Contrasts:
climate politics without the blockade – and with it…
Without the blockade, the Pacific Warriors could have issued media releases and social media memes about climate change and the Pacific that a much smaller group of people would have noticed.
As a result of a vivid and dramatic symbolic action at the world’s largest coal port, they gained a new capacity to reach and engage audiences.
The blockade made the Pacific Climate Warriors a recognisable and visible group and gave them a ‘platform’ for communicating their message. The Warriors’ later involvement in public events involved a sense of occasion: media outlets have since been paying attention to what they have to say.
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- See also: The Pacific Warriors in the Media
‘Sometimes the big men don’t want to listen’
Speaking at the launch of the canoe Ta Reo Vanuatu, (‘the voice of Vanuatu’), Edward Natapei, Vanuatu’s former Prime Minister (and at the time, the President of the Vanua’aku Party and MP for Port Vila, the country’s capital), likened the Pacific Warriors to small ants trying to talk to a big man. Sometimes the big men don’t want to listen, and the only way to be heard is when the ants bite the big man’s toe’.
The Pacific Warriors aim to share stories ‘so that world leaders… will understand that for us in the Pacific, climate change is a question of survival, and they need to listen to the plight of the Pacific’.
In order to get people to listen and to understand in a way that is compelling, an action that sent a message was vital.
This involves more than simply ‘people power’, strength of numbers, coalitions and organised networks: it features the cultural power of the ‘Pacific Islanders in canoes vs. the world’s largest coal port’.
Canoes – ‘a vessel to deliver our messages’
A ‘platform for communication’ is one way to describe what the Pacific Warriors created. 350 Pacific’s Fenton Lutunatabua offers another image. Writing in advance of the blockade, he describes the canoes as a ‘vessel’ for communication:
'traditional styled canoes... will be used as a vessel to deliver our messages on climate change to Australia'
Canoe blockade – 350 Pacific video
Footage of the blockade and interviews with members of the Pacific Climate Warriors.
Frontline Truths
The Pacific Warriors have also launched their own digital storytelling project, ‘Frontline Truths’, featuring text, video and images designed to tell their own stories of climate change.
This video from Kiribati is an example.
Communicating with cultural depth
Facing a crisis over the future of their islands and livelihoods, the Pacific Warriors have brought real cultural depth to their response to the climate crisis.
The decision to use canoes to confront Australia’s coal industry itself grew out of deep cultural traditions.
Interviewed as the blockade approached, 350 Pacific Coordinator Koreti Tiumalu described the linkage between culture and campaigning:
‘The idea behind the canoes is about connecting the past with the present’:
It’s about showing that our Pacific Island communities have been living sustainably off the land for generations, and that we are now being affected by climate change… Our idea is to share and use our traditional knowledge of our warrior history to be able to help guide us in how we can change and heal what is happening to our islands today. Those canoes and how they have been built are symbolic of a people who are desperate to stand together and do something in a way we’ve never done before, but to use those traditional skills and knowledge as a way to tell that story. (See text of article originally published on Telesur).
Confronted with the contemporary crisis of climate change, the Pacific Warriors replied with symbols from their past. Out-leveraging and out-financing the fossil fuel industry was never possible, and appearing in Newcastle in business suits could never have generated a David-and-Goliath moment. Arriving in canoes, however, did.
For more on the role of culture in the work of the Pacific Warriors, see: