Introduction

Colonization as practised by the European imperial powers represented at its heart a prolonged period of state-organized violence, sociocultural destruction and ethnic cleansing, enacted on an immense scale. Initial acts of colonial incursion and annexation presaged elongated periods marked by the political, economic, cultural and social usurpation of Indigenous social systems. For the proud custodians of these systems, this entailed a profound social dislocation from a way of life in which their identity and subjectivity was indelibly rooted, and their gradual incorporation into an introduced system, at a position of extreme disadvantage. The complex legacies of these processes are alive today, in the economic, political and social antagonisms that continue to prime insecurity, conflict and crisis in the global South, albeit sometimes with a subtlety that obscures their origins.

In order to excavate the multidimensional magnitude of colonial violence, and its enduring legacies, a process of epistemological upheaval is required. The methodologies, analytical tools and theoretical concepts we use must be part of a democratizing process of epistemic and analytical diversity, which is receiving renewed emphasis inside and outside academia through social movements demanding a decolonization of knowledge (Agozino, 2003; Connell, 2007) and, as Satia would have it, ‘re-telling’ the stories of the past, and ‘reinterpreting what it is to be human’ (Satia, 2020). This especially concerns the topic at hand, embracing the different ways of knowing and analysis which have emerged from within the geopolitical ‘ground zeroes’ of colonial violence, knowledge that is delivered on occasions through conventions and frames that may not sit easily with the traditions designed and established in and through institutions of the metropoles.

The following chapter presents one such analysis. The lead author, Blaise Iruinu, a village elder and traditional leader from Bougainville in the South Pacific, delivered a series of oral presentations and reflections for a community-based oral history project organized by film-makers and scholars from Bougainville, France, and Australia between 2014 and 2015. These presentations have been transcribed and edited for this chapter. Extended film highlights from Iruinu's contribution to the project are available online on the project website (see Lasslett and Saovanna, 2020).