The only alternative is to decolonize the land

Decolonization is not a metaphor (Tuck & Yang, 2012). At its core, the practice of decolonial research and activism involves a commitment to the principles of Indigenous self-determination and to the repatriation of Indigenous land. Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang write that “decolonization specifically requires the repatriation of Indigenous land and life” (2012, p. 21). Beginning with our understanding of land as sovereignty, it is clear that all acts of decolonization as well as attempts at creating alternative development pathways, centred on Indigenous self-determination, must begin with returning land to Indigenous control. Across Oceania, the overwhelming majority of land, over 80% in most countries, is held under customary tenure arrangements. Like other parts of the region, in Vanuatu, the overwhelming majority of land (currently around 88%) is held under customary tenure managed by customary institutions governed by chiefs, or councils of chiefs, that determine use and access rights over an area of land in accordance with customary principles. In Vanuatu’s traditional economy, people live in large extended family groups and satisfy their food and other basic requirements largely through customary access to land and sea resources, and they generally speak a local Indigenous vernacular language, participate in customary ceremonies and have disputes resolved by local leaders (R. Regenvanu, 2010). Leasing customary land, particularly where it results in the eviction of the Indigenous population—as is increasingly happening in Vanuatu, has profound implications for the operation of customary systems, and for the social and kinship relationships bound within these systems. Removal of land from the customary system has been markedly increasing since 2001, when Vanuatu began to experience a dramatic rush to lease customary land, with the result that over 10% of all customary land is now leased (Scott et al., 2012). On Efate Island where the national capital Port Vila is situated, 43.6% of land previously held under customary tenure is now leased. Many of these leases hug the coastline, with over 56.55% of the coastline of Efate Island now leased. The coastline of Efate represents much of the most arable land that is best suited for cultivation. It is concerning that issues of large-scale land leasing and Indigenous dispossession have occurred in post-colonial Indigenous-governed states, including Vanuatu and Papua New Guinea. In self-governing Indigenous states, key state actors have often been involved in undermining Indigenous land rights. Lease data for Vanuatu indicate that successive Ministers for Land have repeatedly leased customary land without the consent of customary owner groups. At its highest point, in 2004, the Minister for Land signed just under 250 leases in 1 year over customary land, generally without the consent or knowledge of the customary landowning groups (McDonnell, 2017). Numerous court cases and Ombudsman decisions indicate that successive Ministers for Land have abused their powers by leasing customary and urban state land so as to grant land to themselves, close family members, kin, wantoks (one talk people with a shared language and cultural bond), political associates and close business associates (McDonnell, 2018). Acts of dispossession are often sites of Indigenous resistance. As knowledge about the dramatic and widespread scale of the land rush in Vanuatu became available, a political movement grew that critiqued the actions of powerful political figures and called for land reform to change the land laws so as to better protect Indigenous rights. As part of this broader political movement Ralph Regenvanu entered politics first as an independent, and later formed a political party, the Graon mo Jastis Pati (Land and Justice Party). A major platform of the Graon mo Jastis Pati was changing the land laws so as to stop the rapacious leasing of customary land, consistent with the recommendations of the 2006 National Land Summit and other meetings of civil society. In 2013, Ralph Regenvanu became the Minister of Land and we began our efforts to realize this agenda and create substantial reforms of the land laws of Vanuatu and the Constitution. These efforts were supported by a Ministry of Land taskforce, the President and other members of the Malvatumauri (National Council of Chiefs) as well as various working groups from civil society, business and the banking sector. While the description we have just offered details the formal roles that we held in creating new land laws in Vanuatu, it does not describe our collaborative process or practice of working together. Here, we present a transcript of one of our virtual discussions over Zoom on how we began collaborating on land issues: Ralph Regenvanu: I came from the background of having worked with the [Vanuatu Cultural Centre] fieldworkers on the Traditional Money Banks project which involved workshops across Vanuatu. These workshops came up with the idea of needing to have an urgent national meeting to talk about land issues because the leasing of customary land was out of control . . . . The National Land Summit happened the following year, and made twenty resolutions around changes needed to land law and administrative arrangements. I researched land and kastom [custom] with the fieldworkers network. We really wanted to understand what people in Vanuatu valued and what they wanted to see maintained, revitalized and protected. And it became clear that maintaining and protecting those systems would not be possible with the scale of land dealings that were occurring. So, then, we worked to build coalitions between people and organisations to make sure policies and laws were changed, and then moving in the direction and trying to do that. In the Vanuatu Cultural Centre, we were trying to work alongside people and do what was needed but we were constrained by limited resources, and by being a statutory organization in ways I have written about in another paper (R. Regenvanu, 2015). Another complication was that there were sometimes difficulties between fieldworkers and chiefs. Sometimes, they could work together but sometimes they would have different views. Siobhan McDonnell: For me, such a big part of the story around my coming to Vanuatu and working on these issues comes from my previous experience working in Indigenous Australia. So much of my experience before I came to Vanuatu was listening to the impact of dispossession on Indigenous people in Australia, the history of colonization, the stolen generations and the long history of trauma that comes from that. And, so, then, to be in places where that was happening, where land leasing was occurring and people were literally losing access to customary land was like watching the processes of dispossession occurring. When I first went out into North Efate in 2007 there was no real leasing then. It was really just villages and one or two other developments. But when I later began work in North Efate, in 2010, it was a landscape where land issues were tense, it was so fraught. When I first arrived, I was asked to run legal clinics, so, that is what I did. Men would come to me with leases and ask me how they could break them, and often they were signed and legal and there was not much I could do. [However, t]here were some leases that I did manage to break. And I also got to see, in detail, the arrangements that people had entered into which were incredibly unfair on the side of the landowners. In those early legal clinics, people would come to see me with leases that they had signed but had no idea what was in them. And then, over time, I could watch the other developments that took place in the region, and the land deals. Ralph Regenvanu: Yes you came from all the legal and ethnographic research that you had done for years with Lelepa people. That experience of people losing their land. Your experience of working with Aboriginal people on land rights, on understanding the issues of Lelepa people, of being an anthropologist and lawyer was unique. We needed a way to actualize the concerns that people had and turn these into drafting. And, so, then, we met in the policy space, trying to address some of these issues. Our backgrounds were important because you were not just a consultant being flown in. You came out of that specific context of being with communities who were actually losing land and the urgency of having to deal with those issues. And, I was coming from the same situation, it wasn’t my land that was lost but I could feel it through the people that I was working with, through the consultations that had been run with the fieldworkers and in the Land Summit. It was an urgent issue that needed to be resolved. You and I were working with our broader team to make sure that we captured what people wanted from the broad consultations that we held, working alongside people. But also informed by what we both knew about the situation already, and our practical knowledge of the leases and the legal arrangements that were being made with landowners. All the work we did to create safeguards around the leasing process, and make sure that leases would be fairer in the future. (R. Regenvanu & S. McDonnell, personal communication, April 29, 2021) Here, we discussed how our collaboration working towards the land reforms was built from our various experiences of providing legal advice on, hearing and understanding the concerns of the people that we worked alongside and eventually meeting in the policy space on land issues in an attempt to address these concerns. Collaborating in this policy space on land issues is something that was already familiar to both of us because of our previous experiences, and is something that we both continue to do together, and in our own work. For scholars, these spaces are sometimes described in terms of the practice of engaged anthropology (Kirsch, 2018; Low & Merry, 2010), or activist scholarship, but in this article we describe this more simply as the practice of work or scholarship in accordance with kastom and the practice of reciprocity, a discussion to which we return to at the end of this article.