Vahi Tapu: Engaging the “Vā Moana” of Contemporary Rapa Nui Onto-politics
This paper examines the role of vā in the ongoing onto-politics articulating in the Rapa Nui movement for self-determination. At the heart of Rapa Nui onto-politics of late, is the assertion of the Rapa Nui people that the island be understand as a vahi tapu; roughly translated, a sacred place. Rapa Nui place-making practices of the island as a vahi tapu emerge in a broader global, local, and state political ontology that cultural appropriates the Rapa Nui island world as a “park” to serve tourists interests of course, but also manage the island within the “Pacific Islands region” (vā moana) in terms that geopolitically secure the region within the what might be called after Indigenous scholar Jodi Byrd a “transit of Empire” that for many constitutes a military-industrial- digital entertainment complex. Rapa Nui resilience amidst the transmogrification of their vahi tapu into a Chilean National Park and UNESCO World Heritage Site during the past decade became entangled in more than six-month political occupations of the island in both 2010 and 2015 as different “family” (hua`ai) leaders (hōnui) reclaimed parts of the island world in the name of the Rapa Nui people. This paper focuses principally on the 2015 political occupation that at dawn on 26 March 2015, under the leadership of Levianti Araki, President of the Indigenous political organization Parlamento Rapa Nui created at the turn of the millennium to realize Rapa Nui self-determination, led a group of Rapa Nui leaders in an effort that closed and occupied ”El Parque Nacional Rapa Nui” (Rapa Nui National Park)—an UNESCO World Heritage Site since the late twentieth century. The event would lead to a six-month occupation of the “park” by Rapa Nui hua`ai and political organization leaders that in 2017, following complex years of political negotiation, would eventuate in an officially legislated Chilean state “concession” of “park” management to the Rapa Nui people by former Chilean President Michelle Bachelet (currently the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights). Central to the vahi tupuna popularly misconceived in the global society of the spectacle as “Easter Island” visited by over a hundred thousand tourists annually in the recent years of the millennium prior to Covid-19 restricted access, is of course the hundreds of moai monumental statues. As the root morpheme in the Rapa Nui word vahi intimates, vā political ontology is shown to often be fundamentally weaving together the “spaces between” the events of occupation and the ongoing politics of the state resolution through “concession”—an action Vice-President of Parlamento Rapa Nui, Erity Teave, characterized as a “slap in the face” in light of the larger resolution sought by Indigenous leaders— return of the all island territory claimed by Chile as land of the state to Rapa Nui title. Analysis draws upon ethnographic work (interviews and multi-sited participant observation) and archival study with the Rapa Nui people that began in 2004 and is ongoing as of 2021.