Epeli Hau'ofa

Epeli Hauʻofa (7 December 1939 – 11 January 2009) was a Tongan and Fijian writer and anthropologist born of Tongan missionary parents in the Territory of Papua. He lived in Fiji and taught at the University of the South Pacific (USP). He was the founder of the Oceania Centre for Arts at the USP. He went to school in Papua New Guinea, Tonga and Suva, and attended the University of New England, Armidale, New South Wales; McGill University, Montreal; and the Australian National University, Canberra, where he gained a PhD in social anthropology, published in 1981 with the title Mekeo: Inequality and Ambivalence in a Village Society. He taught as a tutor at the University of Papua New Guinea, In 1997, Hauʻofa became the founder and director of the Oceania Centre for Arts and Culture at the USP in Suva.

Writing He was the author of Mekeo: Inequality and Ambivalence in a Village Society; Tales of the Tikongs, which deals (through fiction) with indigenous South Pacific Islander responses to the changes and challenges brought by modernisation and development; Kisses in the Nederends, a selection of earlier works, including fiction, poetry and essays. Tales of the Tikongs was translated into Danish in 2002 by John Allan Pedersen (as Stillehavsfortællinger, )

The BBC History magazine writes that Hauʻofa provided a "reconceptualisation of the Pacific": In his "influential essay Our Sea of Islands", he argued that Pacific Islanders "were connected rather than separated by the sea. Far from being sea-locked peoples marooned on coral or volcanic tips of land, islanders formed an oceanic community based on voyaging." The reframing of the Pacific from "Islands from a Far Sea" to "A Sea of Islands" offered a change from a "belittlement" of the islands to an "enlargement" in regard to the Pacific on a global scale. It centers Pacific Islanders relationships to each other, as historically and presently embedded, and their relationships as navigators of the vast sea.

The essay Our Sea of Islands was published in A New Oceania : Rediscovering our Sea of Islands, co-edited by Hauʻofa, Vijay Naidu and Eric Waddell, published in 1993.

Death Hauʻofa died at the Suva Private Hospital in Suva at 7 AM on 11 January 2009 at the age of sixty-nine. He was survived by his wife, Barbara, and son, Epeli Siʻi. He was buried at his residence in Wainadoi, Fiji.