Now that I’m officially on spring break, I’ll be updating my Pacific Reading dropbox with more links. Aside from that I highly recommened watching this video, We Are Rebels: New Caledonia. It’s a 26 minute documentary on the indigenous people of New Caledonia, the Kanak, and their fight for self-determination under French rule. I will be providing a reading I did for one of my classes that goes along nicely with this video as it outlines the history of French colonialism over the indigenous people of New Caledonia.

(Source: https://www.youtube.com/)

Speak it, Sing it or Lose it – Melanesian Languages Under Threats of Extinction

tribalmysticart:

Speak it, Sing it or Lose it – Melanesian Languages Under Threats of Extinction

AFP News Angency: On the Pacific islands of New Caledonia, it’s feared many of the 28 indigenous languages are dying out. But the success of a local band scoring hits in a native tongue is giving traditionalists cause for hope.

Here is one of my own New Caledonian favourites.

Ok!Ryos – Kini Kinibut

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/wa…

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culturite:

Rebellion (2011)

La Haine director Matthieu Kassovitz’s latest film, L’Ordre et la Morale (re-titled Rebellion in translation) is a surprisingly incisive critique of French neo-colonialism in the Melanesian islands settlers dubbed “New Caledonia”. According to Kassovitz, “La Haine was about police brutality; Rebellion is about government brutality.“ The film focuses on a specific struggle in Ouvéa in 1988, where the Indigenous Kanak population mounted opposition to colonial rule and the ongoing occupation of their islands by the French military.

As Cultural Survival notes, "The dispossession of Kanak lands in New Caledonia has followed the classic pattern of colonial expansion and development of unequal socio-economic relations, which permit the exploitation of labor, land, and natural resources and are all justified by French-imposed economic models." 

But the Kanaks have been fighting back, in part, guided by the fraught leadership of the Kanak and Socialist National Liberation Front (FLNKS), a militant movement for decolonization and indigenous self-determination.

Although the film still centres around Kassovitz’s role as a French gendarme, it also makes room for Kanak voices, perspectives and histories —and presents them narratively and politically as both legitimate forms of anti-colonial resistance and necessary challenges to Indigenous dispossession.

For me, it was a great find and a welcome addition to a small (but hopefully growing) list of recommended anticolonial cinema.

Rebellion is currently streaming on Netflix.