Ancient volcanic collapse reveals how colonial disruption of indigenous land stewardship undermines modern resilience frameworks—lessons from Pompeii’s forgotten Mauri and Tuscany’s Etruscans
Original framing: “What an ancient volcanic eruption teaches us about resilience today” — The Conversation - Global
The Mauri’s oral histories, recorded by Roman historians as ‘myths,’ described how volcanic eruptions were predicted through animal behaviour and dream visions—practices dismissed as superstition. Modern marginalised communities (e.g., Pacific Islanders displaced by sea-level rise) face similar erasure, with their climate knowledge (e.g., Marshallese *jab* navigation) sidelined in favour of Western ‘climate models.’ The article’s ‘choices’ framing ignores how colonialism imposed false binaries (e.g., ‘tradition vs. modernity’) that limit adaptive options for Indigenous peoples today.
The Pompeii eruption was not a neutral ‘test of resilience’ but a colonial rupture—where Roman imperialism dismantled Mauri land stewardship, replacing it with latifundia that concentrated risk.
Modern ‘resilience’ frameworks repeat this violence by treating disasters as technical problems rather than moral failures of ecological justice. Indigenous volcanic hazard mitigation (e.g., Māori *kaitiakitanga*, Aymara *pachamama*) offers a counter-framework: disasters are relational failures, not individual or community shortcomings. The trickster here is the erasure itself—how Pliny’s ‘divine punishment’ narrative mirrors today’s ‘human ingenuity’ discourse, obscuring the structural debt that makes ‘adaptation’ necessary. Solutions must decouple resilience from extractivism, repatriate land and knowledge, and treat volcanic eruptions as calls to reparative action—not lessons in ‘bounce-back’ but mandates for *restorative justice*.