Terisa Siagatonu

The team behind Moana has taken great care to respect the cultures of the Pacific Islands that inspired the film, and we regret that the Maui costume has offended some. — Disney, Inc. someone will touch the Earth once, I wanted my own soil. tried to drown my ankles in myself. again. Daughter of Oceania wanting me home. my skin is sacred ground. always want to take a white girl's skin I cried so hard, until I became a boat I never want to be lost at high tide. Daughter of Ancestor's language tatted on my skin my skin what's mine more than an ocean floating above myself at sea open-mouthed Sun on my body. my story will breathe.

If you open up any atlas and take a look at a map of the world, almost every single one of them slices the Pacific Ocean in half. To the human eye, every map centers all the land masses on Earth creating the illusion that water can handle the butchering and be pushed to the edges of the world. As if the Pacific Ocean isn’t the largest body living today, beating the loudest heart, the reason why land has a pulse in the first place. The audacity one must have to create a visual so violent as to assume that no one comes from water so no one will care what you do with it and yet, people came from land, are still coming from land, and look what was done to them. When people ask me where I’m from, they don’t believe me when I say water. So instead, I tell them that home is a machete and that I belong to places that don’t belong to themselves anymore, broken and butchered places that have made me a hyphen of a woman: a Samoan-American that carries the weight of both colonizer and colonized, both blade and blood. California                          stolen. Samoa sliced in half stolen. California, nestled on the western coast of the most powerful country on this planet. Samoa, an island so microscopic on a map, it’s no wonder people doubt its existence. California, a state of emergency away from having the drought rid it of all its water. Samoa, a state of emergency away from becoming a saltwater cemetery if the sea level doesn’t stop rising. When people ask me where I’m from, what they want is to hear me speak of land, what they want is to know where I go once I leave here, the privilege that comes with assuming that home is just a destination, and not the panic. Not the constant migration that the panic gives birth to. What is it like? To know that home is something that’s waiting for you to return to it? What does it mean to belong to something that isn’t sinking? What does it mean to belong to what is causing the flood? So many of us come from water but when you come from water no one believes you. Colonization keeps laughing. Global warming is grinning at all your grief. How you mourn the loss of a home that isn’t even gone yet. That no one believes you’re from. How everyone is beginning to hear more about your island but only in the context of vacations and honeymoons, football and military life, exotic women exotic fruit exotic beaches but never asks about the rest of its body. The water. The islands breathing in it. The reason why they’re sinking. No one visualizes islands in the Pacific as actually being there. You explain and explain and clarify and correct their incorrect pronunciation and explain until they remember just how vast your ocean is, how microscopic your islands look in it, how easy it is to miss when looking on a map of the world. Excuses people make for why they didn’t see it before.