Caroline Buus Ponthieu, NTNU: Norwegian University of Science and Technology

This poem was written as part of my PhD fieldwork in Kanaky-New Caledonia. On my final day on the archipelago, I was struck by the sense that I would not again experience such a convergence of place, time, and understanding. Kanaky-New Caledonia is a place of cultural richness, yet marked by unresolved colonial history. Its landscapes, particularly its nickel-rich mountain ores, are entangled with the legacy of French colonialism and global demands for strategic minerals. The demographic transformation of the 1970s, driven by the nickel boom and France’s import and export of metropolitan and regional labour, rendered the Indigenous Kanak populations a minority in their own land. These histories continue to structure contemporary political life on the archipelago. The main political divide is between those advocating for independence and those supporting continued ties to France. These positions are bound to questions of identity, culture, and race, and remain closely linked to the nickel economy that underpins the territory’s global significance. At the same time, Kanaky-New Caledonia is increasingly drawn into broader geopolitical and geoeconomic dynamics. The nickel industry situates the archipelago within the European Union’s pursuit of growth and “strategic minerals” articulated through the Critical Raw Materials Act (CRMA), in which Overseas Countries and Territories (OCTs) are defined as strategically important. Yet the eruptions of violent unrest in the 1980s and again in 2024 are manifestations of ongoing political struggles over sovereignty, justice, and recognition.

My poem engages with these layered realities, making their contradictions visible, including my own, as an invitation to embrace complexity. In this academic poem, I ask the reader to consider researcher positionality, and the entanglements of scale, power, and duality that are often difficult to hold within conventional academic formats. Through poetic form, I bring together different conceptual and empirical materials, opening space for interpretation and situated reading. I see this work as contributing to discussions on how knowledge can be produced and represented beyond traditional research genres, and on what becomes visible when we move across forms of writing in critical geography.

The Quest for Minerals in Kanaky-New Caledonia

Growing up in the Parisian suburbs,

I am no stranger to systemic violence

Confronted by injustices from a young age,

Police men arresting my friends,

Letting me go, letting me skip the queue,

Because I don’t share their skin complexion

I’ve ran alongside my friends,

Chased by men with weapons

Guilty of our witness to a system we shame

I’ve existed on the outskirts,[1]

Experience never embodied,

Always looking from the frontier

Knowing the system was always on my side,

My only risk: being silent, letting it slide

Except this violence is different,

But makes me feel the same

I bear witness to a world where beauty

Lives alongside so much hate

Kanaky? New Caledonia[2]

Children taught to hate[3]

Hate the other,

Othering[4] a race, a people, a community

That scares you,

Doesn’t live up to your standards

Refusing the appeal of a comfortable life,

Because that very life is chained to your mother

And demands giving up your entire body to the system

A system that spits on you, tolls you,[5] alienates you,

turns you against your own mother

So you refuse, you ask only for your land

The land of your ancestors

The land that grew yam

You want to preserve your mother,

A mother that has given you life

But your water turns red,

Your fishes float ashore,

Poisoned, and not by your hand

Your shorelines shorten

The mountain’s ore, so prized, so valuable,

For your mother to lie in peace

For the future of modernity[6]

Here lies the root of the conflict

But, you see, we want,

No, we need your mountain[7]

We need to power our private jets,[8]

To meet net-zero targets

We need power for our phones

and data to put in our phones,

To teach an algorithm what justice is,

Until it tells us what justice means[9]

But tell me, what’s the point of fighting,

When your children have already tasted

the sweet flavour of modernity

Routes rerouting in favour of a world

With codes and capital labour

Who can blame them, when money

Has turned the heads of their elders?

Ô and the transition, Ô so green our transition

We need growth, infinite growth![10]

Even when mother says enough!

My tides are rising,

My forests are burning,

My animals are not eating,

My cagous are not procreating,

It is overriding common interest,[11]

And just forget about the kelp,

We need to be “renewable”,

But we forget to ask for your help,

to teach us the meaning of “sustainable”[12]

Because we don’t want to live like you,

So we shame you[13]

And you, my friend, with your tribal practices

You’re in the way

And by the way, we, in the EU,

We will do it better than the Chinese,[14]

Because we’re normative[15]

We’re the just and sustainable bearer,

We have normative power

However, since our rules become softer,

No industry worker is a believer[16]

From screaming wolf, we lost our power

So we dig deeper,[17]

Dear garnierite give us your nickel,

Add some cobalt…

Wait, I need manganese, graphite, lithium[18]

Oh you don’t have any?

I’ll look towards another colony[19]

We need 14 critical raw materials,

It is critical[20]

Make it 20, make it 27,

Okay, let’s settle for 30[21]

Who’ll take my money?

We’ve played the game of capitalism,

You’ve played it with us,

The rest of the world does it[22], so why shouldn’t you,

The entrenchment of capitalism has no limit,

Why should it limit itself to you?

In New Caledonia, we do not measure skull sizes[23]

But your willingness to work,

Alienate your body to the capitalistic cause[24]

We call you “lazy” when you don’t fit in,[25]

Into the system we’ve so dearly imported

In Kanaky, to emancipate yourself from this system,

You’ve decided to play the game[26]

You open a mine, a factory, a harbour,

But this time you will be the leader[27]

You find an investor,[28]

You bring hope to your brother[29]

Of an independence coalition[30]

Economic emancipation,

through extraction[31]

You hire 1,200 workers in the North, for the North,

A bittersweet feeling for the workers,

Pride in contributing to cutting colonial dependency,

Tormented from contributing to the mining industry[32]

As years go by, the Darwinian cut-throat[33]

global markets cut you off

You can’t compete,

Indonesian nickel is too cheap[34]

Chinese investors are on fire[35]

You, you lose your investor[36]

The project stands still

You turn off the oven

Your employees are unemployed

Since the tree trunk[37] is rooted in mother nature,

Some workers are able to go back to their tribes,[38]

Live off of mother’s supplies

Yet a branch of the tree falls off,[39]

“We do not understand, Macron”,[40]

“Why change the rules, Macron”,

Of our electoral thaw,[41]

Which we had agreed on,[42]

Shortly after the death of J. M. Tjibaou,[43]

who advocated for non-violently

reviving Kanak sovereignty

Time may have past,

yet the feeling of disrespect has blast

Alienation no more, we are the CCAT[44]

Enough is enough. This is Kanaky

Burn off their economy,

Both infrastructure and industry[45]

A bullet through the head, for our enemy[46]

The story of a violence with aims,

As the entire city burns in flames,

A violence that no one vents,

So we call them “the events”,[47]

Because how do you condense,

Systemic violence,

Into a single sentence?

Violence transcending time and space,[48]

Systemic violence is our inheritance

I bear witness to a system that I cannot be part of

Yet I am born in entanglement,

To a system I do not vent

I am the product of my own inconsistencies

Latour[49] reassures me, tells me my dichotomies

Are not failures, but the design of social life

So I fly back to my academic elitism,

My country, rich from its extractivism,

And here’s to another dichotomy,[50]

Typing away, the injustices of coloniality.

Endnotes

[1] Reference to my own positionality as a white, blond woman, witnessing injustices from the outside looking in.

[2] The name of the country is very political (see Trépied 2025). The question mark is purposeful: it shows who holds power in a system that has already defined which name should be attributed. And the fact that the name of the country remains, is the heart of how systemic violence works: we just let it slide and keep the colonial name.

[3] In one testimony, an interviewee told me: “My daughter was friends with a Kanak girl, after the riots she called her and said ‘I cannot be friends with you anymore and if I see you, I will kill you’.”

[4] Said (1977).

[5] Reference to the colonial toll system that subjected Kanak people to a curfew. The rule was abolished but still burdened mostly Kanak people who had to commute back and forth until 2013.

[6] Latour (1993).

[7] The importance of linguistics and discourse analyses (see Ponthieu et al. forthcoming).

[8] Gössling et al. (2024).

[9] Reference to AI. And the difficulty of navigating the AI transition.

[10] Draghi (2024) and European Commission (2019, 2025).

[11] European Parliament & Council of the European Union (2024).

[12] Sahoo (2024), Tom et al. (2019) and Turner et al. (2022).

[13] Testimonies from fieldwork through conversations with loyalists: people wanting to stay under French governance.

[14] European Commission (2023).

[15] Manners (2002).

[16] Several testimonies from fieldwork 2025: expert interviews with nickel industry representatives and policymakers.

[17] The nickel ores both in Indonesia and New Caledonia are starting to lose richness.

[18] List of some of the EU critical raw materials for the energy transition.

[19] EU strategic projects under the CRMA, 2024.

[20] Kaikkonen (forthcoming).

[21] European Commission (n.d.).

[22] Global capitalism, and liberal open markets.

[23] Dubow (1995).

[24] Marx (1959).

[25] Reference to my fieldwork, a loyalist defining Kanak Indigenous peoples: “These people are lazy, they never want to work.”

[26] Reference to the Koniambo Nickel SAS project.

[27] Koniambo Nickel SAS (KNS) is a smelting factory that emerged as an economic rebalancing project in the Northern Province of New Caledonia. It is correlated with pro-independence movements and seen as a Kanak reconquest of the nickel sector (Demmer 2024).

[28] First Falconbridge, then Glencore.

[29] From my fieldwork: “Workers came to the mine and were willing to work because they felt like they were contributing to something. And even when we closed down, no one manifested, which is exceptional. People left and thought well at least we tried. And they are waiting, even if it can be economically draining, they still wait to see if the project will restart.”

[30] This view refers to several political parties stating that an independence could keep strategic ties with France but recognise the country as its own sovereign state.

[31] Légifrance (1998) and UN General Assembly (2010).

[32] Testimony from several interviews during my fieldwork.

[33] See Barbesgaard et al. (2024).

[34] See Pantz (2024).

[35] Indonesian prices fell as Chinese investors invested heavily in the Indonesian nickel factories, while subsidizing coal.

[36] Glencore decides to leave in 2024 (Glencore 2024).

[37] Ontological reference: tree trunk as a visual metaphor to your philosophical roots. Vanessa Machado de Oliveira (2021) talks about the modern colonial tree where there is a logic of separation between nature and humans and the Indigenous/relational tree where there is a logic of interconnectedness and entanglement deeply rooted in the tree.

[38] Testimony by two of my interviewees during fieldwork.

[39] Reference to the CCAT that has been leading the riots from 2024 in New Caledonia, as part of a violent independence movement.

[40] President of the French Republic 2017-2027.

[41] Reference to Macron’s decision to unfreeze the electoral rules in New Caledonia, not so long after the 2021 referendum on sovereignty—which was boycotted by a lot of Kanak people because they were in customary mourning.

[42] Nouméa Accords, 1998.

[43] Key figure of the independence movement.

[44] CCAT: Cellule de Coordination des Actions de Terrain. CCAT is a contested political actor and is alleged to be one of the central actors in mobilising demonstrations and roadblocks during the violent civil unrest of 2024. French authorities have most notably accused the organisation of orchestrating violence and leaders were arrested on suspicion of organising disorder. Other perspectives on the CCAT may see the organisation as a grassroots vehicle for anti-colonial mobilisation.

[45] It is of note that mainly Western capital-oriented industries were targeted and sat on fire.

[46] Graffiti I saw right outside the Northern mining facility, aimed at the New Caledonian president, who is a Kanak loyalist.

[47] The unrests of 13 May to December 2024.

[48] The factors that led up to the events are both anchored in the colonial history, told through oral tales and written testimonies, and social inequalities that are passed through generations as some prominent families accumulate wealth, often linked to colonial practices. To understand the extent of the conflict, you need to account for events that are historical, thus no longer with us. But the question is how far do we need to go back and who do we include in the discussion, and who decides what justice is? Especially when the ontological belief is that some protagonists are only with us in spirit.

[49] Latour (2005).

[50] Questioning my right, legitimacy and positionality as a researcher of talking about an issue without having roots in it.

References

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Featured image: “New Caledonia – Thio – Loading of nickel ore from narrow gauge wagons on the pier onto ships – 30 June 1909.” Public domain, available at Wikimedia Commons.