How can Indigenous Pacific wisdom and knowledge help shape the future of our region by 2050.

I am proud to be an Indigenous person of the Pacific Ocean, the blue continent. We share pan-Pacific interconnections. We share cultural practices that come from our contiguous relationships across the Pacific. We all build drua, or canoes. We all practice navigational techniques passed down to us from our ancestors—Pacific celestial navigation, wave piloting, etak or wayfinding. Our ancestors navigated to their island destinations using the knowledge passed down to them. 

As wayfinding navigators they held the past home base of departure and the future destination in the present intention, in what Spiller et al. describe as the “eternal present” as they moved towards landfall in the future.  A responsiveness to their environment enabled our voyaging ancestors to draw an invisible island to them from below the horizon. This Indigenous Pacific wisdom and knowledge provides us with a guiding metaphor. 

We can draw our future to us by responding to our present environment in a way which keeps us moving. We must remain in a constant state of readiness and responsiveness and harness the ability to see the invisible.

What are the biggest challenges facing the Pacific today, and how can we turn these challenges into opportunities?

There are so many challenges facing the Pacific today.  Climate change, sea level rise, pandemics, destructive legacies of imperialism and colonialism. I don’t know how we can turn these seemingly insurmountable challenges into opportunities. I do know that we have and we will survive all challenges. 

Albert Wendt famously described the Pacific as follows: 
“So vast, so fabulously varied a scatter of islands, nations, cultures, mythologies and myths, so dazzling a creature, Oceania deserves more than an attempt at mundane fact; only the imagination in free flight can hope – if not to contain her – to grasp some of her shape, plumage and pain”

We can take our cue from Wendt by sending our imaginations into free flight and centering Indigenous Oceanic science, wisdom, knowledge when facing big challenges.

What is your personal vision for the future of your country, and the Pacific at large, and what steps do you believe are essential to achieve this vision.

The painter and author Herb Kane said: 

“The canoe, the voyaging canoe lies at the heart of the web of Polynesian culture… because if it were not for the canoe, the culture would not exist, nor the people… We see it in the context of the Polynesian culture as a spaceship. You could really call it the spaceship of our ancestors, because with it, they made explorations that were, in the context of their culture, just as staggering as our efforts to go to the moon and other planets today.”

As a science fiction fan and writer I believe we can keep taking extraordinary journeys into staggering and dazzling futures. It is essential that we harness our imagination and shoot for the stars. 

Our ancestors proved that voyage is possible.

Learn more at the Pasifika Futures Forum from 9-14 May 2025 in Suva, Fiji.