Forum Guy Beauregard, Eva Darias-Beautell, Cornel Bogle, and Joanne Leow Islanding Canada, Islanding the World Introduction “Shall we make ‘island’ a verb?” So asks Teresia Kieuea Teaiwa, the late Pacific poet, scholar, and educator. Born to an African American mother and a Banaban/I-Kiribati father in Hawai‘i, Teaiwa was educated there as well as in Fiji and the continental United States, later dedicating much of her professional life to teaching and helping build Pacific studies in Aotearoa, New Zealand. 1 Of particular interest in her life and work across islands is “To Island” (2022), a poem in which she urges us to envision islands as verbs to help develop what might be called “islanding” perspectives. For Teaiwa, viewing islands as nouns leaves them “vulnerable to impinging forces,” including to what she calls “the stupor of continental fantasies.” Paying tribute to the work of Epeli Hau‘ofa, her former colleague at the University of the South Pacific, Teaiwa acknowledges, “Yes, there is a sea of islands”—but, she adds, “‘sea’ can be a verb, just as ‘ocean’ becomes a verb of awesome possibility.” By making island a verb, Teaiwa urges us to act with more care: “Care for other humans, care for plants, animals; care for soil, care for water.” Doing so, she writes, “could save our lives.” Teaiwa’s call to transform island into a verb has profound ethical implications for how we might learn to relearn received notions of which places, spaces, and stories matter. When relocated into the contexts of our teaching and learning and writing, her call affirms the similarly expansive work of “the worlding project” developed at the University of California Santa Cruz, where the notion of “worlding” was tied to what Christopher Connery calls “an interruption and critique of a 10 Canadian Literature 257