Between Papeʻete and Hangaroa, a UN list and two texts

In the Assembly of French Polynesia at Papeʻete, 54 of the 57 members voted last week for a resolution asking the United Nations to send a mission to Tahiti. Pacific Media Network reported the tally on 29 September 2026. The proposed mission would assess conditions in the territory and the aspirations of its people. It would also open the way to renewed dialogue with the French State. Votes from 3 parties made up the majority. The pro-independence Tāvini Huiraʻatira and ʻA Fano Tiʻa voted with the autonomist Tapura Huiraʻatira.

Tapura leader Edouard Fritch told the Assembly that his party had agreed to an information-gathering process. His amendments helped remove the words decolonisation and self-determination from the title of the resolution. The retitled text names the UN mission as its subject. Tapura retains its support for autonomy as part of the French Republic. Assembly president Antony Géros of Tāvini Huiraʻatira told TNTV the parties had united around the request. Their positions on status still differ. Géros said the mission should give the population the information needed to decide its future.

President Moetai Brotherson told AFP that his government supported the resolution. He said the future of the country must be decided by its people at the end of a democratic process recognised internationally. France has long rejected UN involvement in the political future of the territory. Paris argues for direct dialogue with the territory.

In New York, a delegation of about 20 elected representatives is expected to take the resolution to the UN Fourth Committee in October. Oscar Temaru, the long-time independence leader, stayed away from the Papeʻete vote and later criticised the agreement. He has said he plans to declare the full sovereignty of French Polynesia in New York that month. France is likely going to decide the next step through its answer on the mission.

The Fourth Committee hears French Polynesia as a listed territory. The General Assembly returned it to the list of Non-Self-Governing Territories without a vote on 17 May 2013, in resolution 67/265. That resolution recalls General Assembly resolutions 1514 and 1541 of 1960. It also cites articles 3 and 4 of the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, the articles on self-determination. On 30 May 2013 the Assembly in Papeʻete adopted resolution 2013-3 and repealed its own 2011 request for the reinscription. General Assembly resolution 72/101 records the repeal.

Resolutions 1514 and 1541 reappear in a petition for Rapa Nui from the Mana Rapa Nui Foundation. The petition also cites article 3 of the Declaration and asks the State of Chile to inscribe the island on the UN list of Non-Self-Governing Territories. Its authors address the petition to the President and Congress of Chile and plan to present it to the UN Special Rapporteur on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. The text opposes a reform of the Chilean Indigenous Law and asks Chile to honour the 1888 agreement in its Rapa Nui wording.

President José Antonio Kast announced that reform in his first Cuenta Pública (the annual address to Congress) on 1 June 2026. The reform would amend Law 19.253, the Indigenous Law of 1993. Kast proposed removing restrictions on the use of indigenous property and letting community members lease and mortgage it on equal terms with other Chileans. He argued that many plots handed to communities lie unused. He also said his government would consult indigenous peoples on the reform under ILO Convention 169, a treaty ratified by Chile.

Article 13 of the law bars 4 dealings in indigenous property, namely alienation, seizure, encumbrance and acquisition by prescription. It allows them only between indigenous persons or communities of one ethnic group. CONADI, the national indigenous development corporation, may authorise an encumbrance on property other than the family home and the subsistence plot. Community holdings may not be leased, and individual holdings, for up to 5 years. Contracts in breach of the article are void under the rule of nulidad absoluta (absolute nullity). The Supreme Court in Santiago cited that sanction in a unanimous ruling on case 47.409-2021.

In a consultation on customary holdings elsewhere in Polynesia, Huri translators prepared a public body's consultation documents in 2 Pacific languages. A word-for-word equivalent for a tenure expression brought an English property notion into a system of customary holding. The team recast the term against the customary sense. Explanatory glosses set the statutory wording beside it. For Rapa Nui, Huri publishes an engine comparison with a native linguist's sign-off on the final version.

The Rapa Nui wording cited by the petition dates from September 1888. Captain Policarpo Toro reached the island that month from Tahiti with papers from his negotiations there with holders of property on Rapa Nui, El Desconcierto recounted in 2015. Heavy seas on 8 September kept his ship out of Cook Bay, the anchorage off today's Hangaroa. At the talks, Alexander Salmon, a man of Tahitian and English parentage with 10 years on the island, interpreted from Rapa Nui into English. A second interpreter supplied the Spanish from Salmon's English.

Writing in 2003, Chile's Commission for Historical Truth and New Deal examined the 1888 Acuerdo de Voluntades (agreement of wills). There were 2 documents signed on 9 September 1888, a cession called Vaai Honga Kaina and a proclamation called Vananga Haake (Vānaηa Hāʻaki). Their drafters wrote the pair in Spanish and in a mixture of Rapa Nui and old Tahitian. According to the Commission, the Spanish text cedes sovereignty forever and without reserve. The Rapa Nui and Tahitian text differs from it on substantial points.

Diego Muñoz, a researcher with the IndiGen project at LMU Munich, sets the 2 clauses side by side. The Spanish has the chiefs cede sovereignty and retain their titles. The Rapa Nui and Tahitian text has the chiefs retain their titles of authority (i na toroa) and names Chile hoa kona (friend of the place). The state only treats the Spanish version as official, Muñoz reports. He adds that many islanders and Chilean institutions assume a translation relation between the 2 parts.

Although the 1888 scribes wrote in 2 Polynesian languages, the Commission interpreted the clause through modern Reʻo Rapa Nui. Its report quotes the clause as put into modern Rapa Nui. The Spanish gloss beside it confines the writing to the surface of the ground and sets the subsoil apart. A researcher checking that clause today handles 3 languages, Spanish, modern Reʻo Rapa Nui and 19th-century Reo Tahiti.

It was Atamu Tekena, the ʻAriki (paramount chief), who sealed the agreement with a gesture recorded by the Commission from oral tradition. He handed the Chilean commissioners a clump of grass, the soil still in his own hand. The Commission interpreted the gesture as a grant of sovereignty and a reservation of the inalienable ancestral right to the soil.