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.
Japanese settlement in New Caledonia
Official statistics showed some 6,880 Japanese miners that landed in New Caledonia between 1892 and 1919. The Japanese community had almost 3,000 individuals in 1922, and many left New Caledonia in the 1920s and 1930s as ethnic suspicion against ethnic Japanese intensified. Within the Japanese community, Okinawans consisted a sizeable minority, and a 1905 census recorded some 387 Okinawans in New Caledonia. In all official census until the 1940s, Japanese were classified as "Europeans" and enjoyed similar rights with other European settlers. Inter-ethnic unions between Japanese men and women were frequentplace, although some Japanese settlers married Japanese women. A 1940 report showed some 36 men that married Japanese women, while another 20 married French women. Another 107 married or cohabited with Kanak, Vietnamese or Javanese women. In the same year, there were some 200 second-generation Japanese settlers, of which three quarters were born to one non-Japanese parent, while the remainder were of pure Japanese descent.