The French Embassy will be targeted for its ongoing role in the nuclear
poisoning of the Pacific by activists and artists following a day of
kōrero and art-making at the Newtown Community Centre starting at 1pm on
Saturday, 7th August.

“As we commemorate the horror of the first atomic bomb dropped on
Hiroshima, it is important to acknowledge that the impact of nuclear
weapons and the ongoing effects of militarism and colonial oppression in
Te Moana-nui-a-Kiwa have not stopped. Neither has the resistance by
Pacific peoples,” says Peace Action member Valerie Morse.

Speakers at the event will include scholar and writer Dr. Emalani Case
whose book Everything Ancient Was Once New: Indigenous Persistence from
Hawaii to Kahiki was published by UH Press in 2021. Emalani is active
in the movement to demilitarise Hawai’i and stop RIMPAC, the biennial
war games held in Hawai’i, as well as standing up for a free and
independent Pacific

Indigenous Pacific Uprising (IPU) members Sina Brown-Davis and Tāwhana
Chadwick will speak about the situation in Tahiti. IPU works to connect,
amplify and uplift resistance and alternatives to colonial oppression in
the Pacific.

The free event will also involve making activist art together including
a banner expressing solidarity with the Ma’ohi Nui people and the recent
day of action in Tahiti when thousands took to the streets under the
slogan: Mai te Paura Ātōmī i te Tiāmara’a / From Bomb contamination to
self determination.

The Ma’ohi Nui people were contaminated by French nuclear testing in
1974 and are still demanding reparations more than 40 years later.

Sina Brown Davis says, “the IPU stands with our Te Ao Maohi cousins and
their fight for self-determination. Tahitian independence would have
ensured that France would not have poinsoned lands, waters and peoples
with their nuclear testing. There can be no Pacific liberation without
self determination. We must decolonise now.”

“We are continuing our commitment to ethical remembering and active
opposition of structures which colonise, extract, displace, and destroy
for profit, “ says Ms Morse. “While as a nation we have been firm in our
rejection of nuclear arms in our waters, we must look further ashore and
listen to the voices of self-determination in the Pacific and reject
militarism.”

The event will end at the French Embassy.

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