Tuvalu's Entrance to the Metaverse
While the other primary sources of this exhibit are geographically centered around the Great Lakes region, in an effort to anticipate where new technologies may lead Indigenous peoples, I shift my focus to Tuvalu, an island in the South Pacific. While the technologies Indigenous authors in this exhibit use have been methods of resisting settler colonialism, the existential threat facing Tuvalu is less explicitly related to colonialism, but entangled nonetheless. Positing climate change as an effect of global capitalism, I will consider the mapping of Tuvalu in the metaverse along similar lines of resistance and endurance.
Simon Kofe, a Tuvaluan Minister, pioneered Tuvalu’s metaversal existence in his COP27 address in which he explains that “as our land disappears, we have no choice but to become the world’s first digital nation” (0:57). As Kofe continues speaking, the background of the video, which at first is impossible to distinguish from the real physical island, begins to pixelate, stuttering and jumping, insisting on the virtual existence of this place. Kofe explains the urge to relocate Tuvalu to the metaverse because “our land, our ocean, our culture are the most precious assets of our people” which necessitate digital preservation to “provide solace to our people and remind our children and our grandchildren what our home once was” (1:26). As Kofe delivers his speech, the view expands, beginning with a tight focus on him at the podium and ultimately drifting backwards so that viewers can see the entire islet surrounded by blackness.
While this blackness evokes feelings of isolation and marks Tuvalu’s existence in the otherwise unpopulated void of the metaverse, it also practically conveys the space available for the rest of the island’s relocation. Not simply a recreation of the geographic space and aesthetics of Tuvalu, the metaverse also incorporates sound to contribute another aspect of situatedness. Birds squawk as Kofe delivers his speech, waves audibly but gently lap the shore, and foreboding music begins softly and becomes more pronounced throughout the video.
While other Indigenous authors in this exhibit have been less specific in explaining how the particular technologies they use speak to their methods of resistance and endurance, Kofe explicitly notes that “this is also a matter of sovereignty” (1:28). He explains that the digital recreation ensures the persistence and permanent maintenance of the island’s maritime borders and statehood. While rising sea levels in the “physical realm” will obfuscate these borders, leaving Tuvaluans vulnerable to dispossession, erasure, and absorption into capitalist nation-states, the stable delineation of borders and boundaries in the metaverse offers some level of protection against this. The metaverse also ensures future generations have the ability to see their ancestral lands long after their expected underwater submergence. In positioning Tuvalu’s existence in the metaverse as both a protective method for current generations, a “solace” for older generations, and a “reminder” for future generations, Kofe renders legible Lisa Brooks’ invocation of simultaneity. Brooks paraphrases Virginia Jackson to explain simultaneities as “a new plane of historicity on which several temporalities unfold at once’” which is made possible “by the present moment, the (relatively) new technologies we have in our midst” (308). Implicitly and explicitly, Kofe’s address situates Tuvalu in this kind of simultaneity, something the technological promise of the metaverse makes possible.
