An elder from Nui Island warned this week that the Nuian language — a core marker of Nui identity — is “dying”, linking the rapid erosion of culture to climate-driven damage to the atoll’s land and livelihoods. Speaking at the Tuvalu BOLD Response Project inception meeting in Funafuti, retired maritime professor Satalaka Petaia urged officials and community leaders to include cultural revival and language preservation among priorities for addressing loss and damage.
Nui, an atoll of about 600 people located a four‑hour boat ride from Funafuti, is the only island in Tuvalu with Micronesian linguistic roots and strong Kiribati influences. “Our Nuian language is dying, our younger generation now mostly speak Tuvaluan, and other languages,” Petaia said. “If we lose it, we’ll no longer be known as Nuians. We are unique, our language makes us unique but this is disappearing.” He told delegates he hopes the BOLD project will divert resources to revive customs, language and traditional practices.
At the workshop — hosted by the Tuvalu Department of Climate Change with support from SPREP and Climate Analytics at the Tomasi Puapua Convention Centre — participants concentrated on non‑economic losses and damages (NELD) from climate impacts: cultural heritage, governance systems, traditional medicine, health, and identity. Organisers stressed that while loss and damage assessments have typically focused on economic and infrastructure losses, many Pacific communities now face profound cultural and social losses that cannot be easily quantified.
Petaia drew a direct line between environmental change and those cultural losses. Saltwater intrusion from cyclones, storm surges and high tides has devastated pulaka pits — the traditional underground taro gardens that underpin Nui’s food security. “The pulaka pit is our main source of survival, our sustenance and food security. When Tropical Cyclone Pam struck, all the pulaka was dead, so we had to change our way of living,” he said, adding that pulaka pits take at least five years, often longer, to recover and that the increasing frequency of disasters puts recovery out of reach.
Beyond food systems, Petaia said the loss of work tied to pulaka cultivation has altered social patterns on Nui. “There’s nothing for them to do. So their behaviour changes, other habits creep in like grogging because they do not have anything to do,” he said, linking economic displacement to rising social problems. He also described how coastal erosion and sea level rise are swallowing sacred spaces: ancestral burial grounds “that have been there since time immemorial” are disappearing and communities are being forced to relocate graves — an irreplaceable loss of cultural memory.
Seventy‑six‑year‑old Penehuro Hauma of Funafuti told the meeting the most painful consequence is loss of land itself. “The worst impact of loss and damage is the loss of land. When you have no land, you have no identity,” he said, noting the cascading impacts on inheritance, governance and wellbeing.
The BOLD Response inception meeting is intended to set priorities and guide implementation of activities in the coming years. Delegates left with a clearer sense that any response to loss and damage in Tuvalu must extend beyond rebuilding infrastructure and include measures to preserve languages, revive traditional governance and medicines, protect burial sites, and support livelihoods tied to cultural practices. Petaia’s emphasis on language revival frames the crisis not just as an environmental emergency but as an existential cultural threat for Nui and other vulnerable Pacific communities.
Leave a comment