ABSTRACT

This chapter examines radiation ecologies and nuclear colonialism in the transPacic, trans-Indigenous context. This work is illustrative of over a decade of collaboration between academics, scientists and Taiwanese Indigenous artists and writers that has contributed to the development of a school of cultural study that links Taiwanese Indigenous studies to Native North American frameworks of native and Aboriginal cultures.2 Reading Albert Wendt’s novel Black Rainbow (1992) and Syaman Rapongan’s memoir Drifting Dreams on the Ocean (2014), we argue that nuclear colonialism creates an ecological debt to Indigenous islanders. Both writers testify to the nuclear Pacic as an ongoing presence across the Pacic region, which remains in the oceanic body and continually increases the risk of ecological degradation. Both writers reect on the ecological debt-degradation link through the acts of mourning and writing. Albert Wendt was born into a Samoan family and migrated across the Pacic, from Samoa, to Fiji, to Hawai’i and New Zealand. Inspired by the Black Rainbow artwork series of Maori artist Ralph Hotere protesting nuclear tests in the Pacic, his novel Black Rainbow ‘indigenises’ English, in order to raise questions about nuclear colonialism in the Pacic. Syaman Rapongan was born and raised in Pongso no Tau, the home island of the Tau people, located 40 kilometres southeast of Taiwan, where men and women used to live a life in accordance with their oceanic traditions, which are part of the larger Austronesian culture. He left Orchid Island for education on the main island of Taiwan when he was a teenager, remaining abroad for decades to work in Taipei as an urban Indigene. There, he participated in the Aboriginal demonstrations of the 1980s, of which the most signicant was the Tau-led protest against the storage of nuclear waste on Pongso no Tau.