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In accordance to the basic commitment of its members to contribute to the development of their community, and also to its mission to promote leadership in favour of positive change, the Junior Economic Chamber of TAHITI has launched, since decembre 2005, a huge local project that is looking forward to implementing the core value of preservation of its cultural and natural heritage.
Then, three objectives has been set up in march 2006 : firstable, to act for the application of a symbolic cultural site on the French Tentative List of sites to be submitted to World Heritage nomination, then secondly, to assist in ensuring the transmission of the heritage preservation’s core value to the pupils through educational tool or projects.
The third objective is to stimulate a strong local mobilization within the Polynesian community around the preservation of its heritage, by creating and monitoring a high-level event in Tahiti under the Patronage of UNESCO: an International Forum on the Heritage in the Pacific.
But the first step would be to acknowledge that French Polynesia doesn’t possess any cultural and natural heritage that could be isolated from other countries and State parties all over the Pacific. Therefore, the objective of JCI Tahiti is to contribute to raise the regional awareness to the level of understanding this common Pacific heritage.
Since Saint-Exupéry was writing “We do not inherit the land of our parents, we actually borrow it from our children”, were sown the seeds of what should become the UNESCO’s concept of world heritage. “A Gift from the Past in favour of the future generations, but managed in the present”. That is the deep essence of the world heritage’s preservation.
The next step would be to acknowledge that the sustainable preservation of any cultural or natural heritage, whatever it is, could not be reasonably achieved without local community’s involvement under a mutual respect between landowners and the government. This is so true for the Pacific area in which our country, French Polynesia, belongs.
We have decided to act for the nomination of the sacred complex « Te Pô » including the international Marae Taputapuatea, in Opoa (Raiatea), for the power of what it symbolizes toward the whole polynesian community, and because this site has cultural connections with many other communities of the Polynesian Triangle.
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