Food (inter)activism in the Marquesas, French Polynesia

Systems of planetary health and justice are entangled via many different modalities, including food and the language we use around and about it. Environmental balance and human health are both influenced by our foodways (the practices, ideologies, and institutions through which food is produced, distributed, and consumed) and a range of associated discursive practices (Cavanaugh & Riley, 2023; Karrebæk et al., 2018). Relatedly, social justice is both mediated by and facilitated through food and the social interactions that take place through and around it (Broad, 2016; Dossa, 2014). Above all, the listening, reciprocity, and connections embedded in the multisensory aspects of quotidian foodways shape and perpetuate broader understandings of health and the environment. Food (inter)activism (Riley & Paugh, 2019) enlists food-related modes of social interaction in pursuit of food sovereignty, a goal that not only entails fair access to meaningful foodways but will also support environmental justice and health equity (Donaldson & Riley, 2023).

This article offers a brief example of how the just production, circulation, and consumption of foods that are healthy for both the human body and the planet is being hampered by the slow violence (Nixon, 2011; see also Perley, this forum) of gastrocolonialism (see Chao, this forum) and the disruption of local foodway interactions in te Henua ò te Ènana (the Land of the People, commonly known as the Marquesas), a remote archipelago in the semiautonomous collectivity of French Polynesia. Our work with te Ènana ò te Henua (the People of the Land, or Marquesans) has revealed how the semiotic expression and exchange of meanings relating to food and foodways frequently reflects shifting Indigenous identities and values, highlighting the confluences and conflicts between cultural traditions and global health advocacy. Marquesans do not simply accept or reject the health discourses promoted by the French medical establishment. They build new approaches to healthy eating based on scientific medicine, transmitted knowledge about food and the land, and their own personal experiences. More specifically, these transformations emerge from multisensorial engagements with food that support four modes of semiotic discourse: (1) about food—from words and recipes to food-related cartoons and cooking shows, (2) around food—activities in its presence such as fishing, marketing, cooking, and eating, (3) through food—the dishes and foodways that express cultural values, and (4) as food—speech genres such as gossip or curses that can nurture or poison interlocutors (Cavanaugh & Riley, 2023; Riley & Paugh, 2019).

We begin with a brief ethnohistory of how Western interventions have reshaped the Marquesas through the exploitation of marine resources (e.g., turtles and tuna) and arboricultural products (e.g., breadfruit, coconut, and noni fruit), while also affecting Marquesans through the imposition of foreign foodways. We draw on data from our ethnographic research to show how neocolonial capitalism continues to have an impact on evolving, interdiscursive village-level practices and knowledge concerning human health, the environment, and cultural sovereignty. By way of conclusion, we suggest how food (inter)activism can contribute to the regeneration of planetary health and justice in the Marquesas and beyond.

Throughout the world, Indigenous systems of planetary health (environmental and medical) have been devastated by generations of unjust globalizing processes, from colonial plantations and the disruption of traditional forms of resource management to the importation of Western diseases (smallpox, leprosy, syphilis, influenza, tuberculosis, etc.), tools, and subsidized foods (oil, sugar, rice, canned meats, etc.). In particular, traditional foodways have been disturbed by Western modes of valorization, communication, and transportation that have laid siege to Indigenous lives and bodies.

Prior to European contact Marquesan societies were stratified, with complex systems of food production and exchange rooted in networked settlements with stone-paved roads, food processing facilities, massive stone tiki icons, and megalithic residential and ritual sites (Dening, 1980; Rollin, 1974; Thomas, 1990). Although some labor was handled by specialists, including fishing, most sectors of society participated in harvesting high-value foods from the land and sea, from taro and turtles to sweet potatoes and pigs. The most significant staple was breadfruit, an arboricultural crop whose fruit was stored in large communal earth pits several times a year. The elite used the resulting fermented paste, which could last up to 20 years, as capital to recompense the community's labor and to avoid famine—an ongoing threat due to the islands’ periodic droughts (Huebert & Allen, 2020). Spiritual leaders also used their powers to enforce kahui, a kind of taboo on harvesting particular types of fish, fruit or other foods. Though based on religious beliefs and relationships with the spirits, kahui also had the benefit of safeguarding sustainable food sources (Ottino-Garanger et al., 2016).

Colonization ravaged these spiritual links to the land and sea, beginning in the late 1700s. In the early 20th century, a National Geographic article on the “vanishing” people of the Marquesas featured photographs of the “sickly, somber-faced” Islanders and their miserable living conditions (Church, 1919). By that point tens of thousands of Marquesans had died due to introduced disease, warfare and strife, and the population hovered around 2000 (down from an estimated 100,000, precontact). A team of anthropologists was dispatched to document and “salvage” whatever they could of Marquesan culture. A French doctor named Louis Rollin launched a health initiative that helped turn the tide by, among other things, teaching women hygienic practices that reduced maternal and infant mortality rates. By the late 20th century, anthropologists finally stopped lamenting what had been lost and began to explore Marquesan adaptations, resilience, and ingenuity in response to global change (Donaldson, 2019; Kirkpatrick, 1983; Riley, 2013).

By then, the French-educated Marquesan elite were participating in global discourses about the need to preserve and revitalize their traditional culture, hoping to not only safeguard humanity's intangible heritage but also advance their people's psychosocial and economic well-being (Donaldson, 2022). They formed associations,¹ launched festivals,² and promoted tourist events and other cultural projects³ that celebrated the rich semiotic heritage so long suppressed by French administrators and Catholic missionaries (language, crafts, cuisine, dances, tattooing, etc.). As the global spotlight pivoted to the loss of healthy, sustainable foodways in the new millennium, Marquesan leaders began focusing on the negative health and environmental impacts of Western interventions in local foodways (e.g., tuna was being overfished and diabetes was ubiquitous).⁴ Thus, Marquesan festivals and associations repositioned themselves to not only revitalize linguistic and cultural heritage but also protect the environment and their sovereign access to it, once again illustrating the subtle nuance of Indigenous sovereignty efforts (Barker, 2006; Donaldson, 2019, 2022; Riley, 2013).

Foodways are a key point of articulation for such activism, becoming arenas for not only the dissemination of cultural knowledge but also environmental and health justice action. Breadfruit has grown into a global star, lauded for its health and environmental benefits and remade into transnational, healthy, hipster foods, such as chips, crackers, and tortillas.⁵ Coconut oil and noni juice⁶ have enjoyed a similarly more or less quixotic fame. Institutions (schools, health clinics, and NGOs) based in the French metropole or elsewhere help sustain and cultivate some of this framing around healthy foods and sustainable foodways. Yet these discourses also tangle with, and are creatively transformed through, Marquesans’ everyday multisensorial, multimodal interactions about, around, and through food (Donaldson & Riley, 2023).

In tandem with the cultural revival movement, traditional foodways are now being revitalized through a range of modalities, most notably the talk of healthy “traditional” diets and environmental sovereignty activism. The following vignettes touch on how Marquesans dynamically engage with the global issues of human health and environmental justice at the most intimate, localized level. They were collected through participant observation, situated interviewing, and natural discourse analysis by both authors.

In the long, narrow valley of Vaipaeè, Florentine, a bed-and-breakfast owner, explains how food, like language, is a way to affirm her Marquesan-ness. “One day, if someone asks you a question in Marquesan and you don't know [how to answer], you'll be ashamed!” For that reason, she says, “I have always kept [the Marquesan] way of eating: if there's no popoi [pudding made with fermented breadfruit], bananas, plantain, taro, then I have to eat rice! But it's not my thing.” In recognition of this preference, some enterprising villagers have begun making popoi and selling it for 1000 xpf (about $10) per plastic-wrapped packet. Florentine comments: “Not bad. You can buy everything!” (Donaldson, personal communication, October 4, 2013).

Taking a break from watering her garden, Victorine, a former popoi merchant from the valley of Taipivai, sits on her front stoop and talks about how local food isn't just about preparing the dish; it's about working on the land. She and her husband used to make a variation on traditional popoi using manioc instead of breadfruit. She notes how they always planned ahead, rotating planting and harvesting, so that next year's manioc is growing even as they harvest this year's crop. People still like having popoi, she says; “especially the elders, but even young people too, now” (Donaldson, personal communication, October 26, 2013).

Huiata wraps dried bananas tightly in sheets of papery banana bark. Soon the freighter will arrive, and he will send them to his daughters in Tahiti to sell and make money. He is recounting how, in the days before chest freezers, they used to salt fish on the line, and veal, beef, goat, and horse, and no one ever got sick. “We ate natural—bananas, breadfruit, there was no diabetes. [Today] you go to the store and there's Coke, juice, Fanta, all that sugary stuff.” And now “there are tons of sicknesses! Diabetes, heart disease, cancer” (Donaldson, personal communication, May 3, 2013).

Asked about her youth, Huiata's mother, Teupootoee, recalls skinning breadfruit with a cowrie shell and rising at 2:00 a.m. to collect coffee (a cash crop of the 1940s and 1950s that subsequently went bust). “I had my sons here [in the Marquesas] without a doctor […]. There was no boat (to go to Tahiti).” But children were strong back then and didn't die, she adds, because “our food doesn't make you sick—koèhi [fresh breadfruit pudding with coconut milk], fresh breadfruit, manioc cooked with coconut milk. You didn't get sick” (Donaldson, personal communication, May 28, 2013).

Héléna explains how healthcare is spotty in her tiny village of Hohoi, where a doctor visits just once a month from the town of Hakahau. For serious medical problems, you take a plane to Nuku Hiva or Tahiti (paid for by the French government). But Héléna worries about hypertension and diabetes, long-term illnesses that are increasingly common and require ongoing attention. “It's rare to have doctors here in the Marquesas,” she says. “I think it's because of money” (Donaldson, personal communication, October 10, 2013).

In the open-air kitchen at the back of her house, Valerie talks about how she has been drinking Kyäni, a dietary supplement made in the United States, together with pure noni juice from fruit she collects each morning. She explains how she doesn't get sick because of the noni. It's for your blood, she says, but “also for your mind, and your heart, and for diabetes. And cancer, too, apparently.” American researchers have found that “the most powerful noni fruit is Marquesan. That's why I collect them” (Donaldson, personal communication, April 24, 2013).

In Hatiheu, Moi runs a store filled with sweet and salty snacks, canned and frozen foods, beer and wine out of her home, which doubles as a social hub. When she befriended the temporary nurse working there in 2019, Moi regularly received an earful about her diabetes and its relationship to food. Yet the fast-talking nurse seemed to know nothing of Moi's long-standing leadership in local artisanal craft associations, a women's local produce cooperative, and an association to help support diabetics through activities such as regular walks. Moi had only 4 years of schooling and was raised in a remote valley, living off local foods from the earth and sea. Yet she has taken in the modern discourse around health and the environment and creatively transformed it based on what she learned from her parents 60 years ago. While her store is filled with the “junk food” derided by the nurse, her yard is filled with new plantings of breadfruit and avocado, mint, and hot peppers, all of which she transplants to her faààpu (gardens) in the mountains. Her sister, who lives in a larger town nearby, grows seedlings to exchange for the harvested fruit, which she sells at the market. Together they are helping to drive new, localized foodways.

Yet, for many youths, the continuous thread between land, food, and health has frayed. Many families still tend their own  faààpu and socialize their children to collect limes, plant manioc, tend pigs, and hunt shrimp (among other things), but meals frequently consist of easier, more expedient foods: rice, imported chicken, Ramen noodles, and the occasional Coca-Cola bought from the village store (for more about food-and-language socialization in the Marquesas, see Riley, 2016). This trend has been reinforced by French schooling, where cafeteria meals feature imported meat, rice, and maybe a slice of fruit. Even now, as local schools tend their own little faààpu and liberally display colorful posters touting the benefits of local fruits and tubers, students rarely eat local meat or produce. French sanitary regulations restrict the use of local meats, and it is easier for the mothers preparing school meals to procure and cook imported ingredients.

Foreigners (including anthropologists) are often little help: children will eagerly collect grapefruit, mangos, and other local produce in exchange for Petit Écolier cookies or Twisties snacks. Still, many teenagers returning from secondary school in the big towns or Tahiti (with culinary degrees in how to make sashimi, pizza, and hamburgers) eagerly tuck into raw crab, grilled goat, and boiled taro at their welcome-home feasts with family. The traditional earth oven for roasting local pigs and produce is a main feature of marriages and other large gatherings, as well as at the biennial Marquesan Arts Festival. As Victorine pointed out, everyone enjoys a little popoi.

Thus, Marquesans use the semiotic channels of language and food to index their identity and adapt to shifting values. Their remarks reflect both the tension and the confluence of proud cultural traditions and global health advocacy. With the rise in cardiovascular ailments, another wave of gastrocolonial influence, marginalization and inequality has become evident. Yet the Marquesan use and interpretation of natural resources highlights their resistance to these trends. Many Marquesans treat their illnesses with local remedies instead of, or in combination with, Western medicines (Donaldson, 2022). Meanwhile, spurred by the COVID-19 pandemic, Marquesan markets are thriving alongside imported foods.⁷ In the process, the healthy diet discourses pushed by flashy public notices, nurses and doctors tangle with more complex, sometimes conflicting views of health, food and the land.

Marquesan foodways and personal relationships to the land illustrate how complex, overlapping colonial and Indigenous histories are shaping local approaches to global health and environmental initiatives. Here, as elsewhere, Indigenous crafting of local foodways around foreign pressures and introduced foodways highlights not only power and injustice, but continuity, resilience and the ongoing struggle for cultural and resource sovereignty (Barker, 2006). The resulting food (inter)activism suggests a new food-centered arena for exploring some of today's most pressing social justice challenges.