PARADISE IN DISPUTE
A cultural clash on Easter Island
There is trouble festering in paradise.
The 2,500 indigenous Polynesians who live in one of the world’s most remote permanently inhabited places have long chafed at what they regard as Chilean colonialism. Their concerns are growing as more and more mainlanders with a different outlook on life flood in to cater to an exploding tourism industry.
The influx has made the Rapanui, as the islanders call themselves, a minority on this almost treeless speck of land less than one- thirtieth the size of Prince Edward Island, dwarfed by the vastness of the South Pacific.
The disputes, which find an echo in parts of Canada where many indigenous peoples live, have been over language, cultural collapse and land ownership. Today, only about 500 Rapanui speak the local language well. The culture, at least as shown to the 80,000 tourists who visit every year, now consists mostly of energetic, often suggestive dancing of the kind that once entranced HMS Bounty’s muti- nous sailors, whose descendants on isolated Pitcairn Island face problems similar to those found on Easter Island.
The visitors are also attracted by the moai, massive statues which some believe depict dead relatives that were sculpted about 1,000 years ago from volcanic rock. They are believed to be part of an ancestor worship cult.
Land use is controlled by Spanish- speaking administrators, while the law is upheld by security forces and judges imported from the Chilean mainland 3,687 kilometres away.
Five years ago, a bloody riot between Rapanui and Chilean special police left dozens wounded. The violence was triggered by anger over construction of a Chilean luxury hotel on disputed land.
That outburst fed long simmering talk of independence, which has been on the boil again recently with fresh differences over control of the airport.
To protest their inability to own land or control their destiny, a few Rapanui have been building illegal homes on what they regard as their ancestral land in the town of Hanga Roa, where the entire population has been told to live.
Others have been squatting in remote seaside caves.
Talk of rebellion may eventually scare away the tourists who are the island’s main source for income, aside from handouts from Chile and a feeble fishery that has been seriously depleted by Asian factory ships that scoop up tuna and swordfish without even bothering to make a port call.
But it is difficult to see how the heirs to this outwardly idyllic island can survive economically without Chile.
Almost everything on Easter Island, including the subsidies and the tourists, arrive from Santiago on the daily five- hour Lan Chile flight that is the principal link and lifeline to the South American mainland and the world. The island was discovered by a Dutchman in 1722, visited by Capt. James Cook and his crew in 1774 and annexed by Chile in 1888. Yet it was not until 78 years later that the Rapanui were deemed worthy of Chilean passports.
Easter Island’s splendid isolation and the nearly 900 mystical, far larger- than- life monuments that brood over the coast continue to delight and confound archeologists and tourists.
Lush, rolling hills and valleys, fine beaches and an otherwise rugged coastline make the triangle- shaped island spectacularly beautiful.
So do the hundreds of horses that run semi- wild. But like the Rapanui, the animals are under threat. They have been dying off in high numbers because they eat a weed imported from the mainland that ruins their digestive systems.
In fact, imported plants and animals, including horse grass, rats and mice, have destroyed much of the habitat that existed here before the first European explorers arrived in the 18th century.
A young Rapanui woman, a member of the troupe that entertains tourists most evenings, said although gaining independence did not make economic sense, she was for it because she was tired of being told what to do by Chileans.
An ethnic Chilean teenager who was born on the island countered that he had as much reason to be here as anyone else.
Rapanui’s ambition was to become “free like East Timor,” as one local cheerfully told me. But to gain independence from Indonesia, inhabitants of the former Portuguese colony had to fight a long, violent civil war.
Matters are far from being settled on Easter Island. Because descendants of the original inhabitants appear to be strongly convinced they are in the right, and the United Nations supports self- determination for such people, there is perhaps an unjustified confidence the Rapanui will eventually have their way.
But as there are so few of them, what purpose would independence serve, at what cost and who would foot the bill?
Such existential questions confront other indigenous communities in the Pacific basin as well as in Canada’s hinterlands.