Separate Communities

The sites of translation from indigenous to European languages, considered in this chapter as further and particular spaces of writing and reading hybridity between cultures, derive from different periods of New Caledonian post-contact history. They also come from different areas of an archipelago that includes the main island of Grande Terre, the Isle of Pines and Belep, to the south and to the north respectively, and the Loyalty Islands – Maré, Lifou, and Ouvéa. New Caledonian history is distinctive in that the main island's geography has resulted in the division of the indigenous peoples into separate language groups, from valley to valley. Be it through pact or enmity, the Kanak groups were nonetheless connected – by marriage alliances, trade between the tribes of the shore and those of the interior, and war. Excluded from the European enterprise in the colonial period and pushed back into reserves, under the Code de l'Indigenat or Native Code in place from 1887 to 1946, they could not leave these areas without authorization and were largely isolated from the mainstream economy. The movements of the indentured labourers, predominantly from Indonesia and French Indochina, were similarly restricted, in their case to the mining and agricultural areas they served. Of the 22,000 convicts and deportees of European origin dependent on the all-powerful penitentiary authority, some 10 per cent eventually received small concessions of land to work under surveillance and constituted their own small rural communities. Assisted settlers were grouped in independent concessions of land such as Koné or Voh, most often in areas inaccessible to one another by road and linked only through a distant Noumea. The free settlers, possessed of a small capital, who in the last decade of the nineteenth century had been solicited by Governor Feillet to develop coffee plantations, came to a country where the liberated convicts who roamed the colony, the import–export businessmen, and the larger landowners and administrators in Noumea constituted very separate groups.