Learning in Movement: Cultural Reclamation in a Polynesian After-School Program

• In Event: The Power and Possibilities for the Indigenous Good: Collaborative Indigenous Initiatives in Education

Abstract

This paper draws from an ethnographic study at Ridge High School (pseudonym) in Northern California where predominantly Tongan and Tongan-American students and families are resisting assimilative Anglocentric schooling through an afterschool program (Polyclub) premised on Pacific Island dance forms. I discuss the significance of the transnational and transtemporal mobility of Oceanic dance forms as a pedagogy of cultural reclamation for diasporic Pacific Islander communities as well as a continuation of traditional Oceanic practices of interconnectivity. I argue that the afterschool program’s use of traditional dances is not a unidirectional movement towards a Western lineal understanding of ‘past’, but rather they are contextually mediated (re)articulations, which engage students into a simultaneous and reciprocal relationships among ancestors, community and future generations.

Author

• Nathan Gong, University of California - Berkeley