Source: PNG Loop

Through remembrance and protest, a group of Pacific Islanders will be celebrating the one dream for our Ocean, free to be self-determining.

The celebration known as Madang Wansolwara Dance has attracted attendance from all over the Pacific, including artists, musicians, traditional chiefs, academics, clergy, activists, youth and university students, and civil society representatives.

Spokesperson, Rev. Francois Pihaatae says the dance is a narrative of decades and centuries of exiles, expulsion, persecution and pogrom, beginning with the first colonisation of our “sea of islands” to where we are today.

“It is a celebration in protest against the dominant narrative, that development means selling of/or exploiting our lands and our seas for the riches within; it is about adopting universalist ideals, it is about endless growth in which people and cultures are nothing less than commodities; and it is about not having moral limits to what we can do,” said Pihaatae.

“We live in the world of the faceless empire(s). We see, think and construct our realities with the frames and lenses of the alternative, and have become its impeccable protégés in alienating our mother from her children, in condemning our people to a life of poverty and shame, in the raping of our women and girls, and in reinforcing the alternative’s universalist idea of who we are, its logic for our existence and its measures on the trajectory of our development”.

The gathering will affirm who we are as Pacific people using our own art, music, dance, poetry and story- telling to be the writers of our own history.

Bismark Ramu Group Coordinator and local host, John Chitoa says the celebrations of this unique Pacific gathering will be centred around reclaiming of our Wansolwara: one people, one sea.

“The Wansolwara is sacred because it contains the memory of our grandparents and tells us the story about ourselves and who we are as a people. We will not be portrayed or perceived as victims of the empire(s) or alternative influences, either by ourselves or by others,” added Chitoa.

“We will affirm who we are and will celebrate it, even in our dark, fair or brown skins, and in our perfect imperfections…we will frame our language, create and interpret our art, our music, our dance, our poetry, our symbols and our rituals to tell and proclaim to us and others who we are and our place in this universe, he explained.

BACKGROUND: Early this year, a group of people gathered for a planning meeting of four days at the Nadave Training Centre in Fiji. Participants came from Rapa Nui, Guam, West Papua, Bougainville, Hawaii, Papua New Guinea, California, Aotearoa, Vanuatu, Fiji and Australia. Individuals and representatives of organisations, people of diverse professional and organisational backgrounds and personal journeys. Yet, they share the one dream for our Ocean, free to be self-determining. The intention was to tell stories and share experiences on what the “Rethinking the Household of God in the Pacific” is asking. The movement is coordinated by regional partnership from Pacific Conference of Churches (PCC), Bismark Ramu Group (BRG), Pacific Network on Globalisation (PANG) and Social Empowerment and Education Program (SEEP).