Close to ten years ago, I stood before a group of my students in a Pacific Studies classroom, and after spending a semester with them exploring the breadth and depth of the region, one of them said, “It takes a lot of energy to care about things I cannot change.” We had covered a range of issues over the previous fifteen weeks—the ongoing impacts of colonialism, the devastating legacies of militarism, the rising threats of climate change, and a range of other topics related to Pacific lives, places, and futures—and rather than leaving hopeful, this student left feeling despondent. This experience not only changed my teaching practice but also led me to the concept of radical hope.

This presentation will focus on radical hope as critical to individual, collective, and intergenerational wellbeing. In doing so, it will present hope not just as a desire for something, but as an act of Indigenous futurity: daring to dream beyond the present to envision something better, even if present circumstances make that hard, and especially when current circumstances make that hard. When the struggle feels impossible, when it feels like it will take all of our energy, how do we keep moving, keep working, keep striving? What happens when we give in to the notion that things cannot change? What happens to us as individuals, as collectives, as links to past and future generations?

To highlight radical hope, this presentation will share stories of Indigenous protection for land, place, people, and culture as enactments of futurity, or the building of the future in the present. It will engage in decolonial dreaming, envisioning beyond the now. It will challenge us to think about hope, and the work that goes with it, not as fanciful or wishful thinking but as Indigenous responsibility.