Medicine as Resistance: Rapa Nui Ancestral Medicine and Cultural Exclusivity

Sonya Petrakovitz

Rapa Nui – or Easter Island – is the most remote, indigenously-inhabited island in the world. The 63-square-mile volcanic speck in the middle of the vast Pacific Ocean is famed for its nearly 1,000 carved monolithic human heads and upper bodies, named the moai. The Polynesian island is a Chilean-governed territory, despite its distance of over 2,200 miles from the coast of Chile as the Eastern-most point of the Polynesian Triangle. The current year-round resident population of almost 7,800 – about half are of Rapa Nui descent – accommodated over 100,000 tourists in 2019 as part of the omnipresent tourism industry.

Rapa Nui’s intrinsic history as a civilization capable of enduring in physical isolation is not only demonstrated through the incredible moai statues created by their ancestors, but also through their inherited cultural coping strategies that ultimately helped protect the community from COVID-19. On 11 March 2020, the island entered lockdown – stranding 1,000 tourists and enforcing strict shutdowns and curfews. Despite a substantial dependency on food, fuel, and other supply imports from the Chilean mainland in addition to the tourism-based economy, the island was closed indefinitely. The already limited hospital resources – with only 3 ventilators – were desperately vulnerable if the virus were to affect the community.

Yet by 1 July 2020, the island officially marked 100 days free of COVID-19, and activities shifted focus from surviving, to thriving. There is a general hope that a safe return to frequent global travel is possible in the relatively near future, but for most islanders, now is the ideal time to focus on the community’s sustainability and autonomy with the goals of making Rapa Nui’s return to the global stage as deliberate and equitable as possible.

Research overview

From August 2019 through December 2020, I lived in Hanga Roa – the island’s only town – while conducting my research on the local ancestral medicines and the island’s ongoing debates about its political and economic status and future. During my nearly 17-month residence, I examined how the protected knowledge of the Rapa Nui ancestral medical traditions persists as a powerful force for bonding vital aspects of “being Rapa Nui” with parallel civic concerns for immigration, land rights, and political & economic autonomy – addressing persistent community ideologies of who should have access to what on the island.

Since the creation of the Rapa Nui National Park by Chile in 1935, and later with its designation as a UNESCO World Heritage Site of cultural significance in 1996, tourism has been the island’s dominant source of income. During “normal” times on the island, tourists are able to purchase a wide variety of cultural products, souvenirs, tattoos, and other experiences that collectively represent what Rapa Nui looks, sounds, and tastes like. Yet there is one remaining area of ancestral Rapa Nui tradition and practice that is not for sale: the knowledge of and access to the ancestral medicines, their sacred ingredients and locations. The most powerful of these medicines have yet to enter the heavily-commodified tourism marketplace, in contrast to other cultural traditions, imagery, names, dance, music, and body adornment.

The absence of this cultural category from the marketplace does not appear to be accidental, but a continuation of intertwined ancestral Rapa Nui concepts working to help protect their families and heritage. Concerns for ancestral knowledge protection arise from an acute awareness of tourism commodification, generational experiences with resource exploitation on the island, and the anticipation that biochemical or pharmaceutical companies will soon, once again, direct their bio-prospecting gaze towards the island.

Within this context, I investigated how and why the Rapa Nui – with special focus on a group of women taote, or ancestral medicine doctors – have maintained the privileged status of the ancestral medical knowledge and kept their practices and access within Rapa Nui familial connections. By using Indigenous perspectives on healing and community activism, my dissertation aims to discuss how the Rapa Nui approach to this cultural exclusivity and protection offers a valuable perspective on resistance: as a proactive engagement with local heritage that focuses on human rights.

Quarantined in paradise

The appearance of COVID-19 presented me and my research with unexpected and unprecedented access during the first 9 months of the island’s response to the global pandemic. Health, medicine, and local sustainability instantly became the main topics of conversation in all settings as they were abruptly forced to return to a life, once again, as a community in isolation.

On 23 March 2020, the first case of COVID-19 was detected. Within the first two weeks there were a total of five positive cases, but these were contained within two families in the same area, and each case diligently respected the isolation protocols with constant medical and police surveillance.

Faced with this crisis, locals used the ancient Rapa Nui concepts of tapu and umanga to protect their health, community, and elders. In Polynesian societies, tapu is a divine mandate with spiritual restrictions and/or shared prohibitions that control access to certain people, places, or things. “Taboo” is similarly used in English to describe practices that are either forbidden or restricted by social or religious customs. Tapu is a form of discipline rooted in respect and sustainability, and invoking the concept of resulted in a cultural acceptance of the lockdown and promoted restricting social contact.

The local government also employed the principle of umanga to give islanders a shared sense of purpose and responsibility. Umanga describes a collective arrangement of reciprocal labor between neighbors, or the encouragement of collaboration without the expectation of direct personal gains in order to sustain the community as a whole. The concept highlights balancing reciprocity and distribution in order to create the healthiest and most beautiful society. Thanks to the inclusion of both tapu and umanga in the observance of public health protections, Rapa Nui quickly and successfully warded off the coronavirus while bridging the gap between the “old knowledge” and its relevance in a modern world.

From mid-March through 31 July 2020, I organized a public photo contest and raffle. It was an event I hoped would contribute to collecting, sharing, and archiving the experiences of the Rapa Nui community during this time through a variety of photos of daily life. I chose three community members as judges to each select their top 5 winning photos, and then 5 more winning photos were selected at random from the remaining submitted images – for a total of 10 event winners. More information and the complete collection over 500 submitted photos and the winning submissions can be viewed at the project website here.

As the process of public vaccine distribution on the island began in early-February, a group of several hundred people organized to peacefully occupy the island’s airport in protest of what they consider to be gravely flawed residency laws. They argue the Rapa Nui need more control and transparency over who has access to their territory, especially while the island is still vulnerable. This tactic of disruption has been utilized by the island previously, and is one of many strategies the Rapa Nui use to highlight their significant commitments to protecting the island’s future and maintaining their heritage.

In a recent article for the BBC, Mayor Pedro Edmunds Paoa stated he was grateful for the new opportunities that the island is now experiencing, and how the pandemic has altered the focus for the island’s future. “Up until March 2020, we had a mask over our eyes and we couldn’t see.” But now, this mask has shifted from covering their eyes, to covering their mouths. “It shut our mouths, because we kept eating and consuming and searching for money and building and destroying the nature and our fragile culture, without seeing the jeopardy that we were putting ourselves in … Now, our eyes are open, and we are more keen to promote sustainability in words, actions and plans than we ever were before.”

Last updated: 3/16/2021 (Spring 2021 Newsletter piece)