Sergio Tepano Cuevas

Today, all the public services on Easter Island are locally administered by a Rapanui executive. One of these is Sergio Tepano-Cuevas, 35 years old, the son of Ricardo Tepano and Ximena Cuevas, who is the current Head of the Office of Indigenous Affairs, CONADI. His paternal grandparents are Jorge Tepano-Ika, who was nicknamed “Kai Uhi”, and Beatriz Pérez-Farfán. Jorge Tepano was a mayor in the decade of the 1960s. Among his works were channeling the drinking water from Rano Kau volcano to the town of Hanga Roa and participating in the planting of the palm trees brought from Tahiti on the Chilean naval training ship, “Esmeralda”.

His great-grandfather, Juan “Iovani a Rano” Tepano-Huki, better known as “Parare’e “, was a major figure in the contemporary history of the Island, who became a valuable source of information for researchers, such as Katherine Routledge and others. Due to his participation with the Chilean Army at the Battle of Placilla during the revolution of 1891 which overthrew President Balmaceda, he learned to speak Spanish. He was later captured and returned to the Island to help establish Chilean sovereignty. It should be noted that all this happened only three years after the annexation of the Island to Chile by Policarpo Toro, a nephew of the wife of Balmaceda.

Sergio Tepano is an Islander who lived here and studied in the municipal school until his 2^nd year of secondary level and then finished secondary school in Rancagua on the continent. He first decided to study hotel administration in Santiago and then returned to work for a year as inspector and sports instructor at the local Educational Village. It was perhaps this experience that gave him the impulse to study kinesiology in Viña del Mar. In 2014, with his degree as a kinesiologist, he worked with the municipal Corporation for Sports and Recreation and in public health programs of the new hospital, both on Easter Island.

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“I recall the story of my grandfather, Jorge Tepano, who fell in love with my grandmother when she came to the Island accompanying a Chilean family. When she was boarding the naval ship to return to the continent, he, in his little wooden boat, kidnapped her and brought her back to the Island to marry him. They had more than 12 children. My father’s childhood and adolescence was pretty rough, so he stowed away on a ship with a group of Rapanui friends to see the continent and new horizons. It was the only way to travel in those days. When he came back, he married for the first time and had two sons, Jorge and Enrique. Then in an affair, my sister, Karina, was born. Later, he traveled back to the continent where he met my mother, with whom he started a new family into which we three children were born, my two sisters and me. In total, we are 6 siblings.”

For Sergio Tepano, his youth on the Island was hard. “We were all just considered working tools and had to do our share to mote kai, ‘make the kitchen sing’. Even the wife was considered to be another pair of hands. She had the same amount of work as the man and shared in the tasks of the farm, as well. In that time, it was still a period of great scarcity, not like today, where the Chilean government has been a great facilitator to satisfy the many needs of education, health, subsidies for housing and the economic resources for projects which offer jobs.

Felipe Agurto Tuki

Jorge Tepano Ika & Beatriz Perez Farfan

Ximena Cuevas & Ricardo Tepano

“On Rapa Nui, we all have our family lands, except those who have sold theirs for a vehicle or to pay off a debt, without considering the true value of the land within the cosmovision of our people. For them, money comes first. Many people tell me that I am a pessimist or very negative, but the only thing that is remaining of a millennial culture is a romantic ballad. When you want to hear it or revive it, you sing or put it on the radio, but in the day-to-day, it’s another song. Envy and greed have become part of the nature of certain segments of our people. From walking barefoot, we have made a big leap into wealth, but with little education. The abuses begin there.

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“Some of the conduct of some of the Rapanui fits into the well-known Maslow’s Pyramid of Needs, a theory of hierarchy of needs and motivations proposed by the American psychologist, Abraham Maslow. Many live only to satisfy their basic, physiological needs, but if we want to talk about self-organization and self-determination, we are light years away. Many Rapanui don’t think about the future, just the day-to-day, without any long-term plan. Too few have ventured off the Island to travel or study. Luckily, there still are some Rapanui families who carry the culture within them, which gives us the hope that the Rapanui dream can continue for some time more.”

Commenting on the history of Rapa Nui, Tepano emphasizes that, “The Rapanui people are destined to disappear. According to the notes of the navigators who arrived prior to the slave raids from Callao ( 1862- 1863), there already was a decadence in the Islanders. Fifteen years later, Alphonse Pinard, the French commander of the ship ‘Seignelay’, visited the Island and counted only one hundred inhabitants. From that hundred, we come, today all of mixed-blood. Only education will help us to maintain our culture.”

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