Notes

• [1]
  ‪The term “Melanesia” draws an arbitrary line in the Pacific (with Fiji problematically between Polynesia and Melanesia), taking skin color as the primary indicator of difference. Nevertheless, the term has been adopted by leaders and islanders themselves. My focus here is Vanuatu, Papua New Guinea, and Solomon Islands, which share important features. I do not discuss Fiji, with a large population of descended from South Asian indentured workers and traders, New Caledonia, which remains a French colony, or West Papua, which is within the state of Indonesia.‪
• [2]
  ‪Important recent discussions of Malaita in the broader context of Solomon Islands history include Akin (2013), Allen (2013), Burt (1994), Keesing (1992), Moore (2017).‪
• [3]
  ‪These cases are also discussed in McDougall, 2016, Chapter 7. The present article expands on analysis in this earlier work.‪
• [4]
  ‪See Fraenkel (2004) and Moore (2004) for book length overviews of the Tensions and Allen (2013) for militant’s perspective on the conflict.‪
• [5]
  ‪For a discussion of the ways that urban youth are establishing similar roots in Honiara, see Jourdan (1998).‪
• [6]
  ‪Recently, there have been startling reports of exploitation of Pacific Islands workers on Short Term Worker schemes in Australia (Hermant, 2016; Doherty, 2017). In tactics that hearken back to the days of indentured labour, some employers appear to be deducting so much for accommodation and other expenses that workers earn nothing at all. ‪
• [7]
  ‪That few people migrate overseas is clear. What is not clear is how many people move from Honiara to other regional cities or rural areas. People of resource rich and less densely populated Western Province feared being swamped by people of Malaita province who are crowded out of Honiara, including those who have married into Western Province families.‪
• [8]
  ‪In addition to these two edited memoirs, Burt and Kwa’ioloa have co-written an account of the life of Kwa’ioloa’s father (Burt and Kwa’ioloa, 2001) and a pamphlet documenting the traditions of land ownership in Kwara’ae (Burt and Kwa’ioloa, 1992).‪
• [9]
  ‪See Strathern (1985) on a similar process in a Papua New Guinea context. ‪
• [10]
  ‪Rupert Stasch has described the ongoing importance of villages for town dwellers around Melanesia: “villages are geographic figures of nostalgia for a past that is felt to have been lost in the biographical and historical present of urban life, even as urbanites’ actual ties with village settings are morally ambivalent and socially fraught” (2010: 56).‪
• [11]
  ‪At the height of the evictions in 1999-2000, approximately 10% of the entire population of Malaita overall, and up to 25% of some parts of North Malaita, was comprised of returnees from Guadalcanal (Fraenkel, 2004: 61-62). ‪
• [12]
  ‪Ben Burt (Kwa’ioloa and Burt, 2012: 15) acknowledges that such a claim would be contested by many Guadalcanal people.‪