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Paper short abstract

This paper examines how Rapa Nui people expand their margins of self-determination through negotiations operating within and beyond Chilean state frameworks. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork, I demonstrate how Indigenous island sovereignty can be practised incrementally rather than through rupture.

Paper long abstract

Located 3,700 km from continental Chile, Rapa Nui embodies the contradictions this panel addresses: a Polynesian island under South American colonial rule, where over 70% of the territory remains registered as "state land" while 40% constitutes a National Park administered since 2017 by the Indigenous community Ma'u Henua.

Drawing on sixteen months of ethnographic fieldwork (2023–2024), I analyse how Rapa Nui families and institutions practise what I call "transformative continuity": the incremental expansion of self-determination, generation by generation, through strategic negotiations that operate simultaneously within and beyond state frameworks.

The COVID-19 pandemic revealed this capacity dramatically. The community closed the island's borders for over two years, exercised territorial control over entry and exit, reconstituted local food production, and created new ceremonial practices—including the annual commemoration of founding ancestor Hotu Matu'a—that reassert genealogical authority over the territory. These practices challenge Westphalian assumptions by grounding sovereignty not in exclusive state jurisdiction but in relational connections between people, ancestors, and land (kaiŋa).

This perspective contributes to cross-regional debates on island politics by showing how Indigenous sovereignty operates through two complementary registers: one legible to the state (land restitution claims, park administration, international law), another grounded in everyday practices that sustain authority through genealogy, ritual, and territorial knowledge. Rather than a binary between dependence and autonomy, Rapa Nui reveals sovereignty as ongoing negotiation.