Māòhi faatiàraa: A Nuclear World and the Long Road to Compensation, Reconciliation, and Healing
Donnerstag, 24.09.2026, 18:30 UhrVortrag, OSPG, Wien
Ort: HS A, Institut für Kultur- und Sozialanthropologie, Universitätsstraße 7, 1010 Wien
Māòhi faatiàraa: A Nuclear World and the Long Road to Compensation, Reconciliation, and Healing
talk by Tamatoa Tepuhiarii, Universität Hamburg
From cosmogonic narratives to genealogies, from paripari fenua (chants celebrating a place) to ôrero (speech, declamation), orality has always been a fundamental pillar of Pacific Indigenous societies. It is not a mode of expression, but a living existential structure grounded in relationships, responsibility, and the transmission of knowledge, from the creation of the world to everyday life. While Western traditions tend to fix knowledge in written form, oral cultures allow knowledge to emerge through various forms of performance and interaction. In this sense, orality operates as a system for producing and transmitting embodied, collective, and situated knowledge. In Māòhi Nui/French Polynesia, a territory marked by the 193 French nuclear tests conducted between 1966 and 1996, orality takes on a particular dimension. Narratives connected to the “nuclear world” — testimonies, songs, poems, artistic works, and other forms of expression — reflect the diversity of ways in which this event is articulated and understood. Yet these narratives are often confined within reductive interpretations that reduce them to emotion, resistance, nostalgia, or opposition to the Pacific Experimentation Centre (CEP), without fully recognizing their historical, relational, and epistemological dimensions. This research analyses Māòhi narratives as forms of knowledge carrying meaning and lived experience. This explores how these narratives account for nuclear experiences while also contributing to processes of truth-telling, recognition, and healing. In this sense, listening to and understanding these narratives requires questioning the conditions under which stories are produced: who speaks, for whom, and within which frameworks of power. Sixty years after the beginning of nuclear testing, many Māòhi narratives have emerged and continue to evolve and diversify, constituting both collective and individual memory. This thesis seeks to analyze them as forms of discursive representation by studying the processes through which Māòhi people construct their representations of the world, history, and their own biographical trajectories. The study of Indigenous narratives requires first moving beyond readings limited to resistance narratives, the testimonies of former nuclear site workers, Protestant religious actors, or artists — not to reduce these perspectives, but to consider the Māòhi society in the diversity of its identity issues, experiences, and perspectives across different social and socio-professional categories. Secondly, this research proposes analyzing narratives beyond a linear chronological framework structured by a beginning and an end, instead approaching them through an Indigenous temporality conceived as a cyclical, intergenerational, and relational continuum linking experiences from 1966 to 2026. Finally, this research considers Indigenous narratives and lived experiences as legitimate forms of expertise and knowledge production, holding the same level of legitimacy as Western scientific and political knowledge. Thus, understanding and interrogating these voices sheds light on possible pathways toward compensation, reconciliation, and healing. This research raises several questions: why is it important to analyze Indigenous narratives in the nuclear context? How can these narratives support affected communities in processes of compensation, reconciliation, and healing? To what extent do these narratives shift the nuclear lens away from a science-centered legitimacy toward the legitimacy of Indigenous representations in contemporary approaches to nuclear issues? To address these questions, this research adopts a threefold approach: 1. A conceptual analysis of key notions related to the notion of “narratives”; 2. A study of existing narratives, from archival fieldwork research collection in various local spaces, both private and public; 3. An evaluation of the weight of lived experiences within political and scientific institutions, and conversely, the influence of these institutions on Māòhi narratives.
Tamatoa Tepuhiarii is a Māòhi research associate (from Māʻohi Nui/French Polynesia) and a PhD candidate at the University of Hamburg (Institute of Geography, Germany). His research focuses on Indigenous narratives surrounding the “Nuclear world” within the framework of the common research project “Nuclear Justice and Gender in the Sea of Islands.” He has actively contributed to regional and international advocacy efforts for nuclear justice, notably as a delegate of the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN) during Meetings of States Parties to the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons. He has also been involved in regional leadership initiatives and youth policy development across the Sea of Islands (the Pacific). His work is grounded in lived experience and a strong commitment to Indigenous knowledge systems, environmental justice, gender equality, and youth representation in the Pacific.
