Keeping a Culture Afloat (fwd)

[phil cash cash]

http://www.latimes.com/la-fg-easter28jan28,1,4229585.story

Keeping a Culture Afloat

A revival of the Rapa Nui tongue is energizing the small community of
Easter Island natives, whose heritage is at risk of being overrun.

By Héctor Tobar
Times Staff Writer

January 28, 2004

EASTER ISLAND — 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, and 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 AD 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 daily flights
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."

Of the 3,000 or so residents here, about a third are transplants from
the Chilean mainland. Last year, Easter Island had its first armed
robbery — committed by a youth from the mainland.

"It's not that we are against the people coming from the continent,"
says Enrique Pakarati Ika, the island's Chilean-appointed governor.
"The people of Rapa Nui are very hospitable, and many times they invite
Continental people to come."

In the process, however, Hanga Roa risks becoming just another Chilean
town.

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 than 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 visitor's 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.

In public places, Rapa Nui is being replaced by Chilean-accented Spanish
laced with Rapa Nui structure, the Webers say. For example, Rapa Nui
uses frequent "reduplication" of sounds. So you might hear an Easter
Islander greet someone with "Hola, hola" in Spanish.

"Eventually, Rapa Nui will be lost," Robert says. "If Rapa Nui were on
the mainland, it would have disappeared long ago. If we're really
honest, all we're doing is delaying the inevitable."

If true, it will happen despite the long history of resistance and
perseverance of the Rapa Nui people. Against long odds, Easter
Islanders have kept their language alive through their tragic
encounters with the outside world.

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.

Because Rapa Nui has no equivalents for modern words like "computer,"
Haoa and other teachers have coined new terms. A computer, for example,
is a makimi roro uira, which literally means "brilliant mind machine."

Creating new words helps encourage invention and creativity in a
language, an essential part of keeping it alive.

"We've proved that it's possible to teach science in Rapa Nui," Haoa
says. But more important, she adds, "we're preparing our children for
the outside world by giving them a stronger sense of who they are and
where they come from."

Mauricio Valdebenito, a Chilean and a cabdriver, is among the parents
whose children will start the Rapa Nui immersion program soon, when the
next kindergarten class begins. His wife is Rapa Nui, but she and their
5-year-old daughter speak mostly Spanish at home.

"To me, all learning is a good thing. The more the better," Valdebenito
says. "I wouldn't mind hearing her speak it more. It's part of her
culture."

Haoa tries to spread the same message outside the classroom. On her
kitchen door there is a sign asking visitors to speak in Rapa Nui.
"Hare vanaga i te reio henua," it says. "In this house we speak the
voice of the people."

Haoa believes she's making progress. The other day, she was walking
across the playground when she heard something she hadn't heard for
many years, a sound that transported her to her own childhood.

A group of small children were arguing in Rapa Nui.

"They were starting to scream, but they weren't hurting each other," she
says.

So for a moment or two, all she did was listen.