Pacific Island Ethnic Art Museum (PIEAM)

About the Organization:

As the only Pacific Islands museum in the continental US, PIEAM amplifies the collective wisdom of the people of Oceania/Pacific Islands through her artists and cultural practitioners. Our purpose is to ensure that how we share knowledge is in alignment with the diversity of the Pacific Islands indigenous peoples we serve in roots and routes.

The Issue:

The deep seated impact of historical and continued colonization on the Pacific and the people of Oceania cannot be overstated. We have seen and lived the ways it produces severe health, economic, and educational inequities here in the US as well as the destruction of our ancestral lands and water from Bikini Atoll to Red Hill to the rising sea levels that are displacing thousands. A key component of colonization is the suppression of indigenous cultures which has led to a loss of traditions, languages, and stories. What remains of Pasifika cultures today is the result of centuries of resistance.

Despite being hypervisible and the recent proliferation of media about and in the Pacific, our communities still aren’t being authentically seen or heard. The narratives offered are limited and narrow, reducing us to vacation destinations, tourist attractions, and spectacles. These narratives promote the corruption of our cultures, consumption of our land and bodies– without protection for our people. At the crux of this issue is that the majority of these stories are not made by or for our PI communities.

This mis/underrepresentation is constantly reproduced in institutions and at decision making tables inevitably creating systems that aren’t designed to meet the needs of Pacific Islanders. Even spaces that purport PI inclusion have been complicit in our marginalization. We’d be remiss if we didn’t name how AAPI has become an issue for PIs because it’s so often a site of erasure and sometimes contradicts our indigenous principles. However, we continue to grapple and engage with the aggregate since it’s a mechanism through which resources and power are distributed.

The Solution:

Uno hit yan i tano’, i tasi, i guafi, yan i aire (We are one with the land, the ocean, the fire, and the air.)

PIEAM believes that culture is curative and culture keeping is an antidote to colonization. We reject museum models that posit artifacts and art as objects for display. Instead we treat them as relatives– ancestor pieces that we steward with great care. We understand the reciprocity that arises from this specific type of engagement where people transform the art with the stories they tell about it while it simultaneously changes them.

Programs and services advance our mission of an in-community institution and our dedication to uplifting narratives of diverse communities and combating erasure of traditional practices. We provide unrestricted access to PI artists/cultural practitioners to reclaim the power to construct their expansive narratives. In times of crisis, PIEAM acts as a hub, from collecting donations to aid Guam and Rota as they recover from Typhoon Mawar to advocating for community fundraising following the disastrous wildfires in Lahaina, Maui.

Core Services:

Educational Programs/Community Offerings– These can take various forms from language classes to book talks hosted by local and visiting practitioners. The most recent program was a Māori dance and culture workshop led by Amelia Butler of Learn Māori Abroad.
Rotating Installations– The installations are the most dynamic aspect of PIEAM’s work because they’re responsive to community needs and the ancestor pieces. Because of the devastating impact of COVID on PIs, PIEAM artists produced work educating people about the virus and protective measures. After lockdown, PIEAM co-curated Toe Fo’i as a healing space for visitors to process their grief commissioning Pasifika artists to facilitate online story circles and create multimedia art inspired by the experience. The current installation, Living Handbook, puts ancestor pieces in conversation with contemporary works offering guidance on how to be in relationship with these cultural treasures that serve a different purpose while in diaspora.
Living Arts– Performances that include dance and a partnership with Island Block Radio to host intimate concerts featuring PI musicians while the Resident Artist does live painting inspired by the songs.

Manisha G. Bewtra, AICP

Planning, Mobility, and Development Advisor to Tucson Mayor Regina Romero

Manisha Bewtra, AICP (she/her) is Mayor Romero’s Planning, Mobility, and Development Advisor. In this role, she leverages her passion for planning for thriving, healthy, and inclusive communities with her love for policy-making and politics as the Mayor’s liaison on transportation and land use issues. Manisha is an experienced public process facilitator and project manager and works collaboratively with the Mayor’s team and city departments to apply an equity lens to all city initiatives.
Manisha has built her career on bringing divergent perspectives together, facilitating conversations around change, and generating data-informed solutions that move communities forward. She is driven by public service and champions equitable policies and inclusive community engagement.
Prior to her current role, she worked at the Metropolitan Area Planning Council in Boston as a senior regional planner and the manager of the analytics team, at the Massachusetts Housing Partnership where she was a statewide technical assistance provider, as an adjunct city planning instructor for Master’s degree program courses at the Harvard Graduate School of Design and at Arizona State University, and in municipal government and nonprofit community development organizations in Philadelphia, Washington, D.C., Baltimore, and Chandler, Arizona.
Manisha has served on various equity-focused organizations and committees and is a graduate of Emerge Massachusetts, the Initiative for Diversity in Civic Leadership, and the Massachusetts Commonwealth Seminar, three organizations dedicated to training underrepresented groups to influence public policy and to run for office. She has a Master of City Planning degree from the University of Pennsylvania, a BA in Economics and Art from The University of Iowa, and is a member of the American Institute of Certified Planners. She currently serves as a member at large for the American Planning Association Arizona Southern Section and is a member of the executive team for the Asian American and Political Islander Caucus for the Arizona Democratic Party.
Before moving to Tucson in the summer of 2020, she lived in the Boston area for twelve years. During her years in Melrose, Massachusetts, she served as a Human Rights Commissioner and subsequently as a City Councilor. When elected to the Melrose City Council, she became the first person of color ever to serve in elected office in Melrose. She grew up in Iowa and identifies as Desi/Indian-American. She, her husband, and her son felt welcomed and right at home in Tucson when they moved here – even in spite of a pandemic and searing summer heat.

Arnie Saiki

research, writer, program director

Broadly focusing on regional economic and geopolitical themes in the Asia and Pacific regions, Arnie Saiki is currently leading a working group on data, statistics and valuation in the Pacific. His book “Economic and Ecological Accounting: Towards Intemerate Values,” was published last year by the Pacific Conference of Churches, the Pacific Theological College and the University of the South Pacific.

Since the publication, this campaign has been introduced to the Ecological and Economic Justice program at the World Council of Churches and he is participating in a G8 Interfaith forum for the inclusion of Wellbeing indicators into our economic accounts.

While national statistics and ecological accounting normally fall under the purview of government, academic or international institutions, Arnie has been campaigning in democratizing our ecological data, seeking support for a proof-of-concept accounting program that would enable poor, impacted, and indigenous peoples to actively participate in how we account for our socio and economic biodiversity. Intemerate Accounting is an equation that helps to correct accounting disparities that have, to a large extent, excluded the Global South. Revising our accounting system can provide access and opportunities that cross wide campaign sectors, bringing hope, action and efficacy to reverse climate change, restore our ecological biodiversity, and redistribute global wealth more equitably.

Arnie has been actively promoting and working on global justice campaigns since 2007 when he received a “We the People” grant from the Hawai’i Council of the Humanities for his work on Hawai’i Statehood. He has organized conferences with Hawaiian national independence groups, managed the Save Rapanui campaign after the Chilean military forced a lockdown of Easter Islanders. Arnie spoke at the World Bank representing the Pacific Island Forum, and participated in discussions around regionalism in the Pacific. He was recently appointed the US-Pacific Diplomacy and Solidarity Mission for the United Liberation Movement for West Papua (ULMWP), and is on the management team of the Deep Seabed Mining Campaign.

In 2011, Arnie received the blessing from Dr. Kekuni Blaisdell to organize a counter-conference in Honolulu while APEC was there and coordinated the Moana Nui conferences, an international partnership between the International Forum on Globalization and Pua Mohala I Ka Po. For the last ten years he has been campaigning on issues around trade, development, ecological resources, indigenous issues and militarization in the Pacific.

His essays, “TPP at the End of the Line: a briefing on economic cooperation and capacity building” was published in American Quarterly by John Hopkins University Press, and “Manifesting the Liquid Continent,” was published by Yunnan National University, as part of the 1st International conference on Asia and Pacific Ethnology and Anthropology.