Violence Within and Against the Pacific

Katerina Teaiwa

Picture: Moruroa, Fagataufa, Kalama, Nauru, Enewetak, Bougainville, Ko’olawe, Kwa- jalein, Bikini, Rongelap, Kiritimati, Monte Bello, Banaba, Kanaky, Emu, Vatukoula, Maralinga, Woomera.

In the Pacific, many of us are still trying to decolonize politically and intellectually. Our work is often personal even when the language is “objective.” In this paper, my criticism of certain forms of violence in the Pacific is emotive. So where must the proc­ess of decolonization begin? With remembering Bougainville’s “discovery” of the sexu­ally uninhibited noble savages of Tahiti in 1768? With the settlement of Samoa “and other questions” between the British and Germans in 1899 (Daws 1980: 1, Silverman 1971: 94)? What about Albert Ellis’ British flag on Banaba in 1900 (Ellis 1935), or the U.N. creation of the United States “Trust Territories” in Micronesia after World War II? Or with the introduction of the notion that land could be traded, bought and sold, physi­cally re-shaped, or given away to foreigners?

In indigenous epistemology, “land” often includes the people and their culture, the ecology and surrounding ocean. The land and ocean live, breathe and remember. Like many indigenous populations, island communities conventionally have a spiritual con­nection to every rock, plant, animal and phenomenon of nature; this is where gods and goddesses reside. In Kiribati tradition, Nei Tituabine is the giant ray and Tabakea is the turtle; in Hawai’i, Pele is the volcano and Hi’iaka is the forest; in old Samoa, Saveasi’uleo is the eel, O le Fe’e is the octopus; and to Polynesians, the Ocean is Moana Nui. When Europeans came to the Pacific with all their “superior” tools and ideas, these spiritual attitudes towards nature became suppressed.

When I refer to “Pacific Islanders,” I am speaking of Chandra Mohanty’s re­formulations of Benedict Anderson’s “imagined community,” including peoples bound by their location within an ocean of colonial religious, economic, and political histories (1991: 4). Our experiences of colonial dominance are as diverse as are our particular cul­tures and languages, but we all share a common continental misperception as inhabitants of “Paradise.”

Mohanty’s premise for describing “imagined communities” is based on groups which share the potential for political alliances. The penetrating influence of colonialism across Oceania provides such a potential. I do not wish to claim an absolute similarity of experience or attitude for Pacific Islanders, but what we also share is a lack of attention from the international academic community who find more urgent sites of oppression elsewhere. In addition, what many indigenous peoples of the Pacific share, within and without the intellectual realm, is a basic relationship with the land and ocean as a source

of life and spirituality (even among those who have completely converted to capitalism and Christianity) and a struggle to live with the encroaching modernity in a meaningful and strategic mode. I speak of violence within the Pacific, then, from a position at which these commonalities intersect.

We do not need a dictionary to understand that violence means destruction, pain, harm, and suffering. We are appalled at the violence in Bosnia, Somalia, Los Angeles, and Haiti—and then remember that there are wonderful places like Hawai'i, Fiji, and Tahiti with swaying palm trees and hula dancers. As France detonates weapons of mass destruction in the heart of a coral atoll, we—in and beyond the Pacific who have access to television—still dream of and find console in South Pacific, Mutiny on the Bounty, and Green Day's hula dancers on MTV's Alternative Nation.

If an external force drastically alters people's lives causing pain and suffering, it is violence. The “cultural context” of violence does not simply indicate the ways in which violence is played out within and between different ethnic groups or individuals. It could also describe the diverse and highly specific cultural experiences of external (though I admit the boundary implied by the word “external” is not clearcut in some cases) vio­lence, and here, that violence generated by the environment-altering activities of colonial powers in the Pacific—today, specifically, mining and nuclear testing. Such activities have impacted the lives of islanders for decades; the disruption goes on to precipitate “domestic” warfare, dispute, depression, deprivation, dispossession, dislocation, and deg­radation of health, culture, economy, and society. In all cases the rhetoric used to obfus­cate the harmful effects of mining and nuclear testing is that of “paradise,” “develop­ment,” “progress,” “growth,” and “security”—in reality, not ours but theirs.

Today, many islanders, along with the rest of the world, tend to see the manufactured Pacific Paradise and not the Pacific reality. Today, we islanders also watch MTV and eat or desire McDonald's hamburgers and drive Toyota Landcruisers. Well, at least some of “us” do—power is not restricted to Euro/American elites, but belongs to indigenous ones too. One only has to find out what's happened in Tahiti, Fiji, Papua New Guinea, New Caledonia, Aotearoa/New Zealand, and even everyone's favorite paradise, Hawai'i, to comprehend that violence foments here at the physical, spiritual, and psychological lev­els. The root of this chaos is the colonial alteration of island life. Ironically, the Pacific is anything but peaceful.

In social science, there is the notion of structural violence, which manifests itself at the institutional social level, and physical violence, where people actually harm each other. I do not distinguish between structural and physical violence—pain is pain.

Popular notions of islanders remain forever static to the media and its publics. In the film The Fifth Element, 300 years into the future, we still see hula dancers and lei bearers as a significant part of the recreational experience. Paradise simply cannot exist without ocean, beaches, smiling and dancing natives; and while “culture-less” people in the First World develop, the rest of us are held back by our adherence to indigenous identities. Everywhere else but here in the Pacific, our existence relies on the assumption that all is well—unchanging, relaxing, slow, comfortable. The penetrating activities of powerful colonial and neocolonial actors also relies on the “fact” that Pacific peoples are geo­graphically and demographically small in size and number. This is supposed to justify nuclear testing, mining and development in the islands. We're still the last frontier for an ambitious capitalism and militarism.

Many people do not know or care about current problems in Oceania because it's not a wise marketing or patriotic move to broadcast such facts; the countries responsible can hide behind their saintly international and domestic images to distract their citizenry.

The military governor of the Marshall Islands had explained to Bikini Islanders that their home was needed to contribute to the ending of all wars on earth; it was the will of God. How ironic that most islanders and Americans now share this same God. The is­landers must have felt so proud that something belonging to them was needed for the greater good of humankind—and it was, the bikini bathing suit was and continues to be a hit sensation (Teaiwa, T. 1994: 89). Bikini Islanders agreed to be absent from their homes for a short time, but 50 years later, they are scattered throughout the Marshalls. In 1954, with winds blowing towards the east islands, the device code-named “Bravo” was detonated and radioactive ash fell on Rongelap Islanders. They weren't evacuated for three days, and by 1985, 77% of all Rongelapese who were under 10 in 1954 had devel­oped major tumours (Weingartner 1991:20).

We should turn to less depressing matters, to desirable worldly items now available to us like wine and cheese, perfume and designer labels, An American in Paris and Gigi. Ah Paris! The center of high culture and high colonialism. The French Government has done more than their share of violence in the Pacific. Ever since the establishment of the “Centre d'Experimentations du Pacifique,” French Polynesia has been slowly turned into a nuclear and welfare state hostage. Whether they liked it or not, Tahitians, as French citizens, were obliged to provide a testing ground for nuclear weapons which their colo­nial masters considered essential for the security of France as a world power (Finney 1992: 67). Another sacrifice for the “greater good”?

How did the Tahitians go from being the toast of Paris in the 1770s, to the nuclear- radiated natives of the 20th century? Two centuries after Europe decided that the noble savage is ignoble, the modern world promotes the original romantic notions of Polynesia, and even a nuclear bomb cannot make us see that life in Tahiti is not always romantic. There have been three major civil uprisings in Papeete, and the French government still hangs onto these islands long after colonialism has become unfashionable in the rest of the world.

Violence in the Pacific includes everything from French colonialism to tourism mar- keting—the results are enduring for indigenous peoples. The fact that many Tahitian lives are kept going by French monetary subsidies is not always a positive thing for them: for some it is an oppressive situation—politically, economically, and biologically (as the nuclear tests have shown us). Many Tahitians bravely resist the French denial of their autonomy, but dependency is a hard thing to shake off. Of course, not all islanders criticize development, or aid, for that matter. Many, in fact, accept the idea that cash economies are inevitable and they must follow the examples or directions set by First World nations. However, we all carry a thread of suspicion for modernity. Whether or not we act on this feeling politically and economically, is different. Pondering over, ana­lyzing, and contesting the influences of imperialism and capitalism—influences already woven into our practice and ideology—is a luxury reserved mostly for social science university students. But the concerns do surface in different ways—from our insistence at doing things on “Pacific time,” to our poetry, art, music and dance. I will never forget performing an anti-nuclear tamure (Tahitian dance) aboard the Greenpeace ship Rainbow Warrior II just days before it was violently boarded by French commandos in the waters surrounding Moruroa atoll.

Why has the Pacific been militarized by countries like the U.S.A. and France? Why would they extend their violence into the Pacific? Among other things, the ocean is a veritable gold mine of resources. From its sheer size and “lack” of land or “significant” habitation, the Pacific is the perfect place to exploit. There is, or was, in some places, an abundance of mineral deposits. Bauxite, nickel, copper, gold, phosphate, cobalt, and sul­fides are just a few of the geological resources housed by the Pacific. If they haven't al­ready blown it up, powerful countries could mine these minerals for themselves—and some already have (Weingartner 1991: 17).

Britain, which did its own fair share of nuclear testing in Australia and at Kiritimati Island, also participated in massive mining projects which practically drained the land out from beneath Islanders. My sister, Teresia, once said, “agriculture isn't in our blood, but our blood is in agriculture.” The physical land of our ancestral home, Banaba, was mined and shipped off to England, Australia, and New Zealand to provide cheap fertil­izer for their farmers. In Banaban culture, blood was land and kinship was constructed on its exchange (Teaiwa, T. 1995:10, Silverman 1971). However, it was our misfortune that our island was made entirely of phosphate. The destruction of Banaba by the British Phosphate Mining Companies has produced a dislocated, dispossessed (but necessarily creative) group of islanders on Rabi Island in Fiji. To say that we are still struggling to figure out our place in Fiji society and the world in general is an understatement. Bana- bans have experienced exploitation, confusion, and cultural degradation at the physical, psychological, economic, and political levels over the past century. Like Marshall Is­landers and Tahitians, Banabans gave up their island to provide agricultural security (sus­tenance) for colonial governments and foreign populations.

Many of the environmentally and spiritually destructive activities carried out in our region have been justified by the agents of development and growth. Do we really need radioactive fish and phosphate graves in exchange for money and technology in order to grow and feel good about ourselves? In Sustainable Development or Malignant Growth, Atu Emberson-Bain writes, “as a general rule, mining in the Pacific has proved to be one of the most destructive and unsustainable forms of foreign-initiated development” (1994). She describes the suffering of Bougainvillians, in the Northern Solomon Islands, as a result of Australian Colonial copper mining on their land; 3,000 deaths, the wiping out of 6,000 village homes, and the torture and murder of hundreds of innocent people mark the movement of this once peaceful community to armed revolution (Emberson- Bain 1994: 94).

Emerson-Bain goes on to say: “Traditional Pacific values have no parallel in West­ern capitalist notions of land as an alienable and disposable material commodity. Land is crucial to physical survival; it is central to the reproduction of traditional social relations; and it has a spiritual value that enshrines a sacred link between the dead (ancestors) and the living” (1994: 96). Those used to living in contrived suburbs or concrete high-rise apartments, cannot imagine the emotion and anxiety associated with losing a traditional habitat to foreign exploiters. The land and ocean are everything to islanders; destroying it invites retaliation or indigenous cultural recession. The current violence in Bougainville between indigenous rebels and the Papua New Guinea army, is perhaps more literal than the Banaban and Marshall Island cases, but it is definitely in reaction to the initial appro­priation of indigenous land by outsiders for monetary exploitation. Hundreds of people have lost their lives in this war; the state of health and education in Bougainville has been in ruins for almost a decade. There is also severe warfare, armed resistance, and indige­nous persecution in West Papua/Irian Jaya which is connected to Indonesian and Ameri­can exploitation of land through mining and logging. The international media afford little attention to the wars in this Pacific region.

Conventionally, violence is defined as physical force, injury by distortion, infringe­ment or profanation, discordance and undue alteration. Colonialism, together with eco­nomic and military imperialism, has infringed upon Pacific lives, profaning the earth and distorting or altering the physical and spiritual fabric of Pacific lives leaving behind much discord. Such force violates te kainga (ancestral land—Gilbertese, Tongan) and drains our wairua (spiritual force—Maori) and our mana (power—Polynesian). Pacific people continue to struggle with and resist this specter of violence in creative and strate­gic ways.

References

Daws, Gavan. (1980). A Dream of Islands: Voyages of Self Discovery in the South Seas. New York: Norton.

Ellis, Albert Fuller. (1935). Ocean Island and Nauru: Their Story. Sydney, Australia: Angus and Robertson.

Emberson-Bain, Atu. (1994). De-romancing the stones: Gender, environment and mining in the Pacific. Sustainable Development or Malignant Growth, edited by Atu Em- berson-Bain. Suva, Fiji: Marama Publications.

Finney, Ben. (1992). Nuclear hostages. In From Sea to Space. Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press.

Mohanty, Chandra Talpade, Ann Russo, and Lourdes Torres, editors. (1991). Third World Women and the Politics of Feminism. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Silverman, Martin G. (1971). Disconcerting Issue: Meaning and Struggle in a Resettled Pacific Community. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Teaiwa, Teresia K. (1994). Bikinis and Other S/Pacific N/Oceans. The Contemporary Pacific Journal (Spring 1994): 87.

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Weingartner, Erich. (1991). The Pacific: Nuclear Testing and Minorities, A Minority Rights Group Report, Britain, January 1991.