HIST288: Historical Voices of Oceania: Indigenous Voices

The author is a well-known Tahitian independence activist.

The essay discusses, from an Indigenous perspective, the French nuclear weapon tests in the southern Pacific islands. It presents a vivid scenario of the detrimental effects and social inequalities produced by the dynamic of ‘industrialization without industry’ brought about by militarisation and extraction.

This article explores indigenous literary and artistic condemnations of both French and US nuclear testing (which collectively spanned a 50-year period, 1946-96), touching on the work of a range of authors from Aotearoa New Zealand, Kanaky/New Caledonia and Tahiti/French Polynesia, before discussing a recent UK government-funded research project focused on the legacy of nuclear testing in the Marshall Islands.

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Bombarded with the equivalent of one Hiroshima bomb a day for half a century, Pacific people have long been subjected to man-made cataclysm. Well before climate change became a global concern, nuclear testing brought about untimely death, widespread diseases, forced migration, and irreparable destruction to the shores of Oceania. In The Ocean on Fire, Anaïs Maurer analyzes the Pacific literature that incriminates the environmental racism behind radioactive skies and rising seas. Maurer identifies strategies of resistance uniting the region by analyzing an extensive multilingual archive of decolonial Pacific art in French, Spanish, English, Tahitian, and Uvean, ranging from literature to songs and paintings. "

"During the last thirty years thousands of Polynesian men and boys worked at Moruroa and Fangataufa, the two atolls in the Pacific where France conducted its nuclear tests. A curtain of silence has so far existed around their experiences, motivations and anxieties. In this report a representative number of former workers and islanders living in the vicinity of the test sites speak out. Their hidden histories and problems are revealed." -- Back cover.