Workbook
For Pacific Islander Families
A Workbook on Collective Identity, Generational Obligation, and Choosing What to Carry Forward
The Pacific is in you. This is where your family decides what that means from here.
Pacific Islander American families — Native Hawaiian, Samoan, Tongan, Fijian, Chamorro, Marshallese, and others — navigating the shared experience of collective identity, family obligation, and building a life in a country that does not easily hold the Pacific Islander way of being. Families trying to name what they carry and what they are building.
The Name It First Experience
Your family comes from the Pacific. From islands shaped by ocean, by community, by the understanding that you do not exist apart from the people around you. You are raising the next generation in a country built around a very different idea. The gap between those two ways of being is where your family has been living. This workbook does not ask your family to choose between the Pacific and here. It asks you to name — together and on paper — what Pacific Islander identity means in your specific household, what you are carrying on purpose, and what you are choosing to build. Grounded in Racial Identity Development theory (Cross, Helms), Acculturation Theory (Berry), Intersectionality (Crenshaw), diasporic identity scholarship (Brah, Hall), and research on Pacific Islander American family and identity, this workbook gives your family a structure for the conversation. The work is yours to do together. This is where you write it down. You leave with The Pacific Islander Families Agreement.
You can opt into 30-, 60-, and 90-day check-ins from your account. We recommend you do — the point is to see what changed.
Sample questions
- What has your Pacific Islander family given you — the connection to your island, your people, your ways of being in community and relationship that travel with you wherever you are?
- What is the collective identity you carry — and where does it feel like strength versus where does it feel like obligation that was never agreed to?
- What would The Pacific Islander Family Record say — from your experience — about what your family gave you, what it asked of you, and what you are choosing to carry forward?
Research basis
Cross (1971, 1991) Nigrescence Model adapted for Pacific Islander identity / Helms (1990) racial identity statuses / Berry (1997) acculturation strategies / Crenshaw (1989, 1991) intersectionality / Brah (1996) Cartographies of Diaspora applied to Pacific Islander diaspora / Hall (1990) Cultural Identity and Diaspora / Spickard, Rondilla & Wright (2002) Pacific Diaspora: Island Peoples in the United States and Across the Pacific / cultural frameworks shared across Pacific Islander communities: collective identity, family obligation, church community, ocean/land relationship / Anae (2010) on Samoan and Pacific Islander diasporic identity / Native Hawaiian cultural frameworks (Kanahele, 1986) / Māori and Pacific collective identity (Metge, 1990) / Pacific Islander health disparities and identity (Mau et al., 2010) / fa'a Sāmoa, kava ceremony, and Pacific spiritual frameworks across communities.
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