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15.2 (Summer 1991) Western Oceania: Caring for Ancestral Domain

West Papua: Forgotten War, Unwanted People

Nowhere in the modern world has an armed liberation struggle persisted for so long - nearly 30 years - and with such secrecy, as the West Papuan war of resistance against the military government of Indonesia.

Village Videos and Custom Chiefs: The Politics of Tradition

My first exposure to that quintessential hero of American pop culture, Rambo, came in 1988 while I was in Buala village on the island of Santa Isabel, Solomon Islands. Although I had missed out on the first epic Rambo movie, fortune would allow me to catch up on this latest film phenomenon by seeing the second Rambo film, Rambo, at a village video open to anyone willing to pay the 60 cents admission price (about 25 cents US). The video showings run almost nightly on a VCR powered by a gasoline generator in a small house built out of corrugated iron and thatch.

Tribes in Agony: Land, Development, and Politics in Solomon Islands

A common complaint of some outside developers and other business entrepreneurs working in Melanesia is that Solomon Islanders, like many other groups in the Pacific, are very difficult to deal with when it comes to the issue of land. This difficulty, they argue, has to do with the fact that land is owned not by one person only but by clans or by people who believe they belong to the same genealogy. More often then not, the developers complain, the outcomes are negative, and time is wasted on what outsiders perceive to be meaningless genealogical talk.

The Murray Island Case

The status of indigenous land ownership in Australia is by now well known. British settlement of the continent in 1788 eclipsed Aboriginal title in colonial eyes, and this remained the case when Australia became a federation in 1901. The federal and state governments allocated land for Aboriginal people, but these reserves could be returned to the government at any time, and often were.

Reestablishing a Home on Eastern Cape York Peninsula

Queensland, a large state that occupies the northeastern part of the Australian continent, has long had a reputation among Australian states for its repressive policies and practices dealing with the indigenous Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders (the 1986 Census counted 61,268 indigenous people, making up 2.4 percent of Queensland's population). In the past decade, however, it has become impossible for its native affairs agency and police to use force to control where and how Aborigines and Islanders live and work.

Politics and Society in Post-Coup Fiji

On 7 April 1987 Fiji held its fifth general election since gaining independence from Britain in 1970. After months of hectic campaigning, the newly formed National Federation - Fiji Labor Party Coalition won over the long-reigning Alliance Party by capturing 28 of the 52 eats in the national Parliament. On April 12 the new government was sworn into office - only to be ousted a month later, on April 14, in the South Pacific's first military coup.

Negotiating Sea Rights

If I were to visit another country. I would ask my local companion, before I saw any museum or library, and factory or fabled town, to walk me in the country of his or her youth, to tell me the names of things and how, traditionally, they have been fitted together in a community. I would ask for the stories, the voice of memory over the land. I would ask to taste the wild nuts and fruits, to see their fishing lures, their bouquets and fences. I would ask about the history of storms there, the age of the trees, the winter color of the hills...

Land Rights and Development: Writing About Kwara'ae Tradition

One of the problems of most concern to the Kwara'ae people of Mala'ita in Solomon Islands is what is happening to their land or, rather, to the traditional system for managing land "customary land tenure." A familiar way of describing the problem is summarized by the Mala'ita Provincial Planning Office when it points out that "Land tenure is the main constraint against development in the Province" (1988:19). It is equally true to say that development threatens traditional land tenure.

Land and Independence in New Caledonia

This is what we had and this is what you have left us," declared the Kanak Grand Chief Atal in 1878 as he emptied two sacks at the feet of the colonial governor - one sack full of earth and the other, rocks.

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