Review Forum: O’Brien, P 2017, Tautai: Sāmoa, World History, and the Life of Ta’isi O.F. Nelson

Abstract

Biography, Barbara Caine suggests, has much to offer history. It can give us ‘insight […] into the lives and thought of significant individuals’ or those of ‘less-exalted and ordinary people’.It can also illuminate ‘the ways in which particular institutions and events and larger-scale social, economic and political developments were felt, understood and experienced by those who lived through them’.1 These benefits are true of Indigenous and non-Indigenous biographies alike, and The Journal of Pacific History (JPH) has reviewed numerous biographies of individuals influential in the history of the Pacific since its foundation in 1966; the very first issue featured reviews of biographies of Arthur Hamilton Gordon and Charles Reed Bishop.2 During JPH’s first three decades of existence the biographies reviewed were predominantly those of non-Indigenous individuals, with a few notable exceptions.3 In more recent years the balance has improved significantly, one of several positive indications that Indigenous biography, auto-biography and life writing as literary genres are increasingly valued.4 In the past ten years alone, reviews of 13 biographies or autobiographies of Pacific Islanders from various eras