Despite having numerous corporate and military sponsors, this year’s Festival of Pacific Arts & Culture (FestPAC) – a giant quadrennial festival showcasing Indigenous arts and culture – was a site often claimed by participants as a politically alive space for anti-colonial critique and discussion of the climate crisis.
The festival, which took place primarily at Honolulu’s Hawaii Convention Center on the Island of Oahu from June 6-16 and drew together 2,200 delegates from 25 island nations across Polynesia, Micronesia and Melanesia, listed the Hawai’i Tourism Authority, U.S. Army Pacific, U.S. Marine Forces Pacific, and various airlines, resorts and shopping sites among its sponsors, but attendees brought a very different political energy to their participation in the festival.
As poet Johanna Salinas of the U.S. territory of Guam put it during a literary arts event at the festival: “The single largest gathering of Pacific Islanders in the world is not just a fair.”
Indeed, at the same literary event, author Victoria Leon Guerrero proclaimed: “I dedicate this reading to the people in Kanaky and Palestine. We are not free until all peoples are free.” Kanaky is the Indigenous name of New Caledonia, which didn’t send a delegation to FestPAC due to unrest on the Melanesian island.
Leon Guerrero told Truthout, “Guamanians are the longest colonized people in the Pacific. The people of Guam are still colonized by the U.S., just as the people in Kanaky are colonized by the French. With Kanaky’s absence at the festival, we must stand in solidarity with the Kanak people.” (FestPAC is currently scheduled to take place at Kanaky/New Caledonia in 2028.)
Oceania is a large region of the world (along with the Caribbean) that is still dominated by outright colonialism and settler states, occupied by foreign militaries. Guam Museum curator Michael Bevacqua expressed exasperation with Guam’s archaic colonial subjugation and pointed out, “One third of Guam is owned by the military, which impacts the environment and sustainability.” The Pentagon controls 25 percent of Oahu, including Pearl Harbor.
Along with their militaristic domination of many island nations, Washington and Paris have used the Marshall Islands and French Polynesia as nuclear testing sites, which rendered some isles uninhabitable and left local communities with devastating health impacts. Pacific Islanders are often displaced minorities in their own ancestral homelands. Mililani Trask, an elected trustee of the Office of Hawaiian Affairs, a state agency mandated to oversee Indigenous matters, told Truthout: “Seventeen percent of the Big Island’s residents are Hawaiians, but 70 percent of our homeless are Natives.”
“The people of Guam are still colonized by the U.S., just as the people in Kanaky are colonized by the French.”
Despite the commercialism driving the fiscal sponsorship for the festival, many of its participants........