Youth leading fight to preserve traditions

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Windspeaker's Paul Barnsley was one of three journalists sent on a two-week tour of communities in the South Pacific by the Victoria-based Pacific Peoples Partnership. The non-governmental organization seeks to raise awareness of social and political issues in a part of the world that is not seen as a high-priority area in Canada for international aid. Nelson Bird, host of CTV Regina's Indigenous Circle, and Tania Williard, editor of Vancouver Native youth magazine Redwire, were the other reporters.

The young people of Ranon, a remote village of 200 souls located at the base of an active volcano on the northern end of Ambrym Island in the South Pacific, one of more than 80 islands that make up the country of Vanuatu, are organizing and reaching out to their people. Their message is a simple one: Don't believe the people from outside who tell you your ways are backward and obsolete. Believe in yourself and in the strength of your culture and community.

That's a reaction to the pressure being applied on these Indigenous people by the developed Western world, a direct and defiant response to globalization.

The Lolihor Youth Awareness Team (LYAT) is the unfunded youth group that is spreading the word about such fundamental issues all over Ambrym Island.

Vanuatu was formerly the colony of New Hebrides. Prior to achieving independence in 1980, the colony functioned under the joint rule of France and Great Britain. The government is now made up of Melanesian people, but those leaders are being pressured by international agencies to abandon their traditional ways and join the market economy.

Most grassroots people-who make up close to 90 per cent of the country's population-say their country is being crushed by a foreign debt load that leaves it vulnerable to pressures from the World Bank, the World Trade Organization and other international agencies. Those agencies want the people of Vanuatu to give up their subsistence lifestyle and become consumers and laborers.

That appears to be a problem all around the South Pacific, if not all around the developing world.

Even in Canada and the United States, subsistence lifestyles are under attack as primitive and non-productive.

Joel Simo says one has to be careful when using words like "developing." It's a Western term that has a built-in bias against all things Indigenous, the writer and Melanesian nationalist with an MA in linguistics from the University of the South Pacific believes.

"It's another form of colonization. They're just getting us dependent on this aid and then they come in and control us. If you go into any of these government offices today, you'll find a lot of foreign consultants. And those foreign consultants are advising the government as to how the country should go, which I think doesn't really boil down to the fact that we have independence," he said. "With independence, you have to make your own decisions. The colonial masters have left. But now they're back using their aid to control the country again."

Simo and the members of LYAT were intensely interested in the experiences of Indigenous people in Canada. They see the struggle for survival as distinct peoples to be something they have in common.

"It is really interesting because we've been thinking we're the only ones going through these issues. When we learned about 'Indians,' the First Nation people of the U.S. and Canada, these two countries are well off. I mean there's a lot of development. It's a Western society. We think that everybody there has equal opportunities like everybody else. But then when they come and stay with us we realize that's not the case," Simo said. "The First Nation people gave a lot of morale to the group. Because we are all addressing the same issues that they've been through and they're still addressing them. So we'll continue and work, trying to solve the problems that the colonial masters imposed on us. I think it will take time to really get the message acrss to the people, because I believe it's just a mentality, the people's mentality. I think it's just to free up the mind. We can say it's the colonial influence, but again, it goes back to each individual, how you see things yourself, how you control those things yourself and how you manage your life. I think it all boils down to that. Society has to change. We have to change. But at the same time we have to have control over ourselves. If we don't have control over ourselves then letting other influences spoil our lives, I think that's where we'll get into trouble."

Chapter 12 of Vanuatu's constitution, written after independence in 1980, guarantees that the land belongs to the people-not the chiefs-forever. Every member of a village clan owns an equal share of the village land.

Land is incredibly important to the people of Vanuatu.

"In our custom, land is like part of the family," explained Stanley Jack, the chairman of LYAT.

The people of Ranon live a subsistence lifestyle. Western people might call it Stone Age living. There are no paved roads, no vehicles, no modern plumbing, no electricity save what is produced by the one or two gasoline-powered generators in the village. Even the runways used by Vanair, the domestic airline, are unpaved strips of level grass. The people live in bamboo huts with coconut leaf roofs. Many sleep on woven bamboo mats on the floor. Cooking is done over the fire. Most of what the people consume comes directly from their land.

Chickens, pigs, goats, dogs and cats roam freely. A few cows are kept. There is only one horse on the island. It was imported by its owner for transportation purposes. The children are frightened of this strange creature. Some burst into tears at the sight of it.

There's not a lot of use for cash in Ranon. There are few places to spend it. A general store with a very limited list of wares (by Western standards) is open infrequently and receives little traffic. The only industries besides subsistence surival are fishing, raising livestock to trade for manufactured goods, and carving traditional totems for sale to tourists. The music is traditional-the string band. The tunes are melodic; the lyrics in Bislama, a trade language that combines 18th century English, some French and the village dialects.

Much like the drum groups that perform powwow music, the string band musicians crowd around the bass in the centre and sing, blending their voices in a way that is quite pleasing to the Western ear. Admirers crowd around the outside of the circle. All festive occasions require the presence of a string band.

Living so close to the earth makes the people very sensitive to their environment. Not much goes on that misses their notice. They are incredibly in tune with their land. The people are happy, healthy, despite the scarcity of modern medical facilities, and seem quite content to live as their ancestors have lived for thousands of years.

But the West seems determined to crowd its way into this world.

The young people-in their 20s and 30s-who make up LYAT are concerned that the World Bank is pressuring the national government to force land registration. Currently, there are occasional disputes about land boundaries. Some turn violent. But LYAT sees the registration and surveying of land to be the first step towards property taxation.

If the land is surveyed and registered, they worry it will be easier for outside interests to identify plots of land that they could target for acquisition and development.

"If we have land we are free," said Jack.

"When we have land, if you don't have money in your pocket you can still survive," said Simo. "Poverty, real poverty, is what you see in Asia. People begging, no houses, nothing. We see in Thailand when people lose their land, their children become prostitutes to survive. That's poverty. In Vanuatu, they say it's a poor country but everybody has land."

Stanley Jack points out that U.S. President Harry Truman coined th phrase "under-developed" in 1949. He asked who was truly under-developed, saying that people in his village all had land, homes, food and work to do on their land. Poor people in the U.S. have no land, no homes, no jobs and often, no food, he said.

"The white man's development looks good from the outside," Jack added. "In the villages, though things don't look that good, everybody has a share."

Later, Jack, Joel Simo and Pakon Bong Rodney, the co-ordinator of LYAT, all admit that they are not anti-development. They were making a point. The point is that Vanuatu people-perhaps all Indigenous peoples-have bought into the idea that the Europeans' ways are superior, that their people's ways are inferior. They need to find examples that challenge the conventional wisdom about Western ways to start the process of undoing what they call "internal colonization."

Internal colonization, they say, is all about believing you're inferior and less capable. It's about having absorbed the colonizers' arrogance at the expense of your own self-esteem and self-confidence.

Coca-Cola is marketed aggressively in the developing world. It's a symbol of American wealth and sophistication. Jack asked if coconut milk gave you tooth decay or diabetes.

It was his way of making us think about what the advertising messages from the West say to Indigenous peoples.

When a message tells you that consuming Coca-Cola makes you smart and sophisticated-simple marketing-it also tells an Indigenous person that "what I own isn't anything good to me," Jack said.

So when Western development agencies arrive in Vanuatu and apply pressure on the government to open up land for Western-style development with the unchallenged assumption that development is good, LYAT urges caution.

"We need to go slow. The answer for Vanuatu is not a completely cash economy or a completely subsistence economy. The right balance must be allowed to develop and we must remain in control," Jack said.

LYAT is also challengin