Wayfinding

by M. R. O'Connor

  NAVIGATING CLIMATE CHANGE

  When I set out to talk to traditional navigators in the Arctic, Australia, and Oceania, I had not anticipated how intricately the issue of climate change would be intertwined in these conversations. Again and again the indigenous communities I visited happened to be on the front lines of climate disruption, and only later did I fully appreciate that it was often because of their unique cultural practices, including oral transmission of information through generations and methodical observation of nature, that they were so keenly aware of these disruptions. In some cases, individuals are able to compare the changes wrought by climate change against several hundred years of collective experience because of the integrity of their oral traditions.

  In the Arctic, where sea-ice conditions, weather, and temperature are increasingly unpredictable, I learned that for years older hunters—the same individuals who most often possessed a mastery of wayfinding skills—have reported strange environmental phenomena that they said had never been witnessed before. The Inuit filmmaker Zacharias Kunuk was often told by these elders that the sun was emerging after the long winter in different places in the sky than before, and the stars were often appearing in the wrong place. Initially, Kunuk thought it was a joke, but the elders insisted; the earth must have shifted on its axis, they told him. “I never paid any attention to it, but when I started making the documentary Inuit Knowledge and Climate Change, people from other communities started saying the same thing,” he told me. “I don’t think they were taken seriously. The Inuit don’t have a PhD, they haven’t gone to the university.” Kunuk was curious enough that he and a film partner, the geographer Ian Mauro, began reaching out to scientists for an explanation, even writing to NASA, which rebuffed them. They finally found a scientist at the University of Manitoba who was an expert in atmospheric refraction, a kind of mirage caused by changes in air density that deflects light. The earth had not shifted on its axis, but it turns out that the appearance of celestial phenomena had changed in the Arctic, most likely as a result of temperature variations stemming from climate change. As it turns out, the Inuit already had a word for this sort of mirage, but they didn’t connect it to what they saw in the sky: qapirangajuq. It means “spear strangely,” and describes how when spearing fish, a hunter has to adjust for refraction in the water. “You start realizing they are right,” said Kunuk.

  The scientific group Arctic Council, composed of members from eight countries, now predicts that the entire Arctic will be ice free in the summer by 2040. According to Claudette Engblom-Bradley, a professor of education, the Yup’ik in Alaska begin observing and predicting the weather as young children, but environmental changes are now making forecasts extremely difficult. Similarly, in villages like Qaanaaq in Greenland, the changes have wrought havoc on where people can go and what environmental cues they can use to inform their movements. As one villager, Jens Danielson, told the Washington Post, “Earlier, the hunters, they can just look at the weather and see how it is going to be the next few days, so I can go out. But today, you can’t do that anymore, because the change of the weather happens from day to day, or from hour to hour.”

  In the South Pacific, climate change is literally confusing the environmental cues used for navigation. Seasonal trade winds are weakening or blowing in inconsistent directions. Across the South Pacific, home to ten million people, sea level rise threatens livelihoods and entire islands. These changes in sea level have been happening at an average rate of 1.7 millimeters per year for most of the twentieth century, a rate that accelerated in the 1990s, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. For islands like Tuvalu or Vanuatu and hundreds of others, the threat is flooding and erosion, and potentially the submergence of atolls. Ninety percent of the population of the Maldives, Marshall Islands, and Tuvalu live on land, for instance, that is less than ten meters above sea level.

  The potential costs of relocating entire island populations in the future are head-spinning. As Robert McLeman points out in his book Climate and Human Migration, there is no direct modern-day analog for the disappearance of land masses for entire nations as could happen in the South Pacific. Such refugees would join the twelve million currently stateless people in the world. “Tuvaluans will not cease to be citizens of Tuvalu because of [sea level rise] but Tuvalu itself may physically cease to be habitable, becoming a sort of modern Atlantis,” he writes. “No international law or policy would give automatic shelter or protection to those made stateless by [sea level rise]. Although the popular media, nongovernment organizations, and some scholars use terms like ‘environmental refugees’ or ‘climate change refugees,’ such a category of persons simply doesn’t exist under international law.”

  Over the course of my reporting, I began to connect another surprising aspect of the relationship between human navigation practices and global climate. At the start of the Industrial Age, humanity unleashed a revolution in transportation powered by accessing fossil fuels deep in the earth, propelling us to greater and greater speeds in cars, airplanes, ships, and rockets, vehicles unimaginable to our ancestors. In that same period, from the invention of the combustion engine to now, we have put so much heat-trapping carbon into the atmosphere that levels are higher than at any period in the last eight hundred thousand years. In other words, the same revolution in transportation that led to changes in the way we navigate helped create the problem of climate change, and now climate change will undoubtedly impact how and where humans move in the coming decades.

  But are indigenous cultural practices and knowledge of navigation potentially critical tools for combating climate change? McLeman writes that pastoralist cultures from Central Asia to Lapland to Saharan Africa practice inherently migratory lifestyles. Among the Aboriginal Australians, Inuit, and First Nations of North America, mobility and migration are inherent components of culture practice and environmental stewardship. What might others learn from those who embraced mobility and migration as part of their identity and possess skills for travel and survival under their own power? The Columbia University professor Rafis Abazov has written that the modern world has much to learn from nomadic cultures, including attitudes toward the Other, because exploring otherness and learning from newcomers about the land beyond the horizon is essential to nomadism. At the very least, it seems that indigenous communities have much to offer the scientific community if only their traditions and methods for accumulating and synthesizing knowledge were seen as equally valid.

  The Indigenous Peoples’ Bio Cultural Climate Change Assessment Initiative argues that indigenous knowledge, experiences, wisdom, and perspectives are needed to develop evidence-based responses for adaptation. And across the South Pacific, the revival of traditional navigation is increasingly seen as a potent response to the threat of climate change, and the specific technologies and economies that unleashed it. The Marshall Islands is the first Pacific country to commit to reducing its transport emissions by nearly 27 percent by 2030. The Okeanos Foundation wants to create a new Pacific interisland transportation industry using a combination of traditional canoe technology, biofuels, and solar power to wean Oceanians away from a dependence on the very fossil fuels that threaten to submerge their nations. Voyaging societies, NGOs, nonprofits, schools, and communities are recognizing that traditional knowledge and wayfinding could be powerful aspects of a sustainable, fossil fuel–free future.

  * * *

  At the University of the South Pacific on the island of Viti Levu in Fiji, I visited the offices of the Sustainable Sea Transport Research Programme and its director, Peter Nuttall. Dedicated to developing low-carbon shipping solutions, the program is applying traditional Fijian sail technology to commercial global sea transportation in order to end the region’s dependence on fuel. The sea transport industry as a whole is the sixth-largest emitter of greenhouse gases in the world; creating a fleet of sail-powered catamarans, Nuttall thinks, could create a carbon-positive alternative with potential to remake the economy
in ways that would support local indigenous tradition and skill. “Current transport, especially domestic, is increasingly unsustainable and owes nothing to the Pacific’s rich indigenous, historic, and arguably sustainable legacy of vessel/sail technology development,” he has written. In Nuttall’s alternative vision, the solution to the threat of climate change and rising sea levels in Oceania is Oceanic history itself. But carrying out this vision depends on resurrecting the nearly extinguished tradition of canoe-building, which is why I was there: to go to the last village in Fiji whose members still know how to build, sail, and navigate camakau, the country’s traditional boats.

  The story of how Nuttall discovered this village is one of mythlike serendipity. Born in New Zealand, Nuttall likes to describe himself as a grumpy old Kiwi sailor. His kinship with Fijians came from a deep admiration for their sea-transport traditions and love of the ocean, which was

  the connection, the interface, the facilitator between people and god, people and environment and of culture to culture. Sea-going vessels were the pinnacle of societal achievement. They were the ultimate line of defence. Their design and functionality was radically different from that produced from any continental paradigm, almost Zen-like in its approach to finding ultimate form in simplicity and from a minimal resource base. Terrestrial design and construction was not the primary role of craftsmen but what naval architects and shipwrights did in their downtime. Their vessels were the products of cultures where metals were not an available option, where swimming and walking were equally important, where survival at sea, more so than on land, was primary.

  Nuttall knew that Fiji was once part of a complex political and trade network that encompassed most of central Oceania, made possible by the large fleets of Fijian-sourced sailing vessels. But for decades Nuttall simply couldn’t locate any extant examples of their epic sailing past: no traditional canoes or anyone who knew how to build them. Few people seemed to venture beyond the sight of an island or reef anymore; outboard motors had replaced sails, and to save money and fuel, boats were driven in straight lines that cut across currents and winds, ignoring directional cues. Long-distance travel between islands occurred most often by ferry, and some islands received infrequent if any service. The only drua in existence was the Ratu Finau, a boat built in 1913 and currently housed in the Fiji Museum just a few miles from where Nuttall and I sat during our meeting. He once saw a small derelict example of a drua in a village in Kadavu, but no one knew much about it or its history. In 2006 he witnessed several camakau sailing in an arts festival, but he couldn’t track the boats down—they virtually disappeared afterward. His research in libraries and museums was coming up mostly empty. “All indicators were that drua culture was now consigned to history and museum artifact,” he wrote. It seemed to him that the living sailing traditions were virtually snuffed out and could only be pieced together from a scattered and incomplete historical record and a few black-and-white photographs.

  Then in 2009 something miraculous happened. One evening Nuttall was anchored in Laucala Bay near the University of the South Pacific campus when around twilight he saw the silhouette of a laca, a traditional sail, on the horizon. He described the events of that night: “My young sons and I leapt into our sailing dinghy and sped to intercept it. As we met, my sons were plucked from our dinghy and swept onto a large camakau with a ragged patchwork sail by a laughing and obviously Lauan crew. ‘Mai, mai lakomai—come, kaiwai, we go to drink kava,’ they taunted as they raced ahead of me and disappeared into a muddy mangrove-shrouded creek in what I had always assumed was an uninhabited piece of city shoreline.” That night Nuttall sat in the village of Korova until dawn, talking for the first time to Fijians who not only sailed camakau but were, he realized, the last people in Fiji who knew how to build them. They bragged to him that they had never owned outboard motors. It seemed a miracle that he had found this village of sailors, and yet the fact that these representatives of ancient tradition inhabited such an anonymous spit of land in the shadow of Fiji’s capital city was undeniably tragic.

  After meeting Nuttall’s partner, Alison, and their two young sons, and introducing my partner and two-year-old son, we formed a traveling gang and walked to the end of the campus onto a stretch of grass between a ditch and a main road as cars sped by us. We followed the road for half a mile north as it hugged the edge of Laucala Bay and then turned off onto a dirt path leading into a shadowy tangle of mangroves. The first sign of the small village located there was the outpouring of children who ran to greet us, delighted by the new visitors and the unfamiliar toddler willing to be indoctrinated into their group. As we ventured further along the path I saw half a dozen small sailing canoes pulled up onto the shore, and beyond them a cluster of cement-block homes. We greeted the women and men of the village with ni sa bula vinaka (“warm hello”) and were led to a large open-air meeting space with a corrugated tin roof and mats spread on the ground. A large carved wooden bowl with short legs on the bottom was brought into the center of our circle, and one of the women began to prepare kava, pouring water into the bowl and soaking the ground root of the Piper methysticum plant to create a muddy-colored brew containing psychoactive properties renowned for creating feelings of contentment. A young girl filled a half coconut shell with the drink and walked to each of us sitting in the circle. Before accepting the cup from her, we each clapped once with cupped hands and then drank it down, handing it back and clapping again three times. This was the practice of sevusevu, the respectful offering of kava by a host to a guest. Integral to Fijian culture, kava is sometimes called wai ni vanua, meaning “blood of the land.”

  Woven nets hung around the space, blowing in the breeze, and the attention of the group turned to two men in their sixties sitting in the circle. They sat on upholstered seats taken from a car or minivan, and the atmosphere was one of a jubilant court, the elders on thrones and us looking to them as deferential subjects. Juijuia Bera and his older brother Semiti Cama are the last Fijians who know how to build the camakau and the drua. Of the two boats, the drua was the most astonishing in its size and performance: built of wood, grass, nuts, stone, bone, and sharkskin, and containing not an inch of metal, the drua had two asymmetrical hulls and measured a hundred feet. One drua could carry two hundred to three hundred people and travel at speeds of seventeen miles per hour. In times of peace they were used for diplomacy and transferring people and cargo; in war they were used as battleships in massive fleets that acted as rammers, blockade runners, and troop transports. One fleet of canoes carrying warriors was called a bola; in 1808 the trader William Lockerby was chased out of Swaddle Bay by 150 canoes, and in the mid-nineteenth century one observer witnessed two bola in Laucala Bay, just to the east of where I sat.

  Such displays of power are a thing of the past. Most Fijians today have likely never seen a drua, save for one on the national fifty-cent coin. But historians still consider the drua to be the pinnacle of Oceanic technological design, a canoe that was “far superior to those of any other islanders in the Pacific.” The last drua voyage in Fiji was undertaken by Bera and Semiti’s own father, Simione Paki, in 1992, when he sailed from the Lau archipelago to Suva. A Methodist preacher, Paki raised sixteen children on the island of Moce, traveling with them by drua from young ages so they knew their way around the boat and learned to navigate. Of the whole Lau archipelago, which contains the best navigators in Fiji, the Moce islanders are considered the most accomplished.

  More kava was prepared, and Bera and Semiti described how they learned to sail and navigate, using the rising or setting sun to mark the direction of east and west on the horizon and the appearance of the planets Venus, Mars, Jupiter, or Saturn in the night sky. “Swells, wind direction. These are the things that can help you in the sea,” they told me. “In traditional navigation you have to see the sun set every day.” While traveling from one island to another, a star might be followed that marks the direction of travel, until it sets and another star would be chosen, a system of
star paths common to Oceania. They also used familiarity with the currents and wind patterns of the Lau archipelago. In 1989, Bera and Semiti’s father decided they would leave Moce and sail two hundred miles to Suva, where he hoped to start a business offering cruises on drua to tourists and Fijians. He brought Bera and his brother Metuisela Buivakaloloma with him, establishing a village on a sliver of land vulnerable to typhoons and flooding that no one else wanted. In 1993 Buivakaloloma sailed back to Moce to bring back a camakau and was lost at sea; his boat washed up on an island a month later. In 2004, Paki also died at sea. The canoe-building practices back home started to become extinguished. “There’s no water on the island, we have to travel even to get water. Canoes are the only transport that we knew,” said Bera through a translator. “The way we learned is back in the island. I saw it and perfected it and brought it down here. Moce is where the builders come from. In the eighties was when it dropped off. People started relying on outboards. Building canoes was not easy. We have to go out without roads and cut trees. Have to prepare … rope, and have to have money. We left the island and the last canoe that I built, after that it ended. There weren’t canoes anymore.”

  * * *

  Three years earlier, Bera and Semiti had been visited by several producers from the Walt Disney Company. John Musker and Ron Clements, directors of animated blockbusters like The Little Mermaid, Aladdin, and Frozen, were undertaking a research tour for Moana. They brought a sack of plastic toys for the village children and several hundred dollars, drank kava, and asked questions about Fijian boatbuilding, lore, and navigation. The villagers signed a contract with the producers’ lawyers, believing that it entitled them to monthly payments in return for the information they gave Musker and Clements, money that would finally allow them to start the long-dreamed-of tourism business and build the first drua seen in Fiji in decades. But even as the first promotional illustrations for the movie were released, showing a Fijian camakau like those the producers had seen on the banks of the village in Suva, the money never came. In late November 2014 Nuttall met with the frustrated members of Korova village and afterward sent an email to Musker, reminding the producer that Nuttall had previously begged them not to rip off the heritage and indigenous knowledge of the village and their intellectual property rights. Nuttall stated the painful irony of the Moana endeavor for Korova’s community members: “Seems to me Disney is about to launch a new virtual canoe across the horizon and that you will find that a cause of celebration and success and profit. The saddest outcome I can think of would be to find one of the Korova kids … playing with a broken plastic camakau from McDonald’s while sitting on the last rotten camakau hull on a rising tide.”