Tangata o le Moana
Words by Mauatua Fa’ara-Reynolds (she/her)
CW: Effects of Nuclear Weapons
“There are only 90,000 of them out there. Who gives a damn?” - Henry Kissinger, former US Secretary of State.
When you think of Tahiti, you probably imagine beautiful black-sand beaches, ripe and ready coconuts, and smiling women with flowers behind their ears and colourful sarongs wrapped around their waists. This is not the Tahiti I know.
I spent my childhood in Huahine, a small island off of Tahiti, riddled with poverty. I remember the main street littered with stray pieces of plastic food wrapping, emaciated dogs so skinny you could count their ribs, and old shirtless vāhine wearing stained bras with the underwires poking out and stabbing their skin.
We were lucky, though. We grew up in a lovely fare close to the beach. But my Grand-père and Grand-mère lived on the main island in Pirae, in a small concrete house with my two aunties, my uncle, and three cousins.
My Grand-père was a beautiful old man. He was quiet and would spend his afternoons beneath the banana tree, a cigarette in one hand and the Bible in the other. Most children grow up with cute stories about their grandparents. How they met in a little Parisian café in the 60s, or how they were highschool sweethearts, married for 50 years and counting.
The story I grew up with was my Grand-père stationed in the Tuamotu islands during the French nuclear testings. How he saw his best friend, who had been exposed to nuclear waste, scratch his leg down to the bone.
This story has haunted my nightmares ever since. How could this possibly happen to my beautiful people, my beautiful family? What did we do to deserve, as of 2012, the highest rates of thyroid cancer and myeloid leukaemia in the world? What did we do to deserve no ‘maximum radiation dose limit’? What did we do to deserve 5844 tonnes of radioactive materials just dumped into our precious moana?
The last time I saw my Grand-père, his skin had turned grey, he was covered in sores, and he had gone blind in one eye. This was not the beautiful old man I knew. The doctor said this was caused by the ongoing effects of the radiation. In 2021, when he died, the doctor said the same thing.
French Polynesia wasn’t the only one. The Marshall Islands (Bikini and Enewetak Atolls), Johnston Atoll, Kazakhstan, Novaya Zemlya (home to the Nenetz people), Lop Nur (home to the Uygur people), Australia (in the lands of the Maralinga Tjarutja people), Algeria, Tuvalu, Kiribati, Hiroshima, Nagasaki.
With Indigenous populations around the world, and especially in the Pacific, there’s a malicious narrative that we are a small, dependent, and needy people. And, because we’re such a tiny population compared to the rest of the world, we can be sacrificed for the ‘greater good’—a phrase we’re all too familiar with.
Our moana feeds us. Many of us back in the islands still rely on the gifts of the sea to provide nutrition and nurture. But what do we do when our life-force is poisoned? And what will we do when our ocean engulfs and drowns us?
We are tangata o le moana.
We come from the sea, we are nurtured by the sea, and we will return to the sea.
To poison our moana is to poison our people.
And that is the blood of millions.