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1 Introduction The events of November 1984 didn’t just happen—although it is by no means clear exactly what conjuncture of circumstances caused them to take the form that they did. Michael Spencer, It’s Not All Black and White (1988, 182) To the refusal of self that colonialism imposes on us, we oppose the acceptance of self. Nidoish Naisseline, Cité Nouvelle, No 525, 1970. Assassinations, ambushes, massacres, gunfights at roadblocks and rural homesteads, destruction of property, the influx of thousands of French riot police and paratroopers to defend white settlers and mining firms from armed blacks in Rastafarian dreadlocks—such dramatic news images typified reporting on the Kanak uprising in New Caledonia in the 1980s. In rhetoric reminiscent of the Algerian independence war of the 1950s, the conservative metropolitan newspaper Le Figaro attacked the Socialist regime in Paris for allowing a “Caledonian disease” of criminal terrorist disorder to threaten France. A local loyalist Melanesian leader, Dick Ukeiw é, blamed the “infiltration of Marxism in this part of the world through links between the [Kanak Liberation Front] and Libya, Cuba and the Soviet Union.” Le Figaro portrayed the indigenous rebels as “savages” living in the “stone age” who obeyed the “law of the jungle,” and reporter Thiérry Desjardins asserted, “there is no Kanak culture or civilization” (Spencer 1988, 180–185). Yet behind such sensationalist stereotyping lay a long history of foreign labeling and colonialism. The term “Pacific” itself came from Ferdinand Magellan in 1521, because he felt relieved to escape the storms off Cape Horn, the southern tip of South America. Europeans created such names for their own mapping (Kirch 2000). By the eighteenth century, the vast island world in the heart of the Pacific that ancient voyagers had first settled and linked together with exchange systems was called “Polynesia” (many islands); it later became the eastern part of “Oceania.” In the 1830s, northwest Oceania became “Micronesia ” (tiny islands) because of its many coral atolls, though it also has large volcanic islands, and the southwest became “Melanesia,” a racial label meaning islands of dark-skinned peoples. In culturally diverse Melanesia, 2 Introduction Europeans created “new” place-names for convenience, including “New Caledonia,” named after Scotland by British explorer James Cook in 1774. The term kanaka, a Hawaiian word for “person,” traveled around the region in shipboard and plantation pidgin and became canaque in French. Descendants of colonial settlers in New Caledonia would later call themselves calédoniens , while “Melanesian” was often a more polite label than canaque for the indigenous people. In the 1970s, local nationalists revalued “Kanak” (an invariable term, whether singular or plural) as a unifying identity formation because the indigenous people spoke thirty languages. Etymology and polarized politics ultimately pitted Pacific “Scots” against Melanesian “Hawaiians.” But the 1980s Kanak uprising was not simply about timeless ethnic markers, “tribal” warfare, or the Cold War. Three historical changes had pushed New Caledonia to the breaking point. First, from 1959 to 1969, France unilaterally withdrew previously granted self-governing powers from the territory in order to keep control of local nickel mining, which it regarded as a strategic resource. The democratically elected majority in the Territorial Assembly called that regression a betrayal of trust. An analogy might be if the US Congress had revoked Hawaiian statehood and pushed back the clock to the territorial period before 1959. Second, in violation of United Nations General Assembly resolution 2621 (1970), the French state and its local administration deliberately encouraged new immigration during a nickel-mining boom in order to marginalize supporters of self-government. Kanak were already a slight demographic minority, and many felt that their identity as a people was in danger of extinction. Third, in response to these two structural changes, young New Caledonians returning from university studies in France, who had experienced the May 1968 student-worker uprising, felt that powerful outside interests and a flood of migrant opportunists were extinguishing local progressive voices and recolonizing the country. They formed a protest group, the Foulards Rouges (Red Scarves), in what became known as the Kanak Awakening (Réveil Canaque). Increasing political, ethnic, and economic polarization thus culminated in the pro-independence revolt of the 1980s. Together with widespread opposition to French nuclear testing in the Tuamotu atolls near Tahiti, the Kanak struggle to decolonize also aroused anti-French sentiments around the Pacific. Despite the revocation of local self-government and the artificial creation of a loyalist majority through orchestrated migration, pro-French settlers seemed unwilling to believe that...

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