Tokelau's thirty-year preparation for self-government brought unprecedented social change to the villages and led to equally unprecedented outmigration to the metropoles. This is a history of Tokelauan expansion from the homeland to a series of sites that today comprise a transnational archipelago of Tokelauan communities spanning the North and the South Pacific. This dissertation examines the history of these migrations, the relations between the various parts of the archipelago, and the role of these relations in social, cultural, and political changes within the various sites. While there are published studies on Tokelau and its overseas communities in New Zealand there are none on its fourth atoll, Olohega and the Tokelauans who once lived there. The partitioned histories of the Tokelauan people converge in this study as the Tokelauans of Olohega tell their history and offer a counter-narrative to accounts by colonial agents that continue the alienation of Olohega from Tokelau. This dissertation contributes a new case study to the field of Pacific Islands History and should appeal to scholars of world history, decolonization, comparative colonialism, migrations and diasporas, and cultural studies.
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