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.
New Caledonia
The indigenous population or Kanak people were excluded from the French economy and from mining work, and ultimately confined to reservations. This sparked a violent reaction in 1878, when High Chief Atal of La Foa managed to unite many of the central tribes and launched a guerrilla war that killed 200 Frenchmen and 1,000 Kanaks. A second guerrilla war took place in 1917, with Catholic missionaries like Maurice Leenhardt functioning as witnesses to the events of this war. Leenhardt would pen a number of ethnographic works on the Kanak of New Caledonia. Noel of Tiamou led the 1917 rebellion, which resulted in a number of orphaned children, one of whom was taken into the care of Protestant missionary Alphonse Rouel. This child, Wenceslas Thi, would become the father of Jean-Marie Tjibaou (1936–1989).