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Our identity is ahead of us. After we are dead, people will take our picture and put it on the wall, and it will help them fashion their own identity.

Kanak identity is not a fixed relic of the past to be preserved unchanged, but something continually built forward, generation after generation.

Jean-Marie Tjibaou, New Caledonia

Source: Jean-Marie Tjibaou, quoted in academic and cultural accounts of his thought on Kanak identity (e.g. "La présence kanak" and related scholarship on the 1975 Mélanésia 2000 festival)

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