The Festival of Pacific Arts & Culture
52 years of pushing against Western colonialism in the Pacific
(No. 36, a ±07 minute read)
What does reconciling colonialism look like when global warming is sinking your island?
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On Sunday the fifty-second Festival of Pacific Arts & Culture (FesPAC) concluded in Honolulu after sites around the island hosted seemingly innumerable events for ten days. The assembly was an overwhelming congregation of peoples and activities from twenty-five countries and something like 3,000 delegates and participants from every sort of Pacific political construction from nation to territory — with the notable exceptions of New Caledonia and Vanuatu.
Vanuatu is suffering a slow motion collapse of its national economy — its national airline failed in April — requiring its withdrawal. New Caledonia has devolved into violent protest. Unfortunately that fact is often reported without any further context other than present violence being less deadly than that of a civil war in the 1980s. The cause of the upheaval was a decree from France, the colonial power that still controls much of New Caledonia’s politics, that the franchise would be further extended to additional French citizens, diluting the the islands’ indigenous Kanak people’s power at the polls. New Caledonia is rich in nickel deposits and as such the French are loathe to relinquish control.
The extractive impulses that drove colonial expansion are evidently still with us, only possessed of still more complexity in the era of global warming.1 One of many moving sights at FestPAC was the hale (house, shelter) assigned to New Caledonia and occupied in solidarity, initially by Fijian delegates, and decorated with arts and crafts from around the Pacific.
For its many, many bright spots the legacies of colonialism and global warming were never far away from even the most joyous celebrations of Pacific cultures at FestPAC, and neither were controversies attendant to Hawai‘i’s hosting of the 13th FestPAC forum.
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Hawai‘i was not an invitee in 1972 when FestPAC began and only allowed observer status in 1976’s second summit. Concerns about American power in the Pacific and the not-wrong perception that Hawaiians had become divorced from their culture prevented the extension of an invitation in ‘72. The cultural concerns were quickly allayed thanks to the Hawaiian Renaissance; the concerns about hegemonic American power and its instinct to prop up colonial interests, and to work at maintaining its own, remain.
The U.S. is at a critical moment in its history; possessed of less political power and influence than it is accustomed to, militarily less muscular after almost too many recent bunglings to count, and as the single nation most able to set a course to attenuate the climate crisis, it is now particularly able — at a particularly important time — to set a global example of action at home and abroad. The shoring up of democratic norms and scaffolding, reigning in corporatism and its impunity, facing global warming head on — all would go far to bolster perceptions of the U.S., tarnished as it is by its authoritarian drift, indefensible wars, and its having lead the world into economic crisis in 2008.
For Oceanic nations who have been continually ignored or exploited, and are now suffering existential consequences as global warming accelerates, the U.S. and its actions in the Pacific weigh heavily. Future U.S. actions must acknowledge and make amends for others’ and its own regrettable pasts while behaving rationally in the face of a terrifying future as climate systems spin into calamitous territory. Climate terror may not yet exist in Peoria but it’s there, already, in Palau. We in the U.S. need to accept and understand that, as well as our contribution to the paradigm.
Needless to say, Hawai‘i — America’s — hosting FestPAC was complicated. The complication was most concretely evidenced by the event’s principal venue, the Hawai‘i Convention Center, a 1.1 million square foot paean to American business that cost $200 million to build on the site of Aloha Motors, a Chevy dealership that called it quits in 1985. Underutilized and suffering unfunded maintenance it is easy to spend time in its huge air-conditioned spaces and see nothing but the failure to acknowledge the climatic realities we knew ourselves to be facing when the building was opened in 1998, belated LEED sustainable building certification or not.
Sitting in talks about the ongoing consequences of phosphate mining on Banaba Island; the protection of oceanic systems and voyaging at Rapa Nui (Easter Island); and listening to the focused, angry defiance of Marshall Islander Jobod Silk talking of youth unwillingness to flee submerging island homelands; or watching contemporary hula tackling global warming while freezing in air-conditioned comfort in a building designed principally to further the sort of capitalist structures that are destroying the atmosphere was consistently jarring.
Understanding the not-uncommon point of view that Hawai‘i should not be a FestPAC host was also sobering. We here cannot escape our hegemonic perspective on the world, evidenced by the late awakening of Nainoa Thompson to his Pacific allies, and which he spoke about passionately, even as delegates were impatient with his epiphanies, having been there all along. Thompson is Hawai‘i’s Neil Armstrong, he drove the rediscovery of traditional oceanic navigation culminating in the voyages of the Hōkūle‘a — a traditional double-hulled sailing canoe piloted without instruments. Thompson’s late-to-the-party discovery of a Pacific unified both culturally and against global warming occurred, by his admitting, here, at FestPAC last week.
He could not, until this event, see past his local Hawaiian and American point-of-view. We Americans, no matter how far out on the nation’s margins, have a hard time seeing other experience in the world from our seat of power.
We in Hawai‘i, no matter how different from continental American currents, are still yoked to both the American unwillingness to change in order to affect better climate crisis outcomes (a U.S. caused crisis, in large part) and an American inability to see past the end of our noses. This roils, as I have written, “the climate-afflicted who live on the sharp edge of the knife.” Our federal system, it seems, will always prevent climate action from prevailing in the U.S. as long as there are substantial profits to be made from either inaction, or continued contributions to the causes of global warming.
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Kabini Afia, a delegate from the Solomon Islands, and climate science and dolphin researcher, discussed the all-too-real social strategy in his islands of marrying into families from higher-lying islands. He described resettlement as “a mind-boggling concept” and beseeched his country’s “bigger brothers” for help, saying, “We really need some good help.” The heavily forested Solomon main islands are receiving those from rapidly submerging low-lying islands. Five islands have already been totally lost. Now a recent geopolitical prize, perhaps for the first time since the Second World War, recent elections have disdained the great-powers struggle between the U.S. and China that have been playing out there in favor of looking inward to address local issues.
During Afia’s presentation I wrote in my notebook, “Who can look these people in the eyes and say, ‘No, we will not change [to slow global warming and sea level rise]. Your islands will be sacrificed.’” I nudged my seatmate, a person I know who works in academic climate communications, in the elbow and shared what I’d written. Both of us were teary-eyed and the question was gutting. We both see implicitly the ease of forgetting the peoples of the Pacific, and the real possibility of their becoming further collateral damage; of colonial pasts morphing into present and future ruin by the same actors — with China and India as notable new additions — as they fail to clean up the atmospheric mess their prosperity has visited on the earth.
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It’s easy today to sit and watch people spinning dances that have no relation to Eurocentric experience or tradition moving with bare buttocks, pegged ears, playing “primitive” instruments, wearing body paint, and imagine oneself back into the 1700s. Conjure disembarking from the high technology of a tall ship onto an isolated, resource-rich Pacific island — the benighted savages on view, unaware of their nudity, let alone unashamed; sailors looking to fuck a woman after months at sea, sick of their shipmates and shipboard privations; officers heady with the glory of “discovery;” the competition to claim land and wealth for the voyage’s sponsor; the ferocity of ceremonial war dances with primitive weapons no match for a rifle, or syphilis.
Christian Europeanism was never likely to see the complexity of a ceremonial dance performed for visitors so far from Pacific island local experience that they might be received as gods. It was never likely to entertain the possibility that these performances represented complexity and precision, storytelling, comparable to European opera or ballet. Inevitably opaque to European mercantilism was the reality that these performances represented generations of culture, relationally rather than commodity-based — the key relationship being that of the dancers’ kinspeoples’ connection with their islands and the seas surrounding them. How could Eurocentricism see islander complexity, systems of sustainable living in often resource-limited locales? Canons, rifles, and vast shipboard holds must have been impossibly blinding to fraternity when confronted with swaying hips, wooden clubs, and phosphate and nickel riches.
Today we are still blind to human and planetary kinship, even as we have digested William Anders’ Apollo 8 earthrise image illustrating our planet itself as an island, framed by the desolation of our barren moon and cold, empty space. We in the developed world have at hand incredible examples of living on, and like, islands. They are ours to assimilate, or not, as today’s national, and to Kabini Afia and the people he represented last week, notional “bigger brothers.”
The elder sibling’s role, I speak from personal experience, is an important one to eventually inhabit and it brings bi-directional benefit. There are a great many in the Pacific, from cultures millennia older than ours, asking Americans to pick up the mantel. It is a shame so few will hear their call.
To be sure the complexity is in large part the refusal of 19th and 20th century colonial powers to release their hooks and make reparations for their national responsibilities to those who were exploited. Escaping history is obviously very difficult, as Ukraine and Gaza continue to teach us.