Articulating Rapa Nui - Riet Delsing

8/8/2019 Articulating Rapa Nui - Riet Delsing

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ARTICULATING RAPA NUI:POLYNESIAN CULTURAL POLITICS IN A LATIN AMERICAN NATION-STATE

Riet Delsingindependent researcher

Prepared for delivery at the 2010 Congress of the Latin American Studies AssociationToronto, Canada, October 6-9, 2010


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Rapa Nui, the small island in the South Pacific also known as Easter Island, has becomeworld famous due to its large stone statues which have allowed for a thriving touristindustry. 1 Annexed by Chile in 1888, it is the only Pacific island colonized by a LatinAmerican country that forged its own independence from Spain only 70 years beforethat date. It is a little known fact that the Republic of Chile registered the entire island

as Chilean public land (tierra fiscal) in 1933 by declaring it to be terra nullius. Thisdecision was based on the argument that the island lacked an owner. Almost half acentury after the annexation Chile thus failed to recognize that the island was and ispopulated by a Polynesian people, whose ancestors created stone statues that are nowvenerated in the entire world.

During the first half of the 20th century Chile exercised a low-profile colonialismover a small indigenous population of only a little over one hundred individuals at thetime of annexation. Until the mid 1950s the Chilean state let virtually the entire islandto Williamson, Balfour and Co., a British multinational, which used it as a sheep farmfor the production and exportation of wool. During this period Chile maintainedsovereignty through its Navy, whose ships paid the island a yearly visit. The respective

ship captains served as intermediaries in conflicts between the Rapanui people andCompany officials.

Not until 1966 did Chile take full possession by incorporating the island in itsadministrative system and providing the Rapanui (finally) with a Chilean identity card.Some three hundred newcomers (mostly Chilean functionaries and their families) wentto Rapa Nui to implement Chilean rules and regulations in various areas of local life. Ifwe consider that the island had a total population of less than 1000 in 1965, this was anenormous influx of foreigners, who made a profound social, cultural and economicimpact on island life (Cristino 1984). Curiously this happened in the same year that theGeneral Assembly of the United Nations called for the right to self determination of theworlds indigenous populations (Gmez 2010) and several Pacific islands followedcourse during the 1970s. While international institutions thus propagated the course ofglobal political decolonization, initiated after the Second World War -- when large partsof Africa and Asia became decolonized--, Chile took the opposite direction bytightening its relation with its small colony.

Between the 1960s and 1980s Rapa Nui was further integrated into the Chileannation-state. After almost a century of neglect and often abuse, the Rapanui started todemand equality as Chilean citizens after the revolt of a Rapanui school teacher by thename of Alfonso Rapu in 1964. Besides the creation of the Municipalidad de Isla de

Pascua, some 25 Chilean institutions and organizations were installed on the island.This amount of regulating mechanisms in such a small physical and social/cultural

space seems by all means excessive, since all decisions had and have to be approved inthe province of Valparaiso (now the 5th region) and/or the central government inSantiago. Such over-exposure to governmental control as well as internal disagreementsand overlapping and/or contradictory responsibilities between the various Chileaninstitutions, have caused continuous problems of governance, a lack of concretion ofproject proposals and stagnation of other (development) processes.

With the increase of population, caused by the natural growth of the Rapanuicommunity, but also by an uncontrolled influx of mainland Chileans and a rapidlygrowing tourist industry, several services are near to collapse. Many problems havebeen diagnosed but not resolved. These problems occur in the areas of health, education,

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This paper is based on my PhD dissertation: Maria Riet Delsing (2009) Articulating Rapa Nui:Polynesian Cultural Politics in a Latin American Nation-State,University of California at Santa Cruz.Pro Quest, UMI dissertation services.


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natural environment, deterioration of the archeological patrimony, garbage disposal,drinking water, etc. while, on the other hand, the Rapanui are not allowed to take theirfate in their own hands. The situation is complicated because over the years, andpressured by political forces on the mainland, the Rapanui leadership has beenfractured, resulting in tribal in-fights which paralyze and often exhaust Rapanui

potential. As elsewhere, civil society has to face de facto powers of the nation-state andthe market.

Nevertheless, in the last couple of decades many Rapanui have started to shift theiremphasis from rights to equality as Chilean citizens, to rights as a Polynesian people,culturally different from Chilean mainlanders. They thus changed their plea forintegration into the nation-state into a desire for self-determination. Despite a stubborninsistence on sovereignty, during the 2000s several initiatives from the Chilean stateallowed for a shifting relationship between Rapa Nui and the Chilean state. Theseinitiatives coincided with the return to democracy in 1990, after 17 long years ofdictatorship.

Starting with theLey Indgena of 1993 which created a special Development

Commission for Easter Island (CODEIPA), and initiated the process of the return anddistribution of land to the Rapanui, the theme of decentralization was taken up in thecentral government through CIDEZE (Comit Interministerial para el Desarrollo de las

Zonas Extremas). This was followed by a Truth Commission (La Comisin VerdadHistrica y Nuevo Trato para los Pueblos Indgenas) and culminated with the creationof a Special Territory for Easter Island in 2007. TheEstatuto Especialwhich has togovern this territory is still under discussion in the Chilean Parliament in 2010.

During these decade-long conversations between the Chilean state and theRapanui, the latter became better versed in the arguments and reasons that the Stateemploys for its presence in this far away island. The claim of sovereignty is at the basisof this argument, specifically territorial sovereignty. This concept clashes with thePolynesian concept ofkaia, the intimate relationship the people feel with their land andthe inalienability of this land.

Rapanui have started to insist on this and other cultural differences during the lastdecades. We are thus witnessing processes that are far from being resolved.Representatives of the Chilean state, at the highest levels, are now willing to giveautonomy to Rapa Nui, by which they clearly mean administrative- not politicalautonomy. Most Rapanui agree to Chiles sovereignty over the island, thus denyingtheir political autonomy in a Western sense, but claim at the same time the territory tobe theirs. Some Rapanui want independence from Chile. Meanwhile, foreign capital hasstarted to enter the Rapanui tourist industry.

What is lacking is a strong Rapanui leadership, a statement to which most Rapanuiagree, in order to resolve this situation. Such leadership would be able to argue that--since Chile is exercising territorial sovereignty over the island by prescription (and notby cession, as is currently claimed) -- the Rapanui can bring their case fordecolonization in the appropriate international venues, according to international law(Delsing 2009, Gmez 2010). Unified Rapanui leadership would also be able to unravelthe present conceptual impasses, to clarify concepts of individual private landownership versus communal private land ownership or propose different conceptsaltogether (Gmez 2010). Rapanui can also decide to stay being part of Chile, but ontheir own terms. They could thus unify around a common goal and put boundaries toChiles presence on the island. On the other hand, representative or even participative

democracy may be a cultural impossibility, since traditional Rapanui society was guided


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by an ariki mau, a hereditary figure who ruled his people through a system ofmana andtapu.

Taking a step aside from the current impasse in the relationship between the Chileanstate and the Rapanui people, I suggest that there are several areas in which the Rapanui

are exercising a form of cultural self-determination, which empowers them and allowsthem to follow a path that only they can take. By doing so, they can loosen or even altertheir economic and political relationship with the Chilean state. While during the lastdecades Rapanui have fully participated in the conversations around the proposals of thepost dictatorship Chilean state, they are simultaneously revitalizing their culture in theareas of living culture (hacer cultura), their unique language (vanaa Rapanui),traditional ideas about land tenure (kaia) and their bond with other Polynesians. Inwhat follows I will take a closer look at these cultural politics.

Performing Culture

Rapanui have a rich and unique material culture, to use this traditional, but still usefulanthropological term. The continued production of various elements of this materialculture is a decisive factor in the reproduction and preservation of traditional culture andthe reaffirmation of a Rapanui identity. Throughout the year, many Rapanui reproducetheir cultural knowledge in various forms, such as sculpting in wood and stone, dancing,body painting and others.

Besides the famed stone statues (moai) with their platforms (ahu) (Van Tilburg1994), rock petroglyphs (Lee 1992) and wooden tablets (kohau rooroo) engravedwith Oceanias only pre 20th century, as yet undeciphered script (Fischer 1997), themost well known products of Rapanui art are images in wood and stone: various kindsof moai (kavaka, paapaa, taata), dance paddles (ao and rapa), birdman figures,lizardmen (moko), turtle figures, tahoa (heart shaped two headed forms) and woodencrescent breast ornaments (reimiro) (Stephen-Chauvet 1946 for all these images). Whilebarkcloth (mahute), made from the paper mulberry tree was formerly used for clothing(Mtraux 1940) and to cover small, doll-like wooden figures, painted to representtattooing and body painting (takona) (Mtraux 1940; Kjellgren 2002), nowadays smallsheets ofmahute are used as canvas for paintings. Women make necklaces out of shells,feathers, small pieces ofmahute and flowers.

Body decorations in the form of body painting (tacona) and, in lesser form,tattooing are practiced and were registered by the first European visitors. While all earlyEuropean travelers mention that several Rapanui they met had painted bodies, nowadays

Rapanui of all ages paint their bodies during the festival Tapati Rapanui, but also duringthe year in smaller venues and when people want to demonstrate this art to outsiders.Sometimes they first cover their entire bodies with red, white, yellow or black dyes(kiea, marikuru, pua oua, arahu) prepared in the traditional way and extracted fromspecific places on the island. On top of this base, or directly on the body, traditionaldesigns are painted, sometimes combined with figures of plants and other vegetation, aswell as topographical references to specific places on the island.

I have seen this takona ritual several times and to me it is one of the moststriking expressions of Rapanui living culture (cultura viva), mainly because of itsbeauty, but also because I know it to have cultural roots and therefore to mark identity.Sometimes people paint their bodies as part of a dance or music presentation. The artist

will work in deep concentration, often in dead silence. Even if surrounding people areloud and boisterous, the person who is applying the paint and the one receiving it dont


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say a word, or whisper softly, as if words might disturb the creative process and thebodys capacity to receive and absorb the images. It is as if the brush and paint aredoing the talking. At other moments an individual will be standing in front of a publicand present his or her painted body, pointing at each figure explaining its meaning. Thisis quite a feat, because the presentation is done with a lot of gesticulation and facial

expression. The other body art practiced in Rapa Nui is tattooing. It was alsoreintroduced after it had been lost for more than a century, since it was abandoned afterthe missionaries arrived in the 1860s. Nowadays a few young men apply tattoos toislanders and tourists alike.

Other art forms are related to the performing arts: the execution of a large corpusof string figures (kai kai) generally accompanied by chants(patau-tau), and a largevariety of mostly contemporary music and dance forms, in which bodies areembellished with skirts, tops, hami (loin cloths) and elaborate headdresses made fromfeathers, kakaka (strips of banana leaves), pieces ofmanute and shells, especiallypipiand tree kernels.

Rapanui have practiced kai kai without interruption at least since the Chilean

occupation. The string figure is made by one person using teeth and lips to complete thefigure. It is mainly performed by women in front of a public audience, but I have alsoseen small children practicing in school and at home. The recent recuperation of theRapanui language is important in the practicing of this art form. While Mtraux saysthat most people in the 1930s did not understand the content of the chants even thoughthey were very popular, today more Rapanui understand their meaning. Mtrauxremarks that of the corpus of some thirty different string figures with theircorresponding chants only a few were practiced, which is still the case today.Nevertheless, I met a koro (older man) who could memorize several of them. Mtrauxalso suggests that the original purpose ofkai kai was to memorize popular chants andrecall tales, and that children were obliged to memorize the chants before they wereintroduced into other ancestral knowledge. This clearly educational function ofkai kaistill continues today, since the patau-tau preserve stories and names of places and oflegendary figures. Another important contemporary function of the performance ofkaikai is it being a marker of Rapanui difference and identity.

Music and dance comprise another major Rapanui art form. Since the 1960ssmall Rapanui performance groups emerged on the island, as well as on the mainland.Today, several dance and music groups exist, of which I will describe two. Kari Kari, aconjunto (ensemble) with more than twenty members, was formed in 1997. Mostmusicians and dancers worked in former groups, but others are newcomers to the trade.They use traditional instruments and costumes, and do research on traditional practices.

Kari Kari mainly performs on the island itself in hotels and community organizedvenues. Sometimes the group travels abroad, as cultural ambassadors for Rapa Nui.They went, for instance, to Lisbon, Portugal, for the opening of Expo 1998, where theyopened the Chilean exhibit, and to a festival in Korea in 2000. Another group isMatatoa, formed in 1996 by Keva Atan. It consists of five musicians catering to ayouthfull off-island public. Their purpose is to transmit ancestral Rapanui culture, aswell as traditional Polynesian culture. They see their work in the category of worldmusic, and play a fusion of Polynesian and modern music (latino, rock, reggae, pop,

jazz), which they incorporate through modern rhythms and instruments. They havestrong ties to Tahiti and prefer to distance themselves from Chile. Instead, they wish toreinforce their ties with Polynesia. In 2002 they participated in the Rainforest World

Music Festival in Borneo, Malaysia. In 2003 they gave concerts in New Zealand, Tahiti,


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Belgium, Holland, France, Germany, Mexico, Chile and Taiwan. In 2004 they were inEurope again, with 17 concerts in France and Germany.

In May 2006 a much announced concert took place in Rapa Nui by the wellknown Chilean bandLos Jaivas. This group explores a fusion of different music styles,mainly rock and Latin-American themes and rhythms. Their heavy equipment was

transported to the island on the Chilean navy shipAchilles for the Navys yearlycelebration of the da del mar, the context in which the concert was to take place.Los

Jaivas spent a few weeks on the island, preparing for the concert, an old dream of thegroup. It was a truly intercultural event, sinceLos Jaivas were accompanied byKari

Kari, now led by Lyn Rapu, the childrens orchestra of the local school (mainly stringinstruments) and the brass band of the Navy. The concert was held in the open air venueat Hanga Vare Vare, under a starred sky, after it had been raining for weeks. Presentwere Chilean President Michelle Bachelet and some 2000 spectators. This event can beseen as an expression of togetherness of Rapanui and Chileans in the only area, where, Iargue, it is harmonious.

Although music and dance may be the fields where most new and foreign

elements have been introduced in comparison to the other art forms I mentioned, weknow that singing and dancing were already observed by European visitors to the islandin the mid 1800s, before the Chilean colonization. Bodily expression through singingand dancing is thus an integral part of Rapanui cultural roots and widely practicedthroughout the year.

Tapati Rapa Nui

Like other large festivals in the Pacific (see e.g. Stevenson 1990), the yearly TapatiRapanui has several functions: it contributes to the islands social integration, stimulatesits economy and is used politically to confront the Chilean state. It also has become avital element in Rapa Nuis cultural life and a marker of identity. It is said that the ideato create the festival was introduced from the mainland in the 1960s, when the islandbecame integrated into Chiles political system -- a copy of Chilean spring festivals,including the selection of a queen. However, a member of the Huke family told me thather family started the festival in the 1960s.

Nevertheless, festivals already existed in Rapa Nui at least as early as the 1930s.Mtraux makes reference to one in 1935 in his famed ethnography:

On New Years afternoon I attended the great pageant organized each new yearby the natives in honor of the English manager of the Williamson-Balfour

Company. The feast is prepared long in advance, and every detail is carefullystudied. A month before the feast, regular dance lessons are given in the huts ofnative instructors. The pageant itself is distinctively modernized. The feast is atthe same time a carnival, a pageant, a dance and a banquet (Mtraux 1971[1940]: 361).

Many of these elements are still present in the current Tapati2: the long preparations, theattention to detail, the dancing lessons, the large amounts of food and the theatrical

2The activities during the Tapati can be divided into four categories: artistic (painting ofmahute, kai kai,

takona, sculpting, singing and dancing); sports (swimming, canoeing, horse racing, haka pei- sliding

down a hill on banana trunks); productive (fishing, tingi tingi mahute making ofmahute, making ofoutfits of feathers and kakaka, making of necklaces withpipi shells, gastronomy, agricultural products);and a triathlon in the crater lake of Ranu Raraku, a procession of several floats, namedfarandula and a


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performances and parade at the end of the festival.It is important to point out theseparallels with earlier festivities, because again it shows continuity alongsidediscontinuity, although the pageants of the 1930s, as chronicled by Mtraux, dont seemto exist in living memory.

The Tapati started out as a one week event (tapati means week in Rapanui),

but in its current form it consists of two weeks of festivities which take place in the firsthalf of February, midsummer in the southern hemisphere. It consists of a series ofcompetitions between two groups of families, with as apparent ultimate goal theselection of a queen.The vast majority of the population takes part in the preparations inone way or the other, and thousands of tourists flock to the island for the occasion.

The preparations are done in two parts of town, Hanga Roa and Moeroa. Acontest is held to design the poster for next years Tapati, which will travel all over theworld. During the following weeks and months hundreds of costumes are produced. Inseveral houses in Hanga Roa one can see women preparing kakaka (bark of the bananatree) and mahute, and gathering feathers and shells for the confection of the costumes.Preparations also include the formation of large groups of dancers, who, during the last

months before the Tapati, have daily late afternoon practices for several hours. Walkingthe streets in that time of the year, one can hear the sounds of drumming and singing inthe early summer evenings. Special sheds are set up on both sides of town for theserehearsals, and they are always crowded with people dancing, playing musicalinstruments, watching or just hanging around.

Although infighting between the families forms part of the preparations, thesesquabbles are between Rapanui, and unlike most other areas of life on the island, thefestival is an almost exclusive Rapanui affair, in the sense that mostly Rapanui areinvolved in its preparations and performance. As with the overall planning for thefestival, once the festivities of one year conclude, the two family groups start to thinkabout the election of two candidates to queen for the next year.

Rather than giving a detailed description of the Tapati festival, I stress itshistorical continuity, and its political potential with regard to Chile. Besides clearcontinuities in content and form, the highly competitive nature of the event isreminiscent of pre-contact socio-political divisions. I propose that the two familygroups, clustered together in the two sides of the town, Hanga Roa and Moeroa, reflectthe original division of the island into two territorial confederacies, with their respectivemata (clans). One can also suggest an analogy with the taata manu cult of the secondperiod (16th to 18th century), which was the expression of a fierce competition betweenthe clans (mata) about the scarce resources of the island, after the cohesion and mutualdependence between the two moieties under the reign of an ariki mau had fallen apart.

The Tapati also reflects the traditional Rapanui cultural paradigm of oppositionalrelationships, e.g. between the categories of chiefs and commoners, women and men.The principle of oppositional relationships is repeated nowadays in the residents ofHangaroa versus the ones in Moeroa, Rapanui versus Chilean residents, Rapanui versusChilean tourists, Rapanui versus foreign tourists, Chilean tourists versus foreigntourists. These oppositional categories are in competition, but also complement each other(see Sahlins 1981 about the permanence of the structure). At the same time the circularnature of the festival gives it a distinctive Polynesian character (see Hauofa 1993 andHereniko 1994).

While the Tapati on the one hand offers both a mirror to the past and anappropriation of the past, on the other hand it has become a hybrid space. Not only have

big theatrical production of Rapa Nuis origin story in Tahai, staged by the Hucke family on the last dayof the festival (see yearly programs of theTapati).


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certain Western/Chilean activities been introduced, such as swimming competitions andoff shore fishing, also tourists are permitted to receive takona and participate in the

farandula. For this situation one can apply Linnekin and Poyers suggestion of "anOceanic theory of cultural identity that privileges environment, behavior, and situationalflexibility over descent, innate characteristics, and unchanging boundaries" (Linnekin &

Poyer 1990. Here, social relationships prevail over biological inheritance.Another hybrid quality of the Tapati is that it was organized for several years by

the municipality, a Chilean institution and sponsored by Chilean and multinationalbusinesses. The Tapati of 2008, for instance, had as sponsors:Lan Chile, telephonecompanyEntel Chile, Chilean bankBanco Estado, Chilean drugstore chain Cruz Verde,hotels Explora and Hangaroa, Chilean vineyards Montes and Casillero del Diablo, PiscoCapel, ING, Coca Cola, Philips and Peugeot. The Rapanui have strategically appropriatedthese Chilean and international sponsors and used them to revitalize their culturalpatrimony, to strengthen their roots and identity and to increase their tourist industry,bringing capital back into the local economy.

The yearly staging of the Tapati thus expresses and reinforces Rapanui cultural

difference. Through the Tapati and other ways ofhacer cultura as described above,Rapanui challenge Chiles dominant presence on the island by emphasizing theiridentity. Nowhere in Polynesia or de rest of Oceania and certainly not in Chile orelsewhere in Latin America do these specific cultural expressions exist. They areperformed every single day of the year. Rapanui sculpt in stone, make wood carvings,carve the roo roo script on wooden tablets, and assemble necklacess in theferia, themercado and at home. Children and adults dance and sing in cultural ensembles like

Kari Kari and in specific venues, such as the Topatangi and the discos Piriti andToroko. Children perform kai kai in school and at home and takona is practiced onmany occasions. The sheer amount of these cultural representations impregnates dailylife in Rapa Nui.

Rapa Nuis material and performative culture thus stands out as an importantmarker of difference and serves as a reminder that Rapa Nui is an occupied place,literally and figuratively (see Kathleen Stewart 1996). I suggest that a further expansionof this performative culture will overshadow the overwhelming presence of Chileaninstitutions in Rapanui daily life. The political process can thus be influenced by non-political phenomena, and it is possible that political goals can be achieved through non-political means. In the next section I will analyze a feature of Rapanui culture that marksits cultural difference with Chile even more so.

Vanaa Rapanui

The Rapanui language belongs to the Austronesian language family, and within this tothe subgroup of Oceanic or Eastern Austronesian languages, which includes all theAustronesian languages of island Melanesia, many of those of coastal New Guinea, all the languages of Micronesia, apart from Palauan and Chamorro (Marianas) and allthe languages of Polynesia (Bellwood 1975). In a further subdivision, Rapanui isconsidered to be one of the two subgroups of Eastern Polynesian (Weber 2003). Thisplaces Rapa Nui, as far as linguistic characteristics are concerned, firmly andunequivocally in Polynesia.

In this section I discuss how the Rapanui have developed deliberate strategiesfor the preservation and revalidation of their language, particularly since the 1990s.

Although many Rapanui are bilingual, speaking both Rapanui and Spanish, it used to beand arguably still is a form of bilingualism characterized by diglossia, a situation in


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which one of the languages has high and the other one low prestige. Nevertheless, theunequal status of Rapanui and Spanish has changed over the years, and the Rapanuilanguage has become an important marker of contemporary Rapanui identity. As in thecase of Rapanui performative culture, the battle of the languages is taking placeoutside and alongside the often frustrating participation Rapanui have in Chilean

politics. And, although formal language teaching is deeply influenced by Chileseducational system, I propose that language retention is empowering the Rapanui farmore than their attempt to participate in the Chilean political system.

For many years Rapanui were discouraged from speaking their language,especially since the island opened up to the outside world in the 1960s. At the sametime Rapanui started to travel and stay for prolonged periods of time on the mainland,where they were discriminated against for not speaking proper Spanish. The result wasthat speaking Rapanui on the island was discouraged, even forbidden, and Spanish wasemphasized. An increase in the amount of mainland Chileans on the island, as well asan increase in mixed marriages, resulted in a deminished use of Rapanui in the privatesphere.

Resident linguists Nancy and Robert Weber have documented that the amount ofchildren whose maternal or principal language is Rapanui at age four has diminishedfrom 77% in 1977 to 25% in 1989 (Weber and Thiesen de Weber 1990). They estimatedthat this number had gone down to less than 6% in 1996 (personal communication).From personal observation I have noticed that nowadays, walking in the streets ofHanga Roa, la feria and the handicrafts market, most Rapanui older than 45 years orthereabouts speak Rapanui with each other, while most young people communicate inSpanish.

However, since the 1990s, many Rapanui have become concerned about theincreasing disuse of their language amongst youngsters. Young couples now take pridein teaching their children Rapanui. A Rapanui father, in his early 40s, married to aChilean, said to me:

We shouldnt even say that it is important to speak the language. If one says thatit is important, one is creating a doubt about if one should or should not speak it.A child has to speak after it is born. It is just as important as that. Many booksare now written about language loss, and that is a tremendous contribution. Theproblem is that today the language is in disuse, especially among the children.And I am also guilty of that, because I dont speak Rapanui with my girls. Idont understand why I dont speak Rapanui with them. I cant find anyexplanation why I dont speak Rapanui with them. Now, I am speaking Rapanui

to my newborn little girl, but I didnt speak it with the others. They understand,but they dont speak. That is a tremendous punishment for me (interview ErnestoTepano, 2002).

Rapanui school teacher Viki Haoa says that she became interested in teaching Rapanuito school children when her oldest daughter come home after her first day at school andsaid: Mommy, we speak a foreign language here.

How have the Rapanui navigated this situation? Several strategies have beendeveloped to secure the Rapanui language by Rapanui teachers in the local school,Rapanui koros (elders) and foreign linguists.

Language education in the local school


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Besides the home, school is the main site for learning Rapanui. The local public schoolcurriculum is determined by the Chilean Ministry of Education, and one of the mainproblems has been that for many decades little attention had been paid to Rapanuicultural specificities. Instead, Chilean history and culture were predominately taught.

In 1975, the Ministry of Education issued a decree, which approved for the first

time the official teaching of the Rapanui language at elementary school level for 4 hoursweekly. In order to teach Rapanui, materials and curriculum had to be developed. Anagreement between the Catholic University of Valparaso and the American SummerInstitute of Linguistics, through their linguists Robert and Nancy Weber, allowed forthis to happen. Together with the local school they created thePrograma de Lengua

Rapa Nui,in which a set of six textbooks for reading and writing Rapanui wereproduced. The books were self teaching and the idea was that the parents would supportthe kids. Developing the materials was not an easy task. The percentage of Rapanuispeakers at Kindergarten level diminished considerably between 1977 and 1989 (from77% to 25%), exactly in the same period that the new materials were tested in school.The Chilean national television chain TVN introduced television on the island in 1976,

which meant a major reinforcement of the Spanish language. The likely impact of theintroduction of daily television on such an isolated community was neither prepared for,nor researched afterwards. Teaching Rapanui thus became an upward battle, since thenumber of Rapanui speaking kids diminished so rapidly that Rapanui culture wasmainly taught in Spanish in the obligatory Rapanui language classes.

It soon became clear that a different methodology for language education wasnecessary. This was not readily understood by the Ministry of Education and themembers of the school administration. The difference in methodology had to do withthe teaching of Rapanui as a first (native) or a second (foreign) language. Some kidswere native speakers, but most were not any longer, or never were. Teachers started tofeel a desperate need to separate the students and teach Rapanui according to their levelof understanding and speaking the language. It is difficult to understand that theprinciple of teaching a language as a first language through immersion was notconsidered by the Ministry of Education, because it is a well known principle in Chileanprivate education. In Chile, children of well-to-do, often immigrant parents are taught inFrench, German, English, etc., according to their countries of origin, in private schoolswith names such as La Alliance Franaise, Die Deutsche Schule, and a number ofEnglish teaching schools, amongst them The Eagles Nest. The results of languageteaching in these schools are excellent. However, the connection with far-away, ethnicRapa Nui, where a low language is in danger of extinction, was apparently not made.

ThePrograma de Lengua Rapa Nui, consisting of a handful of people, had to

put up a fight with a school administration that did not understand the differencebetween teaching Rapanui as a first or a second language. School functionaries werealso tied to strict teaching schedules, imposed from the mainland, and had, according toone of the participants in thePrograma an underlying desire to see the languagedisappear, because it would simplify things, keep in line with Chileans coming here,intermarrying and making the local culture blend in. A Chilean school teacher oncesaid to me, when we were watching a performance on the beach of Anakena: Whenwill they stop speaking that language?

Besides the misunderstandings around the issue of teaching Rapanui as first orsecond language, there were other problems as well. One was the lack of professionallytrained Rapanui school teachers with enough knowledge of Rapanui to teach it as a first

language; another, disagreements amongst the teachers themselves, which still exist


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until today. Add to this the problems caused by the Chilean political transition, and onecan appreciate how difficult the situation must have been.

Nevertheless, things were on the move. In 1990, Viki Haoa participated in aneducation conference for indigenous peoples in Aotearoa/New Zealand. She wasaccompanied by Petero Edmunds, who was about to be elected mayor. In New Zealand

they learned about Maori strategies for language preservation through the officialeducational system. This was the first time they were exposed to the impact immersioneducation can have on the preservation of a Polynesian language. A year later the firstCongress of Polynesian Languages was held in Aotearoa as well.

In the same year some Rapanui teachers created the Department of RapanuiCulture and Language. Their goal was to socialize the drastic decline of the languagewith the parents of the students, local and mainland authorities and with Rapanuispeakers in general. They also created aDa de la lengua (language day) which stillexists. Every year in early summer, the language teachers of the school organize anevent with activities related to the vanaga Rapanui in which schoolchildren andteachers take part and only Rapanui is spoken. Children and teachers dance and sing and

perform Rapanui legends in Rapanui. TheDa de la lengua is well attended by theRapanui community and tourists alike.

Meanwhile the struggle about how the language should be taught continued. In1993 theLey Indgena was issued, in which intercultural bilingual education wasintroduced. Elaborate projects have been developed by this program and vast amountsof government funds spent (US$10,000,000 by 2004) on indigenous scholarships,improvement of infrastructure, teacher training, etc., in mainland indigenouscommunities all over Chile, which are mainly aimed at integrating indigenous peoplesinto Chilean society (Intercultural Bilingual Education Program 2002). A wellconceived case study by students of the University of Temuco, analyzing two classroomsituations in Mapuche communities, concludes that

the teachers in charge of developing intercultural bilingual education dont havethe necessary competence in the knowledge and command of Mapuzungun, so itwould be difficult for them to teach the Mapuche language to girls and boyswho, for different reasons, dont have a command of the language either..Themain demand of the community has to do with the language, since Mapucheknowledge and identity is located in the language. The expectations of thecommunity are not met in the school work, since language [teaching] is notoffered in the classroom (Leyton et al. 2005).

This is not an isolated case as the Rapanui example similarly indicates. Thereality is that the deterioration of native languages amongst indigenous peoples in Chilehas reached the level that it is difficult to teach them in a formal school context. The twoprincipal reasons are that there are no qualified teachers who speak the language and, onthe receiving end, indigenous children dont have sufficient knowledge of their nativelanguage. Intercultural bilingual education works in places where there is a strongmother tongue speaking population, which is no longer the case in Chile. Theeducational project of the Ley Indgena thus seems flawed a priori. Nevertheless, theconcept of bilingual intercultural education is proudly used and marketed by thegovernment.

As we saw above, it is very important to analyze particular local situations to see

if a specific language should be taught as a first or a second language. While someRapanui teachers, supported by the Webers, were convinced of the benefits of


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immersion education, others were not. Immersion education finally got off the groundin 2000. It happened even though there is no real conviction on part of the Chileansand no real conviction on part of the Rapanui, or rather, there is ignorance. It also has todo with race and class. Chileans and Rapanui talk down to each other. One out of thefour courses at first grade level became an immersion class. The first year children were

selected through a linguistic evaluation. Nancy Weber comments that

You need a critical mass to make the Rapanui happen. Even if the parents wantit, but the kid does not have enough Rapanui, you should not take the kid. Thatswhy it is important to have preschool immersion.It doesnt matter if a kidstarts reading Spanish in third grade, but parents may not understand that. Itdepends on the importance you want to give to the revitalization of Rapanui.You have to allow for some discrepancies and assume that these things willdisappear over time (interview 2002).

Nevertheless, it was not an easy decision for parents to send their kids to immersion

education without knowing what the results would be, and there was some fluctuation inthe first years, because parents put kids in and out of the immersion groups.

Immersion education is now well off the ground in 2009, while the rest of theschool population continues to receive Rapanui classes as ordained by the Ministry ofEducation in 1975. Immersion classes exist now from preschool up to the 4th grade.3 Aboost to the program has been that the results of the SIMCE, a Chilean national testabout learning results applied by the Ministry of Education in the 4 th grade ofelementary school, has, during the last couple of years, given as high or even higherresults for the immersion classes as those of the Spanish taught classes (personalcommunication Viki Haoa).

The process is in full swing and the results will have to be evaluated at a laterstage, but Rapa Nui is the only place in the Chilean educational system whereimmersion education is being put into practice. The main problems are still a lack ofqualified Rapanui speaking teachers, adequate materials, and, importantly so, training inlanguage teaching. In Aotearoa/New Zealand and Hawaii teacher training collegesreceive government financing. Nancy Weber thinks that the success of languagemovements in New Zealand and Hawaii during the last several decades is partly due tothe more sophisticated school systems in those places. We are just limping along here,she says.

Undoubtedly, the enthusiasm and determination of Rapanui teachers, the supportof competent and dedicated foreign language experts, as well as contact with other

Polynesians, has improved formal language teaching in the Rapanui school system. It isalso clear to me that informed Chilean government policies about language educationand the financing of such programs would have made a considerable difference inlanguage maintenance in Rapa Nui and among other indigenous people in Chile.

The politics of language

Besides the developments in the local school, other phenomena influenced therevitalization of the Rapanui language in important ways. One of them is thedevelopment and ready acceptance of what Makihara defines as syncretic Rapanui, -themixing of Spanish and Rapanui elements within and across speakers utterances

3Emersion education was temporarily discontinued for the 2010 school year. I dont have enough

information to evaluate this situation.


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(Makihara 2004).4 The school teachers and the SIL linguists teach such a dynamicRapanui, which allows for introductions from the Spanish, although they try to avoidmixtures. This is in accordance with their teaching philosophy that emphasizes theimportance of communication:

when people are concerned about how they say things, then the languagebecomes an artifact of the culture and it is no longer a vehicle ofcommunication. Pure speech becomes more important than communication,so I rather dont speak, because every time I open my mouth, somebody says Ido it wrong. Keep communication first I think that Rapanui is used moreand more to establish their identity (interview Robert and Nancy Weber 2006).

Makihara says that these relatively new ways of speaking Rapanui evolved inthe 1970s and 1980s. She attributes this important change of language consciousnessand practice to two main factors. One is economic growth due to tourism since the endof the 1960s. Tourism is based on the commodification of cultural difference, and a

main marker of this cultural difference is language. A second factor is the desire forincreased local political and economic control since the early 1990s, enhanced by thedemocratization process in Chile. Makihara argues that

instead of maintaining Spanish as a medium of communication with outsidersand as the exclusive language within institutional domains characterized byunequal power relations, Rapa Nui men and women challenged the colonialdiglossic hierarchy by demanding the right of participation in local politics, andby bringing syncretic Rapa Nui into these spaces (Makihara 2004).

I have participated in several public meetings in which Rapanui switched fromSpanish to Rapanui during the last decade. Meetings among Rapanui are now almostalways held in Rapanui, such as the debates about the Truth Commission, the SpecialStatute and the Rapanui Parliament. This is the case in small as well as largergatherings, in which the whole community is invited to participate, e.g. in the localschool, where sometimes more than two hundred people would be present. Rapanui isalso spoken in meetings with Chilean government officials (e.g. meetings of theDevelopment Commission (CODEIPA), and even during official visits of highgovernment officials to the island. These meetings are conducted in Spanish, but theRapanui participants will switch from Spanish to Rapanui in the heat of a discussion,which also shows their defiance towards mainland Chileans.

The Webers, on the other hand, argue that economic growth and the increaseddesire for self-determination were not the only factors, since a concern for languagemaintenance already existed for several decades. When TV was introduced in 1975, itcontained clips of local events and people became sensitized about the kind of Rapanuithat was spoken on television. Some Rapanui who had lived on the continent used a lotof Spanish, while others made a conscious effort to speak proper Rapanui in publicaddresses (interview Webers 2006). Consciousness about language use was also notedby Nancy and Robert Weber in their literary workshops, when participants started torealize that they wrote the way they spoke, using borrowings from Spanish.

Concern with the purity of Rapanui was also expressed in other venues andincreased during the 1990s. Stimulated by theLey Indgena, Rapanui elders started to

4I have borrowed the distinction between syncretic and purist Rapanui from Miki Makihara (Makihara

2004, 2007).


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work on language issues by creating a comisin para la estructuracin de la lenguaRapa Nui (commission for the structuring of the Rapanui language). Over the next yearsthis group published a grammar (1996) and a dictionary (2000). Hotus explains:

We have to work on language structuring in order to be able to teach, to know

where words come from, and what they mean. That is the reason why we areoffering a grammar and a dictionary, so that they can learn and learnimmediately. The Rapanui language is not going to be lost, but we have to workto recuperate it, because nobody knows Rapanui(interview 2002).

The latter comment shows the philosophy of this group, namely that proper Rapanuiwas spoken in the past, but not any longer. In the same interview Hotus told me that heconsiders that the Rapanui school teachers dont speak proper Rapanui or properSpanish, and that it would be best to teach Rapanui to Chilean teachers who at leastspeak Spanish, so that they can use the grammar and dictionary to teach Rapanui inschool.

Simultaneously a group of elders also worked on the etymologies of words,including the ones used in stories and chants that dont appear in other dictionaries andidentifying persons and places referred to in songs. This group generally gathered in theschool and also worked on the creation of neologisms, which was considered animportant activity, because new words and concepts are necessary for teaching inRapanui.

Besides syncretic Rapanui, Makihara also distinguishes a purist speech style.Syncretic and pusrist speech styles are both an expression of language revitalization.While syncretic Rapanui developed almost spontaneously and naturally through themixture of Rapanui and Spanish features since the 1970s, purist Rapanui is a morerecent conscious effort to bring back the old language, imagining the historicalcontinuity of language from a time prior to contact with outsiders (Makihara 2007).Both Makihara and the American linguists point out linguistic insecurities in someRapanui speakers since the concerns about pure Rapanui became voiced, worried asthey were about speaking Rapanui correctly. This is not a widespread phenomenonthough and most Rapanui feel comfortable in speaking syncretic Rapanui in everydaylife.

Makihara suggests that Rapanui use these linguistic styles for political ends tovoice different but complimentary sets of values those of democratic participation andthose of primordialism and ethnic boundary construction (Makihara 2007). She addsthat purist linguistic choice has so far mainly had the effect of strengthening Rapa Nui

unity vis--vis Chilean Continentals, rather than heightening difference amongst theRapa Nui themselves (Makihara 2007). Elsewhere she says that a key factor in thetransformation of colonial diglossia and Rapa Nui language maintenance lies in thedevelopment of positive attitudes toward syncretism and ethnic solidarity (Makihara2004). These are interesting reflections, because they stress the idea that therevitalization of the Rapanui language has become an important factor in cultural self-determination and a marker of identity.

As already mentioned, another important phenomenon over the last couple ofdecades has been the shift from the use of Rapanui from the inner to the outer sphere.Although Rapanui may be spoken less at home, it is taught and encouraged in schooland spoken in public meetings, even in those meetings organized by Chileans in which

Chileans are supposed to lead the conversation, as I have witnessed personally.


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Makihara proposes that this expansion to the public sphere has also contributed to breakdown colonial diglossia (Makihara 2004).

A growing concern about language loss has thus made language into a tool forcultural revitalization, but it has also become a political tool in Rapanui resistanceagainst Chilean governance. It is a cultural process running parallel to Chilean persistent

and excessive presence in Rapa Nui and reaffirming Rapanui difference. In the nextchapter I will discuss another Rapanui cultural feature that emphasizes their singularityand stresses their difference and identity.

Kaia Rapanui

Land in Rapa Nui, as elsewhere, carries political, economic and cultural meanings. I willfirst discuss the political and economic significance of land. This is to say, how does landrepresent power and wealth, how does it allow for control over others, and how does itprovide the material condition for survival? (see Shipton, Coheen, 1992)

In traditional Rapanui culture the production of food, consisting of fish and

agricultural products, was of prime importance. The first settlers, Hotu Motua and hisdirect descendents that constituted the Miru clan are said to have established themselvesalong the northwest coast of the island, because these lands gave access to the best fishinggrounds. This made the Miru into the principal mata (clan) of Rapa Nui, headed by theariki mau. Other mata were agriculturalists and lived mainly in the southeastern part of theisland. Rapanui pre-contact history is generally divided in two periods: the phase of theahu-moai (1000-1500 AD) and the decadent phase in which the taata manu (birdman)cult developed (1500-1722) (Kirch 1984). Towards the end of the second period, a gradualdepopulation of the island produced a shift in the significance of these land divisions. Foodproduction became less important, and the hierarchical divisions between the mata becameless pronounced.

Both the economic and political meaning of land in Rapa Nui underwent a radicalshift after the Chilean annexation, when the island was converted into a sheep farm. Someparts, particularly the Vaitea area in the center of the island and the Poike peninsula, wereused for sheep farming and thus acquired economic value for the Williamson BalfourCompany, while the Rapanui were forced to live in the settlement of Hanga Roa, wheresmall plots of land were given to them.

While the Compaa was mainly interested in the profits of the wool business,the Navy represented the Chilean nation-state. Acting as the legal owners of the land,the Navy started to distribute plots of 5 hectares for agricultural use from 1917 onwards.By the 1960s, 525 provisional land titles (ttulos provisorios) had been handed out.

From the Chilean governments perspective, these provisional titles only allowed thebeneficiaries to use the land, while the Chilean state was its legal proprietor. However,over the years the provisional titles came to be considered as definitive titles by theRapanui. These individual titles were transformed into common land titles for thefamily groups in the mind of the Rapanui, and the right to usufruct came to beinterpreted as a full property right (see Andueza 2004). This situation continued afterthe 1933 inscription of the island as Chilean public land. The Chilean state allowed forthese cultural interpretations of its legal dispositions to take place without giving itfurther importance.

Individual private land ownership as such was only officially introduced by theLey Pascua of 1966 and continued in theLey Pinochetof 1979. In the name of equality

this right was not only extended to Rapanui, but also to non-Rapanui Chilean citizens.However, these dispositions did not have a major effect. The titles to individual


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ownership only referred to the urban area of Hanga Roa, where virtually all Rapanuilived and the vast majority did not bother to get land titles for places where they hadbeen living with their families for several decades. No titles were given to Chileansliving on the island based on theLey Pascua. So the remarkable thing is that, for severalyears to come, islanders kept living their lives in their Hanga Roa homesteads without

significant changes as far as legal land titles is concerned.

Cultural value of land: huaai and kaia

While most of the land outside Hanga Roa had lost political and economic value for theRapanui after Chilean colonization, Rapanui families (huaai) now attached their culturalidentities, this is to say, their intimate relationship with the kaia to the Hanga Roahomesteads, which came to replace the original clan lands. At the same time the symbolicvalue of specific ceremonial sites of the island kept lingering in the collective mind of thedifferent huaai. The Hanga Roa plots were hardly ever their original mata (clan) landsand when the Navy started to hand out plots on request outside the urban area, it played a

major role, perhaps unwittingly so, in the further severing of the ties between the Rapanuiand their original clan lands.

The cultural value of land is also expressed by the Rapanui in writing. When theElders Council published the genealogies of their kinsmen--connecting them to specificterritories--in their 1988 bookTe Mau HatuO Rapa Nui,the Councils head, AlbertoHotus, writes in the preface to this publication:

For the Rapanui the land has a different meaning and value then for other peopleand cultures, but similar to that of other Polynesian cultures. For the Rapanui, aprofound emotional tie exists with this land that saw them being born. This isreflected in the fact that land is called kaia in our language, which means womb,uterus (El Consejo 1988).

An adequate understanding of Rapanui concepts is difficult to reach, because theyare culturally untranslatable. In Spanish and English we dont have equivalents for theconcepts ofhuaai and kaia, so any analysis is by definition flawed, or at the leastconfusing, even if it is made by Rapanui writing in Spanish. The more than twenty existingRapanui surnames are much more than surnames, because they also point to kin groupsthat consider themselves to be related to specific territories, ure, mata and, ultimately toHoto Matua himself.

In recent years another important shift in the political and economic value of

land took place. After Chiles return to democracy in 1990, the new government issuedin 1993 theLey Indgena, which established norms of protection, promotion anddevelopment of Chiles indigenous populations. This law recognizes that land is thelifeblood of indigenous cultures. Nevertheless, like previous laws, it preserved theconcept of individual private property, although it states explicitly, for the first time andafter a long debate in the Chilean Parliament, that, for the case of Rapa Nui, only peopleof Rapanui descent can own land in Rapa Nui and that it cannot be transferred to non-Rapanui.

In the context of theLey Indgena the Chilean state returned 1,500 hectares(3,700 acres) of government-owned land to Rapanui in 1998. This was the first timeever that a Chilean government returned land to the Rapanui people. The Chilean state

thus implicitly recognized that the 1933 inscription of the island as tierra fiscalwasmistaken, but the gesture also corresponded to Chilean national politics. The celebration


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of the centenary of the annexation had taken place towards the end of the dictatorship in1988, and the newly elected democratic governments wished to set their ownbenchmarks in their relationship with Rapa Nui, especially in the context of theLey

Indgena. However, lands were returned to Rapanui individuals, not to families.Some Chilean professionals with longstanding contact with the island

understood this problem and favored collective return. For instance, Chilean lawyerFernando Dougnac is of the opinion

that the island is too small for private property. We should go back to thetraditional system in which the use of the land was assigned to a specific familybut not in ownership, because, ultimately, the ethnic group was the owner. Forthe Chilean government the only way to return the land was as private property,an anthropological mistake I have never been able to understand (interview2001).

Had government functionaries paid more attention to the importance of Rapanui family

structure, based on ancestral tribal affiliations, they might have come to realize that it isnot the same to return land to one of the 36 recognized Rapanui families, or to anindividual member of one of these families. The Ministry ofBienes Nacionales assignedindividual land titles of five hectares each in a rather haphazard way, not respectingtribal affiliations of the applicants, which created problems amongst several Rapanui.

In November 2001 then minister of housing and urbanism, Jaime Ravinet, visitedthe island to award more than 400 land titles to Rapanui individuals. He emphasized that itwas the first time in Chilean history that the government transferred plots of land toRapanui, in anticipation of the return of the rest of the fiscal land. The government thusrecognized the fact that in 1888 only sovereignty was transferred to the Chileans and notthe land, he said.

An interesting and rather questionable effect of the land delivery is that someRapanui have traded their plots of land for motorcycles, used cars, or anything else theyhad set their eyes on. The fact that they had no particular plans for the use of the landindicates that these individuals requested land titles just for the sake of the land beingreturned to them. In other words, one could suggest that the political argument overruledthe economic one, even though the acquired items were not exempt of economic value.Nevertheless, it soon became clear that these arbitrary transfers allowed other Rapanui toaccumulate land, which has stimulated the development of a real-estate market during thelast couple of years unheard of before. This implies a further erosion of the concept ofkaia, since it separates the Rapanui from their traditional clan lands, furthers thedisintegration of their traditional social organization and creates economic differencesbetween Rapanui that never existed before. The root of the problem seems to be that the

Ley Indgena allows for individual private property in detriment of collective privateproperty, or the idea ofkaia.

Loopholes in the law have also permitted the investment of outsiders on theisland, a phenomenon that requires close supervision on part of the Rapanui. Anemblematic case, the first of its kind, is the recent construction of a five star hotel of theexclusive Chilean hotel-chainExplora, opened in January 2008. TheExplora hotelsbelong to Chilean Pedro Ibaez, a wealthy food tycoon and travel entrepreneur. After

consulting for several years with various Rapanui families, theExplora operatorscontacted a Rapanui business man by the name of Mike Rapu. According to theLeyIndgena, the land lease with Rapu has to be renewed every five years. Any outsider


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doing business on the island is subject to this risk, and trust in Rapanui partnersbecomes a major issue.Besides providing the land, Mike also invested US$ 3,000,000,out of the total cost of $10,000,000. However, this investment consists of a bank loanbacked byExplora. Rapu expects to be able and pay off the loan within the first fiveyears of operation (interview 2006).

TheExplora hotel sets a precedent and opens the door for future foreigninvestments. Its eventual success has already inspired other Rapanui to think of theirlands in terms of real-estate, a far cry from customary concepts of land as being suitablefor agriculture and fishery to the benefit of clan members. The economic and politicalvalue of land in Rapa Nui has thus experienced a major shift since the 1990s. Politicallyit is no longer specific mata that occupy the better lands, but rather Rapanui individualscapable of negotiating land deals with foreign investors, or convincing other Rapanui totransfer their lands to them.

Although the Chilean state took over Rapanui land and territory and stripped theRapanui of their economic and political rights to these lands, they have not been able todo so (as yet) as far as their cultural meaning is concerned. With some exceptions, most

Chilean government functionaries simply were not aware of this meaning of the land.Had they paid more attention to the importance of Rapanui family structure, based onancestral tribal affiliations connected to territories, they might have come to realize thatit is not the same to return land to one of the 36 recognized Rapanui families, or to anindividual member of one of these families.

Now, in 2010, almost ten years after the first entrega and after a long andconfusing process, more than 1000 Rapanui are still waiting for the secondredistribution, which now consists of 1,000 hectares. Although many Rapanui say todisagree with the Chilean system, they have submitted to it in practice, and while theyresisted land titles before, they have now registered for them. At the basis of the conflictare the concepts of land as individual private property versus the concept ofkaia andthe idea that the huaai are inseparably connected to their ancestral lands. The hugedelay in the process has also caused mistrust and discontent in the community. One ofthe principal reasons is that the Rapanui Development Commission CODEIPA up tillnow only has an advisory function to the Chilean government through its Ministerio de

Bienes Nacionales in Santiago and cannot make decisions on its own.These issues surface in various forms. Over the last decades individual Rapanui

have settled in parts of the national park, claiming that the land belongs to theirancestors, their mata. Some grow crops, others have built small houses. Generally thegovernment has allowed this to happen except in some exceptional cases in which acouple of houses were destroyed and removed by CODEIPA. However, lately the

situation has gotten out of control since several Rapanui have illegally occupied parkland. By October 2009 the Huke Atan family had taken more than 200 hectares. In Julyand August 2010 some hundred Rapanui occupied plots of land where Chileangovernment offices are located, such as the Ministry of the Interior, the Ministry ofPublic works, the Ministerio de Bienes Nacionales, the Municipality and the hotelHangaroa, the only hotel that is not owned by Rapanui. The argument is that these arelocated in ancestral lands, belonging to various huaai/mata. In the context of thisconflict, it was the first time the Chilean press employed the term clanes familiares orsimply clanes to refer to the participants in the occupations. Chilean governmentofficials, on the other hand, are said to base their arguments on the Chilean estado dederecho. Even though by no means the majority of the Rapanui agree with these land

occupations, they do represent many Rapanui and are an indication of the continuingclashes between the Chilean state and the Rapanui people.


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We can thus conclude that the cultural meaning of land in contemporary RapaNui is a potent marker of difference. Rapanui specific social organization as expressedin the huaai and their relationship with the kaia, although profoundly changed sincethe Chilean annexation, still exists in modern Rapa Nui. A unified emphasis on thiscultural asset may lead to further emphasis on (cultural) self-determination. In the next

section I will move away from local cultural politics and discuss Rapanui incursionsinto Polynesia, their participation in Polynesian gatherings and their reencounter withone of the forgotten ancestral knowledges: seafaring.

The Polynesian homeland: a sea of islands

Tongan scholar and writer Epeli Hauofa writes in his essay Our Sea of Islands that"Our ancestors, who lived in the Pacific for over 2000 years, viewed their world as a'sea of islands', rather than 'islands in the sea'" (Hauofa 1993). This powerful concept isa relational rather than a geographic one, since it emphasizes relations between theislanders and their (is)lands, rather than insurmountable distances between the islands.

In accordance, independent lines of evidence in various disciplines such aslinguistics, biological anthropology and comparative ethnography show that Polynesiancultures display several characteristics in common. They have a common proto-language, a common parental population expressed in a core set of systemic culturalpatterns indicating descent from a common ancestor, similar social groups and landtenure patterns (kaia), the concepts ofmana and tapu, cosmogonic origin myths andthe presence of hereditary chiefs (Kirch 2000). The performative is also a characteristicfeature of Polynesian cultures in general and already commented upon by the firstWestern voyagers in the 18th century.

Rapanui cultural revival since the 1990s takes place in the context of regional(Polynesian) cultural revival. Rapanui consider themselves to be an integral part ofPolynesia and have been participating in cultural events with other Polynesian islandsby participating in Polynesian language conferences, Pacific Arts Festivals and othermusic festivals. They have also taken part in the revival of Polynesian voyaging throughthe visit of Hawaiian voyaging canoeHokulea to Rapa Nui in 1999.

Polynesian gatherings

The idea for a Polynesian Language Forum was born in Aotearoa/New Zealand amongstPolynesian residents that were witnessing the struggle and results of the Maori people topreserve their language. The first conference was organized in Hamilton, New Zealand in

1991. The purpose was to share and exchange experiences about various issues, such asteaching methods and materials, expanding vocabularies, the creation of new words andthe contact with respective states. The Forum has fourteen members, Rapa Nui being oneof them.

Although no Rapanui participated in this first language conference, they had beenpresent in the conference about education in Aotearoa the year before and they would beactive members in the years to come. The next conferences took place in Tahiti (1992),Hawaii (1993), Aotearoa (1994), Tahiti (1998), Rapa Nui (2000) and Aotearoa (2003).

The Rapanui cultural groupKahu Kahu o Hera took on the organization of the6th conference, together with the office of the secretary general of the PolynesianLanguages Forum from the University of Hawaii at Hilo. The meeting was held at the

senior citizens center in Rapa Nui from March 24-30, 2000, with the participation ofAotearoa, Hawaii, Henua Enana (Marquesas), Cook Islands, Mangareva, Rurutu,


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American Samoa, Tahiti, Tuamotu and Rapa Nui. The Fijians excused themselves fornot being able to attend. A total of forty six official delegates and observers participated,as well as several Rapanui guest speakers and some one hundred and fifty Rapanuiattendants. Translation was available for English, French and Spanish, reflecting thecolonial legacies of the islands.

The conference consisted of three full days of workshops. Other days were filledwith cultural activities, especially food, music and performance. There were also severalnative and religious ceremonies, evoking the tapuna as well as the Christian God.Besides reports from each island or island group, two roundtables were held, one onimmersion education and bilingual education and the other one on sociolinguistic realityand language viability. A good part of another day was spent on the meaning of stringfigures and their transfer to new generations. Several delegates spoke of language lossin their respective places, but also of successes in language preservation, mainlythrough the use of immersion education and visual media, especially television.

Immersion education was recommended over bilingual education and theimportance of teacher education was emphasized. Emphasis was also put on speaking

the language at home, as well as on an increasing need for new words. On a dissidentnote, Alberto Hotus, as Rapanui guest speaker, insisted on the limitations of theRapanui language and the consequent need to use Spanish. Other Rapanui guestspeakers spoke about the meaning and significance of the Rapanui reimiro flag, theneed for the officialization of the Rapanui language, the meaning of the roo rooscript, the work on neologisms, and an interpretation of sculptures and petroglyphs asvisual language.

A statement was issued at the end of the conference in which the participantsaffirmed that our Polynesian languages are a treasure from our ancestors that bindstogether the people of our individual islands and the whole of the Polynesian Triangle.It also referred to the fact that the languages and cultures are endangered, but have beenrevitalized as well. It ends by saying that the language that we use in the home andwith our fellow Polynesians will be the language of identity for our future generations.

The realization of this conference in Rapa Nui is undoubtedly a testimony tohow connected the Rapanui are with other Polynesians, as well as to their capacity toorganize such an event. I was told that the organization was fluid and the members of

Kahu Kahu o Hera were proud of this accomplishment.Another gathering in which the Rapanui have participated with great enthusiasm

is the Festival of Pacific Arts. Conceived by the South Pacific Commission as a meansto stem erosion of traditional cultural practices by sharing and exchanging culture, it ishosted every four years by a different country since the first festival took place in Suva,

Fiji, in 1972. The major theme of the festival is traditional song and dance. Rapanuidancers, musicians and artists have formed an integral part of these gatherings. The lastone, in 2008, took place in American Samoa, where some 2000 artists attended. Agroup of Rapanui had a major role in this gathering, since they were in charge of theopening ceremony. Besides this large venue, small Rapanui performance groups takepart in cultural happenings in various islands, such as the Marquesas islands in FrenchPolynesia, Cook Islands etc. during the year. They thus share their cultural heritage andreestablishing contacts with fellow Polynesians.

Further, in 2009 Te Moana Nui a Kiwa, a foundation of the sovereign states ofthe Pacific Triangle was formed in Aotearoa /New Zealand. The ariki nui of severalislands and island groups joined in this foundation, with their official headquarters in

Aotearoa. Their purpose is, amongst others, to reinstate the king blood lines of old, toenhance the rights of the people of these nations, to protect them from industrial nations


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and to protect the lands, which are sacred and can not be sold. Rapa Nui has itsrepresentative, Ariki Nui Tuki Tepano and in February the meeting of the foundationwas held in Rapa Nui.

We can see then that Rapa Nui, despite its limited territory and small population,sits on the front row of Pacific happenings. The strength and mana of Rapanui cultural

practices have given it a powerful presence on the world scene. This cultural capital isshaping the Rapanuis modern cultural and social identity as a people, more so thantheir reeling and dealing with a nation-state that does not fully recognize their desire forself-determination.

Polynesian voyaging. The visit of Hokulea to Rapa Nui

The recent revival of traditional Polynesian voyaging started in Hawaii. In the 1960s, whenPolynesian voyaging canoes had disappeared and ways of navigating without instrumentshad been largely forgotten, Hawaiians began to reconstruct sailing canoes and to testtraditional ways of navigating without instruments over legendary voyaging routes. This

was partly in response to Thor Heyerdahls theory that the Pacific had been colonized fromSouth America. After a decade of planning and navigating, and the reconstruction of aHawaiian double canoe, in 1973 a group of people formed the Polynesian VoyagingSociety, one of them anthropologist Ben Finney, with the purpose of building a deep-seavoyaging canoe to show that the ancient Polynesians could have settled Polynesia indouble-hulled voyaging canoes using non-instrument navigation. Hokulea was launchedin 1975, and it was the first voyaging canoe to be built in Hawaii in more than 600 years.Since then several trips have been undertaken onHokulea.

The topic of revitalization is once again of relevance, since canoe building andknowledge of Ocean voyaging had been forgotten in Hawaii, as it has been in Rapa Nui.Anthropologist Jocelyn Linnekin has suggested in her important essay about the politics ofculture in the Pacific that in the context of theHokuleas voyages Hawaiians haverecognized a broader, Polynesian ethnicity (Linnekin 1990).

One of the important figures in this voyaging revival movement is Mau Pialug, amaster navigator from the atoll of Satawal in the Caroline Islands in Micronesia, whopassed away in July 2010. Mau navigatedHokulea from Hawaii to Tahiti, on its firstvoyage in 1976. Between 1985 and 1987Hokulea sailed more than 16,000 miles oftraditional migratory routes from Hawaii to Tahiti, Rarotonga, Aotearoa, Tonga andSamoa. In 1995 six canoes --Hokulea, Hawaiiloa, and Makalii from Hawaii, one canoefrom Aotearoa, and two from Rarotonga-- left the Marquesas Islands for Hawaii. Five ofthe six canoes only used traditional methods and all six arrived safely in Hawaii. In 1999

Makalii traveled from Hawaii to Chuuk, in the Caroline Islands, with Mau aboard, on avoyaging expedition called "Sailing the Master Home". After a successful trip Makaliiarrived back in Hawaii on June 1.

The Polynesian Voyaging Society met its biggest challenge yet, whenHokulea leftHawaii in June 1999 to sail via the Marquesas and Mangareva to Rapa Nui. Beforetraveling, theHokulea navigators studied native legends, as though they were travel logs.They had also done this when they first set course to Aotearoa/New Zealand in 1985. Onthat trip they tested the historical accuracy of Maori canoe legends and found theirinstructions to be correct, not only as to the direction to be taken by the voyagers, but alsoas to the most appropriate time of the year to undertake the voyage (Finney 1991).Information on both these issues is present in Rapa Nuis foundational story about its first

colonizerHotu Matua. These indications were taken into account by Nainoa Thompson,


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main navigator ofHokulea, when planning the trip, thus honoring the historicity of nativemyths, as the Hawaiian navigators had done when they set sail to Aotearoa.

Although sailing against the prevailing easterly trade winds had for a long timebeen considered an impossibility for anthropologists and other scientists alike, theexistence of occasional westerly winds proved to be a fact. AfterHokulea left Mangareva

in French Polynesia on September 21, winds were blowing from all directions, except forfrom the southeast. They lasted nine days, which allowed the canoe to advance at a highspeed in the right direction. On October 1 the winds died, and for the next eight days thecrew had to deal with relatively unfavorable winds and poor star sightings, due to overcastskies. Nevertheless, near dawn on October 8, the Micronesian crew member MaxYarawamai saw, through a hole in the clouds, a flat black surface that did not changeshape. It turned out to beRano Kau, one of Rapa Nuis three volcanoes. It is interestingthatHokulea approached the island from the same directionHotu Matua and hisexplorers had done, some fifteen centuries earlier, and that she did so at dawn, thus literallysailing into the rising sun, as the legend suggests.Main navigator Nainoa Thompson was atthe stern looking out for the island, since he thought that they might have sailed by it

during the night. When Yarawamay pointed at the flat black line, Nainoa was of theopinion that it had the wrong shape, because he was expecting to see the highest point ofthe island, Maunga Tere Vaka. As a matter of fact he had been a hundred miles off in hiscalculations and he wanted to sail north, but the wind did not allow him to do so and ledhim straight to the island. This was the start of a most remarkable visit, where Rapanui andhundreds of Hawaiians connected I song, dance and other cultural activities (see Delsing2000)

Sam Kaai of Maui said to me in an interview on October 8, the very dayHokuleasighted Rapa Nui:

This visit completes all the cultural songs of the voyaging... For the scientific worldthis is a matter of proving how the discovery was done, but for us it is a matter ofobeying the call to go home. Andrew Sharp of New Zealand said that we were allan accident, which is a way of saying that one is less than ones traditional storiessay one is. He stole our mana. All our stories are about traveling from the West tothe East... We have gone down obeying the ancient chants. We will complete theEuropean idea of the Polynesian triangle, although Polynesia is not even our word.We call it te moana nui, te moana akea. The triangle celebrates the present time.For us there are only songs of where we went, leis of islands, strung up by vaka andpeople and ceremony. These are the flowers of the lei.

These words represent the spirit and the knowledge of the island people, of Rapanui andHawaiians alike. The visit ofHokulea to Rapa Nui demonstrated this knowledge andstrengthened this spirit. It reaffirmed the deep connection that has always existed betweenthe Ocean, the islands and the people who make them their home.

Rapanui have thus traveled all over Polynesia to participate in cultural festivals,language conferences and other meetings, and a group of Hawaiians sailed to the island ona spectacular voyage to connect with the Rapanui in their condition as fellow Polynesians.These Polynesian connections are important markers to differentiate Rapa Nui from theChilean mainland. The Hokulea voyage proofed what Polynesians were capable of doing:to travel the vast ocean until they got to the last island with the help of winds, waves and

stars. And that is where a small group of Polynesian voyagers settled, when the wind found


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his last resting place, like famed poet Pablo Neruda suggests when he wrote: hasta queestableci grmenes puros, hasta que comenzaron las races (Neruda 1997).

Some final thoughts

The purpose of this paper has been to show how, during the last decades, Rapanui haveempowered themselves by emphasizing their cultural difference. In the area ofperformance culture they have been able to do so freely, spreading their culturalmessage on local, regional and global levels. Although their vanaa has been greatlyinfluenced by the introduction of Spanish and Chilean educational policies, this uniquelanguage unquestionably marks Rapanui difference. I have shown how Rapanui arestruggling to keep their mother tongue alive. Another important marker of Rapanuidifference is their Polynesian social organization expressed in the concepts ofkaia,mata and huaai, a unique unity between land and people.

It is in the latter area that the conflicts with the Chilean nation-state are

persistent. There are profound discrepancies between the Western concept ofsovereignty, signifying jurisdiction in a specific territory, and the Polynesian idea ofsovereign rulers, the unity between land and people and the inalienability of this land.Centuries of construction of different political philosophical frameworks in East andWest have created and sustained these discrepancies. In the case of Rapa Nui, whereboth systems have been coexisting and colliding for more than a century, the time mayhave come to sit together and really listen. This is an urgent business, because theincreasing and disturbing noises of the market forces may take away the possibility ofhearing each other altogether.

Meanwhile, cultural politics, as discussed above, are keeping Rapanui differenceafloat and thriving and, simultaneously, produce cracks in discourses and practices of amodern Latin American nation-state. At this very moment, August 2010, Rapanuihuaai or clans, as the Chilean press now terms them, are occupying various plots ofancestral lands on the island, thus challenging, what they call, the Chilean estado dederecho. Rapanui and the Chilean government know that the world is listening in onthis debate. We can only wait and see what the outcome will be.

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Articulating Rapa Nui - Riet Delsing