Māori and Pasifika leaders are leading climate adaptation, guided by ancestral knowledge and Indigenous principles to build resilience and shape global solutions.

Last week, they played a key role in launching a new Indigenous climate adaptation network at a wānanga ahead of Adaptation Futures 2025, held on October 13-16 in Ōtautahi Christchurch.

The network aims to build a global movement grounded in Indigenous knowledge, centred on decolonising systems and financial mechanisms, and ensuring Indigenous peoples have direct access to climate finance, the funding that supports actions to address and adapt to climate change.

The wānanga was led by Lisa Tumahai (Ngāi Tahu), New Zealand patron for Adaptation Futures 2025 and deputy chair of the NZ Climate Commission, and Tagaloa Cooper (Ngāti Hine, Ngāpuhi, Niue), director of the Climate Change Resilience Programme at the Secretariat of the Pacific Regional Environment Programme (SPREP) in Apia, Samoa.

“The Indigenous Forum came from what we learnt at the previous two adaptation conferences. The recommendations from Indigenous peoples were to step it up a bit at this conference and create an intentional day and space for Indigenous voices,” says Tumahai.

“For the first time, people are really seeing the commonalities we share with other Indigenous populations, whether they’re from Canada, Africa, or the Amazon.”

Kotahitanga across Te Moana-nui-a-Kiwa
Cooper said many of the Pasifika in attendance felt “at home” in Aotearoa and welcomed the opportunity to have a major conference hosted in the region, as international events are often inaccessible due to high costs.

“I’d like to have more of these types of conversations with our cousins in New Zealand where we can exchange knowledge, learn from each other, and also be innovative about how we do adapt,” she says.

She added that, in speaking with Pacific participants, there was a strong call for deeper engagement with iwi across Aotearoa, particularly in rural communities facing similar challenges to small island nations, to create more opportunities for sharing and exchanging traditional knowledge.

The value of Indigenous knowledge
Cooper emphasised that Indigenous peoples hold a vast body of knowledge that has long been marginalised.

“Science now is telling us what we’ve always known as Indigenous people,” Cooper says.

“We must remember our ancestors navigated the vast oceans to get here and then grew nations in very difficult places. There is a lot to learn from our people because we have adapted to live in new lands and we’re still here.”

As Indigenous observer for the World Bank’s Climate Investment Funds, lawyer Taumata Toki (Ngāti Rehua) says this is a growing area that deserves attention, given the value Indigenous peoples bring and how their knowledge can strengthen climate adaptation projects.

He says he is continually inspired by Indigenous leaders around the world who are not only experts in Western knowledge systems but also grounded in Indigenous principles that are transforming how climate change is addressed.

Toki says the guiding aim of tikanga is balance, a core concept that aligns with many other Indigenous worldviews and shapes how they approach climate change and sustainability.

Barriers to climate finance
Indigenous peoples globally have often had limited access to UN climate change negotiation spaces.

Tumahai said barriers include accreditation requirements or registered body status to access climate finance.

Cooper added that smaller nations and small administrations often lack the capacity, time, and personnel to develop complex project proposals, causing delays and frustration in the flow of funds.

When asked whether Māori face additional barriers to accessing climate adaptation funding as Indigenous peoples within a developed nation, Toki says that, on a global scale, Māori are at the forefront of sovereignty over what development looks like.

However, he acknowledges that when this is set against the wider context of what is happening in Aotearoa, “it doesn’t look the best,” pointing to the ongoing challenges Māori face at home despite their strong global standing.

Māori-led adaptation and succession planning
“When it comes to Māori-led adaptation, it needs to start in our court,” he says. “We need to have our own really thought-out discussion in terms of how we develop these projects to be both tikanga-aligned, but also wider Indigenous peoples’ principles aligned.”

Once internal cohesion across iwi is established, state support will play an important role.

Despite the challenges, Toki says the potential ahead is immense, both economically and environmentally, and Aotearoa has the opportunity to be world-leading in this space.

Tumahai agrees that the work has to start at home, and her passion, which she has long championed, is succession planning to bring rangatahi into the work.

“And with that succession planning, it’s not to be dismissive of the pakeke or kaumatua who are really that korowai and the knowledge holders,” she says.

“We have our own systems that ensure the conversations are held and led where the knowledge is sitting.”

Te Aniwaniwa is a digital producer for Te Ao Māori News and contributes to Asia Pacific Report. This article was first published by Te Ao Māori News and is republished with permission.

Article by AsiaPacificReport.nz

Forty years ago today, French secret agents bombed the Greenpeace campaign flagship  Rainbow Warrior in an attempt to stop the environmental organisation’s protest against nuclear testing at Moruroa Atoll in Mā’ohi Nui.

People gathered on board Rainbow Warrior III to remember photographer Fernando Pereira, who was killed in the attack, and to honour the legacy of those who stood up to nuclear testing in the Pacific.

The Rainbow Warrior’s final voyage before the bombing was Operation Exodus, a humanitarian mission to the Marshall Islands. There, Greenpeace helped relocate more than 320 residents of Rongelap Atoll, who had been exposed to radiation from US nuclear testing.

The dawn ceremony was hosted by Ngāti Whātua Ōrākei and attended by more than 150 people. Speeches were followed by the laying of a wreath and a moment of silence.

Tui Warmenhoven (Ngāti Porou), the chair of the Greenpeace Aotearoa board, said it was a day to remember for the harm caused by the French state against the people of Mā’ohi Nui.

Warmenhoven worked for 20 years in iwi research and is a grassroots, Ruatoria-based community leader who works to integrate mātauranga Māori with science to address climate change in Te Tai Rāwhiti.

She encouraged Māori to stand united with Greenpeace.

“Ko te mea nui ki a mātou, a Greenpeace Aotearoa, ko te whawhai i ngā mahi tūkino a rātou, te kāwanatanga, ngā rangatōpū, me ngā tāngata whai rawa, e patu ana i a mātou, te iwi Māori, ngā iwi o te ao, me ō mātou mātua, a Ranginui rāua ko Papatūānuku,” e ai ki a Warmenhoven.

A defining moment in Aotearoa’s nuclear-free stand
“The bombing of the Rainbow Warrior was a defining moment for Greenpeace in its willingness to fight for a nuclear-free world,” said Dr Russel Norman, the executive director of Greenpeace Aotearoa.

He noted it was also a defining moment for Aotearoa in the country’s stand against the United States and France, who conducted nuclear tests in the region.

In 1987, the New Zealand Nuclear Free Zone, Disarmament, and Arms Control Act officially declared the country a nuclear-free zone.

This move angered the United States, especially due to the ban on nuclear-powered or nuclear-armed ships entering New Zealand ports.

Because the US followed a policy of neither confirming nor denying the presence of nuclear weapons, it saw the ban as breaching the ANZUS Treaty and suspended its security commitments to New Zealand.

The Rainbow Warrior’s final voyage before it was bombed was Operation Exodus, during which the crew helped relocate more than 320 residents of Rongelap Atoll in the Marshall Islands, who had been exposed to radiation from US nuclear testing between 1946 and 1958.

The legacy of Operation Exodus
Between 1946 and 1958, the United States carried out 67 nuclear tests in the Marshall Islands.

For decades, it denied the long-term health impacts, even as cancer rates rose and children were born with severe deformities.

Despite repeated pleas from the people of Rongelap to be evacuated, the US government failed to act until Greenpeace stepped in to help.

“The United States government effectively used them as guinea pigs for nuclear testing and radiation to see what would happen to people, which is obviously outrageous and disgusting,” Dr Norman said.

He said it was important not to see Pacific peoples as victims, as they were powerful campaigners who played a leading role in ending nuclear testing in the region.

Between March and April this year, Rainbow Warrior III returned to the Marshall Islands to conduct independent research into the radiation levels across the islands to see whether it’s safe for the people of Rongelap to return.

What advice do you give to this generation about nuclear issues?
“Kia kotahi ai koutou ki te whai i ngā mahi uaua i mua i a mātou ki te whawhai i a rātou mā, e mahi tūkino ana ki tō mātou ao, ki tō mātou kōkā a Papatūānuku, ki tō mātou taiao,” hei tā Tui Warmenhoven.

A reminder to stay united in the difficult world ahead in the fight against threats to the environment.

Warmenhoven also encouraged Māori to support Greenpeace Aotearoa.

Dr Norman believed the younger generations should be inspired to activism by the bravery of those from the Pacific and Greenpeace who campaigned for a nuclear-free world 40 years ago.

“They were willing to take very significant risks, they sailed their boats into the nuclear test zone to stop those nuclear tests, they were arrested by the French, beaten up by French commandos,” he said.

Republished from Te Ao Māori News with permission.

Article by AsiaPacificReport.nz

Over 30 years the French government tested 193 nuclear weapons in Māohi Nui and today Indigenous peoples still suffer the impacts through intergenerational cancers.

In 1975, France stopped atmospheric tests and moved to underground testing.

Hinamoeura Morgant-Cross was eight years old when the French nuclear tests at Moruroa and Fangataufa stopped in 1996.

“After poisoning us for 30 years, after using us as guinea pigs for 30 years, France condemned us to pay for all the cost of those cancers,” Morgant-Cross said.

She is a mother of two boys and married to another Māohi in Mataiea, Tahiti, and says her biggest worry is what will be left for the next generation.

As a politician in the French Polynesian Assembly she sponsored a unanimously supported resolution in September 2023 supporting the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW).

It called on France to join the treaty, as one of the original five global nuclear powers and one of the nuclear nine possessors of nuclear weapons today.

As a survivor of nuclear testing, Morgant-Cross has worked with hibakusha, which is the term used to describe the survivors of the US atomic bombs in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan, in 1945.

Together, as living examples of the consequences, they are trying to push governments to demilitarise and end the possession of nuclear arsenals.

Connections from Māohi Nui to Aotearoa
Morgant-Cross spoke to Te Ao Māori News from Whāingaroa where she, along with other manuhiri of Hui Oranga, planted kowhangatara (spinifex) in the sand dunes for coastal restoration to build resilience against storms or tsunamis at a time of increased climate crises.

In the 1970s and 1980s, many of the anti-nuclear protests were in response to the tests in Māohi Nui, French Polynesia.

The Nuclear Free and Independent Pacific (NFIP) movement began in Fiji in 1975 after the first Nuclear Free Pacific Conference, which was organised by Against French Testing in Moruroa (ATOM).

The Pacific Peoples’ Anti-Nuclear Action Committee was founded by Hilda Halkyard-Harawira and Grace Robertson, and in 1982 they hosted the first Hui Oranga which brought the movement for a nuclear-free and independent Pacific home to Aotearoa.

In 1985, Greenpeace was protesting against the French nuclear tests in Moruroa on its flagship Rainbow Warrior when the French government sent spies and members of its military to bomb the ship at its berth in Auckland Harbour. The two explosions led to the death of crew member Fernando Pereira.

Condemned to intergenerational cancer
“We still have diseases from generation to generation,” she says.

Non-profit organisation Nuclear Information and Resources Services data shows radiation is more harmful to women with cancer rates and death 50 percent higher than among men.

In her family, Morgant-Cross’ great-grandmother, grandmother, aunt and sister have been diagnosed with thyroid or breast cancer.

A mother and lawyer at the time, Morgant-Cross was diagnosed with leukaemia at 25 years old.

Valentina Cross, her mother has continuing thyroid problems, needs to take pills for the rest of her life and, similarly, Hinamoeura has to take pills to keep the leukaemia dormant for the rest of her life.

Being told the nuclear tests were “clean”, Morgant-Cross didn’t learn about the legacy of the nuclear bombs until she was 30 years old when former French Polynesian President Oscar Temaru filed a complaint against France for alleged crimes against humanity at the International Criminal Court (ICC) for the the nuclear tests.

She then saw a list of radiation-induced diseases, which included thyroid cancer, breast cancer, and leukaemia and she realised it wasn’t that her family had “bad genes”.

Known impacts ‘buried’ by the French state
Morgant-Cross says her people were victims of French propaganda as they were told there were no effects from the nuclear tests.

A 2000 research paper published in the Cancer Causes & Control journal said the thyroid rates in French Polynesia were two to three times higher than Maōri in New Zealand and Hawaians in Hawaii.

In 2021, more than two decades later, Princeton University’s Science and Global Security programme, the multimedia newsroom Disclose and research collective INTERPT released an investigation — The Moruroa Files — using declassified French defence documents.

“The state has tried hard to bury the toxic heritage of these tests,” Geoffrey Livolsi, Disclose’s editor-in-chief told The Guardian.

The report concluded about 110,000 people were exposed to ionising radiation. That number was almost the entire Polynesian population at the time.

New nuclear issues and justice
Similarly in Japan, the government and scientists are denying the links between high thyroid cancer rates and the Fukushima disaster.

Morgant-Cross said she was also concerned with the dumping of treated nuclear waste especially after pushback from NGOs, Pacific states, and experts.

The Pacific Islands Forum had an independent expert panel of world-class scientists and global experts on nuclear issues who assessed the data related to Japan’s decision to discharge ALPS-treated nuclear wastewater and found it lacked a sound scientific basis and offered viable alternatives which were ignored.

In Māohi Nui, much of the taxes go towards managing high cancer rates and Morgant-Cross said they were not given compensation to cover the medical assistance they deserved.

In 2010, a compensation law was passed and between then and 2020, RNZ Pacific reported France had compensated French Polynesia with US$30 million. And in 2021, it was reported to have paid US$16.6 million within the year but only 46 percent of the compensation claims were accepted.

“During July 2024 France spent billions of dollars to clean up the river Seine in Paris [for the [Olympic Games] and I was so shocked,” Morgant-Cross said.

“You can’t help us on medical care, you can’t help us on cleaning your nuclear rubbish in the South Pacific, but you can put billions of dollars to clean a river that is still disgusting?”

As a politician and anti-nuclear activist, Morgant-Cross hopes for nuclear justice and a world of peace.

She has started a movement named the Māohi Youth Resiliency in hopes to raise awareness of the nuclear legacy by telling her story and also learning how to help Māohi in this century.

Republished from Te Ao Māori News with permission.

Article by AsiaPacificReport.nz

West Papuan independence advocate Octo Mote is in Aotearoa New Zealand to win support for independence for West Papua, which has been ruled by Indonesia for more than 60 years.

Mote is vice-president of the United Liberation Movement for West Papua (ULMWP) and is being hosted in New Zealand by the Green Party, which Mote said had always been a “hero” for West Papua.

He spoke at a West Papua seminar at the Māngere Mountain Education Centre tonight.

ULMWP president Benny Wenda has alleged more than 500,000 Papuans have been killed since the occupation, and millions of hectares of ancestral forests, rivers and mountains have been destroyed or polluted for “corporate profit”.

The struggle for West Papuans
“Being born a West Papuan, you are already an enemy of the nation [Indonesia],” Mote says.

“The greatest challenge we are facing right now is that we are facing the colonial power who lives next to us.”

If West Papuans spoke up about what was happening, they were considered “separatists”, Mote says, regardless of whether they are journalists, intellectuals, public servants or even high-ranking Indonesian generals.

“When our students on the ground speak of justice, they’re beaten up, put in jail and [the Indonesians] kill so many of them,” Mote says.

Mote is a former journalist and says that while he was working he witnessed Indonesian forces openly fire at students who were peacefully demonstrating their rights.

“We are in a very dangerous situation right now. When our people try to defend their land, the Indonesian government ignores them and they just take the land without recognising we are landowners,” he says.

The ‘ecocide’ of West Papua
The ecology in West Papua iss being damaged by mining, deforestation, and oil and gas extraction. Mote says Indonesia wants to “wipe them from the land and control their natural resources”.

He says he is trying to educate the world that defending West Papua means defending the world, especially small islands in the Pacific.

West Papua is the western half of the island of New Guinea, bordering the independent nation of Papua New Guinea. New Guinea has the world’s third-largest rainforest after the Amazon and Congo and it is crucial for climate change mitigation as they sequester and store carbon.

Mote says the continued deforestation of New Guinea, which West Papuan leaders are trying to stop, would greatly impact on the small island countries in the Pacific, which are among the most vulnerable to climate change.

Mote also says their customary council in West Papua has already considered the impacts of climate change on small island nations and, given West Papua’s abundance of land the council says that by having sovereignty they would be able to both protect the land and support Pacific Islanders who need to migrate from their home islands.

In 2021, West Papuan leaders pledged to make ecocide a serious crime and this week Vanuatu, Fiji and Samoa submitted a court proposal to the International Criminal Court (ICJ) to recognise ecocide as a crime.

Support from local Indonesians
Mote says there are Indonesians who support the indigenous rights movement for West Papuans. He says there are both NGOs and a Papuan Peace Network founded by West Papuan peace campaigner Neles Tebay.

“There is a movement growing among the academics and among the well-educated people who have read the realities among those who are also victims of the capitalist investors, especially in Indonesia when they introduced the Omnibus Law.”

The so-called Omnibus Law was passed in 2020 as part of outgoing President Joko Widodo’s goals to increase investment and industrialisation in Indonesia. The law was protested against because of concerns it would be harmful for workers due to changes in working conditions, and the environment because it would allow for increased deforestation.

Mote says there has been an “awakening”, especially among the younger generations who are more open-minded and connected to the world, who could see it both as a humanitarian and an environmental issue.

The ‘transfer’ of West Papua to Indonesia
“The [former colonial nation] Dutch [traded] us like a cow,” Mote says.

The former Dutch colony was passed over to Indonesia in 1963 in disputed circumstances but the ULMWP calls it an “invasion”.

From 1957, the Soviet Union had been supplying arms to Indonesia and, during that period, the Indonesian Communist Party had become the largest political party in the country.

The US government urged the Dutch government to give West Papua to Indonesia in an attempt to appease the communist-friendly Indonesian government as part of a US drive to stop the spread of communism in Southeast Asia.

The US engineered a meeting between both countries, which resulted in the New York Agreement, giving control of West Papua to the UN in 1962 and then Indonesia a year later.

The New York Agreement stipulated that the population of West Papua would be entitled to an act of self-determination.

The ‘act of no choice’
This decolonisation agreement was titled the 1969 Act of Free Choice, which is referred to as “the act of no choice” by pro-independence activists.

Mote says they witnessed “how the UN allowed Indonesia to cut us into pieces, and they didn’t say anything when Indonesia manipulated our right to self-determination”.

The manipulation Mote refers to is for the Act of Free Choice. Instead of a national referendum, the Indonesian military hand-picked 1025 West Papuan “representatives” to vote on behalf of the 816,000 people. The representatives were allegedly threatened, bribed and some were held at gunpoint to ensure a unanimous vote.

Leaders of the West Papuan independence movement assert that this was not a real opportunity to exercise self-determination as it was manipulated. However, it was accepted by the UN.

Pacific support at UN General Assembly
Mote has came to Aotearoa after the 53rd Pacific Island Forum Leaders summit in Tonga last week and he has come to discuss plans over the next five years. Mote hopes to gain support to take what he calls the “slow-motion genocide” of West Papua back to the UN General Assembly.

“In that meeting we formulated how we can help really push self-determination as the main issue in the Pacific Islands,” Mote says.

Mote says there was a focus on self-determination of West Papua, Kanaky/New Caledonia and Tahiti. He also said the focus was on what he described as the current colonisation issue with capitalists and global powers having vested interests in the Pacific region.

The movement got it to the UN General Assembly in 2018, so Mote says it is achievable. In 2018, Pacific solidarity was shown as the Republic of the Marshall Islands, Tuvalu and the Republic of Vanuatu all spoke out in support of West Papua.

They affirmed the need for the matter to be returned to the United Nations, and the Solomon Islands voiced its concerns over human rights abuses and violations.

What needs to be done
He says that in the next five years Pacific nations need to firstly make the Indonesian government accountable for its actions in West Papua. He also says outgoing President Widodo should be held accountable for his “involvement”.

Mote says New Zealand is the strongest Pacific nation that would be able to push for the human rights and environmental issues happening, especially as he alleges Australia always backs Indonesian policies.

He says he is looking to New Zealand to speak up about the atrocities taking place in West Papua and is particularly looking for support from the Greens, Labour and Te Pāti Māori for political support.

The coalition government announced a plan of action on July 30 this year, which set a new goal of $6 billion in annual two-way trade with Indonesia by 2029.

“New Zealand is strongly committed to our partnership with Indonesia,” Foreign Affairs Minister Winston Peters said at the time.

“There is much more we can and should be doing together.”

Te Aniwaniwa Paterson is a digital producer for Te Ao Māori News. Republished by Asia Pacific Report with permission.

Article by AsiaPacificReport.nz

Hawai’ian academic Dr Emalani Case has condemned the 2024 Rimpac military exercise that began off the coast of Hawai’i today, saying the military personnel from 29 countries taking part are “practising to invade”.

“They call it practising defence but they’re really learning how to defend an empire while putting indigenous people at risk,” she said.

Hawai’i has been heavily impacted on by militarisation.

Dr Case, a senior lecturer at Auckland University, said her people had had to deal with military harm and damage to their people and environment for more than 100 years.

The kingdom of Hawai’i was invaded by the US in 1893. The monarchy was overthrown, and the islands have stayed under US control since, with several large military bases.

Dr Case said the military made it a hard place to live when the land and people were routinely dismissed and disregarded.

The US Navy had publicly said it was committed to the environment and reducing harm.

Nonetheless, it had had a highly destructive track record when it came to pollution and environmental harm, she said.

For example, SINKEX was an activity during Rimpac where various navies shoot ammunition at decommissioned ships off the coast of Kauai island.

Dr Case told Te Ao Māori News, “The ships just sink and they leave them there. So there are toxins leaking out into our ocean.”

Anti-war groups demand end to war games as Rimpac begins.  Video: Hawai’i News Now

Tourism paradise?
Te Ao Maōri News asked Dr Case why Hawai’i was known as a “paradise” tourist destination but many people did not know about the violent history.

Dr Case referenced the works of the late Dr Teresia Teaiwa, an I-Kiribati and African-American scholar, who had said tourism and military worked together to dispossess and displace Hawai’ians.

“‘Militourism’ is a phenomenon by which a military or paramilitary force ensures the smooth running of a tourist industry, and that same tourist industry masks the military force behind it.”

— Teresia Teaiwa

Tourism masked the military violence by placing a flower over it, or a swinging hula girl, Dr Case said.

“[Hawai’i] is beautiful but the US military is one of the biggest abusers of that beauty.”

The people of Hawai’i were often left behind and focus placed on tourists, yet residents were without enough water or resources to house and care for the people. Dr Case said this explained the “enormous diaspora of Kānaka Maoli” living outside Hawai’i.

“We cannot be thinking about relying on the 25,000 personnel who are going to be coming, bringing their dollars, but also bringing their violence, bringing the increase in sex trafficking, bringing in an increase in violence against women.”

The only year there was not an increase in sex trafficking and violence during Rimpac was in 2020 because of the covid-19 pandemic, which downscaled Rimpac and meant military personnel were not able to go ashore, she said.

“That’s what they’re bringing to our islands.”

Violent attack on akua
Kānaka Maoli say they have a spiritual and genealogical connection to the oceans and lands. This includes Kanaloa and Papahānaumoku, the gods of ocean and earth, which is similar to Tangaroa and Papatūānuku in Aotearoa.

Papahānaumoku is the akua in Hawai’i that births their moku, islands.

“Any assaults against our akua, our gods, is an assault against us, it’s an assault against our whakapapa, it’s an assault against everything that we stand for,” Dr Case said.

Dr Case grew up and her whānau still live in Waimea, 45 minutes from Pōhakuloa, one of the largest military training facilities. She grew up feeling and hearing bombs all the time.

“I grew up hearing and feeling bombs all the time and it’s a kind of pain you don’t ever want to experience because you know what’s happening to Papa, what’s happening to your family. We view land, mountains, rivers, ocean as family.”

— Emalani Case

Rimpac and Palestine, West Papua and Kanaky
Rimpac was an international issue, Dr Case said, and a gateway event.

“We’ve got to think about these colonial nations coming together to train and provide so-called security and safety to the world while really putting all of us at risk, who have never been deemed human enough to be worthy of that same safety and security,” she said.

The nations participating in Rimpac include Israel and Indonesia.

Dr Case said her homeland was being turned into a training ground for “imperial genocidal regimes” which learned, practised and honed their skills to then commit genocide in Palestine and West Papua.

She also cited the participation of France, which had no proximity to the Pacific but had “oppressed Pacific brothers and sisters in the French-occupied Kanaky”.

“Militarism is upheld by and supports settler colonialism. It supports white supremacy.”

Dr Case said calling for an end to Rimpac and demanding that New Zealand withdraw was not just about saving Hawai’i.

She said boycotting Rimpac was about peace, demilitarisation, decolonisation and climate justice.

“The US military is one of the largest contributors of pollutants into the environment.”

Rimpac and FestPAC
Dr Case was in Hawai’i for Protecting Oceania, part of FestPAC — the festival of Pacific arts and culture hosted by Hawai’i this year.

She said there was a lot of discussion about Rimpac during Protecting Oceania.

“Rimpac and FestPAC didn’t happen at the exact same time but it’s interesting to think about the convergence of these cultural celebrations and violent military detonations around the same time, in the same waters, and on the same land.”

She was pleased to see people holding banners saying “STOP RIMPAC” in the closing ceremony at FestPAC. She said culture and politics went hand in hand.

Te Aniwaniwa Paterson is a digital producer for Te Ao Māori News. This article is republished with permission.

Article by AsiaPacificReport.nz