Rapa Nui knowledge in the face of socio-ecological crises and colonialism (2019-2024)

Abstract (English)

This presentation analyzes how the Rapa Nui people face critical socio-ecological peaks - such as the COVID-19 pandemic and plastic pollution - through everyday reorganizations articulated from their own principles, such as maramarama (ancestral knowledge, cultural intelligence, and shared ethics), the kaiŋa (inhabited territory, relational principle of inhabitation, space of care and respect), the ʻūmaŋa (shared work, cooperation, solidarity), and the hakahara (extended kinship networks, family), rooted in shared memories and situated knowledge (Haraway, 1995).
These critical peaks are part of permanent socio-ecological crises that have traversed Rapa Nui history and that in contemporary terms are deepened by the Chilean colonial imposition and by global capitalist production, of which Chile is a part, but not a central actor.
From the approach of Critical Disaster Studies (Oliver-Smith, 2022; Gaillard, 2018; Matthewman and Uekusa, 2022; Uekusa et al., 2025), the uncritical use of categories such as resilience or adaptation to understand socio-ecological crises is challenged by proposing that in colonized island contexts, the vulnerability of territories and their populations derives from historical structures of dispossession, ongoing power relations and imposed development policies (Tuhiwai, 2016; Mignolo, 2009), in this case by the Chilean state on the Rapa Nui people.
The analysis is organized around three ethnographic cases that show how Rapa Nui people respond to crisis through everyday reorganization, cultural reinvention, and epistemic sovereignty. The first examines the ʻumu (underground stone oven), a pre-colonial cooking practice that is at once an intergenerational space for the transmission of situated knowledge, memory, and family and community organization. Its contemporary use, even during the pandemic, reflects a kaiŋa and maramarama ethic of care and communal sharing. The second deals with local tourism planning processes, based on conversations and meetings between different institutions and community representatives, in which colonial control is displaced and the community's own political and cultural agency is affirmed. The decision to close the airport during the pandemic, based on principles such as tapu (sacred prohibition), moʻa (respect), and ʻūmaŋa (shared work, cooperation, solidarity), is an example of this epistemic agency. The third case presents an analysis of the making of dance costumes for Tāpati (the island's main cultural festival) from macro- and microplastics collected from the coasts, as a practice of cultural reinvention and epistemic sovereignty that transforms waste into a message of resistance that allows us to claim relational ways of living in the face of capitalist devastation.
This presentation argues that these practices are expressions of cultural reinvention (Wagner, 2020) and epistemic sovereignty (Tuhiwai, 2016) that allow for facing critical peaks by reorganizing the present and sustaining ways of life that resist and reconfigure contemporary forms of colonialism from their own ontological frameworks.