12 Foundations (Feature

FOUNDATIONS

Mauatua Fa’ara Reynolds (she/they; Samoan Ti’avea & Lalovaea)

“I’m Mauatua.” My name feels like home in my mouth. My own whare. A hoem that holds so much history, meaning, mana. A fare owned by my ancestor, the daughter of a chief, who helped begin a new Pacific civilisation and culture. Now, this is mine. And I care for this house with so much aroha, arofa, and aloha because it was passed down to me and is my legacy.

But it’s not my name when the white girl repeats it.

“Mow-a-too-a? Makatonga? Mowatushka? Moana!” her serrated shark teeth (not my special ma’o or mango teeth) crush my house. She tears through the foundations. Our foundations.

Because she doesn’t know that the powerful atua seated at the end is omnipresent throughout our sea of islands. And when I reach my left ear to Samoa and Aotearoa, they chant the same word spoken in my heart. Atua. She doesn’t know that our atua journeyed across the largest living body on this earth And morphed And transformed. Because when I reach my right ear to Hawai’i, I hear them cry akua. While our people, words, and vaka have voyaged far and wide, stretched to the ends of the earth and evolved, our hearts and mana remain the same.

But she doesn’t know that.

All she knows is that “Bora bora is so pretty! It’s all over my insta feed”. She doesn’t know that my grand-père was put on a big industrial boat (not our strong wooden wa’a) and shipped to the Tuamotu islands where he had to assist the nuclear testing.

When I was just a young tamahine, my Mama told me that ‘once upon a time’ he was on the beach with his friend doing work. His friend started complaining about how itchy his leg was. Āue, stupide, my grand-père thought. So itchy, he kept saying. He walked over to the coconut tree and started rubbing his leg against the rough surface of the trunk. Finally, some relief My grand-père watched his friend itching his leg, As his skin slowly started to peel off in strips, like the bark of our trees.

Before he passed, my grand-père still had the nuclear bombs exploding inside him. That sickening murky radiation coursed through his blood for decades. It blinded him. It gave him incurable ulcers. It ate away at his mana. It took him from me. Slowly.

My story is not just my own. It belongs to the Marshallese, the French Polynesians, to all of us.

How bad does it need to be to get an apology? Because those bombs were more than 10 times the size of those that destroyed Hiroshima. Do I need to kick, cry and scream? We’ve been doing that for decades. Do I need to howl for my grandfather’s decaying corpse? I still do that. Too often, our islands have been perceived as tiny, dependent, weak, isolated, and expendable. They use our fenua as a testing ground and our tangata as lab rats. They used us as sacrifices for the ‘greater good’. They poisoned our life force, our moana, our fenua, our nurturing mother. And it continues to kill us, because the subterranean fractures under our atolls could release radioactive material into the sea. This would be devastating. We are not small. We are not fragile. We are not disposable.

We are vast. We are strong. We are fierce.

My name is Mauatua. Learn it.

Illustration: Amiria-Rose Monga

OUR HISTORY, THE TRUTH

• By 1996, France had conducted 45 atmospheric and 134 underground tests. Those bombs were up to 200 kilotons: over ten times the size of the bomb that destroyed Hiroshima. Each test cost an average of $2 billion CFP, the equivalent of more than $31 million NZD.

• Information on the tests is still kept under wraps by the French Government, and we may never know the full extent of radioactive contamination affecting French Polynesia and the surrounding islands.

• The catastrophic methods used for the first tests included placing the bomb onto a barge and letting it explode, which caused the water and everything it contained to travel into the sky and fall back over the atolls, covering land and water with dead sea life. These were left for weeks to rot in the sun.

• In 1968, Fangataufa was so badly contaminated by a thermonuclear detonation that it was shut off from humans for six years. It is now listed as a wildlife sanctuary for birds, and classified as a common military zone (338).

• Apparently, everytime a test was imminent, the locals were placed in shelters, then afterwards their houses were sprayed down with seawater, hardly a process of decontamination.

• In the Tuamotu, bombs sometimes triggered underwater landslides and even tidal waves.

• The amount of spilt plutonium in the same area would have been enough to exterminate the entire population of French Polynesia.

Scan this QR code and sign the petition to ask the French government to acknowledge and compensate those affected from the Tuamtous Islands and surrounding Islands.