Saving Rapa Nui
from LA Times [registration blah]

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, 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.

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Saving Rapa Nui

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.

Ancient tales

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.

Isolated culture

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."

Independance dreams

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.

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

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.

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.

Spread of Spanish

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.

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.

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.

posted by prof_booty | 08:57 AM