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Under the Colonial Radar?

The History and Memory of an “Invisible” Mixed-Race Household in New Caledonia

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 April 2025

Adrian Muckle  and
Benoît Trépied
Adrian Muckle
Affiliation:
Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand [email protected]
Benoît Trépied
Affiliation:
CNRS, Paris, France [email protected]
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Abstract

An expanding scholarship on interracial intimacy in colonial contexts has generally focused on cases of administrative disputes or judicial conflicts that brought “mixed couples,” “mixed-race families,” or “métis” to the attention of colonial authorities. But what of the lives and experiences of those who did not contest their legal status, remaining under the administrative radar and thus virtually invisible in the archives of the colonial state? This article tackles these issues in the context of the French colony of New Caledonia by analyzing the trajectory of a household established out of official sight, made up of a French settler, a Kanak woman, and their descendants. The goal here is to understand what this phenomenon of relative social invisibility reveals about the scope and limits of colonial domination “at ground level.” Combining ethnographic fieldwork and archival research, the article traces the conditions under which this family configuration was able to emerge and then endure for over fifty years. It finally disappeared after the death of the French settler, when each of the wider family groups—European and Kanak—to varying degrees sought to efface this awkward past within their respective social worlds.

Les recherches sur les intimités interraciales en contexte colonial s’intéressent généralement à des cas de litiges administratifs ou de conflits judiciaires qui ont attiré l’attention des autorités coloniales vis-à-vis de certains « couples mixtes », « familles multiraciales » et autres individus « métis ». Mais qu’en est-il de la vie et de l’expérience de celles et ceux qui n’ont pas contesté leur statut légal et sont restés sous le « radar administratif », demeurant ainsi virtuellement invisibles dans les archives de l’État colonial ? Cet article aborde ces questions dans le cadre de la colonie française de Nouvelle-Calédonie, en analysant la trajectoire d’un foyer familial établi à l’abri des regards officiels, composé d’un colon français, d’une femme autochtone kanak et de leurs descendants. L’objectif est ici de comprendre ce que ce phénomène de relative invisibilité sociale révèle de la portée et des limites de la domination coloniale « au ras du sol ». Croisant enquête ethnographique de terrain et recherche en archives, l’article retrace les conditions dans lesquelles cette configuration familiale a pu émerger puis se maintenir pendant plus de cinquante ans. Elle a finalement disparu après la mort du colon français, lorsque chacun des deux groupes familiaux élargis– du côté européen et du côté kanak – a œuvré, à des degrés divers, à l’effacement de ce passé gênant au sein de leurs mondes sociaux respectifs.

Type
Research Article
Information
Annales. Histoire, Sciences Sociales - English Edition , First View , pp. 1 - 40
Copyright
© Éditions de l’EHESS 2025

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Footnotes

This article was first published in French as “Sous le radar colonial ? Histoire et mémoire d’un foyer multiracial ‘invisible’ en Nouvelle-Calédonie,” in “Mondes océaniens,” thematic dossier, Annales HSS 79, no. 4 (2024): 563–604, doi 10.1017/ahss.2025.2.

References

1. Ann Laura Stoler, Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power: Race and the Intimate in Colonial Rule (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002); Stoler, “Tense and Tender Ties: The Politics of Comparison in North American History and (Post)Colonial Studies,” Journal of American History 88, no. 3 (2001): 829–65; Pascale Barthélémy et al., “Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power: Race and the Intimate in Colonial Rule,” Monde(s) 24, no. 2 (2023): 133–59.

2. On the “politics of difference” at the heart of imperial formations, see Jane Burbank and Frederick Cooper, Empires in World History: Power and the Politics of Difference (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010), 11–13.

3. On this last point, the literature is extensive. In general, as colonization developed authorities became less tolerant of interracial relations previously deemed necessary or desirable, but which later threatened growing ideals of bourgeois respectability as white women arrived in larger numbers. Significant variations emerge however between European colonies in which exploitation was based on economic, commercial, diplomatic, or military domination with a relatively small European presence (as in the majority of colonies in Africa, Asia, and Oceania), and colonies of settlement in which there were relatively large European populations—with a greater proportion of white women—and projects to establish new European societies (principally in the Americas, Algeria, South Africa, Australia, and New Zealand). Other differences are evident between colonies with or without a history of slavery; in the former cases relations between whites and “natives” might be more favored or tolerated than those between whites and slaves. Gender differences are also of note: while unions between white women and “native” men or slaves were almost universally deplored if not prohibited, they were much more likely to be tolerated between white men and non-white women. This schema however cannot do justice to all the diversity of colonial situations. In the French case, see for example Gilles Havard, “‘Les forcer à devenir Cytoyens.’ État, Sauvages et citoyenneté en Nouvelle-France (xviie–xviiie siècle),” Annales HSS 64, no. 5 (2009): 985–1018, here pp. 1001–1005; Cécile Vidal and Emily Clark, “Famille et esclavage à La Nouvelle-Orléans sous le régime français (1699–1769),” Annales de démographie historique 122, no. 2 (2011): 99–126; Emmanuelle Saada, Empire’s Children: Race, Filiation, and Citizenship in the French Colonies [2007], trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012); Rachel Jean-Baptiste, Conjugal Rights: Marriage, Sexuality, and Urban Life in Colonial Libreville, Gabon (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2014). On the British Empire, see Durba Ghosh, Sex and the Family in Colonial India: The Making of Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006); Damon Ieremia Salesa, Racial Crossings: Race, Intermarriage, and the Victorian British Empire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011); Claudia Knapman, White Women in Fiji, 1835–1930: The Ruin of Empire? (Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 1986); Angela Wanhalla, Matters of the Heart: A History of Interracial Marriage in New Zealand (Auckland: Auckland University Press, 2013). See also, in other imperial contexts, Amandine Lauro, Coloniaux, ménagères et prostituées au Congo Belge, 1885–1930 (Loverval: Labor, 2005); Charlotte de Castelnau-L’Estoile, Un catholicisme colonial. Le mariage des Indiens et des esclaves au Brésil (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 2019); Frances Gouda, “Genre, métissage et transactions coloniales aux Indes néerlandaises (1900–1942),” Clio. Histoire, femmes et sociétés 33, no. 1 (2011): 23–44; Carmen Bernand et al., eds., “Amériques métisses,” special issue, Clio. Histoire, femmes et sociétés 27, no. 1 (2008). For wider surveys, see Jean-Frédéric Schaub and Silvia Sebastiani, Race et histoire dans les sociétés occidentales, xve–xviiie siècle (Paris: Albin Michel, 2021); Chelsea Schields and Dagmar Herzog, eds., The Routledge Companion to Sexuality and Colonialism (London: Routledge, 2021); Solène Brun, Derrière le mythe métis. Enquête sur les couples mixtes et leurs descendants en France (Paris: La Découverte, 2024), 35–71.

4. Saada, Empire’s Children, 59–65.

5. Ibid., 1–41; Rachel Jean-Baptiste, Multiracial Identities in Colonial French Africa: Race, Childhood, and Citizenship (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2023); Violaine Tisseau, Être métis en Imerina (Madagascar) aux xixe–xxe siècles (Paris: Karthala, 2017); Owen White, Children of the French Empire: Miscegenation and Colonial Society in French West Africa, 1895–1960 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999). Stemming from the ideology of “natural parentage” and questions over the links between parentage, transmission, social status, race, gender, and citizenship, this debate is reminiscent of an older controversy over the status of bastards under the ancien régime and then the Revolution. See Sylvie Steinberg, Une tâche au front. La bâtardise aux xvie et xviie siècles (Paris: Albin Michel, 2016); and “Et les bâtards devinrent citoyens. La privatisation d’une condition d’infamie sous la Révolution française,” Genèses 108, no. 3 (2017): 9–28; Saada, Empire’s Children, 17–22.

6. Stoler, Along the Archival Grain: Epistemic Anxieties and Colonial Common Sense (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009).

7. Chelsea Schields and Dagmar Herzog, “Sex, Intimacy, and Power in Colonial Studies,” in Schields and Herzog, The Routledge Companion to Sexuality and Colonialism, 1–17, here p. 3; Barthélémy et al., “Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power,” 139.

8. Bastien Bosa, “Comment devient-on aborigène ? Trajectoires familiales dans le Sud-Est de l’Australie,” Annales HSS 64, no. 6 (2009): 1335–59, here pp. 1338–39.

9. Stoler, Along the Archival Grain; Marie Rodet, “C’est le regard qui fait l’histoire. Comment utiliser des archives coloniales qui nous renseignent malgré elles sur l’histoire des femmes africaines (archives),” Terrains & travaux 10, no. 1 (2006): 18–35; Pascale Barthélémy, Luc Capdevila, and Michelle Zancarini-Fournel, “Femmes, genre et colonisations,” in “Colonisations,” ed. Barthélémy, Capdevila, and Zancarini-Fournel, special issue, Clio. Histoire, femmes et sociétés 33, no. 1 (2011): 7–22; Elisa Camiscioli, “Women, Gender, Intimacy, and Empire,” Journal of Women’s History 25, no. 4 (2013): 138–48.

10. For example, Ghosh, Sex and the Family in Colonial India; Amandine Lauro, “‘J’ai l’honneur de porter plainte contre ma femme.’ Litiges conjugaux et administration coloniale au Congo belge (1930–1960),” Clio. Histoire, femmes et sociétés 33, no. 1 (2011): 65–84; Rachel Jean-Baptiste, “‘A Black Girl Should Not Be with a White Man’: Sex, Race, and African Women’s Social and Legal Status in Colonial Gabon, c. 1900–1946,” Journal of Women’s History 22, no. 2 (2010): 56–82; Bosa, “Comment devient-on aborigène ?”; Angela Wanhalla and Kate Stevens, “A ‘Class of No Political Weight’? Interracial Marriage, Mixed Race Children, and Land Rights in Southern New Zealand, 1840s–1880s,” History of the Family 24, no. 3 (2019): 653–73.

11. Here we situate ourselves in continuity with the work of Françoise Blum and Ophélie Rillon on the d’Arboussier family and with Violaine Tisseau on the histories of mixed-race families in Madagascar. See Françoise Blum and Ophélie Rillon, “Une histoire de famille dans l’empire colonial français. Penser les trajectoires individuelles et familiales au prisme de l’intersectionnalité,” 20 & 21. Revue d’histoire 146, no. 2 (2020): 39–52; Tisseau, Être métis en Imerina; and Tisseau, “Au creux de l’intime. Familles et sociabilités de l’entre-deux à Madagascar pendant la période coloniale (1896–1960),” Annales de démographie historique 135, no. 1 (2018): 113–40.

12. As exemplified in the work of Clare Anderson, Subaltern Lives: Biographies of Colonialism in the Indian Ocean World, 1790–1920 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012); Martha Hodes, “A Story with an Argument: Writing the Transnational Life of a Sea Captain’s Wife,” in Transnational Lives: Biographies of Global Modernity, 1700–Present, ed. Desley Deacon, Penelope Russell, and Angela Woollacott (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 15–26; Hodes, La femme du capitaine. Guerre, amour et race dans l’Amérique du xixe siècle (Toulouse: Anacharsis, 2019); and Virginie Riou, “Trajectoires pseudo-coloniales : les Français du condominium franco-anglais des ex-Nouvelles-Hébrides (Vanuatu) de la fin du xixe siècle à l’entre deux guerres” (PhD diss., EHESS, 2010). See also Angela Wanhalla, In/visible Sight: The Mixed Descent Families of Southern New Zealand (Wellington: Bridget Williams Books, 2009), which charts the author’s own family history to exhume largely “invisible” mixed-race histories in southern New Zealand; Wanhalla and Stevens, “A ‘Class of No Political Weight’?” 653–55.

13. The noun and adjective “Kanak” (both used invariably) are used today to designate the Indigenous people of New Caledonia.

14. Frederick Cooper, “Conflict and Connection: Rethinking Colonial African History,” American Historical Review 99, no. 5 (1994): 1516–45, here p. 1518. On “thinking with” cases, see Jean-Claude Passeron and Jacques Revel, eds., Penser par cas (Paris: Éd. de l’EHESS, 2005).

15. Tisseau, “Au creux de l’intime,” 114.

16. Tisseau, Être métis en Imerina, 181–84.

17. Benoît Trépied, “Politique et relations coloniales en Nouvelle-Calédonie. Ethnographie historique de la commune de Koné, 1946–1988” (PhD diss., EHESS, 2007); Trépied, Une mairie dans la France coloniale. Koné, Nouvelle-Calédonie (Paris: Karthala, 2010).

18. Benoît Trépied, interview with Maria Napoaréa (born in 1947), Tiaoué (Koné), December 3, 2002.

19. We discuss the specific features of this locality in the commune of Koné below.

20. Benoît Trépied, interview with Roger Mennesson (1923–2008), La Tontouta, January 12, 2004.

21. Benoît Trépied, interview with Léon Magnier (1925–2015), Koné, April 17, 2003.

22. Tribu is a colonial category designating a “native reserve” delimited by the colonial administration and placed under the authority of an administrative petit chef. The Koné region today has nine tribus, distinct from the settler township of Koné (the “village”).

23. Benoît Trépied and Sonia Grochain, interview with Suzanne Napoaréa (widow Moagou), Koniambo (Koné), November 6, 2002. All subsequent citations of Suzanne draw on this interview. We examine the question of her patronym below.

24. Trépied, Politique et relations coloniales; Trépied, Une mairie dans la France coloniale, 100–104.

25. Adrian Muckle, “Spectres of Violence in a Colonial Context: The Wars at Koné, Hienghène and Tipindjé – New Caledonia, 1917” (PhD diss., Australian National University, 2004); Muckle, Specters of Violence in a Colonial Context: New Caledonia, 1917 (Honolulu: University of Hawaiʻi Press, 2012).

26. Adrian Muckle and Benoît Trépied, “Les transformations de la ‘question métisse’ en Nouvelle-Calédonie (1853–2009),” Anthropologie et sociétés 38, no. 2 (2014): 89–108; translated into English as Muckle and Trépied, “The Transformation of the ‘Métis Question’ in New Caledonia, 1853–2009,” in Mixed Race Identities in Australia, New Zealand and the Pacific Islands, ed. Kirsten McGavin and Farida Fozdar (New York: Routledge, 2016), 116–32.

27. According to the 1901 census, 5,180 of the 12,253 free settlers were female, including 896 single women over eighteen, 1,754 married women, and 2,126 children. Of the 5,323 penal settlers (libérés), just 144 were women. “Recensement général de la population, November 3, 1901,” Journal officiel de la Nouvelle-Calédonie (hereafter “JONC”), April 5, 1902.

28. Joël Dauphiné, “Le métissage biologique dans la Nouvelle-Calédonie coloniale (1853–1939),” in Colonies, territoires, sociétés. L’enjeu français, ed. Alain Saussol and Joël Ztomersky (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1996), 217–22.

29. Isabelle Merle, Expériences coloniales. La Nouvelle-Calédonie, 1853–1920 (Paris: Belin, 1995), 360–68.

30. Ibid., 363–64.

31. Saada, Empire’s Children, 3, 22, and 40; Marie-Paule Ha, “‘La Femme française aux colonies’: Promoting Female Immigration at the Turn of the Century,” French Colonial History 6 (2005): 205–24, here pp. 207–209; Stoler, Carnal Knowledge, 48–51 and 53–55.

32. Saada, Empire’s Children, 19; Tisseau, Être métis en Imerina; White, Children of the French Empire; Muckle and Trépied, “The Transformation of the ‘Métis Question.’”

33. Alban Bensa, “Colonialisme, racisme et ethnologie en Nouvelle-Calédonie,” Ethnologie française 18, no. 2 (1988): 188–97; Merle, Expériences coloniales; Jean-Louis Rallu, “Les catégories statistiques utilisées dans les DOM-TOM depuis le début de la présence française,” Population 53, no. 3 (1998): 589–608, here p. 604; Frédéric Angleviel, ed., La Nouvelle-Calédonie, vol. 1, Terre de métissages (Paris: Les Indes savantes 2004); Saada, Empire’s Children, 31–32.

34. Christiane Terrier, “Calédoniens ou métis ?” in Angleviel, La Nouvelle-Calédonie, vol. 1, 65–80, here p. 70; Merle, Expériences coloniales, 364–66.

35. Cited in Saada, Empire’s Children, 31.

36. Florence Weber, Penser la parenté aujourd’hui. La force du quotidien (2005; Paris: Éd. Rue d’Ulm, 2013), 7–11.

37. Alban Bensa papers, Genealogy of the Napoaréa (Näpôaréa) family, established with Christian Napoaréa, August 5, 1987, copy given to the authors by Alban Bensa.

38. Jean-Marc Estournès, “La saga Henriot,” in Sagas calédoniennes : 50 grandes familles, vol. 1, ed. Dimanche Matin (Nouméa: Dimanche Matin, 1998), 128–31. Recently we have discovered on an open-access genealogy website that Auguste Henriot is now publicly presented as the father of “Loulou Napoaréa” and of “Suzanne Henriot.” Loulou’s mother is identified as “X Iaba” and Suzanne’s as “Marcelle Soukita.” The author of the genealogy, “J. P. K. Gousset,” does not specify his sources and Auguste’s other children (whom we discuss below) do not appear. Nevertheless, the very existence of this notice testifies to the greater openness that now prevails around questions of métissage in New Caledonia, in contrast to the powerful silence on this subject that marked the twentieth century and is discussed in the final part of the article. See https://gw.geneanet.org/jpkgousset?lang=fr&n=henriot&p=auguste+louis (consulted December 13, 2024).

39. Claude-Léon’s concessions comprised a “village” section in Koné, where the family home was established, an adjacent “garden” section, four hectares of “agricultural” land to the west of the village, and another twenty hectares of grazing land.

40. Nouméa, Archives de la Nouvelle-Calédonie (hereafter “ANC”), 97W, “Renseignements sur les colons,” Koné, February 12, 1895.

41. Merle, Expériences coloniales, 230, 269, and 320–22; Christiane Terrier, “La colonisation de peuplement libre en Nouvelle-Calédonie (1889–1909), ou des conséquences de la confrontation entre intérêts métropolitains et insulaires dans l’évolution d’une utopie française en Océanie vers un type colonial spécifique” (PhD diss., Université de Nouvelle-Calédonie, 2000), 231–33.

42. ANC, 1093W65, act granting definitive title to concessions, October 26, 1896; Aix-en-Provence, Archives nationales d’Outre-mer, Dépôt des papiers publics des colonies, ncl/114, Notariat, Bourail, 1901–1902, deeds of sale dated July 30, 1901, and August 1902.

43. ANC, 129W1. According to the deeds granting definitive title on April 6 and 16, 1917, the Baco concessions were allocated on January 22, 1900, and September 17, 1904.

44. Merle, Expériences coloniales, 343–45 and 353–55.

45. Estournès, “La saga Henriot,” 129.

46. Ibid., 130.

47. Ibid.

48. In 1908, Henri purchased Auguste’s and Alexandre’s Koné village sections, but land tax records suggest that Auguste remained responsible for them. ANC, 231W33, “Matrice de la contribution foncière,” 1911.

49. Nouméa, Archives de l’Archevêché de Nouméa (hereafter “AAN”) 87.7, “Exilés à l’Île des Pins – Recensement,” February 1894. The names recorded in 1894 do not correspond precisely with those recorded after 1934 on the Kanak état civil under the family name Neniko. We conjecture that the sister identified in 1894 as Agnes Chouké is Adèle Mou and that the unnamed brother is Adrien Tiéou (see fig. 1).

50. On the fate of the exiles more generally, see Alain Saussol, L’Héritage. Essai sur le problème foncier mélanésien en Nouvelle-Calédonie (Paris: Musée de l’Homme, 1979), 245–49.

51. JONC, November 17, 1894. Marcelle’s date of birth is estimated in the post-1934 état civil for the tribu of Tiaoué.

52. AAN, 87.7, Notes Journal, Vao, November 3–9, 1894.

53. AAN, 45.2, Xavier Chaboissier to Monseigneur, Koné, June 27, 1895.

54. Anon., “Dans l’intérieur,” La Calédonie, January 15, 1896, pp. 2–3.

55. Arrêté no. 1004, October 25, 1899, Bulletin officiel de la Nouvelle-Calédonie (1899), 630.

56. Union agricole calédonienne, Notice sur la Nouvelle-Calédonie, ses richesses, son avenir (rédigée pour l’exposition universelle de 1900) (Paris: Société d’éditions littéraires et artistiques, Librairie Paul Ollendorff, 1900), 17–18.

57. William Matthew Cavert, “Remaking the Pacific: Ecological Imagination and Transformation in France’s Pacific Island Empire, 1842–1931” (PhD diss., University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa, 2022), 252–53.

58. Gustave Gallet, Notice sur la Nouvelle-Calédonie (Nouméa: Imprimerie du gouvernement, 1884), 51.

59. Anon., Guide de l’émigrant en Nouvelle-Calédonie (Paris: A. Challamel et Léon Chailley, 1894), 40; Terrier, “Calédoniens ou métis ?” 71–73.

60. Maintained in each municipality, the French état civil or civil register recorded births, deaths, and marriages as well as declarations of paternity or maternity for all French citizens and foreign residents. As Kanak had their own customary civil law status they were not required or even permitted to be recorded in the French état civil, though there are many exceptions. Prior to 1934, the Kanak état civil existed only in a rudimentary form, with administrative chiefs being required to inform authorities of births and deaths and to assist with maintaining the lists on which the head tax and levies on labor were based. In 1934, detailed procedures for a Kanak état civil were set out; from then on, registers were maintained for each tribu under the supervision of the gendarme delegated to oversee “native affairs” in each locality. To the best of our knowledge, this is when the details of all families living at Tiaoué were first compiled. In addition to these administrative records, the Catholic priest in each parish maintained registers of baptisms, marriages, and burials in which no formal distinction was made between Kanak or French. The extant records of the Koné parish, including Tiaoué, begin in 1900.

61. Alban Bensa papers, Genealogy of the Napoaréa (Näpôaréa) family, established with Christian Napoaréa, August 5, 1987, copy given to the authors by Alban Bensa.

62. Gabriel and Alice were baptized on October 9, 1920, Loulou on June 21, 1921, and Suzanne on December 8, 1927. ANC, Koné Mission, register of baptisms. For Loulou and Gabriel, we privilege the dates of birth estimated at baptism (1901 and 1903) over the dates recorded in later documents (1902/1903/1906 for Loulou and 1906 for Gabriel). In Suzanne’s case, 1910 is the date estimated at baptism and in official records, but her family believe it was 1906: “‘Mamie Toutou’ centenaire,” Les nouvelles calédoniennes, January 3, 2006, https://www.lnc.nc/article/societe/mamie-toutou-centenaire.

63. Adrian Muckle and Benoît Trépied, “In the Long ‘Run’: Kanak Stockmen, the Cattle Frontier and Colonial Power Relations in New Caledonia, 1870–1988,” Oceania 80, no. 2 (2010): 198–215, here pp. 199–206.

64. Merle, Expériences coloniales, 366–67.

65. Koné, État civil, marriages, 1880–1920.

66. Koné, État civil, births, 1880–1907.

67. Cavert, “Remaking the Pacific,” 247–48.

68. ANC, 23WE4, “Jugement de Simple Police,” Koné, October 28, 1907; Koné, État civil, record of marriage, December 29, 1913.

69. Adrian Muckle, “‘Natives,’ ‘Immigrants’ and ‘Libérés’: The Colonial Regulation of Mobility in New Caledonia,” Law, Text, Culture 15, no. 1 (2011): 135–61, here p. 151.

70. ANC, 441W, 1921 census and 1926 census.

71. Estournès, “La saga Henriot,” 129.

72. On discourses surrounding European women as harbingers of morality, prestige, and respectability in the reshaping of colonial society, see Stoler, Carnal Knowledge, 55–57 and 70–71; Ha, “‘La Femme française aux colonies,’” 205–209.

73. Riou, “Trajectoires pseudo-coloniales,” 442.

74. During the colonial period, Kanak as native subjects (rather than French citizens) retained customary civil law status (statut particulier). Their civil law relationships (e.g., marriage, adoption, and inheritance rights) were governed by uncodified indigenous custom rather than the French Civil Code. Prior to 1946, the few Kanak who became French citizens were removed from this customary jurisdiction and became subject to the French Civil Code. Since 1946, when all Kanak became French citizens, Kanak have been able to choose to retain their customary civil law status.

75. Isabelle Merle and Adrian Muckle, The Indigénat and France’s Empire in New Caledonia: Origins, Practices and Legacies (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2022), 233. See also the review of the French version of this volume by Emmanuelle Saada, Annales HSS 79, no. 4 (2024): 663–68.

76. Auguste Albert Faure, “‘Affaires de Koné.’ Rapport du Brigadier Faure sur les débuts de l’insurrection de 1917 en Nouvelle-Calédonie,” Journal de la Société des Océanistes 76 (1983): 69–88, here pp. 74–75; Muckle, Specters of Violence, 17–20.

77. AAN, 46.1, Halbert to Monseigneur, Koné, December 4, 1924.

78. Revue Agricole, January 1933, 940–50. See also Jean-Marie Lambert, La nouvelle politique indigène en Nouvelle-Calédonie. Le capitaine Meunier et ses gendarmes, 1918–1954 (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1999).

79. Évelyne Henriot family papers.

80. Jean Risbec, “L’Agriculture en Nouvelle-Calédonie,” La revue du Pacifique, July 15, 1933, 406–17; Risbec, “Les parasites du caféier en Nouvelle-Calédonie,” L’Agronomie colonial. Bulletin mensuel du Jardin colonial, October 10, 1936, 105–22, here p. 108.

81. Marie Salaün, L’école indigène. Nouvelle-Calédonie, 1885–1945 (Rennes: Presses universitaires de Rennes, 2005), 103.

82. Benoît Trépied, interview with Micheline Moagou, Koniambo (Koné), July 14, 2016. All subsequent citations of Micheline draw on this interview.

83. AAN, 21.7, “Déposition du témoin Henriot Auguste,” October 2, 1918.

84. Maurice Coyaud, Contes chinois et kanak (Paris: PAF, 1982), 56.

85. Merle, Expériences coloniales, 360–64.

86. Muckle and Trépied, “In the Long ‘Run,’” 199–202. They were Antoine Chautard (Auguste’s neighbor at Baco) and Jean-Marie Fiacre.

87. ANC, Koné Mission, register of burials, February 15, 1921. Alice’s death record has not been located, but according to Suzanne she too died in the local partial leprosarium.

88. That Loulou was baptized on the same day as his adoptive uncle, Prosper Téin Tarino Napoaréa (1880–before 1935), also reinforces this hypothesis.

89. See Isabelle Leblic, “Adoptions et transferts d’enfants dans la région de Ponérihouen,” in En pays kanak. Ethnologie, linguistique, archéologie, histoire de la Nouvelle-Calédonie, ed. Alban Bensa and Isabelle Leblic (Paris: Éd. de la Maison des sciences de l’homme, 2000), 49–67.

90. It is also noteworthy that, according to Catholic church records, Patrice Oué Napoaréa himself had been born to exiles on the Isle of Pines; he subsequently appears to have been adopted into the Napoaréa lineage as a junior brother to Prosper Téin Tarino Napoaréa. This invites further questions on the incorporation of the former Poya exiles into the Tiaoué tribu that are beyond the reach of this study.

91. Arrêté no. 681, September 3, 1915, art. 1, JONC, September 11, 1915, 550.

92. Merle and Muckle, The Indigénat and France’s Empire, 205–206.

93. In New Caledonia, gendarmes (paramilitary police responsible for policing in rural areas) were also delegated responsibilities as agents (syndics) for local government services such as native affairs and immigration.

94. See Bastien Bosa, Julie Pagis, and Benoît Trépied, “Le passing : un concept pour penser les mobilités sociales,” Genèses 114, no. 1 (2019): 5–9.

95. ANC, 23WC15, Cougoul to the governor, February 19, 1917.

96. ANC, E-DC9 2D1, [Koné Municipal Commission] to the Procureur de la République, June 3, 1929.

97. South Pacific Commission, Pacific Islands Manuscripts, no. 53, Conférence des natas, Poyes, 1929.

98. Merle and Muckle, The Indigénat and France’s Empire, 233.

99. Koné, État civil, decennial tables.

100. Salaün, L’école indigène, 58–60.

101. AAN, 46.1, Jules Halbert to Monseigneur, Koné, March 31, 1927.

102. Tiaoué, État civil, entry for the birth of Loulou Bernard, August 23, 1935.

103. Merle and Muckle, The Indigénat and France’s Empire, 315–16.

104. Benoît Trépied, interview with Gathélia Wabéalo, Pouembout, July 12, 2016.

105. Jean Guiart, Les Mélanésiens devant l’économie de marché. Du milieu du xixe siècle à la fin du millénaire (Nouméa: Le Rocher-à-la-Voile, 1998), 56. See also Sonia Grochain, “Les Kanak et le travail en Province Nord de la Nouvelle-Calédonie” (PhD diss., EHESS, 2007), 176.

106. On the coffee industry’s decline, see Alain Saussol, “Le café en Nouvelle-Calédonie. Grandeur et vicissitude d’une colonisation,” Les cahiers d’outre-mer 20, no. 79 (1967): 275–305, here pp. 294–98; Trépied, Une mairie dans la France coloniale, 230–32.

107. Évelyne Henriot family papers, deed of succession for Auguste Henriot, 1958.

108. On the historical force of silencing in New Caledonia, see Louis-José Barbançon, Le pays du non-dit. Regards sur la Nouvelle-Calédonie (1992; Nouméa: éditions Humanis, 2019).

109. Benoît Trépied, interview with Évelyne Henriot, Nouméa, July 7, 2016.

110. Estournès, “La saga Henriot,” 130.

111. Benoît Trépied, interview with Yvon Goromoedo, July 18, 2016.

112. Benoît Trépied, interview with Évelyne Henriot, Nouméa, July 7, 2016.

113. Benoît Trépied, “Nouveaux regards sur la situation coloniale en Nouvelle-Calédonie,” in Les sciences humaines et sociales dans le Pacifique Sud. Terrains, questions et méthodes, ed. Laurent Dousset, Barbara Glowczewski, and Marie Salaün (Marseille: Pacific-credo Publications, 2014), 229–48.

114. Martha Hodes, “The Mercurial Nature and Abiding Power of Race: A Transnational Family Story,” American Historical Review 108, no. 1 (2003): 84–118, here p. 85.

115. Stoler, “Tense and Tender Ties,” 829. See also Riou, “Trajectoires pseudo-coloniales,” 441–42.

116. Following the well-known category of the “exceptional/normal” in microhistory. See Edoardo Grendi, “Micro-analyse et histoire sociale” [1977], Écrire l’histoire 3 (2009): 67–80; Ivan Ermakoff, “La microhistoire au prisme de l’exception,” Vingtième siècle. Revue d’histoire 139, no. 3 (2018): 193–211; Passeron and Revel, Penser par cas.

117. Solène Brun, “La socialisation raciale : enseignements de la sociologie étatsunienne et perspectives françaises,” Sociologie 13, no. 2 (2022): 199–217.

118. Drawing on work on métissage in France and “racial passing” in the United States, for example, Brun, Derrière le mythe métis; Trépied, “Des Noirs qui passent pour Blancs ? Enjeux analytiques et méthodologiques des enquêtes sur le passing aux États-Unis,” Genèses 114, no. 1 (2019): 96–116.