When I first met Peni, he was strumming a red guitar in the backyard of his in-laws' house. There, members of the Auckland Tuvaluan community were preparing for the giant feast to be held later that night, welcoming a choir visiting from Tuvalu as part of a traditional three-month group trip called a malaga. Auckland Tuvaluans use the malaga to stay connected to island traditions, and gather for elaborate feasts, dancing and prayer services that take days and nights to prepare.
For this celebration, old women prepared the food in the basement, frying traditional donuts called funa-funa on hot plates behind the stairs. As afternoon turned to evening, the whole extended family caravaned to a spare church hall and laid out the food -- at least 10 variations of taro root, as well as less traditional foods like strawberries and egg foo young -- in the center of the room. Families huddled together on straw mats, while the visiting islanders, dressed head to toe in orange, sat on chairs at the front of the room. A few young girls were employed to stand over the food swatting flies throughout the opening greeting ceremony and prayers. After dinner came the fatele -- a performance of traditional Tuvaluan singing, dancing and drumming, in which performers wear colorful straw skirts and crowns of flowers and leaves -- that lasted long into the night.
On a leisurely Saturday morning a few days after the feast, Peni invited me to his three-bedroom house in a west Auckland suburb, where he lives with his father and stepmother, three sisters, and his wife and their two young children. The Taniela living room, like most Tuvaluan homes, contains no furniture, only straw mats on the floor where his father and stepmother sleep (Telaki says it hurts his back to sleep on a bed after so many years on mats). The walls are lined in shell necklaces and family photos. After breakfast, Peni popped in a home-video tape of a fatele, which the family had brought with them from Tuvalu. His toddler daughter climbed off her bike and sat staring at the TV screen, humming along gently to the music. Peni is adamant that she and her brother know their parents' culture. "I need to keep my language," he says. And he hopes someday he can take his children back to Tuvalu, to show them where he's from. "They say, 'Tuvalu, Tuvalu, where is Tuvalu?' They don't know where Tuvalu is"
Anthropologist Michael Goldsmith of the University of Waikato in Hamilton, New Zealand, who has spent time studying Tuvaluans and other Pacific Islanders, believes that home islands become important cultural symbols. He points to the example of Niue and Tokelau, two New Zealand-owned islands from which almost the entire population has emigrated to New Zealand. "Even if the majority of the people may live in New Zealand, if there is a homeland for people to go to, then that acts as kind of the image of the hearth of culture," says Goldsmith.
And what will happen if there's no longer a hearth? Vince McBride, who runs the Pacific Cooperation Foundation in Wellington, New Zealand, and has spent years working and living in Pacific islands, imagines a future where "Tuvalu" really means a minute corner of New Zealand. He says there's a danger that "the culture and the language would gradually start to be lost as a sort of a thriving, vibrant, live culture, because inevitably it would start to get eroded and swallowed up by the New Zealand culture." Of course, "Some people would be absolutely strong in insisting that they keep their culture and would have their own festivals and church gatherings and all the rest of it, but it would be inevitable over a period of time that the culture would start to erode away." McBride also acknowledges that predicting the challenges these displaced communities will face is difficult, because their situation is unique: "That's just a guess. We haven't seen a situation here where that's happened before."
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Koloa Talake was the prime minister of Tuvalu from 2001 to 2002. Before that he was Tuvalu's only ice cream vendor. Now he lives on a remote peninsula across the street from the beach, 45 minutes from Auckland, and keeps his distance from the tight-knit Tuvaluan community down the coast. It was during his term that New Zealand agreed to change its immigration policies to formally admit 75 Tuvaluans a year under its Pacific Access Category. New Zealand intended the Pacific Access Category to simplify its immigration policies, but for Talake, the request was a way to start moving people off the islands. "Eventually if the global warming takes effect, Tuvalu will be affected, and it's a problem of removing a lot of people off Tuvalu. This taking people each year is a gradual reducing the population in Tuvalu," explains Talake. "I thought that we should take precautionary action before D-Day arrives."
Talake speaks slowly and doesn't seem fully present here. He sits in his small modern kitchen in shorts, his eyes drifting through the glass windows of his porch, looking out toward the sea. He says the decision to ask another nation to take his people was both a "hard and a good policy." "You have to make a choice," says Talake. "Swimming underwater or give it up, and come here to New Zealand. You can preserve part of your tradition, that is suitable to your new environment. You keep those appropriate traditions and do away with the inappropriate ones."
Now Auckland Tuvaluan leaders, convinced they will have to adapt to the inevitable, are starting to think themselves beyond the islands. "We are trying to gradually build a house here," says Vaeluaga Iosefa, a longtime New Zealand resident. "By that house we are talking metaphorically -- a house that accommodates us not only for sleeping purposes, but also a meeting house, a church building, a house that can provide us food, a house that can provide us with the adequate income. It's a village resettlement project."
Vaeluaga is the younger brother of Rev. Suamalie Iosefa, the unofficial leader of Auckland Tuvaluans. He has the air of a college professor, with long gray hair tied gently in a ponytail, big sideburns. He pronounces each syllable precisely, and rolls his R's almost regally. "In Tuvalu, there are no doors to knock on, everyone sleeps in one room, there's open space, there's a framework there," says Iosefa. "That's the kind of environment we are proposing here. Bring the island here to New Zealand. Maintain all the essential dynamics there but also integrate the western New Zealand way of life."
Journeys aren't anything new for Polynesians, who traveled by canoe across the Pacific Ocean -- to far-flung spots like Samoa, Tonga, Aotearoa (New Zealand), Tahiti and Tuvalu -- long before European explorers arrived. And many Tuvaluans have spent at least some portion of their life away from their home island.
"Old people used to say you need two feet in order to survive," said Vaeluaga. "One foot to go to new land. And one foot to stay on old land. The underlying interpretation behind that is to go out into the world and look for better land, and look for a better life in order to survive, and if one person survives in New Zealand, then the whole clan can claim one is surviving there."
Vaeluaga believes that as the sea levels rise, Tuvaluans may have to stand in New Zealand on one foot alone.
But the current Tuvalu government isn't satisfied with letting the islands drown in exchange for a rescue boat. "I think these things are quick-fix types of approaches," said Tuvalu United Nations Ambassador Enele Sopoaga from his office one block from the U.N. building in New York, where he works full-time raising awareness for his country's plight. Tuvaluan officials realized their predicament early on, and were among the first countries to sound the alarm on sea-level rise, beginning with the 1988 Pacific Forum in Tonga. In 2000, the government sold the only thing it had of real monetary value -- a Dot TV (.tv) Internet domain name -- for $50 million and bought its way into the United Nations in an effort to gain a louder voice. Today, Tuvalu delegates like Sopoaga travel the world to U.N. conventions, Commonwealth meetings, and international environmental forums, hoping countries like the United States and Australia will heed their call, sign the Kyoto Protocol, and limit their carbon emissions. But, unlike Talake and other previous prime ministers, they will not accept a contingency plan.
"There are a lot of places in the world you can relocate Tuvaluans to and then forget about the problem of climate change. I don't believe this is a responsible way to deal with the problem," said Sopoaga. "Tuvaluans want to live in their own islands forever. To relocate is a shortsighted solution, an irresponsible solution. We're not dealing here with Tuvalu only. All of the low-lying island coastal areas are going to be affected. You tell me whether the world is ready to evacuate everybody. There is a challenge to reverse and address climate change, to try to mitigate greenhouse gas emissions, and I think the world should focus on that."
Some Tuvaluan citizens are not so optimistic. Fala Haulangi, a union organizer and radio host in Auckland, wants her people to be officially recognized as environmental refugees. Global warming is a topic of frequent discussion on her weekly radio show. She's a sprightly woman with giant hand gestures, and uses colloquial slang like "auntie" and "uncle" to refer to politicians. Although she often lets out a hearty laugh in the back of her throat, she takes a cynical view. "It's happening," she says. "I believe we better do something now instead of waiting. We can never change your uncle's [meaning Bush's] view in signing up for Kyoto Protocol. I think the damage is done, so now it's a matter of having someplace to go."
We're sitting at a Starbucks in a mall, overlooking the escalators. She turns to me, still laughing but suddenly urgent, emphatic. "Tuvalu is our identity, our culture," she says. "We may be Kiwis now, but I'm still proud of where I come from. The little ones born here say, 'I'm New Zealand born, but I'm a Tuvaluan.' It will be very hard to accept we're no longer on the map."
Read other articles in the Early Signs: Reports from a Warming Planet directory.
About the writer
Alexandra Berzon is a freelance journalist. This story is a joint production of Salon, NPRs Living on Earth and U.C. Berkeleys Graduate School of Journalism.
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