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Remember the arrivals of Mā’ohi ancestors who traversed the sea and surged upon the shores. Over generations, many groups explored and peopled te fenua, travelling around the archipelagos by va’a and on bare foot. Te nūna’a Mā’ohi built up the land, and the land built up te nūna’a, with fare, fa’apū, tumu, marae, and stories. Te fenua and te nūna’a shared experiences and developed knowledges, year in, year out, together. 

In other worlds, those we call popa’āwere knowing and being in very different ways. Over time, te popa’ābuilt physical, spiritual, and epistemic walls to imagine a separation between themselves and the land. They dreamed of knowing without relation, and called it “objectivity.” Adrift in the violent nightmares of their mindless fantasies, te popa’ābecame ungrounded. They tried to fill this existential void through stories of supremacism, which they acted out through projects of transoceanic conquest. In their empty confusion, te popa’ācame to te fenua Mā’ohi with greed, envy, arrogance, disease, and weapons of mass destruction. 

Whether through deliberate genocide or oblivious indifference, popa’āarrivals decimated Mā’ohi communities, as local populations fell by 80% to 90%. This formative trauma foreshadowed disasters to come. Te popa’āstole te fenua’s physical wealth on a massive scale, and then imposed a nuclear weapons testing program, bringing radioactive waste, cancer, and other illness. Te popa’ātimed the introduction of mass tourism with atomic testing, to obscure the social, economic, and environmental impacts of the nuclear program. They deceived ta’ata Mā’ohi with empty stories, progressively luring many ta’ata into a modern nuclear-tourism future of individualism, wage labor, cash economies, consumer advertising, broadcast entertainment, artificial scarcity, and nuclear family subdivisions. Te popa’āsought to break the bond between te ta’ata and te fenua. They did not know, this bond cannot be broken. 

The popa’āproject of supremacist colonial modernization is ongoing. But so is the Mā’ohi project of knowing and growing with the land. 

Tahitian language glossary

fare house(s), building(s)

feafea (i) thinking (of, about)

fenua land(s), territory(ies), world(s)

fa’apū garden(s); place(s) for growing crops

nūna’a people, peoples, nation(s)

Mā’ohi Indigenous to French Polynesia

marae ceremonial pavilion(s)

miti salt water; sea(s)

o of

popa’ā the people who think they are white

te the, a, an, some

ta’ata person, people, human(s)

tumu tree(s); root(s)

va’a canoe(s); sailing canoe(s)

Photo: Maupiti lagoon. Text, photo and layout by Teo Akande Wickland. Made with Mā’ohi, Black American, Latinx, queer, feminist and modern/colonial knowledges.

Wickland, Teo Akande. "Feafea i te miti o te fenua ." In 4S Paraconference X EiJ: Building a Global Record, curated by Misria Shaik Ali, Kim Fortun, Phillip Baum and Prerna Srigyan. Annual Meeting of the Society of Social Studies of Science. Honolulu, Hawai'i, Nov 8-11, 2023

The question of data relates to Denise Brock’s key role in the passage of the Energy Employees Occupational Illness Compensation Program Act (EEOICPA). Brock independently collected thousands of documents related to the health of  workers in nuclear facilities like Weldon Spring in her efforts to show that they had been exposed to pathological levels of radiation. In many cases, their employers were fully aware of the dangers these workers faced, but kept this information to themselves or hidden away in the private documents that Denise uncovered decades later. Prior to Denise's work this information was not publically available, and if workers who had become ill wanted to receive compensation for worksite expose, they would have to undergo exposure reconstruction assessments, which--due to the lack of accurate and available data--were imperfect evaluations of the actual levels of radiation workers had been exposed to. Due to Denise's advocacy, which led to the passage of the EEOICPA, workers at nuclear facilities are exempted from the exposure reconstruction assessments and are eligible for compensation payments up to a maximum amount of $250,000, plus medical expenses for accepted conditions.

Denise's experience raises a few questions and reflections on data in the Anthropocene:

•  Issues like worksite and environmental exposure are often plagued by invisibilities and what STS scholars have referred to as "agnotologies"--where can activists/scholars/any interested party gain access to relevant data in relation to these issues (in a similar fashion to Denise's work)?
• For historians in particular: do the thousands of documents Denise complied consitute an archive? How can these and similar archival practices be Anthropocenic strategies?