American Indian Culture and Research Journal

Prolonged stays in French Polynesia and Madagascar and later in the state of Connecticut awakened my interest in Indigenous culture and its preservation, colonial imposition and appropriations, and postcolonial relations between the colonized and colonizers. Such research could seem unreasonably rash because, according to Lyotard, Indigenous people are different, “irrepresentable,” for Europeans. Stokes too cautions to “tread warily as this is not our geography.” As a bilingual researcher in the Pacific, I feel compelled to bring knowledge of the French-speaking territories and some understanding of their different and differing political contexts to the attention of the English-speaking world I live in. Research in Pacific Island countries, including French pays, requires that its methodology and approaches be decolonized so that the Kanak (in New Caledonia) or the Polynesian (in French Polynesia and the Territory of Wallis and Futuna Islands) voice “enunciates” or spells out their concerns and priorities rather than mine. This article analyzes how tourism, because it is possible to establish it from the grass roots, encouraged within New Caledonia by the French government is used to (try to) overcome decades of colonial rule in spite of political and colonial resistance by the white settler community known as Caldoche (see fig. 1). Caldoche also often includes other white groups who have settled in New Caledonia, even if only temporarily. The article will first justify the postcolonial framework used for this analysis, including its limitations. It will then describe the (post?) colonial context of New Caledonia. Tourism is examined from a postcolonial geographic perspective to determine its validity as a tool to rebalance economic wealth in New Caledonia through economic growth in areas where the Kanak population is predominant. One aim of tourism is to counter emigration so that people remain on and exploit the tribal lands located in the two provinces where the Kanak are the majority.