Paddling as ‘Pelagic Postcolonialism’: Pacific voyaging resurgence,ocean justice and outrigger canoe racing (Va’a) in Fiji

Abstract

This article presents an exploratory study of va’a, or outrigger canoe racing, in Fiji, based on 13 semi-structured interviews with paddlers and administrators. The sport, which is deeply embedded in Pacific seafaring heritage, emerged in Fiji in the 1980s against the historical background of the region’s decolonisation. The paddling community subsequently developed notable inclusivity in terms of gender, ethnicity and age, in contrast to the gendered and racialised nature of dominant sports in the country, notwithstanding persisting geographical/class disparity. Fiji paddlers have cultivated va’a into a multifaceted sporting practice that simultaneously constitutes a highly competitive modern game, a hip and cool recreational activity, and a cultural movement underpinned by ocean-centred regionalism and an agentic community coalesced around the shared pursuit of ocean justice. Whilst their active involvement in ocean/climate action parallels the environmental activism of nature-based lifestyle sports in other global locations, Fiji paddlers’ engagement with and stewardship of the ocean are inseparable from postcolonial resistance to the subjugation of the Pacific Ocean, knowledges and cultures, a direct consequence of which is the ocean/climate crisis, an unprecedented existential threat to the Pacific Islands today. The distinct nature of their paddling practice may be described as a ‘pelagic postcolonialism’.

Keywords

va'a outrigger canoe racing Fiji Pacific Islands voyaging resurgence ocean justice postcolonialism regionalism

Introduction

No sport strikes a chord with the peoples of the Pacific in the way outrigger canoe racing, or va’a, does. To understand the unique regional nature of this sport, one must appreciate the centrality of the ocean and voyaging in Oceanic ontology (Howe, 2006; Nuttall et al., 2014). Pacific Islanders are, in the words of esteemed Tongan anthropologist the late Epeli Hau’ofa, ‘ocean peoples because our ancestors, who had lived in the Pacific for over two thousand years, viewed their world as “a sea of islands” rather than as “islands in the sea”’ (1994: 153, emphasis original). Well before the onset of modern industrial transport and electronic communication, Pacific peoples had at their disposal highly refined seafaring vessels and navigational technologies to travel and connect with each other across their vast ocean home (Irwin, 2006). Seafaring crafts were the means of their initial settlement on the islands; villagers in Kadavu, Fiji, were documented in 1968 to know the names of the vessels that had brought them to their location and the approximate routes taken (Tippet, 1968). Collectively called waqa in Fiji, va’a in Tahiti and Samoa, vaka in Tonga, wa’a in Hawai’i and waka in Aotearoa New Zealand, single- and double-hulled vessels, with structural and technological variations according to locations and purposes (Di Piazza, 2015; Finney, 2006a; Finney and Low, 2006), were indeed ‘the supreme achievement of Oceanic cultures’ (Banack and Cox, 1987: 148). Their English description, ‘canoe’, does not do justice to the magnificent size and technical sophistication of many of them (Looser, 2015). The Fijian drua¹ (double-hulled canoe) was a chief's most valuable asset, comparable in size and superior in speed to equivalent European vessels of the contact period (Nuttall et al., 2014). As witnessed by early English missionary Thomas Williams (1858/1982: 76), these ‘well built and excellently designed canoes of the Fijians’ facilitated trade, war and political expansion and could ‘safely convey a hundred persons, and several tons of goods, over a thousand miles of ocean’. In 1840, Lieutenant Charles Wilkes of the United States Exploring Expedition wrote in his journal of sighting one such drua belonging to a paramount chief:

On the 12th [of May], whilst engaged at the observatory, the canoe of Tanoa, the King of Ambau [Bau], was discovered rounding the southern point of the island: it had a magnificent appearance, with its immense sail of white mats; the pennants streaming from its yard, denoted it at once as belonging to some great chief. It was a fit accompaniment to the magnificent scenery around, and advanced rapidly and gracefully along; it was a single canoe, one hundred feet in length, with an out-rigger of large size, ornamented with a great number (two thousand five hundred) of the Cyprӕa [Cypraea] ovula shells; its velocity was almost inconceivable, and every one [sic.] was struck with the adroitness with which it was managed and landed on the beach (Wilkes, 1845/1985: 54).

Canoes were not only integral to chiefly and political enterprises but also a medium of day-to-day fishing, trade, ceremonial exchanges and travel of the people and hence served as the basis of social reproduction (Barlow and Lipset, 1997; Tippet, 1968). Accordingly, the above-quoted missionary Williams (1858/1982: 85) recorded: ‘Sailors – an important part of the Fijian community – are found throughout the [Fiji Islands] group; and not among the men only, for women are able to discharge the duties of “ordinary seamen”.’ Large drua, which easily outperformed European ships, remained chiefs’ preferred transport until the end of the 19th century and smaller (saucoko) drua were a vital component of inter-island and inter-state trade well into the 20th century (Nuttall et al., 2014).

It is in the context of such historical legacy that Pacific peoples, governments and scholars commonly describe their region with reference to the ocean and canoes (see e.g. Diver, 2018; Pratt and Govan, 2011; Quirk and Hanich, 2016). If indigenous voyaging practices were eventually eclipsed with the introduction of colonial vessels and the imposition of modern administrative boundaries (Looser, 2015), the livelihoods, movements, identities and socio-ecological worlds of Pacific peoples have continued to be profoundly embedded in the ocean. Importantly, the region has witnessed a ‘renaissance’ of indigenous voyaging crafts and technologies since the decolonisation era of the 1970s (Finney, 2006b; Looser, 2015). The founding of the Polynesian Voyaging Society in Hawai’i in 1973, followed by equivalent organisations in several Pacific Island countries, led to the construction of vessels based on historical designs and their trans-Pacific journeys. The continuing symbolic presence of canoes can also be found in their metaphoric use by Pacific peoples (Barlow and Lipset, 1997; Lipset, 2014; Looser, 2015). In 2017, a drua was displayed at the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Bonn as part of the Fiji government's 23rd Conference of Parties (COP23) Presidency, signifying the message that ‘we are all in the same canoe when it comes to Climate Change’ (COP23, 2018). Canoes represent key regional organisations in their logos, such as the University of the South Pacific (USP) and the Pacific Community. Even in sport, Fiji's recently launched Super Rugby franchises were named Fijiana Drua (women's team) and Fijian Drua (men's), with an image of drua featured in the franchise logo.

The reclaiming of indigenous voyaging heritage over the past few decades has been paralleled by the growth of outrigger canoe racing, or va’a² (a term deriving from Tahitian va’a rudderless outrigger canoe), as an organised sport. Historically, there had always been va’a races among fishers, families, villages and islands in many parts of the region (International Va’a Federation, n.d.-b). In Tahiti, these races became a feature of the Heiva Festival in the 19th century, and in Hawai’i, competitions were initiated in the 1920s and formalised in the 1950s (International Va’a Federation, n.d.-c; West, 2023). The subsequent decades saw the sport develop and spread to the rest of the region and beyond, reaching North and South America, Asia and Europe. The International Va’a Federation (IVF) was established (initially as the International Polynesian Canoe Federation) in 1981, its present membership encompasses 33 countries and territories (IVF, n.d.-a). The annual IVF World Championships, competed by up to 2000 paddlers, alternate between sprints (of 250–1500 m by one-person (V1) to 12-person (V12) canoes) and long-distance races (of 5 km or more by V1 to V6 canoes) (IVF, n.d.-c). The intensity of marathon races is worth mentioning; Tahiti's prestigious international V6 race, Hawaiki Nui Va’a, covers over 120 km in 3 days (Paddling Life, 2022). Va’a is the national sport of Tahiti (Moana Voyages, n.d.) and the official state team sport of Hawai’i (State of Hawai’i, 1996). It has been contested at the Pacific Games since 1995 and the Pacific Mini Games since 2005, with Tahiti dominating the majority of the races. While it is not an Olympic sport, para va’a debuted at the 2020 Summer Paralympics.

There exists a substantial body of historical, archaeological and ethnological work on Oceanic canoes (e.g. Barlow and Lipset, 1997; Clunie, 2015; Di Piazza, 2015; Finney, 2006a, 2006b; Finney and Low, 2006; George, 2017; Howe, 2006; Irwin, 2006; Irwin and Flay 2015; Lipset, 2014; Looser, 2015; Nuttall et al., 2014; Tippet, 1968). Yet, outrigger canoe racing as an organised sport in the Pacific has attracted surprisingly little empirical research attention outside of sports science and sports medicine (e.g. Canyon and Sealey, 2016; Haley and Nichols, 2009; Kerr et al., 2008; Sealey et al., 2010). Liu's (2021, 2022) ethnographic study of the sport in Aotearoa New Zealand, known as waka ama, is among the first social scientific work (see also Thorpe et al., 2011). Liu focuses on the indigeneity of waka ama, which she argues embodies the emotional and spiritual connection between Māori ancestry, nature and people and is, therefore, most suitably described as a ‘post-sport’. Building on this pioneering work, I have elsewhere suggested (Kanemasu, in print) that outrigger canoe racing in Fiji, having initially emerged as a ‘revival’ of indigenous cultural practice, is marked by a notably multicultural, inclusive nature rather than timeless indigeneity, grounded in the centrality of the ocean to paddlers of all ancestry. The present article is intended to delve further into the social construction of va’a in Fiji, especially as a postcolonial socio-cultural and socio-ecological practice. The following discussion shows the sport, currently pursued by about 300 paddlers in the country's major cities and towns, to be a multifaceted sporting practice that simultaneously constitutes a highly competitive modern game, a profoundly postcolonial cultural practice and an agentic community coalesced around shared pursuit of ocean justice.

Intriguingly, surfing, another oceanic sport of Pacific origins, has attracted much greater scholarly attention. This literature has examined, among other things, (often Western) surfers’ ecological sensibilities and environmental activism emanating from their physical and spiritual connection with the sea as well as broader social contexts such as the rise of new social movements (e.g. Borne, 2018; Borne and Ponting, 2015, 2017; Hill and Abbott, 2009; Olive, 2015; Stranger, 2011; Wheaton, 2007, 2013). Researchers have investigated not only responsible consumption, environmental lobbying and related practices of sustainable surfing but also tensions and contradictions in the sport as a multi-billion-dollar global industry with negative environmental impact. This literature offers an instructive comparison with Fiji va’a, in that, whilst Fiji paddlers share some of Western surfers’ ecological ethic, their engagement with and stewardship of the ocean are inseparable from postcolonial resistance to the subjugation of the Pacific Ocean, knowledges and cultures, a direct consequence of which is being experienced today as the ocean/climate crisis, an unprecedented existential threat to the Pacific Islands. The distinct nature of their socio-ecological paddling practice may be described as a ‘pelagic postcolonialism’ (Sharrad, 1998).

The next section presents a brief discussion of the interview method employed in this study as well as my researcher positionality. It is followed by an outline of Fiji's social and sporting context as a background to the main discussion, where the history and dynamics of Fiji va’a as a sporting, socio-cultural and socio-ecological practice are examined through an overarching lens of regional voyaging heritage, ocean justice and postcolonialism.

Method

This article relies on the primary data garnered through 13 semi-structured interviews with paddlers and administrators in the capital city Suva (eight³ participants), the second largest city Lautoka (one participant) and via Zoom (three participants) between January 2023 and March 2024. The snowball and purposive sampling methods were employed to recruit participants with extensive involvement in the sport and/or leadership roles at club/national levels. Five of the sport's six pioneering clubs were represented in the study. Nine participants had over 10 years of paddling experience, and three had been paddling for five to 10 years, with the majority having experienced national representation. The demographics of the participants reflect the heterogeneity of the paddling community. They were aged between their early 20s and 60s and of diverse ancestry – part-European,⁴ indigenous Fijian, Rotuman,⁵ of other Pacific Island descent and part-Indo-Fijian (in the order of participant numbers). Six were women and the other six were men. All were in professional occupations except one who was not in wage employment. The interviews, conducted in English, were recorded, transcribed and put to thematic analysis (Nowell et al., 2017) guided by an exploratory aim of understanding what paddling means to the participants and other paddlers as well as new themes emerging from the data. In what follows, quotations from the interview data are presented in indented paragraphs or inverted commas.

It is important to acknowledge that I am an outsider to the sport as a non-paddler and a non-Pacific Islander. Originally from Japan, I have lived in Fiji for over two and a half decades, initially as a master's student and currently as as academic staff at USP. It may be worth adding that, during my student years in the 1990s, I became friendly with several avid paddlers, some of whom remain active in or familiar with the sport today. My prior personal knowledge of and connection with the paddling community were instrumental in initiating this study, while the extensive support provided by the Fiji Outrigger Canoe Racing Association, clubs and individual paddlers was critical in the subsequent research process. Throughout the fieldwork and analysis stages, I was also guided by the advice and encouragement received from my regional colleagues and friends. Although this by no means substituted for the lack of an emic viewpoint, it nevertheless allowed for a fuller appreciation of the experiences and insights the paddlers freely and passionately shared with me.

Fiji and sports

Discussion of Fiji va’a must be situated in the country's broader social and sporting context. The Republic of Fiji, a former British colony (1874–1970), has a multiethnic population of 890,000 consisting of indigenous Fijians (62%) and Fijians of Indian descent (henceforth Indo-Fijians; largely the descendants of indentured labourers brought from India in the late 19th and early 20th centuries) (34%), along with smaller communities of Rotumans and Fijians of European, part-European, Chinese and other Pacific Island ancestry (Fiji Bureau of Statistics, 2021). Ethnic politics rooted in divisive colonial rule intensified in the post-independence period, leading to recurrent political instability and coups d’état in 1987, 2000 and 2006 with severe political and socio-economic consequences (Naidu, 2007). The national economy depends primarily on tourism, while over 66% of workers are in the informal sector, such as subsistence farming/fishing and casual work (International Labour Organisation, 2021). Although Fiji is classified as an upper-middle-income country (World Bank, 2021), 24% of Fijians lived below the Basic Needs Poverty Line and 30% suffered from multidimensional deprivations in 2019/2020 (Fiji Bureau of Statistics, 2021; World Bank, 2022).

Fiji's major sports are heavily racialised and gendered. Historically, the ‘national’ sport of rugby union has been played and administered overwhelmingly by indigenous Fijian males and is widely associated with indigenous martial tradition, hegemonic masculinity, spirituality and chiefly authority (Guinness, 2018). Netball, the most popular ‘girls’ sport’, is also dominated by indigenous Fijian athletes and administrators, while soccer is commonly regarded as an ‘Indian sport’ due to Indo-Fijian men's prominence in its administration and following (Sugden et al., 2020). Despite the popularity of netball, recent research (Kanemasu, 2023) has revealed extensive barriers to women's and (especially older) girls’ sport participation, ranging from normative restrictions on mobility and bodily display to gendered labour roles, gender-based violence in the family/community and sporting structures that presume and perpetuate (indigenous) masculine physical dominance. Outrigger canoe racing emerged on the margins of this sporting landscape as a minority sport, yet developed into a distinct, cohesive community that is beginning to grow notably in popularity and attract greater public attention.

Fiji va’a: An overview

Va’a as an organised sport was introduced to Fiji in the second decade of the country's political independence. The first V6 canoe was constructed by George Marlow, a national airline pilot, and Tailasa Tupou, an indigenous Fijian shipwright, at a workshop in Suva in 1985 ( Fiji Times, 1985 ). The PVC-foam-and-fibreglass vessel was modelled after Hawai’ian outrigger canoes, but with efforts to make it as close to Fijian takia (smaller dugout outrigger canoe) as possible. The workshop owner Anthony C. Philp (former Olympic sailor and co-founder of the Fiji Yachting Association) and his family subsequently played a vital role in the sport's inception. The Philps, who own the Yacht Shop and the Fibreglass Shop in Suva, imported the first canoe mould from Australia and began producing V6 vessels. The late Colin Philp, Anthony C. Philp's son, became an avid paddler and facilitated the formation of the first paddling club and the Fiji Outrigger Canoe Racing Association (henceforth Fiji Outrigger, following the common local reference). Small groups of early social paddlers soon started competing in international races including the IVF World Championships. Men's and women's national teams participated in the inaugural va’a races of the Pacific Games in 1995 and have since raced competitively in every edition of the regional event (the latest achievements being two women's V1 gold medals, two women's V6 silvers and two men's V6 bronzes at the 2023 Games).

While the Philps and many other early paddlers and administrators were part-European Fijians, Rotumans also gained a notable presence, having established their own club in Suva in 1997. More clubs were formed in the following years in Suva, Lautoka, Nadi (the third largest conurbation) and other towns of the islands of Viti Levu, Vanua Levu and most recently Ovalau. In the past decade, the canoe supply has been greatly expanded by the Lautoka-based Tahitian family company Varua Va’a, which began local production with Tahitian moulds in 2012. Today, approximately 300 paddlers are registered with 12 clubs overseen by Fiji Outrigger.

In the shadow of the nationwide celebration of rugby, outrigger canoe racing has been a marginal presence in Fiji's sporting scene: ‘We’re up against these big rugby players. It's like nobody sees you. They’re only looking at netball and rugby’. Fiji Outrigger cannot count on regular government grants, and, as a non-Olympic sport, it does not qualify for National Olympic Committee support beyond coaching training and sporadic equipment provision. The sport is financed primarily through Fiji Outrigger membership fees, an annual business house competition (for which participating corporate teams pay fees), club fundraising, self-funding and minor corporate sponsorships. Nevertheless, its relative marginality, combined with its technical characteristics and oceanic embeddedness, has given the paddlers an opportunity to develop an autonomous vision of their sport. Fiji Outrigger and the clubs have actively sought to broaden participation, which has resulted in notable inclusivity in terms of ethnicity, gender, age and body type.

Paddling has often been perceived as a part-European sport because of part-European Fijians’ leadership in its earlier development. But the current paddler population consists of an indigenous Fijian majority with substantial numbers of Rotumans, part-Europeans and Fijians of other ancestry, along with USP students and expatriates of various nationalities. Although few Indo-Fijian women are involved, likely due to the greater barriers they face in accessing sport in general (see Kanemasu, 2023), Fiji va’a of today is a visibly multicultural community. Its gender parity also sets it apart from most other sports. If va’a was started by men, it has since been embraced by as many women. Fiji Outrigger, headed by a female president with a women-dominated executive committee for the past several years, systematically encouraged women's participation. The annual business house regatta requires every V6 crew to enlist at least two women, and official regattas include the ‘mixed [gender] race’ category, which normalises participation beyond gender divisions. Vigorous cheering for women paddlers at competitions forms a contrast to catcalls and verbal harassment often directed at women in other sports in Fiji (see Kanemasu, 2023). Women indeed make up an estimated 60% of the current paddler population. Many research participants also pointed out that ‘women outshine men in paddling’; most conspicuously, the country's top paddler, Elenoa Vateitei, won two gold medals at the 2023 Pacific Games and a bronze at the 2023 World Championships. The fact that va’a is not gendered like many other sports in Fiji does not mean that Fijian women have unrestricted access to it. Still, those within the sport have come to claim prominent status in participation, administration and high performance.

Furthermore, the non-contact, low-impact and technique-orientated nature of the sport makes it suitable for persons of varying body types. In a V6 canoe, the lightest persons sit in the first and sixth seats and the heaviest in the middle, and the outcome of a race is dictated by the coordination among paddlers rather than individual fitness. As explained by a Rotuman pioneer paddler: ‘There's a place for everyone. Physically not too challenging to anybody because there's no impact. You’re on a boat that's buoyant; it's all about skills. Va’a is more like teams dancing together in coordination. It's not about the biggest muscles’. This also allows for remarkable age inclusivity. The IVF age categories extend to Master 60, Master 70, Master 75 and Master 80. In fact, age can be a significant advantage because experience and technique, not physical strength per se, matter greatly in paddling. The research participants were keen to describe the high-performance kudos of senior members of their community. Salome Tabuatalei was selected in the national women's team for the 2023 Pacific Games in her 60s, and Pierre Guyot scored a silver medal in the men's Master 60 category at the 2022 and 2023 World Championships respectively. Older, pioneer paddlers also play a key role as ‘elders’ in the paddling community, with some having transitioned to coaching and administration. They provide mentoring and moral/technical/practical support for new and younger paddlers, contributing to a sense of continuity and sociality in the community.

Currently, Fiji va’a is further growing in age diversity with the entry of an increasing number of youths, due in part to the clubs’ school outreach efforts. Among junior paddlers are the children of experienced paddlers, a reflection of the sport as a family affair. Whereas the indigenous origins of va’a attracted pioneer paddlers who subsequently developed it into a highly competitive game, ‘for younger people, it [the attraction] would be more the coolness of it. Also using the cultural side as a rubber stamp: “This is my sport”… That's why you see a lot of young people coming in’. A substantial number of youths and urbanites seek to paddle as a ‘hip and cool’ recreational activity whose affinity with the sea and cultural symbolism appeal to them: ‘Everyone is walking up and down … with their paddles. It's so cool and “indigenous” [with air quotes] eh?’ Taken together, these characteristics render Fiji va’a a notably heterogeneous community, which is visible at regattas and in social media posts, where one is immediately struck by the diversity of paddlers as well as a relaxed, ‘fun’, family atmosphere even at the fiercest competitions.

At the same time, Fiji va’a has yet to overcome some long-standing inequities, especially in terms of class and geography. The sport has tended to be more accessible to those with professional occupations and material means: ‘The flip side of paddling is that it is a very expensive sport in some ways and that creates an exclusion’. If indigenous canoes were once integral to the everyday life of the people, ‘the modern sport of outrigger canoeing is very specific. Fibreglass canoes with particular kinds of hybrid paddles; it is very expensive’. The minimum cost of a paddle is FJ$250–300 (US$110–135), a V1 canoe FJ$2000 (US$890) and a V6 canoe FJ$10,000 (US$4460) in a country where the minimum wage is just FJ$4 (US$1.80) an hour (Ministry of Employment, Productivity and Industrial Relations, 2022). As aptly put by a top paddler of indigenous descent: ‘Just remember, a V6 canoe itself is $12,000. Who's gonna buy that canoe rather than buying a house?’ The clubs have tackled this by acquiring paddles as collective assets and loaning them to new members; similarly, V6 (and some V1) canoes are owned by clubs and shared by their members. Perceived association between the sport and affluence has nevertheless persisted. Added to this is an even greater challenge of geography. Va’a has been an urban sport, with clubs located in city/town areas, which automatically excludes those located outside of these areas and without transport to reach them. Although Fiji Outrigger has encouraged and subsidised the establishment of clubs beyond the historical centres of the sport, the barrier remains. Consequently, ‘over the years, a particular perception has been created’, a senior paddler observed, ‘that it is a sport for a particular cohort of society. It's either you’re young, you’re white, you’re urban, or you’re part-European. In a lot of ways, that's why it hasn’t garnered the kind of interest that it could’. Such a perception, this paddler added, is ‘a historical irony, because we know that [voyaging heritage] is what sets us apart from the rest of the world’.

Even as they grapple with these contradictions, Fiji paddlers of different ethnicities, genders and ages have embraced their game with passion, and in the process, cultivated it into a notable vehicle of postcolonial socio-cultural and socio-ecological agency, as detailed below.

Paddling as pelagic postcolonialism

Paddling as a socio-cultural practice

The paddling community's effort to broaden participation is at least partially motivated by the need for talent identification and indeed for the survival of their sport in a society where rugby, soccer and netball reign supreme. However, it is also grounded in a shared desire to reclaim what they deem to be uniquely theirs yet subjugated through colonial and globalising processes – their historical, symbiotic relationship with the ocean, in which paddling practice was once central. Canoe voyaging constituted ‘unquestionably “the” connection, the interface, the facilitator between people and gods, people and environment, and of culture to culture’ in the Indigenous Pacific (Nuttall et al., 2014: 3). The emergence of va’a in Fiji coincided, and, in fact, intersected, with the resurgence of Indigenous shipbuilding and navigational culture in the region. Colin Philp was not only a co-founder of Fiji Outrigger (and IVF vice-president 2008–2012) but a key figure in the Pacific voyaging movement as a founding member of the Fiji Islands Voyaging Society, which is currently the Uto ni Yalo⁶ Trust, named after the organisation's iconic drua built in 2010. Other paddlers were also involved in the Uto ni Yalo's trans-Pacific journeys:

Colin [Philp] and Johnathan Smith [the first skipper of the Unit ni Yalo] were joined by paddlers who already loved the ocean. Because they were paddling, they were sought out. When the Uto ni Yalo was built, they were looking for crew, looking for people who were seamen and knew the ocean in Fiji and around the Pacific. So, what better way to fish out potential sailors than to come to the paddling community; we actually treat the ocean as our second home. So the paddling community greatly influenced the sailing community in Fiji and vice versa.

The research participants described the Pacific voyaging resurgence and the growth of va’a in Fiji as ‘inter-linked movements’. Pioneer paddlers regarded va’a as not only an organised sport (which they played highly competitively) but also a profoundly cultural movement to reinstate indigenous voyaging heritage in the postcolonial world: ‘It's something much more than a leisure activity, something much more than a sport … This is something that our ancestors once did, and here we are, reviving it once again many, many years later’. Today's younger paddlers, initially drawn to it as a ‘cool’ sport, also often begin to cultivate similar meanings in it: ‘It's a historical sport that tells the journeys of our forefathers … Younger guys think it's trendy. But at some point, they would go: “Oh yeah, I’m doing this sport that brings back the culture”.’ The cultural properties of va’a, the research participants stressed, reside not only in its genealogy and symbolism but in the embodied experience of paddling, even if it takes a contemporary, institutionalised form with a modern governing structure and vessels no longer made of timbre and coconut husk fibre. The participants had much to say about the reflective, spiritual and even cathartic moments they had during marathon races. In a leading female paddler's words:

It always amazes me. I get that feeling, the mana,⁷ eh? I’m amazed at how my forefathers paddled, went across island to island to transport food or to look for places to take shelter. When I’m out there – I’m not gonna lie – during international comps, because I’m representing this small island nation Fiji, I always feel that mana, out there on the water.

A veteran male paddler similarly observed:

We have short sprints. It's merely for fun; like, who's the fastest, who's the strongest? But with long races, you have all kinds of emotions going on in your head… And I quote [a pioneer paddler]. One of his famous quotes is ‘Guys, be one with the ocean!’ You know, when you hear that and you’re paddling, all of a sudden, you’re one with how the ocean moves; when he calls a command in the back, ‘Guys, be one with the ocean!’, everyone in the boat understands that … So, on a long race like that, you have all these emotions. For me, in all those long races, I’d think: ‘My God, we are paddling and we are moving. I wonder what it was like back then?’ It was very different for them; they had a purpose. We also have a purpose; we want to come first [in the race]. They had a bigger purpose; they were looking for settlements; they were looking for islands. But you are one with the ocean, right?

Importantly, for these participants, paddling reconstructs and reimagines Pacific regional, rather than specifically Fijian, oceanic heritage:

In texts that have been written, they usually stress Polynesian influence on the sport of va’a. But we see that … barriers that lie between what constitutes as Micronesia, Melanesia and Polynesia are blurred. These are only constructs made by people who came from outside … Va’a transcends a lot of these barriers. You see, voyagers from Fiji, from Vanuatu, from the Solomon Islands and Papua New Guinea; voyagers from Samoa, Hawai'i, Aotearoa; voyagers from Kiribati, RMI [the Republic of Marshall Islands], Palau – when it comes to the context of voyaging and sailing, they’re very similar. We all use the same principle of having an outrigger to balance the canoe; we all have the same principle of having our sails pointed down towards the sea … It's little things like that. When we pick up on them, we come to realise that the lines that exist between the classifications of Micronesia, Polynesia and Melanesia are very blurred. And it's up to us to reshape, rethink, and re-define it our way. I’m glad that part of the sport helps to facilitate that change in thinking and that shift in our ideals.

A postcolonial regionalism that positions the Pacific as ‘our sea of islands’ – an expansive, interconnected ocean space entwined with the ancestral and contemporary life-worlds of Pacific peoples – invites inclusivity, and furthermore, endows the sport with powerful oppositional meanings. Paddling here assumes a significant element of resistance against historical and ongoing subjugation of the socio-cultural (and socio-ecological, as discussed later) sovereignty of the Pacific.

British colonisation of Fiji, ostensibly ‘indirect rule’ in the name of paternalistic protection of indigenous populations (Durutalo, 1986), left an indelible mark on the lives of Fijians, of which the decline of their drua culture was a part. There is evidence that the ancestors of Pacific Islanders had crossed the Pacific Ocean from west to east, reaching the west coast of the Americas, before the first European sighting of this ocean in 1513 (Finney, 2006a; Nunn, 2012); they navigated the vast expanse of sea, relying on their senses and knowledge passed by oral tradition to read stars, clouds, winds, ocean swells, seabirds and other elements of the marine environment (Finney and Low, 2006). Yet, as highlighted by Hau’ofa (1994: 155) and others, 19th-century imperialism ‘erected boundaries that led to the contraction of Oceania, transforming a once boundless world into the Pacific Island states and territories … No longer could they travel freely to do what they had done for centuries’. In Fiji, the colonial administration prohibited indigenous Fijians from being absent from villages for more than 3 months, whilst consolidating the authority of chiefs as agents of colonial rule (Nicole, 2010). The Native Regulations restricting their movement to/from urban areas were not abolished until 1967, just three years before the national independence (Veracini, 2008). Although Fijians by no means passively submitted to the colonial order (Nicole, 2010), the systematic spatial and political containment of the indigenous populations, combined with the calamitous effects of introduced diseases such as measles and other socio-political changes, suppressed the labour-intensive seafaring culture and oral knowledge (Nuttall et al., 2014). The act of paddling bears political significance in this context. A young indigenous paddler offered:

When we look at the map that European people had drawn out, we see that part of the colonisation process was to try and trap our thinking into believing that we are isolated from all of these island nations because we’re small in land mass … While making us feel small, they also took away the idea that the ocean is something that connects us. Rather, they imposed the idea that the ocean separates us … In the paddling community, we see with our own eyes that the ocean is something that actually connects us … Part of the reason why colonisers back then were threatened by our presence on the water is because of our indigenous spirituality and cultural connection with and the mana that we drew from the land and the sea. Because we were able to speak to the sea in a way that they wouldn’t understand, in the way that we voyaged, in the way that we travelled across the ocean, in the way we looked after it and it looked after us.

It follows then that va’a as a postcolonial cultural expression encompasses fishing on the canoe (‘We are the biggest fishermen using our canoes. We don’t use it for just sport. You’d see some of the boys go out and while they are training, they throw out a trolling line’), paddling for leisure (‘It's a sport for us as a club, but for our people there are other things involved. We just came back from a camp in Nukulau [Island] and most of us paddled there’), introducing paddling to children through school outreach (‘We focus on the basics of the sport, the culture of va’a and its context in the Pacific … We try and instil in them that we are people of the ocean’) and other activities that may be simply categorised as ‘social paddling’ but invested with greater meanings of reconstructing paddling as a way of life.

This reconstruction cannot be attributed to an exclusive ethno-nationalism. Given the major role played by part-European Fijians in the game's early development and the valuing of the ocean as a collective home, highly politicised discourse of indigenous paramountcy, which has long loomed over Fiji's ethnic relations (see e.g. Lawson, 2012), has limited relevance in this space. Non-indigenous paddlers, along with indigenous youths and urbanites less familiar with the cultural properties of paddling, may come into the sport without the visceral connection with the ocean described by the above-quoted participants. But their immersion in the game and day-to-day inculcation by the elders and other paddlers foster a sense of shared ownership of va’a underpinned by an open-ended cultural regionalism (rather than an immutable and exclusive ‘indigenous Fijianness’). As an organised sport with modern sporting structures, as a trendy urban recreation, and as a postcolonial cultural reconstruction, it evolves with time and is claimed by contemporary Fijians of diverse ancestry in an ongoing and collective process of meaning-making: it is a continually unfolding social construction.

Scholars have warned of the dangers of romanticising the ocean, which can mask social inequalities reproduced in oceanic spaces (Hill and Abbott, 2009; Olive and Wheaton, 2021). In the case of Fiji va’a, the geographical (and class, to a somewhat lesser extent) hierarchies of access, as well as the gendered/racialised absence of Indo-Fijian women, do not warrant uncritical exaltation of the subversive properties of its ocean-centred regionalism. In fact, Pacific regionalism as a political discourse has not been without tensions arising from intra-regional differences and conflicts (Fry, 2019). Even so, it is notable that va’a has developed a degree of open-endedness by drawing on its ocean embeddedness, regionality and postcoloniality, which few other sports in Fiji have. Such framing of the sport is closely bound up with the regional struggle for ocean (and climate) justice, as explored below.

Paddling as a socio-ecological practice

For many active Fiji paddlers, va’a becomes a socio-ecological, as well as socio-cultural, practice at some point in their paddling career. The above-mentioned Uto ni Yalo Trust (2024) was founded with the aims of not only ‘rejuvenating traditional boat building, celestial way-finding & ocean voyaging’ but also advocacy of sustainable sea transportation epitomised by its flagship vessel Uto ni Yalo. The Trust's voyaging expeditions and other projects are more than an exercise in cultural symbolism; they integrate marine conservation awareness raising, community mobilisation, scientific marine research and related ocean and climate action. In 2019/2020, for instance, the Trust constructed and distributed 100 historically-designed sailing canoes (camakau) to local communities as ‘not just a novelty or as a token of tourist item but to look at ways in which we can contribute to decarbonising the national economy’ (Krishna, 2019). Voyaging resurgence is thus a simultaneously socio-cultural and socio-ecological matter. So is paddling.

Fiji paddlers’ engagement with ocean justice advocacy dates at least as far back as the 1990s. Letila Mitchell, a Rotuman paddler and the winner of the 1997 Hibiscus Festival pageant, whose canoe-shaped parade float was carried through the capital city by her fellow paddlers, spoke extensively on stage about marine conservation. In 2004, Colin Philp initiated the formation of the Suva Harbour Foundation, whose primary aim is to fight pollution (e.g. littering, oil spills and derelict vessels) in the Suva Harbour and adjacent rivers. Today, together with a small group of stand-up paddle boarders, a substantial proportion (at least 30% according to a research participant) of active paddlers participate in the work of the Uto ni Yalo Trust, the Suva Harbour Foundation, related marine conservation and/or climate action. Even those who are not formally involved in organised actions engage in some form of environmental conservation as part of everyday paddling practices. Litter picking, both on the water during paddling sessions and on the beach, is commonly practiced by paddling clubs. Some take up informal sea ranger activities; they may report illegal fishing boats, or paddle out to nearby Makuluva Island, where turtle feeding grounds are located, to check that turtles and their eggs are not disturbed by poachers. Most recently, paddlers were an integral part of opposition to a proposed (and eventually rejected) foreign-owned development project on a Suva foreshore that was to cause mangrove forest destruction (Fotheringham, 2023). As explained by a senior paddler:

There is a new kind of Pacific Island identity that's been forged around climate action. Outrigger canoeing is a non-motorised sport and with a connection with the ocean. Currently, there is a proposed development in Nasese. Paddling groups, the stand-up paddlers, the outrigger canoers, are all getting involved in trying to prevent that kind of destructive development, because we’re really connected to the ocean … I don’t know if the sport attracts people who are already in that kind of climate action or it awakens you or gives awareness around those issues. But whatever it is, there is that close connection. So you find us paddling in things like ‘Save Suva Harbour’ or other kinds of actions like that.

The ‘connection with the ocean’ articulated by these paddlers concerns wider society. An estimated 60% of Fijians live in coastal communities, with their health, wealth and livelihood directly linked with ocean-reliant activities (Hall, 2017). It is also more than a matter of immediate, day-to-day connection, as discussed above. The ocean holds significant relational value, a value derived from ‘meaningful, and often reciprocal human relationships – beyond means to an end – with nature and among people through nature’ (Himes et al., 2024: 31), which may be contrasted with the conventional Western instrumental–intrinsic value dichotomy. Such value of the ocean rests on the embeddedness of the ancestral past of Pacific peoples, as well as their contemporary and future worlds, in it (see e.g. Chao and Enari, 2021; Enari and Viliamu Jameson, 2021).

This ocean is presently faced with unprecedented threats of pollution, acidification, overfishing, coastal development, proposed deep-sea mining, global warming, rising sea levels and extreme weather events (see e.g. Devlin et al., 2021). Many of these may be traced to commercial and industrial interests outside the region as well as to the integration of formerly subsistence societies of the region into global capitalism and its development paradigm focused on economic growth. The Pacific Island countries are responsible for just 1.3% of the world's plastic pollution but are disproportionately affected by its impacts (Secretariat of the Pacific Regional Environment Programme (SPREP), 2022). Overfishing is due in large measure to pressure from subsidised foreign fishing fleets, with three-quarters of total harmful subsidies coming from the top seven subsidising World Trade Organisation members (Pacific Islands Forum (PIF), 2024b). Customary practices of marine conservation and resource management (such as seasonal harvest bans, temporary area closures and restrictions on certain times, places, species or persons) were long superseded by modern development pursuits and have only recently begun to be accorded greater institutional recognition (Vierros et al., 2010). Today, an alarming rate of decline in biodiversity is being documented in the Pacific Ocean, such as nearly 50% of coral reefs rated as threatened (Pacific Community, 2022). Similarly, the Pacific Islands region contributes less than 0.03% of the world's total greenhouse gas emissions, yet is among the most vulnerable to the impacts of climate change, including on marine ecosystems (SPREP, 2019). Climate change has indeed been named by Pacific leaders as ‘the single greatest existential threat’ (SDG Knowledge Hub, 2022), with over 50,000 people displaced annually due to climate- and disaster-related events (PIE, 2024a).

The unprecedented crisis has given new impetus to Pacific regionalism. Climate change and environment have surfaced to the forefront of the regional cooperation agenda, evident in a series of multilateral/multilevel negotiations and collaborations that Pacific governments, regional bodies and civil society organisations engage in with external parties as well as regional approaches to ecological resilience and climate adaptation programming (e.g. Enari and Viliamu Jameson, 2021; PIF, 2022; SPREP, 2017). To quote Hau’ofa again, ‘our region has achieved its greatest unity on threats to our common environment: the ocean’, and it is through a regional united front against these threats ‘that the sense of a regional identity, of being Pacific Islanders, is felt most acutely’ (Hau’ofa, 1998: 400) even in the face of ongoing tensions and contestations.

Va’a as an embodiment of relational valuing of the ocean and a reenactment of sustainable sea transport coheres with this broad-based regional push for ocean/climate justice. A common view expressed by the research participants was that:

You don’t paddle out there and come back unchanged or have no feeling or care about what happens to the ocean because you get to experience it either at its best or you get to see a lot of the damage that we are doing. So it's very visceral and very real for us.

A young participant explained in depth, as we sat by the sea for the interview:

We’re reinforcing the connectivity that we have with our vanua [‘land/tradition/people’ in Fijian], with our moana [‘ocean’ in Hawai’ian/Māori/Samoan/Tahitian/Tongan]. It's mainly because – here's a good example – you see all this rubbish [pointing to plastic litter floating on the water in front of us]. We’ve done so many clean-ups, but rubbish keeps on coming up. If people were proud of their moana, this would never have happened. So, we look at problems that are present, like waste management, and we look at what our ancestors once did in order to solve these problems … Back in the day, because of the spiritual connectivity that our people had with their land and sea, it was almost an assumed role that we take up stewardship. It's something that all of us as indigenous people and as people who call Fiji home share today.

Literary scholar Paul Sharrad (1998: 97) once used the term ‘pelagic postcolonialism’ in his study of ocean navigation as a ‘master trope for Pacific literary production’. He revealed how literary works since the 1940s from across the region – including Hau’ofa's – variously present anti-imperialist narratives of navigation and ocean space, which position the sea as ‘not empty space, but road, history, cultural text’. The ‘Pacific archipelagic identity’ evoked by these narratives, wherein islands are ‘clusters on a circuit of travel’ and ‘each is unique but all are interconnected and they owe their identity … to the sea between them’, is postcolonial insofar as it serves to debunk the Western ‘discursive historical imperative for discovery in land-based maps of the Mercator kind’ (Sharrad, 1998: 97, 103).

Borrowing from Sharrad, Fiji va’a, aligned with the regional voyaging resurgence and struggle for ocean/climate justice, may be understood as its own form of pelagic postcolonialism that weaves together sporting, socio-cultural and socio-ecological agentic practices. As a broader current of pelagic postcolonialism gathers momentum in multiple and interconnected domains of state, inter-state and civil society action, va’a is emerging as its key sporting expression. In Fiji, it is a minority sport, albeit one that is gaining greater participation and public recognition. It is also by no means the only or even the most prominent sport imbued with postcolonial meaning. Recent decades have seen a rising interest in the revival of indigenous sports and games⁸ across the region (see e.g. Uperesa, 2021). Moreover, ‘modern’ sports in the Pacific have been profoundly indigenised/localised as in the case of rugby (see e.g. Guinness, 2018), or radically transformed in the case of kirikiti (indigenised cricket) (Sacks, 2019). The social and political significance of va’a should, therefore, be situated in the context of the long history of Pacific peoples claiming sports of varied origins and trajectories as agentic practices/resources (besides other things). Va’a is notable among them for its ocean-embeddedness and congruence with ocean/climate action.

Fiji va’a shares with sustainable surfing and nature-based lifestyle sports documented in other (often Western) locations ecological sensibilities derived from participants’ embodied and spiritual experience of ‘the interconnectedness, the more-than-human-ness, of the environment and … a sense of themselves as a part of that’ (Olive, 2015: 503). Like va’a, these sports constitute ‘cultural spaces in which the potential for more transformative relationships and identities exist’ (Wheaton, 2007: 281). Literature reveals the growth of sustainable surfing, for instance, to be closely linked with broader social processes like the commodification of nature, the expansion of the global surfing industry and its impact on ocean/coastal environments, counterculture and new social movements, technological advancements and the rise of sustainability discourses (see e.g. Stranger, 2011; Wheaton, 2013). Va’a too took shape out of the specificities of the socio-historical conditions under which Pacific peoples and communities give meaning to their sporting practices. Whilst intersecting with global forces of environmentalism and climate activism and sharing some of the environmental grievances, sustainability ethos and socio-political impetus driving these trends, paddling practices in Fiji are uniquely situated as a postcolonial reclamation of the socio-ecological anchoring of Pacific peoples. The unfolding meaning of the oceanic sport is entwined with the Oceanic pursuit of ecological justice as the region grapples with its singular most urgent challenge.

It is important to acknowledge that va’a in Fiji is as much a highly competitive modern sport as a postcolonial movement, with many paddlers firmly focused on national team selection and high-performance outcomes at national/regional/international competitions. The IVF World Championships and the Pacific Games are central events on the paddling calendar. In contrast to many Western lifestyle sports, Fiji va’a straddles across alternative and mainstream sporting domains. The paddlers interviewed for this study did not recognise a lifestyle-competition binary: ‘Of course, we want to win a medal … but we also want a platform to do something good. They are not two separate aspects as most people would look at it. They are one and the same thing for us’. It is to be seen how the synthesis of alternative and mainstream sporting practices/meanings is sustained as they strive to share their game with broader communities.

Conclusion

The foregoing is an attempt to explore the dynamics of the ongoing social construction of va’a, or outrigger canoe racing, in Fiji. Particular attention has been given to the significance of paddling as socio-cultural and socio-ecological practices in the contemporary Pacific regional context. Since its origins in the 1980s, the paddling community has grown considerably in terms of scale and competitive success, with the conscious pursuit of inclusivity as its key characteristic running counter to the gendered and racialised nature of Fiji's dominant sports. Va’a was taken up by early paddlers against the historical background of decolonisation in the region, which shaped the game's socio-cultural meaning as a reinstatement of Pacific seafaring heritage. It paralleled the resurgence of indigenous shipbuilding and ocean navigation represented by the advent of Voyaging Societies in Hawai’i, Fiji and elsewhere. In Fiji, the two movements intersected, with many paddlers playing pivotal roles in the formation and subsequent work of the then Fiji Islands Voyaging Society, today's Uto ni Yalo Trust. Such sporting reconstruction of the voyaging tradition diminished through colonisation and globalisation processes bears a key political dimension. Paddling of expansive, shared and lived ocean space evokes an open-ended regionalism distinct from indigenous nationalism; it furthermore converges with the regional quest for ocean/climate justice as the Pacific Islands continue to bear the brunt of an unjust distribution of climate change and environmental damage costs and grapple with their own transition towards sustainable practices and development. Seen through this lens, paddling is constitutive of a broader, multifaceted regional current of ‘pelagic postcolonialism’.

The historical prominence of part-European Fijian paddlers and those of professional backgrounds may resemble the White, middle-class orientation of Western lifestyle sports and mainstream environmental movements. The game did initially develop a degree of ethno-class character; yet, Fiji paddlers have sought a kind of inclusivity commensurate with the centrality they accord to the relationality of, and threats to, the ocean, which transcends (if not cancel out) many divisions in the contemporary Pacific. As they continue to grow and shape their game, a key task may be to cultivate it into a mass sporting/cultural practice beyond urban confines. Many paddlers who participated in this study indeed envisioned such a future – to connect with yet more people, communities and networks in their unfolding voyage of reclaiming and fostering their ‘sea of islands’. Future research may usefully trace their journey as well as examine the preliminary insights presented here in other Pacific Island contexts for a fuller understanding of this uniquely Oceanic sport.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank the Fiji Outrigger Canoe Racing Association and the research participants for their generous support and assistance for this study. I am also deeply grateful for the advice and guidance I received from Dr Sarah Pene of the University of the South Pacific and Mr. Alexander Patrick throughout the research process.

Declaration of conflicting interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Notes

References

Banack

Cox

(1987) Ethnology of ocean-going canoes in Lau, Fiji. Economic Botany 41(2): 148–162.

Barlow

Lipset

(1997) Dialogics of material culture: Male and female in Murik outrigger canoes. American Ethnologist 24(1): 4–36.

Borne

(2018) Surfing and Sustainability. London: Routledge.

Borne

Ponting

(eds) (2015) Sustainable Stoke: Transitions to Sustainability in the Surfing World. Plymouth: University of Plymouth Press.

Borne

Ponting

(eds) (2017) Sustainable Surfing. London: Routledge.

Canyon

Sealey

(2016) A systematic review of research on outrigger canoe paddling and racing. Annals of Sports Medicine and Research 3(5): 1076.

Chao

Enari

(2021) Decolonising climate change: A call for beyond-human imaginaries and knowledge generation. eTropic 20(2): 32–54.

Clunie

(2015) Tongiaki to Kalia: The Micronesian-rigged voyaging canoes of Fiji and Western Polynesia and their Tangaloan-rigged forebears. Journal of the Polynesian Society 124(4): 335–418.

COP23 (2018) [X] Available at: https://twitter.com/cop23/status/967232677970661376?lang=bn (accessed 24 December 2023).

10.

Moana Voyages (n.d.) Culture: The Polynesian outrigger canoe. Available at: https://www.moanavoyages.com/eneu/blog/the-polynesian-outrigger-canoe/ (accessed 15 January 2024).

11.

Devlin

Lyons

Johnson

, et al. (2021) The tropical Pacific Ocean scape: Current issues, solutions and future possibilities. Marine Pollution Bulletin 166: 112181.

12.

Di Piazza (2015) Words for canoes: Continuity and change in oceanic sailing craft. The Journal of the Polynesian Society 124(4): 445–460.

13.

Diver

(2018) The ocean in us: Pacific regionalism and identity as a catalyst for global ocean action. Devpolicy. Available at: https://devpolicy.org/pacific-regionalism-identity-global-ocean-action-20181107/ (accessed 22 February 2024).

14.

Durutalo

(1986) The Paramountcy of Fijian Interest and the Politicization of Ethnicity. Suva: USP Sociological Society.

15.

Enari

Viliamu Jameson

(2021) Climate justice: A Pacific Island perspective. Australian Journal of Human Rights 27(1): 149–160.

16.

Fiji Bureau of Statistics (2021) 2019–2020 Household income and expenditure survey main report. Available at: https://www.statsfiji.gov.fj/ (accessed 11 January 2023).

17.

Finney

(2006a) Ocean Sailing Canoes. In: Howe

(ed) Vaka Moana: Voyages of the Ancestors: The Discoveries and Settlement of the Pacific. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, pp. 100–153.

18.

Finney

(2006b) Renaissance. In: Howe

(ed) Vaka Moana: Voyages of the Ancestors: The Discoveries and Settlement of the Pacific. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, pp. 270–333.

19.

Finney

Low

(2006) Navigation. In: Howe

(ed) Vaka Moana: Voyages of the Ancestors: The Discoveries and Settlement of the Pacific. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, pp. 154–197.

20.

Fotheringham

(2023) Costly development of Suva forest may now not happen. RNZ. Available at: https://www.rnz.co.nz/international/pacific-news/484141/conservationist-calls-on-fiji-govt-to-preserve-rare-mangrove (accessed 15 March 2024).

21.

Fry

(2019) Framing the Islands: Power and Diplomatic Agency in Pacific Regionalism. Canberra: ANU Press.

22.

George

(2017) Te Laa o Lata of Taumako: Gauging the performance of an ancient Polynesian sail. Journal of the Polynesian Society 126(4): 377–416.

23.

Guinness

(2018) Corporal destinies: Faith, ethno-nationalism, and raw talent in Fijian professional rugby aspirations. HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 8(1–2): 314–328.

24.

Haley

Nichols

(2009) A survey of injuries and medical conditions affecting competitive adult outrigger canoe paddlers on Oahu. Hawaii Medical Journal 68(7): 162.

25.

Hall

(2017) The ocean state of Fiji – Turning the tide. UNICEF. Available at: https://www.unicef.org/pacificislands/stories/ocean-state-fiji-turning-tide (accessed 25 January 2024).

26.

Hau’ofa

(1994) Our sea of islands. The Contemporary Pacific 6(1): 148–161.

27.

Hau’ofa

(1998) The ocean in us. The Contemporary Pacific 10(2): 392–410.

28.

Hill

Abbott

(2009) Surfacing tension: Toward a political ecological critique of surfing representations. Geography Compass 3(1): 275–296.

29.

Himes

Muraca

Anderson

, et al. (2024) Why nature matters: A systematic review of intrinsic, instrumental, and relational values. BioScience 74(1): 25–43.

30.

Howe

(ed) (2006) Vaka Moana: Voyages of the Ancestors: The Discoveries and Settlement of the Pacific. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press.

31.

International Labour Organisation (2021) Informal sectors of Fiji, Palau, Tonga and Vanuatu key to COVID-19 economic recovery. Press release 26 February. Available at: https://www.ilo.org/suva/public-information/press-releases/WCMS_774071/lang–en/index.htm (accessed 18 January 2022).

32.

International Va’a Federation (n.d. -a) About the IFV. Available at: http://www.ivfiv.org/about-the-ivf.html (accessed 15 June 2023).

33.

International Va’a Federation (n.d. -b) History of the Va’a. Available at: http://www.ivfiv.org/history-of-vaa.html (accessed 15 June 2023).

34.

International Va’a Federation (n.d. -c) 2021–2025 Strategic plan. Available at: http://www.ivfiv.org/uploads/1/3/7/9/137911945/ivf_strategic_plan_2021_2025_final_.pdf (accessed 15 June 2023).

35.

Irwin

(2006) Voyaging and Settlement. In: Howe

(ed) Vaka Moana: Voyages of the Ancestors: The Discoveries and Settlement of the Pacific. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, pp. 54–99.

36.

Irwin

Flay

RGJ

(2015) Pacific colonisation and canoe performance: Experiments in the science of sailing. Journal of the Polynesian Society 124(4): 419–444.

37.

Kanemasu

(2023) Pacific Island Women and Contested Sporting Spaces: Staking Their Claim. London: Routledge.

38.

Kanemasu

(in print) Paddling our sea of islands: Fiji outrigger canoe racing (va’a) as living culture. In Kanemasu Y (ed) Towards a Pacific Island Sociology of Sport: Seeking New Horizons. Leeds: Emerald.

39.

Kerr

Spinks

Leicht

, et al. (2008) Comparison of physiological responses to graded exercise test performance in outrigger canoeing. Journal of Sports Sciences 26(7): 743–749.

40.

Krishna

(2019) Uto ni Yalo Trust constructs 100 canoes. FBC News 12 May. Available at: https://www.fbcnews.com.fj/news/uto-ni-yalo-trust-constructs-100-canoes/ (accessed 15 January 2024).

41.

La Maison de la Culture (2019) Traditional sports – Heiva Tu’aro Ma’ohi. Available at: https://www.heiva.org/en/event/heiva-tuaro-maohi-en/ (accessed 15 January 2024).

42.

Lawson

(2012) Indigenous nationalism, “ethnic democracy.” and the Prospects for a Liberal Constitutional Order in Fiji. Nationalism and Ethnic Politics 18(3): 293–315.

43.

Lipset

(2014) Living canoes: Vehicles of moral imagination among the Murik of Papua New Guinea. In: Lipset

Handler

(eds) Vehicles: Cars, Canoes and Other Metaphors of Moral Imagination. New York: Berghahn Books, 21–47.

44.

Liu

(2021) Paddling through bluespaces: Understanding waka ama as a post-sport through Indigenous Māori perspectives. Journal of Sport and Social Issues 45(2): 138–160.

45.

Liu

(2022) Paddling with Maxine Sheets-Johnstone: Exploring the moving body in sport. International Review for the Sociology of Sport 57(2): 236–255.

46.

Looser

(2015) Oceanic imaginaries and waterworlds: “Vaka moana” on the sea and stage. Theatre Journal 67(3): 465–486.

47.

Ministry of Employment, Productivity and Industrial Relations, Fiji (2022) Extraordinary Government of Fiji Gazette Supplement. Available at: https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=&ved=2ahUKEwjL_LOeieODAxVhUWwGHdQTD1kQFnoECBgQAQ&url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.employment.gov.fj%2Fresources%2Fprs%2FGazetteNotice.pdf&usg=AOvVaw2bEt9Uvz4RY4VfbQHLgALZ&opi=89978449 (accessed 15 January 2024).

48.

Naidu

(2007) Coups in Fiji: Seesawing democratic multiracialism and ethno-nationalist extremism. Devforum 26: 24–33.

49.

Nicole

(2010) Disturbing History: Resistance in Early Colonial Fiji. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press.

50.

Nowell

Norris

White

, et al. (2017) Thematic analysis: Striving to meet the trustworthiness criteria. International Journal of Qualitative Methods 16: 1–13.

51.

Nunn

(2012) Climate Change and Pacific Island Countries. n.p.: United Nations Development Programme.

52.

Nuttall

D’Arcy

Philp

(2014) Waqa Tabu—Sacred ships: The Fijian drua. International Journal of Maritime History 26(3): 427–450.

53.

Olive

(2015) Surfing, localism, place-based pedagogies and ecological sensibilities in Australia. In: Humberstone

Prince

Henderson

(eds) Routledge International Handbook of Outdoor Studies. London: Routledge, 501–510.

54.

Olive

Wheaton

(2021) Understanding blue spaces: Sport, bodies, wellbeing, and the sea. Journal of Sport and Social Issues 45(1): 3–19.

55.

Pacific Community (2022) Ocean acidification: A tide of challenges for Pacific Islanders. Available at: https://www.spc.int/updates/blog/2022/08/ocean-acidification-a-tide-of-challenges-for-pacific-islanders (accessed 15 January 2014).

56.

Pacific Islands Forum (2022) 2050 Strategy for the Blue Pacific Continent. Available at: https://www.forumsec.org/2050strategy/ (accessed 15 January 2014).

57.

Pacific Islands Forum (2024a) Pacific Regional Framework on Climate Mobility. Pacific Islands Forum Secretariat. https://forumsec.org/sites/default/files/2024-07/2024%20Pacific%20Regional%20Framework%20on%20CM.pdf.

58.

Pacific Islands Forum (2024b) Release: Fishing for consensus: Harmful subsidies talks intensify as MC13 nears end. Available at: https://forumsec.org/publications/release-fishing-consensus-harmful-subsidies-talks-intensify-mc13-nears-end (accessed 15 January 2014).

59.

Paddling Life (2022) Getting your mana on: Inside Tahiti’s 29th Hawaiki Nui Va’a Race. Available at: https://paddlinglife.com/canoeing/getting-your-mana-on-inside-tahitis-29th-hawaiki-nui-vaa-race/ (accessed 12 June 2023).

60.

Pratt

Govan

(2011) Our sea of islands, our livelihoods, our Oceania. Framework for a Pacific Oceanscape: A Catalyst for Implementation of Ocean Policy. n.p. Secretariat of the Pacific Regional Environment Programme.

61.

Quirk

Hanich

(2016) Ocean diplomacy: The Pacific Island Countries’ Campaign to the UN for an ocean sustainable development goal. Asia-Pacific Journal of Ocean Law and Policy 1(1): 68–95.

62.

Sacks

(2019) Cricket, Kirikiti and Imperialism in Samoa, 1879–1939. Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan.

63.

SDG Knowledge Hub (2022) Pacific Island leaders declare climate emergency. Available at: https://sdg.iisd.org/news/pacific-island-leaders-declare-climate-emergency/ (accessed 14 March 2024).

64.

Sealey

Spinks

Leicht

, et al. (2010) Identification and reliability of pacing strategies in outrigger canoeing ergometry. Journal of Science and Medicine in Sport 13(2): 241–246.

65.

Secretariat of the Pacific Regional Environment Programme (2017) Coastal and marine ecosystems critical for a resilient Pacific region in the face of climate change. Available at: https://www.sprep.org/news/coastal-and-marine-ecosystems-critical-resilient-pacific-region-face-climate-change (accessed 20 March 2024).

66.

Secretariat of the Pacific Regional Environment Programme (2019) Low carbon development shared the Pacific Island way. Available at: https://www.sprep.org/news/low-carbon-development-shared-the-pacific-island-way (accessed 20 January 2024).

67.

Secretariat of the Pacific Regional Environment Programme (2022) Pacific Islands takes on fight against plastic pollution on global stage. Available at: https://www.sprep.org/news/pacific-islands-takes-on-fight-against-plastic-pollution-on-global-stage (accessed 20 January 2024).

68.

Sharrad

(1998) Pathways in the sea: A pelagic post-colonialism? In: Durix

(ed) Literary Archipelagoes / Archipels littéraires. Dijon: University of Dijon, pp. 95–107.

69.

State of Hawai’i (1996) Hawai’i Revised Statutes: Chapter 5 emblems and symbols. Available at: https://www.capitol.hawaii.gov/hrscurrent/Vol01_Ch0001-0042F/HRS0005/HRS_0005-.htm (accessed 15 June 2023).

70.

Stranger

(2011) Surfing Life: Surface, Substructure and the Commodification of the Sublime. London: Routledge.

71.

Sugden

Kanemasu

Adair

(2020) Indo-Fijian women and sportive activity: A critical race feminism approach. International Review for the Sociology of Sport 55(6): 767–787.

72.

Thorpe

Barbour

Bruce

(2011) “Wandering and wondering”: Theory and representation in feminist physical cultural studies. Sociology of Sport Journal 28(1): 106–134.

73.

Times

(1985) Canoe that’s being built to race the seas. 20 March, 23.

74.

Tippet

(1968) Fijian Material Culture: A Study of Cultural Context, Function and Change. Honolulu: Bishop Museum Press.

75.

Tuwere

(2002) Vanua: Towards a Fijian Theology of Place. Suva: University of the South Pacific.

76.

Uperesa

(2021) Entangled histories and transformative futures: Indigenous sport in the 21st century. In: Hokowhitu

Moreton-Robinson

Tuhiwai-Smith

Anderson

Larkin

(eds) Routledge Handbook of Critical Indigenous Studies. London: Routledge, 511–524.

77.

Uto ni Yalo Trust (2024) Uto Ni Yalo Trust, Linkedin. Available at: https://www.linkedin.com/company/uto-ni-yalo-trust/about/ (accessed 23 January 2024).

78.

Veracini

(2008) “Emphatically not a white man’s colony”: Settler colonialism and the construction of colonial Fiji. The Journal of Pacific History 43(2): 189–205.

79.

Vierros

Tawake

Hickey

et al. (2010) Traditional Marine Management Areas of the Pacific in the Context of National and International Law and Policy. Darwin: United Nations University–Traditional Knowledge Initiative.

80.

West

(2023) Outrigger canoeing a Pacific wide sport. Available at: https://www.fijimarinas.com/outrigger-canoeing-a-pacific-wide-sport/ (accessed 18 January 2023).

81.

Wheaton (2007) Identity, politics, and the beach: Environmental activism in surfers against sewage. Leisure Studies 26(3): 279–302.

82.

Wheaton

(2013) The Cultural Politics of Lifestyle Sports. London: Routledge.

83.

Wilkes

(1845/1985) Narrative of the United States Exploring Expedition during the Years 1838, 1839, 1840, 1841, 1842, vol.3. Suva: Fiji Museum.

84.

Williams

(1858/1982) Fiji and the Fijians: The Islands and Their Inhabitants. Suva: Fiji Museum.

85.

World Bank (2021) Fiji. Available at: https://data.worldbank.org/country/fiji?view=chart (accessed 20 December 2020).

86.

World Bank (2022) Update on Fiji 2019–2020 Household Income and Expenditure Survey. Available at: https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=&cad=rja&uact=8&ved=2ahUKEwi06r2z-d2DAxWgU2wGHe3ZAswQFnoECBMQAQ&url=https%3A%2F%2Fthedocs.worldbank.org%2Fen%2Fdoc%2F592481a9b487107114a733bce2d6bc44-0070012022%2Foriginal%2F220425-WB-Statement-FijiPovertyRevision-final.pdf&usg=AOvVaw1BXU1d3X2dP3Si-PXYrt6d&opi=89978449 (accessed 10 January 2023).