Moana

Our late beloved Tongan Queen Salote Pilolevu, among her countless allegiances, believed in the power of words. She utilized them in their various forms, whether sung to a prescribed harmony, used to address a people, or shared in reverence in the form of prayer. She knew their power: this 'knowing' helped to sustain Tonga's solidarity tot he present day. The late Queen was a lover of words-a master of their manoeuvres- a poetess.

Her practice was reactive of word's power to move: to invoke war, but more significantly to petition for peace. Perhaps it is our contemporary yearning for peace that leads us to constructive remembrance of the past and as we, a young generation of Polynesians, move into a future of possibility, our stories of the past and present must be told like our late Queen Salote proved-to once again petition for peace.

"Moana" is an attempt to retell stories, like the Polynesian storytelling practice of old. We are an autonomous voice from the University of Utah. Our purpose to publish 'progressive' Polynesian journalism, providing information on issues pertinent to our communities that mainstream media have inadequately addressed or neglected. We advocation social reform and equality by reporting important events, issues and struggles of Polynesians at the "U," at local high schools, in our communities and in the United States. By exposing and opposing the negative depictions which appear often in the mainstream media; and in general, by supporting all struggles that sought the eradication of race, sexuality, class and gender inequalities here in this university and within our communities. This publication will attempt to bridge the gap between the working class Polynesian communities in Utah and academia, making the university accessible to our youth, which would encourage the recruitment and retention of Polynesian students and faculty to this university.

As we move forward as Polynesian people, as children of "mana" which is the spiritual power for radical transformation, a power marginalized in Western cultural politics and always existing within the peripheries of Western epistemology, we must remember that ours is a shared struggle with survival contingent on our allegiance to community. Therefore, in these dangerous days it is imperative that we do not allow our individual struggles for self-aggrandisement obstruct our overall goal for peace. Our history states that it was through the immaculate power of mana and the ferocious labor of our ancestors that lead them through tumultuous winds and wide oceans to discover and settle the Polynesias. These expeditions contradicted all reliance on the West's "superior" technology and/or Gods. Thus, this history of our constructions stand as evidence that if the impetus of our labors are to sustain community then we are an indestructible people. In our search for "the promised land" borrowing a metaphor from the late reverend Martin Luther King, we must ask ourselves why we as a kiang/kinship, as a people of divine inheritance should desire anything less than a progressive politics-a liberation politics that is heterogeneous and triumphs in the pleasures of diversity?

Our survival as a people demands a progressive politics that is transgressive of the stringent, century-old boundaries of hate and monolithicism that have inevitably separated our communities and have placed confinements on our imagination. This progressive politics is not a new type of politics for us Polynesian people. Rather it is a return 'home' to the base of our indigenous cultures. This is a location that is never complacent in its mobility, but is ever shifting, always interrogating its inhabitation of space. Like the protagonist Beth in Maori film-maker Lee Tamahori's Once We Were Warriors who after living a reality of poverty, violence and death in New Zealand's urban city, takes her surviving children and returns 'home' to her native Maori village and people. She is in search of a salvation that a dominant culture has denied her. Beth's return 'home' is both a spiritual and physical pilgrimage, because literally she shifts her demographic location, but more significantly, Beth's return 'home' is about constructively remembering, rearticulating and reconstructing 'home'. She recreates an emancipatory space that a predominant cultural politics both negates and repudiates. Beth's return 'home' is decolonization-a location for radical departure. Here she returns again to believing in mana-the unyielding thread that binds Polynesianism. This is Beth's 'return' to a progressive politics, an 'extreme,' counter-hegemonic politics, but it is our only absolute-this politics we know as love.

Mana is love.

    Love is the only revolution.

Fuifuilupe 'Alilia Niumeitolu, Editor in Chief, pays tribute to her grandmothers Ane Vaimoana Makakaufaki and Sauliloa Leafaa Niumeitolu, for their love has ignited a fire.