Susanna Ounei
Susanna Ounei was born in 1945 in Ouvéa in the Loyalty Islands Province of New Caledonia.
Her official birthdate was 15 August 1945, although later in life she found that this date may have been incorrect.
She grew up in Poindimié on the east coast of New Caledonia.
Under French colonial rule the Kanak population fell from about 70,000 in the pre-colonial era to about 26,000 in the 1980s.
The Kanaks were segregated from whites and were subject to many restrictions and impositions.
Ounei wrote that "We grew up seeing how our parents were humiliated."
Serious Kanak resistance began to develop in the 1960s and 1970s.
In response, the French government encouraged massive migration to New Caledonia to reduce the Kanaks to a powerless minority.
Kanak people
New Caledonia was annexed to France in 1853, and became an overseas territory of France in 1956. An independence movement led to a failed revolt in 1967, and was restarted in 1984, pursuing total independence status from the French rule. When the 1988 Matignon agreements were signed between the representatives of France and New Caledonia to decide on holding the referendum for independence, Jean-Marie Tjibaou, the Kanak leader of the independence movement, had mooted a proposal to set up an Agency for the Development of Kanak Culture (ADCK). After Tjibaou's assassination in 1989, the French President François Mitterrand ordered that a cultural centre on the lines suggested by Tjibaou be set up in Nouméa, the capital of New Caledonia; it was to be the last of Mitterrand's "Grands Projets". The Jean-Marie Tjibaou Cultural Centre was formally established in May 1998.