by JOSS DOUGLAS and SAMANTHA NADLER
Famous for its monolithic Moai head stones that were mysteriously erected at the dawn of history, the UNESCO World Heritage Site of Easter Island is today making headlines of a different sort. The pristine and storied image used to market Easter Island as a tourist mecca began to unravel as unrest surfaced there last August, when the native islanders confronted Santiago’s representatives of Chilean state (who annexed the island in 1888) in the latest bid for self-rule. While the issue is not on the agenda for President Obama’s March 21 trip to the Chilean capital, many feel that it should be.
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On Easter Sunday 1722, Dutch sea captain Jakob Roggeveen landed on the island’s shore. Located more than 1,200 miles east of the Pitcairn Island (its nearest inhabited neighbour), and 2,000 miles west of Chile, Easter Island marks the south-eastern point of the Polynesian “triangle,” with Hawaii to the north and New Zealand to the west. Archaeologists and historians debate the date of Easter Island’s initial habitation by Polynesians who navigated in canoes from either the Gambier Islands (some 1,600 miles away) or the Marquesas Islands (some 2,000 miles away), but the date is thought to be some time between 300 and 1100 AD. Given its geographic seclusion in the South Pacific, the island’s first natives called the island Te pito o te henua, meaning “the ends of the Earth.” The name could not be more fitting. For most of its existence as an inhabited island, the islanders have lived and developed in total isolation. This came to an end with the arrival of the Dutch, marking the beginning of a fateful new chapter in the island’s history.
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In 1888, a Chilean naval officer formally annexed Easter Island, turning it into a province of the Chilean state. Chile’s ostensible even-handedness in the process of annexing the island led the Rapa Nui to believe that the end of colonial oppression was in sight. However, the islanders could not have been further misled. Immediately following the application of the treaty, Easter Island came to be ruled as a police state and once again the islanders were banished from their various locales on the island into the Hanga Roa settlement. The rest of the island was leased to a Scottish ranching company, the Williamson-Balfour Company.
Council on Hemispheric Affairs for more