Before we start here’s a message from The Librarian.
Hey readers!
I’m so excited to have finally reached the latter half of Chapter 1. As you know only 3 more pages until we close out, and enter Chapter 2. As we approach this deadline I’d like to thank everyone who reads, shares, and discusses the many fascinating topics covered so far.
Additionally, I’d like to apologize for the inconsistency with audio episodes and overall posting. There’s been a lot of work behind the scenes to get this blogcast off the ground, and ensure quality in each topic. We’re currently a solo gig, but to ensure the longevity of this blogcast I’m trying to expand outwards to collaborate with lots of cool people and organizations in the space.
The page you are about to read consists of an academic paper from Fiji I wrote for the past spring semester. I’ve removed relevant in-text citations for ease of reading, but as always all citations will be in a pinned comment at the end. I’m looking to appropriate more of my past works, both activist and academic, to discuss topics that are particularly exhaustive or research-heavy in Chapter 2.
Stay tuned for that as more information will be released very soon.
As always I’ll be in the comments, and enjoy the page!”
-The Librarian
Welcome,
I’m The Librarian and you are reading The Garden Library. This is a blogcast that tackles a variety of topics with a skew towards climate and environmental policy. This is Chapter 1, Page 9 and we are discussing disaster as man-made historical vulnerability.
What makes a disaster, disastrous?
This was the key question surrounding my Hazards, Disasters, and the Human Experience class this past Spring Semester. Scholars have long debated and devised metrics or methods to determine what disasters are and when they form.
Initially, consensus was reached in seeing disaster as an event, a moment in time, that disrupts the status quo. An unexpected anomaly in the day-to-day that society would bounce back from and return to normalcy. This latter half, the return to normalcy, was the philosophy behind humanitarian aid and disaster response for decades. In the aftermath of Hurricanes, the government and community would band together to repair damages and continue living. Disaster symbolized a speed bump that slowed us down only for us to roll over it and speed up again.
But what about disasters that reappear? If these are truly unpredictable “acts of god”, how come they tend to happen to the same types of people? This “pattern of disaster” led contemporary scholars to a realization: disaster doesn’t exist in the present but in the past.
Let’s redefine our understanding with this realization. These natural disasters understood as Earthquakes, Floods, Hurricanes, and Tornados, are instead hazards—phenomena with the potential for great harm or danger.
But once again there is a problem. Even all hazards don’t create disasters if there is no population impacted, or if they have adequate access to resources.
Imagine a Category 5 Hurricane that never makes landfall or a magnitude 5 earthquake in a well-built city. No disaster. Yet, even a Category 1 Hurricane Florence to the poverty-stricken sections of New Bern, North Carolina devasted the region.
All of a sudden, a hazardous condition amounted to a disaster for this vulnerable population and a rainy day for the more resilient/affluent residents. Therefore, a population must have some underlying disaster vulnerability that allows an otherwise avoidable, endurable, hazard to create a disaster.
The problem isn’t the Hurricane of today, but the redlining and segregation of a century ago that forced black people into the flood zones. It’s the racism that prevented black and brown people from being able to afford home repairs and improvements, better jobs, and infrastructure investments in their community. Whether the hazard was present or not, the disaster vulnerability existed long ago.
We now reach the final working conclusion of disaster experts. Disaster is created along sociopolitical fault lines where hazards interact with human populations.
In essence, every disaster needs 3 components:
A hazard
A population to be impacted
And an underlying disaster vulnerability.
When these 3 components merge, a disaster has occurred.
Wait, doesn’t this mean disaster is man-made?
Yes.
Aside from meteors from space, or alien invasion, disaster is always man-made. This is because hazards need a human population to interact with, and a vulnerability to worsen their impact.
To demonstrate this best, I’m appropriating a paper I used to tackle the very question we started this page with.
For my final Anthropology research paper, which earned me an A, I discussed the impact of Tropical Cyclone Winston on Fiji. Highlighting the way this disaster was experienced differently by Indo-Fijians compared to Indigenous Fijians.
Without further ado.
History Lesson on Fiji
November 10th, 1874 saw the cession of Fiji to Britain, kickstarting almost 100 years of British colonial rule. Throughout this time, sugarcane was the bulk of the Fijian economy. Companies such as the Colonial Sugar Refining Company opened mills and plantations worked by imported indentured workers from East India. These Indo-Fijians toiled and faced severe colonial restrictions, including institutional and physical segregation from indigenous communities.
Unlike many indigenous populations across the world, the Indigenous Fijians lived a favorable life. British rule attempted to maintain the quality of Indigenous life and build relationships with their communities, not because the British were compassionate but just for the convenience of governance.
They granted Indigenous Fijians much more freedom and privilege than the average Indo-Fijian. One particular privilege, land ownership, was exclusive to non-Indo Fijians resulting in most Fijian land, even today, being owned by Indigenous Fijians. At the time, Indo-Fijians were forced to lease their communities and homes instead of outright buying them. This severe financial detriment created a hierarchy, Indo-Fijians as the lower income tenants, and Indigenous Fijians as the landlords.
Throughout the 20th century, Indo-Fijian “slave contracts” expired, which saw some return to India. However, many stayed in Fiji, and Indo-Fijians, outnumbering Indigenous Fijians and newly emancipated, became a major part of the economy. The cultivation of sugarcane became a place of economic prosperity for freed Indo-Fijians. So as the nation moved toward self-governance, Indo-Fijians aligned along economic and ethnic lines embraced this newfound freedom. Unfortunately, after Fiji’s independence from Britain in 1970, the specter of colonial segregation and prejudice reared its ugly head.
Independence efforts scared Indigenous Fijians, they were concerned about a future where Indo-Fijians took control of the country and stripped them of their land rights. However unrealistic and reactionary their position, to them, British colonial rule was the preferable “stable” option. Under the British, they maintained their cultural heritage, were still land owners, and saw financial profit from the indentured servitude of Indo-Fijians on sugarcane plantations. So when the British officially left Fiji and a coalition government was established, Indigenous Fijians were predictably dissatisfied.
The new coalition government was much more representative of and favorable to Indo-Fijians, it was a first step towards their believed nightmare of losing land ownership. This fear led to multiple political demonstrations and the eventual military coup by Colonel Rabuka. Rabuka’s coup was one of many over the next decade that saw a descent to military control, Indigenous political dominance, and polarization along Indo-Indigenous lines.
Indo-Fijian Vulnerability
Separate from all this polarization, Indo-Fijian living conditions were in a constant state of disrepair. The same communities they leased were often in and around former plantations. Plantation agriculture relied on poor practices that accelerated soil loss and land degradation. Under British rule, the importation of birds, the removal of local pigs, the malnutrition of Indo-Fijians, and the overuse of soil, among others, resulted in the ecological death of old Fiji.
Beyond the environment, socially Indo-Fijians were at a loss. Indigenous Fijians held many cultural practices and relationships to the Pacific, their local knowledge allowed them resiliency to change and disaster. Indo-Fijians, coming largely from East India, had no reference point for the climate, no practices to bring, nor culture to engage in. In many ways, they were forced to start anew in a land much different from their own. This meant many were unaware of the hazards and mitigation methods in their region, and had no established community support network.
In essence, Indigenous Fijians still occupied land largely untouched, and in many ways rested upon generational wealth and culture. While Indo-Fijians inherited uninhabitable soils, poor public health, and colonial separation from their culture. This vulnerability created unsafe conditions for the Indo-Fijians, who lived at the intersection of historical discrimination and environmental disaster. Couple that with their minimal political power to invest in their communities, due to the many coups, and you have an Indo-Fijian disaster waiting to happen.
Disaster Strikes
A disaster that struck on February 20, 2016.
Fiji was hit by Tropical Cyclone Winston (TCW) a Category 5 Cyclone with over 177mph winds. The damage caused was unimaginable, costing over $1.3 billion in repairs, killing 44 people, destroying over 400,000 homes, and displacing over 300,000 people across the island nation. While you might expect this tragedy to bring people together, for many Indo-Fijian families and villages, it did the opposite.
Naohiro Nakamura published a study in 2020 that he conducted on villages in Fiji following TCW. Most of these villages were entirely Indigenous populations, as were the cases of Bukama, Koro, and Delaakado. Only one of these villages had Indo-Fijians, Rakiraki.
Rakiraki is at the northern tip of the main island of Fiji, it is entirely Indo-Fijian. This village saw severe damage from the cyclone with some houses destroyed and sugarcane plantations damaged by over 50%. Yet, months into 2016 long after most other Indigenous villages started to see construction supplies and aid roll in, Rakiraki still awaited aid.
“[We] repaired our house and we were told to be given a refund and we have applied. No response till now from any government ministries”- Rakiraki Woman
For what aid the village eventually received it was insufficient compared to their Indigenous Fijian counterparts. One Rakiraki family noted food aid coming a month after the cyclone that amounted to one “packet of milk” shared between 3 Indian families. Simultaneously they saw “big boxes of groceries” given to each indigenous Fijian household.
The discrepancy in institutional disaster relief is one of the many ways disaster is experienced differently depending on your ethnicity in Fiji. There was also an observed divide in community preparedness.
In all Indigenous Fijian villages networks existed to support each other as did traditional practices. The women of Koro village weaved mats and baskets to sell for funds, and mutual aid groups across villages sent excess to aid those in need. Most villages were nearly 100% aware of cyclone signs, and agricultural and building practices to preserve food and shelters, even going so far as to have prepared surplus food or shelter supplies from past disasters.
To drive home the significance of cultural history, let's look at the religious beliefs of indigenous Fijian communities. The prevalence of ghosts in the local cosmology materializes the historical trauma of environmental disasters. They possessed ancestral lessons of geography, disaster, and what went wrong, that descendants must heed or risk upsetting the spirits. These religious conceptions influenced human actions: where people lived, how they lived, agricultural practices, their relationship to climate change, and environmental disruptions. This important cultural factor benefitted disaster resiliency for Indigenous Fijians but is absent for Indo-Fijians.
TCW for Indigenous Fijians was just another disaster, a rainy day in their life of sunshine. This was not the case for the Rakiraki. Their lack of historical community and tradition caused them to be blindsided by the cyclone. One woman reported being unaware of what a Category 5 even meant, as many hadn’t experienced one. This disguised the risk of TCW: people didn’t tie down houses, shutter windows, or even alert whatever preparedness instinct they had. Post-disaster the Rakiraki experienced isolation and independence from their neighbors, with foreign NGOs and their families being the only sources of support. Infrastructure for a mutual aid network across villages just wasn’t there. Unlike the indigenous, Indo-Fijians had no cultural precedence for unity and community.
Disaster is Design
The observed schism of experience for the Indo-Fijian and Indigenous-Fijian communities at its core is historical. It was slavery and indentured servitude that stripped Indo-Fijians of their culture and heritage, the plantation economy made them reliant on agriculture, land ownership laws forced them to live on unstable soils, and historical segregation divorced them from any local knowledge or aid. These root causes and dynamic political pressures birthed the unsafe conditions Indo-Fijians live in every day. As a result, the same TCW that was largely recoverable by the Indigenous Fijian villages dealt irreparable blows to villages like Rakiraki.
The Indo-Fijian disaster was designed long ago by British colonial rule, while that same rule primed Indigenous Fijians to be resilient to this disaster. The presence of local knowledge, access to levers of power and influence, segregated land ownership, and distance from the plantation, gave indigenous communities a favorable relationship to disaster.
Even though all Fijians are vulnerable to Pacific hazards, especially in the era of climate change, Indigenous Fijians aren’t facing the same extreme vulnerability as their Indo-Fijian neighbors. Not by nature, but by historically designed inequity predating the Cyclone itself.
Resolution is Redesign
History hasn’t just impacted Fiji. Across the world, we see communities vulnerable to disasters due to the inequity of our creation. Be it colonialism, racism, sexism, capitalism, homophobia, or whatever other system of oppression is at play.
The biggest hazard of our day is climate change, a minotaur centuries in the making that threatens all life on Earth. Today only those most at risk feel its impacts hard, but tomorrow we’ll all be knee-deep in the floodwaters.
If Fiji and disaster have taught us anything, vulnerability is by design. But design can be redesigned, and reformed into more equitable and equal ways that ensure vulnerability doesn’t exist in the first place.
If you remove the historical inequity, removing the 3rd component of disaster, there will be no disaster. Climate change is no different. If we can repair our communities by dismantling the systems of oppression and building a new system entirely for our collective benefit. Then the hazard of climate change won’t create a disaster.
Climate Change will still suck, and we’re already feeling its impact albeit unequally. Even a heatwave in the most prepared city is a dangerous nuisance. But today’s storms and flooding don’t have to be the best of it, we aren’t resigned to a fate of worsening conditions. If we organize and fight to win a better world, today could be the worst of it. Tomorrow could be a better day.
If disaster is design, then resilience, recovery, revolution, and resolution are redesign. Redesign is our vaccine to the virus of historical inequality, and it’s one that we’re all familiar with.
Reparations, Housing Vouchers, Public Transportation, Public Banks, land back for Indigenous tribes, actions and policies that restore power and agency to community and disadvantaged groups. Redesign doesn’t need us to reinvent the wheel, or scientifically break down some device to combat disaster, but to undo the systems of oppression at play. Every protest, every election, every action taken no matter how small, inches us closer to that future.
We can end the era of disasters by redesigning the system, a goal that we march towards every single day.
I appreciate your time here at The Garden Library. I invite you to subscribe and explore all of the different offerings.
Until the next page unfolds.
Supporting Documents:
Nunn, Patrick D. “Recent Environmental Changes on Pacific Islands.” The Geographical Journal, vol. 156, no. 2, 1990, pp. 125–40.
Nakamura, N., Kanemasu, Y. “Traditional knowledge, social capital, and community response to a disaster: resilience of remote communities in Fiji after a severe climatic event”. Regional Environmental Change, vol. 20, 2 no. 3, 2020.
Ballard, Chris, Siobhan McDonnell, and Maëlle Calandra. "Confronting the Naturalness of Disaster in the Pacific." Anthropological Forum. Vol. 30. No. 1-2. Routledge, 2020.
Cox, John, et al. "Disaster preparedness and the abeyance of agency: Christian responses to tropical cyclone Winston in Fiji." Anthropological Forum. Vol. 30. No. 1-2. Routledge, 2020.
Vandertop, Caitlin. "Ghosts of the plantation: sugar, narrative energetics and gothic ecologies in Fiji." Green Letters 24.2 (2020): 155-168.
Presterudstuen, Geir Henning. "Monsters, place, and murderous winds in Fiji." Monster Anthropology. Routledge, 2020. 159-172.
Bonilla, Yarimar. “The coloniality of disaster: Race, empire, and the temporal logics of emergency in Puerto Rico, USA.” Political Geography. Vol. 78. 2020.