‘Wallis and Futuna Have Never Been a Colony’: A Non‐sovereign Island Territory Negotiating Primary Education with Metropolitan France

Abstract

ABSTRACTWallis and Futuna are a French overseas collectivity in Oceania. In 1969, the French state formally ceded responsibility for the territory's primary education to the Catholic mission and reimburses related expenses. Against this backdrop, this article uses the negotiations about primary education between these two non‐sovereign island territories and their colonial metropole to explore islanders' views of the relationship. We conducted interviews with eight representatives of local institutions associated with primary education and we analyzed relevant official agreements. Our analysis suggests that, from the islanders' perspective, the negotiations with metropolitan France about policies and funding for primary education are driven by different identities located within a shared national identity. We find these identities are not merely different, but complementary in a non‐hierarchical fashion. We also find that these identities seem to be mutually constituted between metropolitans and islanders through negotiations that are often adversarial and—from the islanders' view—predicated on detailed knowledge of the history of these negotiations. In addition, the resulting education policies regularly see primary schools receiving unequal treatment in comparison to schools in metropolitan France. However, in counterweight, islanders can also succeed in giving unequal treatment to metropolitan regulations by bending them to suit local interests or values.