university. At the end of the interview, our discussion becomes more informal. The committee members talk about the diversity of their department. They already have women, they tell me, and confirm to each other as I sit there that I would be perfect for helping the department further diversify its faculty. I smile and nod (having been told you should always do this in a job interview) and only realize later that I allowed them to objectify me as something resembling an artifact with fixed cultural value.

Each experience reminds me of how strangely juxtaposed the facets of my identity are. This is not an essay about what I do or how I do it. This is about what I am and how I feel being what I am in the academy. Teresia Teiawa writes that "Native peoples . . . have for a very long time been simply objects of scholarly discourse.... written about, talked about, photographed, medically dissected, biologically and anthropologically classified... our bones have been displayed in museums."2 How do we move from being an absent presence in the academy to being a subjective presence validating all that we are? Further, how can women of color become a presence when our gendered roles are sometimes as foreign in the academy as our cultured otherness? When I was pregnant and for months afterward, I ignored the fact that the roles of woman and mother had any effect on my scholarship. I was willing, however, to take on the role of minority scholar, one who may know ways of understanding that other academics or students around me are not aware of. With the heightened stakes of the job search, I was even more willing to do so. The more common experience of being a woman, however, is what I felt I must suppress. Later I came to understand that, with my pregnancy, I thought my female identity was separate from and more disruptive to the institution than my cultural identity. The job interview further confirmed that my cultural self is a more valuable commodity than my gendered one. Thus, many of my experiences in graduate school were instrumental in shaping the way I have assumed culture and gender occupy separate spheres. However, my position within the academy has also been key in helping me understand this dynamic.

This is, perhaps, a good time to stop and explain my particulars of difference. My mother is Maori, a Nga Puhi from the North Island of New Zealand. By the time I was born, my mother had already spent a significat part of her life away from her culture. She was part of the generation punished for speaking Maori in school and for speaking English at home. My family emigrated to the United States soon after I was born; I grew up, for the most part, in Las Vegas, where our whanau3 consisted of Hawaiians, Maori, and Samoans living in the Vegas valley. Konai Helu-Thaman, Tongan poet and scholar, argues that being a Pacific Islander "embodies a collective cultural identity which characterizes many Pacific societies as opposed to the individualistic ones that are more typical of European societies."4 This kind of community, the collectivity commonly recognized as the foundation of Pacific indigenous societies, transmutes into something different once Pacific Islanders start emigrating. Growing up in Las Vegas, our otherness, signified through the fantasy of Polynesia, became a commodity. One of my first jobs was entertaining, doing the hula, snapping and twirling poi balls, and shaking my hips in the Tahitian tamure at parties and conventions. I grew up in a displaced Polynesian community where access to traditional ways was limited to our compliance with the dominant view of Polynesia as "paradise." Our home cultures-fractured by colonialism and diaspora-did not even faintly resemble the fantasies we were paid to live out on the stage. What I grew up experiencing in Las Vegas is what Haunani-Kay Trask calls "recreational culture," situations in which the subject's everyday lived experience does not mirror that of their traditional culture.5 Trask's project is an important one in that it validates Native culture, revealing how its common practices are crucial to its vitality. I am part of a whole population that grew up with merely "recreational" contact with home.6 Yet, in a culture where my family had to submit to the dominant ideology, providing Polynesian "entertainment" was itself a subversive practice because we were both perpetuating the Polynesian sense of community and benefiting economically from it.7