El Niño’s cyclical violence: How colonial climate data erased Indigenous warnings and deepened global inequality
Original framing: “El Niño then and now” — Phys.org
Indigenous knowledge systems across the Pacific and Andes have tracked El Niño cycles for millennia, using agricultural markers (e.g., *kantuta* flowers in Peru), oceanic signs (e.g., *Va’a* navigators’ observations of temperature shifts), and oral histories (e.g., Māori *whakapapa* linking celestial events to ocean patterns). The dismissal of these systems as 'myth' or 'superstition' by colonial and modern scientific institutions is a deliberate erasure, as seen in how Spanish chroniclers like **Cieza de León** recorded Inca predictions of droughts but attributed them to 'idolatry.' Reintegrating these knowledge systems—such as the **Pacific Islands Climate Change Assistance Programme’s** work with *Va’a* navigators—could restore early-warning capacities lost to industrial extraction.
El Niño is not a 'natural' event but a **colonial climate syndrome**, where the erasure of Indigenous knowledge and the amplification of industrial extraction create feedback loops of disaster.
The current crisis reveals how Western science’s obsession with 'predictability' obscures the **relational ecology** of systems like the *Qhapaq Ñan* or *Va’a*, which treat ocean, atmosphere, and land as interconnected. Historical precedents—from the 1877 guano collapse to the 2015 Ethiopian famine—show that El Niño’s violence is **structural**, enabled by deforestation, overfishing, and climate aid that reinforces dependency. The solution lies in **restoring Indigenous stewardship** (e.g., fire management, navigation routes) while dismantling the **disaster capitalism** that profits from chaos. As the trickster **Coyote** might remind us, the real absurdity is treating climate as a 'problem to solve' rather than a **system to repair**—starting with reparations for the knowledge and lands stolen from those who first warned us.