Social and Political Changes in the Cook Islands

Abstract

THE Cook Islands are a group of fourteen small islands spread over an area of some 850,000 square miles of the South Pacific Ocean. The total land area of the group is about 63,000 acres, ranging in area from about i6,ooo acres for Rarotonga, the administrative centre of the group, to about 300 acres for the tiny islet of Nassau. The islands of the southern group, strung on a rough arc iio to iso miles north and west of Rarotonga, are elevated, wooded and fertile. The northern islands of the group, 700 miles or more north and northwest from Rarotonga, are mainly low, flat, coral atolls, relatively infertile and supporting small populations on fish, taro and coconuts. The total population of all of the islands in I945 was just over I4,000, the large majority of which claimed to be full-bloods. Of the 537 non-natives, about one-third are Europeans, one-quarter are Chinese-Native mixes, and the remainder are mixtures of native and other Polynesian or non-European stocks. Within the past three years there has been significant evidence of unrest and dissatisfaction in many islands in the group. Mainly the trouble has arisen from attempts to unionize the natives employed as manual labourers and as stevedores. But this trouble has only been symptomatic of an undercurrent of dissatisfaction with the present degree of participation of the Islanders in the administration of the political affairs of the group. The Cook Islands, in other words, are suffering at the moment from political and social growing pains. An understanding of the trends implicit in this contemporary social change in the Cook Islands involves some appreciation of the whole movement of social change that has gone on since their first discovery by the West at the end of the eighteenth century. It is difficult to generalize about all of the Cook Islands. The northern Cook group, with its small atoll cultures and total population of just over 2,000, presents one variation on the major themes of social change. The southern Cook group, with its generally larger islands and total population of I2,000, with its earlier discovery and longer contact with Europeans, with its more varied food supplies and more complex social life, again presents a series of variations on the major themes of social change worked out