More Rapa Nui Info

[Andre Cramblit]

02/02/2004 - EASTER ISLAND
ASSOCIATED PRESS

Evelyn Hucke wants her son to speak in the language of the king who
settled this remote island more than a millennium ago, the same
Polynesian tongue spoken by the people who carved the totemic statues
that rise above the powder-blue waters of the South Pacific.

Hucke, 30, grew up speaking that language, known as Rapa Nui. But as
she walks the streets of Hanga Roa, Easter Island's only town, she
hears the Polynesian-faced children chattering and arguing in
Spanish, the language of the island's current rulers, the Chileans.

Every day is a linguistic battle for Hucke as she fights the cartoons
beamed in from South America, the Spanish repartee at the grocery
store and in the island's only schoolyard.

"Ko ai a Hotu Matu'a?" she asks her 7-year-old. Obediently, he
answers in the same language: "He was the first king who came here."

Often called the loneliest place on Earth, Easter Island is now
caught up in the swirling changes of globalization and is on the
front line of a broader effort to preserve the world's endangered
languages.

Every year, more languages pass into extinction. In the Chilean
archipelago north of the Strait of Magellan, the last dozen or so
speakers of the Kawesqar Indian language are aged. Inevitably,
Kawesqar will join Kunza and Selknam on the list of Chile's dead
languages.

Only an end to "Chileanization," local leaders here say, can rescue
Rapa Nui -- the term applies to the language, the 2,000 people who
speak it and the island itself. Rapa Nui leaders want political
autonomy from Chile or independence so they can control the migration
of Spanish-speaking "Continentals" to the island.

Saving Rapa Nui has become an obsession for a handful of people here,
including a pair of California linguists who've spent nearly three
decades helping create a Rapa Nui literature, and a former medical
worker who became a schoolteacher and launched the island's first
Rapa Nui "immersion" program.

"You realize something of your people is being lost, the spirit of
our people," says Virginia Haoa, who runs the immersion classes for
students from kindergarten through fourth grade.

For Haoa and others, saving Rapa Nui means saving Easter Island's
uniqueness -- "our culture, our cosmology, our way of being," Haoa
says. If Rapa Nui dies, so will a living connection to ancestors who
built an exotic, mysterious civilization on an island just a few
miles wide in a vast, otherwise empty stretch of the Pacific, 2,300
miles from the South American mainland.

For now, there are still Easter Islanders who can tell you, in Rapa
Nui, stories that have been passed down for generations about Hotu
Matu'a, who, around A.D. 400, arrived with seven explorers from the
land called Hiva to settle this place. You can still talk to people
whose grandfathers were part of the Birdman cult that raised one of
the last of the island's 800 famed, imposing "moai" statues. It was
later shipped off to the British Museum in London.

"What we've kept alive (of our culture) has been entirely on our own
initiative," says Alfonso Rapu, 61, who in the 1960s led one of the
most important protests against Chilean rule, escaping an arrest
warrant by hiding in the island's caves.

Intermarriage with Chilean Continentals, he says, might soon do away
with many of the 39 surnames associated with the island's tribes.

Chile has ruled the island since one of its admirals arrived here in
1888, signing a treaty with its last king, who residents believe was
later poisoned in the Chilean city of Valparaiso.

Until recently, geographic isolation kept alive the Rapa Nui
language -- a rhythmic tongue with few hard consonants -- despite the
small number of people speaking it.

But these days, the peak of tourist season brings four flights weekly
from Santiago, Chile's capital. Taxi drivers who've relocated from
Santiago cruise up and down Atamu Tekena Avenue in Hanga Roa, in
search of fares.

"Word has gotten out in Chile that you can make dollars easy on
Easter Island," explains Hucke, a member of the self-appointed "Rapa
Nui parliament," which is pushing to have the island's status placed
on the agenda of a United Nations committee on colonization. "They
come to try their luck. They aren't interested when we tell them our
culture is being destroyed."

Chileans are currently as free to come to Easter Island as Americans
are to move to Hawaii.

"The Constitution of Chile is killing my culture and my identity,"
says Petero Edmunds, the mayor of Hanga Roa and the island's only
popularly elected official. "We are a millenarian culture that
existed long before Chile did. And the only way to protect that
culture is by regulating migration."

Edmunds and other leaders head to Santiago several times a year to
negotiate autonomy with the authorities. Islanders hope to eventually
achieve a status similar to their oceanic neighbors in French
Polynesia, which was granted self-rule in 1984.

"We are Polynesians," says activist Mario Tuki Hey, expressing an
opinion shared by most anthropologists. "It's only an accident that
makes us part of Chile."

There is a growing consensus on the mainland that Easter Island
deserves a different status from other isolated corners of the
Chilean state.

"There is unanimity in the idea that certain places, like an island
located in the middle of the Pacific, should receive special
treatment," said Sen. Jaime Orpis, a member of the conservative
Independent Democratic Union who was part of a Chilean Senate
commission that visited the island in September. "They should have
autonomy."

Sen. Carlos Ominami of the Socialist Party said such a status would
probably be based on that of the Galapagos Islands, which are allowed
to control migration from Ecuador and charge a visitors' fee to raise
money for development.

The Easter Island negotiations have dragged on for at least a year.
For the time being, the island remains simply another administrative
subdivision of the city of Valparaiso, Chile's main Pacific port.

"We are as far from Valparaiso as Los Angeles is from Miami," Edmunds
says. "It does not make sense that I have to call Valparaiso to get
the money to fill a pothole or to have a Chilean bureaucrat tell me
in what language I should educate my children."

In fact, the island's school established its Rapa Nui immersion
program four years ago in defiance of Chile's education laws, which
mandate instruction primarily in Spanish. The educators and linguists
behind the program say Rapa Nui was in such desperate straits, they
couldn't afford to wait any longer.

"For anyone under 25, Rapa Nui is not their primary language," says
Nancy Weber, a linguist who has worked on the island with her
husband, Robert, since the mid-1970s.

Back then, things were different. "When we came, probably the
greatest percentage of Rapa Nui children spoke Rapa Nui as their
primary language," she says.

Television arrived on Easter Island about the same time the Webers
did. In those days, the linguists had great fun listening to the
island's schoolchildren talk -- in Rapa Nui -- about the strange and
exotic happenings on shows such as "Daniel Boone." The beaver-capped
explorers and tomahawk-wielding Indians on the series were speaking
dubbed Spanish, and the children weren't entirely sure what they were
saying or doing.

"None of them agreed with each other about what they had seen on TV
the night before," Robert says. "And none of their stories seemed to
match the `Daniel Boone' I had seen."

At the same time, the Webers set out to create Rapa Nui texts,
inviting local residents to writing workshops and publishing
mimeographed anthologies of poetry and family narratives. If Rapa Nui
was to be taught in school, they felt, it needed a literature --
writing that reflected its cultural reality.

"People were moved to tears when they produced their first books,"
Nancy recalls.

Rapa Nui, it seemed, was on the rebound.

But as time passed, Rapa Nui began to slip behind Spanish, especially
after Chilean TV expanded to a daylong schedule. By 1997, a
sociolinguistic survey of the school found that no exclusive Rapa Nui
speakers were left and that only a handful of students
were "coordinate bilingual," or equally fluent in Spanish and Rapa
Nui.

The Chileans are only the most recent in a long line of Europeans and
South Americans to control the island. For centuries, colonialists
and slavers decimated the population.

The small group of elders who could read Easter Island's rongo rongo
writing system -- preserved in 28 carved wooden tablets -- all died
as slaves in 19th century Peru. By the time the Chileans arrived, the
Rapa Nui people numbered fewer than 200.

In the 20th century, Chile ruled the island with a mixture of
paternalism and benign neglect. Older residents remember an island
without electricity or running water, run by Chilean naval
officers "as if the island were a ship and we were all sailors."

Chilean educators encouraged the parents of Easter Island's "best and
brightest" to send their children to mainland boarding schools.

Haoa, the Rapa Nui teacher, was sent off to Chile when she was 9. She
suffered an unbearable loneliness for months on end, rarely hearing a
word of her native language. "The nuns told my parents I was too
smart, that it would be a waste to let me stay on the island," she
says.

As an adult with a Chilean university degree, she returned to the
island to work at the local clinic -- until the day her oldest
daughter started kindergarten at Easter Island's elementary school.

"I had always spoken to her in Rapa Nui because I knew when she grew
up there would be pressure to speak in Spanish," Haoa remembers.
After that first day of kindergarten, Haoa discovered that Rapa Nui
was being treated "like an alien language" in her daughter's class,
which was conducted entirely in Spanish.

Soon Haoa was volunteering to organize Rapa Nui workshops at the
school. Eventually, she became a full-time teacher there. "It was
urgent that we have our children speaking our language," she says.

Related Links
http://www.alphabets-world.com/rapanui.html
http://www.ethnologue.com/show_language.asp?code=PBA