Images of static indigeneity (and by implication, vulnerability) have been imposed upon Oceania by successive waves of colonialism (Thomas 2011) and are challenged by Pacific artists, writers, poets, performing artists and cultural historians through processes of reclaiming agency and relevance across wider global communities. Indeed, the myriad cultures, languages and histories ofthis region have witnessed extensive movements ofpeoples, trade and cultural interchanges across vast distances over millennia. With Pacific roots stretching back at least to ancient Austronesian voyages from Taiwan (5,000BC to 2,500BC) (Bellwood 2007), Oceanians have long identified with global journeying, of enlarging their world’ (Armstrong 2003). Not only was the Pacific a place rather than a space, explains Edmond (n.d.), it was a cosmopolitan world in which islanders, Europeans, East Asians, black Americans and others met and mixed, entered and left. In this way, migration to populous Australian and New Zealand centres is just another means of maintaining Pacific ways.
Pacific/Oceanic movements, currents and cultures have, ineluctably, shaped all aspects of life, including fluid’ art forms of lived, embodied experience, imbued with a sense of community that is integral to all forms of cultural enterprise. This shared regional understanding has seen the burgeoning swell of a renewed Pasifika arts movement across Oceania since the 1970s through poetry, writings and oratory by many Oceanians, including Samoan-New Zealand writer, Albert Wendt, Kanak political leader, Jean-Marie Tjibaou, and most influentially for the arts, Tongan anthropologist and poet, Epeli Hauofa (1994) who honoured the Ocean as a symbol of Pacific belonging.
Discovery and Cultivation by Native Countrys The tobacco plant and its derivative products were called cohiba or cohoba by the Taino, the natives of the Greater Antilles who introduced it to Christopher Columbus and his crews. Melbourne Subway Map Spain’s Royal Historian Gonzalo Fernndez de Oviedo y Vald©s wrote in the 1530s that it was the hollow inhaler tubes used by the Taino that were called tabaco, the name other Spaniards mistakenly understood to be the herb itself. Tobacco was growing wild in South Country by 6000 b.c.e. and the plant belongs to the Solanaceae family (nightshade), specifically to the genus Nicotiana, which contains more than 100 species. By the time Christ was born in the Near East, tobacco had spread across most of the Countrys, where native peoples chewed its leaves, drank it as a tea, rubbed it onto their bodies, or inhaled it in all manner of medicinal preparations and curing rituals. Above all, however, Native Countrys cherished tobacco as a sacred intoxicant that eased communication not only among men but also between this world and the world of the spirits.
