island conversations
podcast series

“OUI” (“Yes”) and “NON” (“No”) ballots for the 2018 referendum for independence in which voters were asked to answer the question “Do you want New Caledonia to attain full sovereignty and become independent?”, 2018.

Credit: Anaïs Duong-Pedica 

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Yes, I agree that it's not to say that Anglophone Pacific is 100% decolonised, if you want to say that. I wouldn’t go that far, decolonisation is the land back . Decolonising academia is an ideal level kind thing. But I would say that, even though the conversations that are happening in Anglophone Pacific, there is a clear resistance to it in the French academic realm within the Pacific. As you're saying, you still don't have people being very reflexive, you still don't have people acknowledging their position, as an insider, as an outsider, you don't really have people acknowledging the history of their disciplines, and the damage that their disciplines have done on to our peoples. I mean, they're coming in as objective researchers to a blank state. And that's just not true. And there's so much work around that, countering that and they're still ignoring those conversations […] 

I'm doing work in Pacific Studies, about Francophone Pacific or French occupied Pacific, French colonised Pacific, and yourself as well, we are a few of a handful, but we want to have more of these conversations. And we want to break that divide that has been not benefiting us basically. Like, I choose not to be in anthropology and archaeology and all that kind of stuff, because I don't want to continue that sort of research. I want to be in Pacific Studies, because that's the research that I want to do and the space I want to do it in. I think that’s rare in the French colonised Pacific […] and we have to acknowledge the researchers here, who are indigenous and the people that would benefit ultimately from that kind of research. 

I guess we can talk more about the Francophone universities, and I guess their resistance to sort of opening up that conversation about self-reflexivity. And […] when you start that reflexive sort of conversation, it is basically like handing over power, right? I don't think the French Empire wants to hand over that power. And that's why it's been perpetuated for so long, in 2022, where it's glaringly colonial, and the big elephant in the room, yet nobody's addressing it. And that's then aided by how the universities run here in French colonised Pacific, if you want to go into that.

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I think […] there's so many things that we could discuss about the universities in the French colonised Pacific. I mentioned quickly about how the kind of courses that are possible to do, the types of training, the type of research that is possible to do in those universities, the type of things that students are going to learn, are still mostly what outsiders have written about the Pacific, and about culture in the Pacific. It's also very much a culturalist… When one could instead for example focus on social movements, and things like that. 

But there is also the fact that there is this observation that we are making, that the majority of the scholarship on the Pacific that is produced is still produced by outsiders, from France most of the time. This is also something that we find in our universities, where the majority of the teaching staff and the research staff is French. I'm just going to share an anecdote... At the University of New Caledonia, once I heard a white scholar kind of taking pride in himself for teaching to a majority of Pacific Island students. The majority of the students who attend the University of New Caledonia are Pacific Islanders, so they are Kanak, or you know, Tahitian, Ni-Vanuatu, from Wallis and Futuna, for example. He was taking pride in this. But I think we also need to look at why is it that it is the majority of Pacific Island students in those universities. I think what's important to look at is that a lot of non-Pacific Islander students go abroad to study, they go to France, Australia, Canada. And so, we need to think about that: people don't necessarily have the same types of choices when they choose an institution. 

Now, for me, it's really problematic if you look at… and I don't know exactly what the statistic is… but let's say that 90% of the students are Pacific Islanders. But then the vast majority of the teaching and research staff is French, from France. For me, this is clearly an issue, because then you are reproducing that very thing where the people who have the knowledge to teach, and especially about the Pacific but not just, since there are other degrees, they are French, and most of the time, white people. And the people who are in positions of learning all the time from those people are indigenous Pacific Islander students.  Those aren't new critiques; those are critiques that have been made in other contexts. 

Vehia, you mentioned Sereana Naepi’s work in Aotearoa/New Zealand. There's also Haunani-Kay Trask that has made a critique of the University of Hawai’i in her book. We're seeing this in our universities and how our universities […] train students, their students that are coming out of those universities with degrees, with PhD degrees and titles, but they are not being employed by those universities. There are people who are trained, but those people aren't hired. There aren’t more Pacific Islanders occupying positions of responsibility in our universities in the Pacific, and that's an issue.