Climate Change: Digging Up Family Graves To Move Away From The Sea

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[tweetmeme]Originally posted 18th September 2008
Updated

By Vienna Richards

As a child growing up in Samoa, I was told that the graves of my father’s parents, my grandparents, had to be  dug up several years after they died because the salt water, the sea we loved, was getting closer to the fales.  It happened long before I was born.

Even so, each time my mother told me the story and the circumstances, I didn’t get it as a child. I never told her though.  Instead, this child’s mind thought: how could anyone in their right mind dig up their parents graves and disturb their resting place? In Samoa, it is traditional for your loved ones to be buried on you family property, usually in front of the house or fale.  Reality is, they had no choice but to disturb the graves, and relocate. Now, as a fully fledged adult, I understand.  I know now what Mother was trying to tell me as a child. She was talking about the effects of rising sea levels encroaching little by little on the village of Matatufu.

Back then, I didn’t quite get it, when Mother was reciting those experiences. Because the ocean and the sea were our playground in Samoa. Those were my fondest childhood memories: swimming in the lagoon, going diving with Grandma, my mother’s mother,  and the Peace Corp toilets out at sea that I continued to dream about, long after we left Samoa. On bristly days, the sea would throw  itself up  through the toilet hole we sat on. Very funny.

So Mother’s recollection of the sea getting close, and our family moving away from the sea, confused me as a child.  Because in my child’s mind, I thought the sea would obey our will and simply stop encroaching further onto crops and living areas. Yeah right.  The villagers could no more control the sea patterns than I could control which way the wind would blow.

Fast forward to the present, and at some stage, I found out there was a term called climate change. It roughly meant the same things  Mother spoke to me about. Climate change wasn’t a term coined in my ancestors’ time. But they certainly recognised what was going on with the sea and the seasons. They saw the sea levels rising and rising over the years…and they took action.

Last year, I visited my grandparents’ relocated grave in Matatufu. It was my first time back home to Samoa in 38 years.   Their graves, once buried on the beach where the village originally stood before rising sea levels forced Matatufu further inland,  are now covered in concrete slab. A few months later, I returned to Samoa to mark the day I came into this world.  And for the first time in their lives, my sons, aged 17 and 15 at the time, came face to face with their mother’s birthplace. They also came face to face with Samoa’s relative poverty juxtaposed against some of the most beautiful landscapes and gardens they had ever seen. They visited their  late beloved grandmother’s village in Satapuala while we stayed in the outbacks at Paradise Cove near their grandfather’s village of Matatufu. (In light of what would later happen to the South Coast of Upolu, I remain forever grateful that they saw, and were mesmerised by, the beautiful landscape, beaches and ocean surrounding Aleipata and Lotofaga.)

I came across this email a  year or so ago which one of my older siblings sent to young Pacific people  in a bid to  motivate them take action on climate change. In it, he told them of our family village, my father’s Matatufu, along the South Coast of Upolu, the most beautiful stretch of paradise on earth.

Some fifty years ago the villagers of Matatufu, Upolu, in Samoa began the process of moving their simple thatched roof homes inland away from the seashore. With each incoming tide, the seawaters moved closer and closer to the village area on the beach.

After their homes were moved they exhumed their dead until eventually everyone had left the village site. The only thing that the villagers could not move was a small Church which they built with stones held together by cement.

Today in 2007, there is no trace of a village ever being established in that particular spot. The incoming tide regularly covers that whole area in deep water. There are fragments of black rocks which protrude from the sand and is the only evidence that can be seen as a small reminder that a church building once stood there surrounded by thriving village homes.

The rising sea water level is real for Matatufu village as it is for the entire Pacific region. The sad thing is the Matatufu villagers had very little to do with the cause of rising sea water levels or the phenomenal climate changes we are currently experiencing.

I hope you can pass on the email message below to all your youth, or better still assign a youth representative to lead any effort in becoming involved with the issue of climate change. The environment is an issue that will impact on future generations as much as present generations.

Climate change threatens the existence of homeland, however tiny, in the Pacific Islands…the birthplace of many of us now living in New Zealand…from the Cook Islands, Samoa, Tonga, Niue, Tuvalu, Kiribati, Fiji, PNG.  I hope we care enough to take an interest in what’s happening environmentally to the islands.

If we, in the Pacific, don’t speak up loud about the effects of climate change in the Pacific, and the need to prioritise plans in the Pacific, who will?

You tell me.

Postscript: A year after this was written, on Tuesday 29th September 2009, a 8.3 magnitude earthquake shook the islands of Samoa. It triggered a destructive tsunami along the South Coast of Upolu slamming itself against more than 20 villages including my father’s village of Matatufu. The official death count for Samoa (Niuatoputapu and American Samoa were also hit and lost more than 40 lives) was estimated at over 140 with   Samoa Government acknowledging that many families have buried their dead in the outback villages without reporting the deaths to police.

Eyewitness accounts report that the tsunami travelled as far as a kilometre and a half inland so despite the village of Matatufu having moved inland, they were still hit by the tsunami. Crops and fales were damaged or destroyed. But they were fortunate to escape with their lives with the villagers running to the mountains in time,  thanks to heeding the tsunami warning in time.

Human Induced or Natural Cycle?

Finally, do I believe that the accelerated global warming we’re experiencing now is part of  earth’s natural cycle or human-induced? I don’t know. I’m not an expert on the science of rising sea levels.  I haven’t studied  in depth, at this point, the data, and other mitigating factors, affecting Planet Earth.  But from what I have read,  so far, it’s clear that the planet goes through a natural cycle and sequence of events over hundreds of years.  Over the past 100 years or more, report state that this apparent natural cycle is accelerating at a faster rate than ever before, bringing us dangerously close to more human suffering.  It’s not about saving the planet from where I stand. It’s about saving human lives and reducing the human suffering as a consequence of climate change.

How much of this is human-induced is clearly wide open to debate. But I do know that Pacific island nations are already in the grips of suffering the adverse effects of climate change as the planet gets warmer. I also know environmental pollution, a human-induced factor, has an detrimental impact on land, sea, and all life forms as it travels through the air. Is that influencing climate change? You be the judge.