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By Anita Hofschneider
More than 2,000 people gathered in Hawaiʻi for the 13th Festival of Pacific Island Arts and Culture, or FestPAC, from June 6 to June 16, 2024.
The festival is the largest gathering of Indigenous Pacific peoples in the world, and it came at a critical time for the island region known as Oceania, as sea levels, storms, and other climate effects threaten traditional ways of life and connections to land and sea.
Normally the festival takes place every four years and rotates between the three regions of the Pacific: Polynesia, Micronesia, and Melanesia. But because of the pandemic, the event hadn’t happened for eight years. It was last held on Guam, and this was the first time since it was established in 1972 that it had occurred in Hawaiʻi.
For 10 days, Indigenous peoples from more than two dozen Pacific nations and territories shared their weaving, tattoo creations, films, visual art, wood carvings, dances, songs, literature, music, food, and other expressions of Indigenous culture.
Tarcisius Kabutaulaka, a University of Hawaiʻi associate professor from the Solomon Islands and a former director of the university’s Center for Pacific Islands Studies, said even though the focus of the festival was on performing arts, Pacific cultures are deeply interwoven with the environment.
“We produce and perform our culture vis-à-vis the environment,” said Dr Kabutaulaka. “The baskets that we weave, the dances that we dance, are often about the environment. We use materials around us to create material culture.”
That interdependency makes climate change an existential threat. In Kiribati, Dr Kabutaulaka said, taro is a key source of food and cultural celebrations, but sea level rise — and the resulting saltwater intrusion into islands’ freshwater lenses — is making it harder to grow the starch. Forced relocation is another ongoing problem. In late May, Papua New Guinea was the site of a deadly landslide that buried a village. Climate change will make such extreme weather events more common, forcing villages to relocate and severing Indigenous Pacific peoples’ connection to their ancestral lands.
Some participating island nations also continue to deal with the ongoing effects of colonialism. New Caledonia’s delegation pulled out at the last minute after France’s efforts to push through a referendum that would have diluted Indigenous voting power prompted protests and violence.
The festival also hosted a roundtable discussion on climate change, featuring political leaders from Palau and the Federated States of Micronesia as well as local activists who spoke on militarisation and environmental justice, and the connections between Hawaiʻi and Palestine.
Dr Kabutaulaka helped organise an academic event called Protecting Oceania, which focused on discussions of climate change, deep sea mining, mental health, and other issues. “It [grappled] with the idea of protection, what we are trying to protect, and how we are protecting it,” he said.
Arts remain at festival’s heart
But the heart of the festival was still the arts. Vilsoni Hereniko was a student in Fiji in 1972 when the first Festival of Pacific Island Arts and Culture was held. He’s now a weaver, playwright, scholar, and a professor of cinematic arts at the University of Hawaiʻi.
“There will always be academic conferences,” said Professor Hereniko, who is indigenous to Rotuma, a Polynesian island in Fiji.
“But you won’t always have a hundred people from Fiji come to Hawai’i to dance the old dances and sing and chant in the ways of ancestors.”
Professor Hereniko showed two of his films about the coconut tree during the festival in Hawaiʻi, where the tree, beset by invasive beetles, has often been reduced to the status of an ornament for tourists, instead of a critical source of food and nourishment. “In a way, the coconut tree without its coconut symbolizes colonization and what it’s done to the Native people,” he said.
The festival officially kicked off with an opening ceremony on Thursday, June 6. But a day earlier, it began with a private event on the windward side of Oʻahu, where thousands gathered to welcome crew members of voyaging canoes. Among them was the canoe Marumaru Atua, which arrived in Honolulu last weekend after sailing for 23 days from Rarotonga in the Cook Islands. The 16-person crew navigated to Hawaiʻi using traditional knowledge of the stars and sea.
Teina Ranga is a Māori Cook Islander who is part of the Cook Islands Voyaging Society but flew separately to Honolulu at the last minute to join the delegation. He runs a nongovernmental organisation helping young islanders reconnect with their culture through fishing and farming, and hopes the festival will continue to focus more on environmental issues moving forward.
“When do we ever have an opportunity to bring Pasifika together?” he said. “We need to push the idea of valuing who we are. The world cannot just continue [on this path]. I don’t want the Cook Islands to look like this conquering city.”
Feature image taken by Anita Hofschneider.
This article originally appeared in Grist at https://grist.org/arts-culture-indigenous-pacific-island-arts-festival-cost-climate-change/
Grist is a nonprofit, independent media organisation dedicated to telling stories of climate solutions and a just future. Learn more at grist.org
