Active Agents versus Passive Victims: Decolonized Historiography or Problematic Paradigm?

Abstract

Pacific history claims to have decolonized by focusing on Islanders as active agents who made participatory choices in their interactions with outsiders. "Islander-oriented" studies are a decided improvement over imperial histories, but modern revisionism has tended to downplay evidence of depopulation, cultural domination, or colonial exploitation, on the basis that such narratives rob Islanders of their dignity by representing them as "passive victims" being acted on by outsiders. This polemicism still decides for Islanders what is important about their past. Nationalists often emphasize injustices committed against their peoples. Such active modern agents discourse about victimization to portray not helplessness but innocence, and the need for redress. This dilemma reveals the need to revise Pacific history's dominant paradigm: victims need not be passive, and actors tend to be embedded in structures.

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