"The Noumea Accord and the Evolution of Kanak Movements: From Political Soverei

The Noumea Accord and the Evolution of Kanak Movements: From Political Sovereignty to Indigenous Rights?

Marie Salaun
University René Descartes, Paris

3:00 pm  23 August 2007 Crawford 115

After two decades of struggles for political independence, decolonization seems to be underway in New Caledonia. The Noumea Accord (1998) implements a gradual and irreversible process, which will lead to a vote upon the achievement of full international responsibility status and the conversion of citizenship into nationality. Ironically, the restoration of “kanak people’s confiscated identity,” which “equates with a recognition of its sovereignty,” has recently witnessed new forms of Kanak activism, in the name of Indigenous people’s rights. How do these new claims challenge the former, and still ongoing, claim for independence?

Marie Salaün works as a maître de conferences at the University René Descartes in Paris. She obtained her PhD from the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales in Paris in 2000. Salaün’s socio-historical work examined Kanak people’s schooling beginning with implementation in the 19th century. She is in charge of the organization of the weekly Oceanists’ seminar at the EHESS and is responsible for a research project entitled “Pacific Islands Peoples and the State: Indigeneity, Identity, Ethnicity, Citizenship” financed by the French National Agency of Research. The first goal of this project is to allow young researchers that have already trained in fieldwork in the Pacific, notably for their thesis studies, access to a second stage of fieldwork in order to develop the comparative dimension in their research. Salaün came to Mānoa to start comparative work on the American and French contexts concerning the implementation of linguistic realities and local cultures in educational systems through the examples of Hawai‘i and New Caledonia.

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Cosponsored by Center for Pacific Islands Studies, UHM For further information, please contact Anthropology at anthprog@hawaii.edu

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