Community Researching

by: Fuifuilupe Niumeitolu

Surrounded by the vast Pacific Ocean and located in the heart of the South Pacific triangle, the Tongan archipelago neighbors the islands of New Zealand, Samoa and Fiji. Tongan migrations to the United States began at the end of WWII and it proliferated after 1965. In a recent entry on Tongans Americans included in the Encyclopedia of Race and Ethnicity, I wrote about Tongan migrations to the United States. Tongan Americans represent a relatively small group in the United States: according to the 2000 Census, there were 36,836 Tongans or part Tongans in the U.S. This is about 0.01 percent of the U.S. population.

I have been given the opportunity to discuss the growing diaspora of Tongans relocating to locations in industrialized countries like the U.S. as migration overseas has become common in Tongan life. More than half the population of the islands lives abroad in industrialized countries such as Australia, Canada, New Zealand and here. In fact, four in ten Tongans live here in the United States, a country viewed as the preferred and most prestigious destination.

I want to highlight Tongan migrations to the United States because I am interested in examining some of the issues that might instigate and shape these migrations. Moreover, I am interested in contextualizing Tongan peoples’ intimate relationship to the institutions here like U.S. nationalism and Mormonism, for this unlikely pairing preceeds Tongan migrations here.

Before proceeding with this research, I want to acknowledge the important work on Tongans in the United States conducted by earlier Tongan Studies pioneers. I am especially grateful to Tamar Gordon’s because her research on the intimate relationship between Tongans and the U.S.-based Mormon Church has helped me in developing this research. Gordon reveals the prodigious role of the Mormon Church in shaping Tongan migrations and subsequently also shaping Tongan culture here in the diaspora. She asserts, “ [Tonga] has the distinction of being the most successful foreign mission field for the Mormon Church.”

Statistics documenting the growth of the Mormon Church in the year 2005 reveal that one out of every two Tongans living in the islands of Tonga is Mormon. It is imperative to note that the growing rate of Tongan migrations to the United States correlates to the high rates of Tongan conversions into the Mormon Church. Tongans are also the fastest growing Pacific Islander-American population, as the population nearly doubled in each of the last three national censes. The inextricable connection between the high rate of Tongan conversions to Mormonism and to rising Tongan migrations should not be easily dismissed as “natural” and in accordance to the linear process of progress and enlightenment” as some have proclaimed. I believe that interrogating this phenomenon and untangling the power nexus that “naturalizes” and therefore invisibilizes these relationships are challenges that should be a priority for Tongan Studies scholars because of the salient histories on Tongan culture, Tongan subjectivities, and the metaphysical qualities of being Tongan that this excavation can yield.

Interrogating the intimate relationships between the U.S-based institution, Mormonism to Tongan people and Tonganness is one of the objectives of my research. Interestingly, the unsettling and profound intimacy between Tongans and Mormonism was the subject of a Disney blockbuster film, The Other Side of Heaven, nationally released in 2002. The film is based on a memoir, published in 1993 by the Mormon Church leader John H. Groberg, entitled In the Eye of the Storm. The memoir chronicles Groberg’s experiences as a Mormon missionary in the Tongan islands during 1954-1957.

It is my intention, in my most recent research, to critically examine the production of Tongan manhood in the 20th and 21st centuries. I will examine the image of the Tongan male character Feki in the Disney blockbuster film, The Other Side of Heaven. In the popular film, Feki embodies the trope of “side-kick” to the American male missionary, John H. Groberg.

Feki is a severely racialized, gendered and subsequently sexualized image that is politically efficacious and advantageous for the formation and proliferation of colonialisms. My research reveals that Feki is a historical product that is produced by intersecting and contemporaneous histories of colonialisms constituted through Tongan and U.S. nationalisms, Mormonism and the desires of global capital markets. My analysis will reveal that Feki is not a contemporary colonial invention but rather, his image follows in the historical trajectory of colonial imagery from the past that marked Cap. James Cook’s third voyage to the Tongan islands in the late 18th century and this image reemerged during the U.S. occupation of the Tongan islands during WWII. Like the colonial imagery of the past, Feki’s role is to meant to allay and silence Tongan people’s robust histories of resistance against colonialisms and the proliferation of neo liberalism.

This work also will contexualize the visual technologies deployed in the film to produce Feki and Tonganness. I will analyze the visual language of the film and illuminate the ways that the film inscribes Feki’s masculinity as gendered, sexualized and racialized, while it simultaneously centers Groberg’s masculinity as superior and inevitable. Lastly, I will show that the film delineates Feki as the quintessential Tongan man. I will show that this preferred image of Tongan masculinity constituted through White fear and sexual anxieties is a systemic response as well as a political maneuver aimed to contain and discipline the imagined images of Tongan hypermasculinity and to continue the proliferation of colonialisms.