The men who came ashore in 1863 did not arrive with weapons. Crews from Peruvian vessels, among them the Rosa y Carmen, presented themselves in connection with the mission — an approach that worked because Nukulaelae had welcomed its first Christian congregation only two years earlier, founded by Elekana, a Cook Islander whose canoe had drifted onto the atoll. The islanders were invited aboard. Below deck, they were confined.
They were taken to dig guano: seabird droppings piled up over centuries on the rainless Chincha Islands, deposits tens of metres deep, sold to the farms of Europe and North America. The dust ruined the lungs of those who worked it. Almost none of the Tuvaluans came home. Peru ordered repatriation the same year under diplomatic pressure, but smallpox and dysentery killed great numbers of the deportees on the return voyages, and some ships carried the diseases to the islands where they put survivors ashore.
The film, The Stolen Laevans of Tuvalu: The Peruvian Slavery Nightmare, came out of the University of Fiji's journalism and media studies documentary course, made together with the Kaupule, the elected executive of the island's local government. Vice-Chancellor Professor Shaista Shameem said it was made with an international audience in mind. It premiered in Tuvalu during the Fakaapo Tuvalu Arts Festival, with a Fiji screening to follow and a film-festival run planned beyond that.
Prime Minister Feleti Teo called it a reminder of the injustices and inequities his people were subjected to. The film does not stop in the nineteenth century: it follows the generations who rebuilt the island and sets that history beside what confronts Nukulaelae now. The atoll's highest natural ground sits under five metres above the sea; across Tuvalu the average is about two.
The university frames the project as preservation and as a contribution to the argument over restorative justice. On Nukulaelae, it was something simpler first — a room full of people, sitting with what was done to them.