Illustration by Karunya Baskar, Currentconservation.org, in search of coastal sand dunes
With the second installation of the blockbuster Dune saga in theaters, sand dunes are on the brain. This winter I surfed the dunes of the Western Sahara in the borderlands between Morocco and Algeria. It wasn’t until all I could see into the horizon was receding crests of dunes that I finally felt the otherworldly feeling that Frank Herbert must have felt in the 1950s, when he was inspired by the sand dunes of the Oregon Coast to write his epic classic. Yes, I flew across an ocean to be moved by a dunescape when I could just drive an hour from my home to the famous dunes of Florence, Oregon. And I did that because our Oregon dunes are dying.
But I’ll return to Oregon’s dying dunes in a bit, because I want to talk about yet another dune that is halfway across the world, one that lives in Poiganallur in my ancestral lands in Southern India. In January of 2005, I traveled to India in the wake of a massive tsunami in the Indian Ocean that took nearly a quarter of a million lives, more than in any other tsunami in recorded history. I was a lawyer at the time, mindlessly plucking away at my keyboard in the offices of Fenwick & West in an office building perched above downtown San Francisco and overlooking the Bay Bridge. Nearly three years into my career in law, I wasn’t feeling particularly inspired. I loved nature, but had chosen a career that kept me indoors, with nature taunting me outside plexiglass skyscraper windows. I wanted to make a difference in the world, but all I was doing was fighting tech entrepreneurs’ market battles in courtroom intellectual property squabbles. On Christmas day of 2004, I was pondering my future when the tsunami struck in my homeland.
Two weeks later, I found myself in Nagapattinam, a small coastal town that was India’s ground zero, where tens of thousands of people had died. Given my fluency in Tamil, I agreed to serve as a liaison between impacted communities and international NGOs who were flocking to the site, dumping fancy fiberglass boats on fishing villages to make donors in the Global North feel better about themselves. I’d travel to villages to host conversations with families and gather their input, and then I’d bring this input to the Collectorate (basically the county seat), where I’d share it with NGOs who hoped to make a difference.
Driving down the coastal road between villages, I would see boats sitting upturned in rice fields a mile inland, covered in sand. In the villages, I would meet children who had lost all of their relatives and were being cared for by neighbors. One ten-year-old said he was fishing with his father when the force of the tsunami wave pummeled their boat and thrust both of them into the shore, where he was able to grab and hug the trunk of a coconut palm. When the wave receded, it took his father, and the boy was left clinging to the tree 20 feet up in the air. Village after village, I’d hear similar heartbreaking stories.
But in one village, I heard something quite different. South Poiganallur is a small village nestled between two others. In the two neighboring villages, thousands died the morning of the tsunami. In South Poiganallur, only two people died while near the shore fixing a dyke in their sand dune. It seemed a miracle that villages only a few kilometers away had been devastated, whereas South Poiganallur saw only inundation of their crops and two local losses. The villagers attributed this marvel to the dune grass that scaffolded South Poiganallur’s sand dune.
Image: The side of the Poiganallur dune that faces the village, with an inundated crop field in the foreground.
Dune grasses are perennial plants. Given they are constantly buried by sand left by waves and the wind, they are forced to grow both vertically and horizontally to survive. Under the dune, rhizomes (runners) tunnel their way horizontally and send new shoots up vertically. As this matrix of dune grass propagates through a dune, it stabilizes the dune, keeping new sand from washing or blowing away. With every foot of grass, a foot of sand accumulates, growing the dune taller year upon year.
The people of South Poiganallur told me that their sand dune was built by their ancestors, who planted Ravanan’s Meesai to accelerate the growth of their dune. Ravanan’s Meesai is a type of dune grass named after the mustache of the demon god Ravanan, whose exploits are detailed in the Hindu epic the Ramayana. In most depictions, Ravanan sports an epic handlebar mustache, a key trait of every Indian villain in every Indian story ever, from mythology to Bollywood. Lore tells us Ravanan kidnapped Lord Rama’s wife, Sita, and whisked her away to his lair in Lankapattanam (Sri Lanka). Ravanan’s lair of lore sits only 50 miles across the Palk Strait from his mustache’s namesake dune grass buried in the South Poiganallur sand dune.
500 years ago, ancestral South Poiganallurians planted Ravanan’s Meesai to create a natural filter for seawater. As seawater would pass through the dune, the dune grass web would trap salt, leaving the relatively desalinated water to make its way through to the fields of crops. Standing atop this dune in 2005, I was in awe. On one side of me, the ocean roiled. On the other side lay lush greenery, and what before the Tsunami had been verdant fields of crops. I thought, if only these villagers’ ancestors knew when they started their dune project 500 years ago that their scientific endeavor would save their descendants’ lives. …
Two months after I arrived in India, I abruptly returned home to California, and memories of the tsunami, along with the story of the ancestral dune grass savior of South Poiganallur, receded like a wave… all until a few months ago, when I visited the dunes an hour from my house on the Oregon Coast. This time, I was touring the Siuslaw watershed, meeting with conservationists, community members, and Indigenous land protectors to understand what community-led conservation efforts might look like. With its golf courses, breweries, and vacation homes, the Oregon Coast stands in stark contrast to the livelihood fishing and agricultural villages of Nagapattinam in India. But growing between the foundations of these vacation homes and across the sandy golf courses are ammophila arenaria and ammophila breviligulata, two species of dune grass that have hybridized to create the gargantuan dunes that Frank Herbert visited 70 years ago.
The story I heard from Jesse Beers, knowledge keeper and member of the Confederated Tribes of the Coos, Lower Umpqua, and Siuslaw Indians, was the story of dying dunes. In this story, Ikt’atuu (the river that settlers named the Siuslaw) used to flow freely into the Pacific Ocean through multiple ribbons of waterways between coastal marshlands, forming a large estuary in which the tribes fished for salmon and gathered important plants like Sweetgrass, Wapato, Camas, and Hawthorn. In this story, the mouth of the river used to shift several miles up and down the coast depending on the year, and the tribes’ life ways would shift with the seasons and the land. In this story, the dunes were more dynamic, moving and quickly transforming every year along with the mouth of the river. But with the arrival of white settlers came the dreaded dune grass. To the Siuslaw people, the dune grass was not a savior, but a tool of the colonizers, who literally put roots down to stabilize the dunes and build homes closer to the water. With the dune grass came a landscape transformation that profoundly impacted the Siuslaw tribes’ cultural ways. If you want to hear more about this story of the dying dunes of Oregon, Outside/In just released this great podcast episode about them.
Image: Beach grass on Oregon Dunes, courtesy of rawpixel
Herein lies the paradox. How can dune grass be considered indigenous in my homelands in India, but destroy the livelihoods of Indigenous people in Oregon? How can it be a savior in India, but an invader on the Oregon coast? In perseverating over this paradox, a new question arose for me. When Ravanan’s Meesai was introduced to stabilize the sand dune and support agrarian livelihoods in South Poiganallur hundreds of years ago, did the indigenous people who relied on fishing at the time consider the new farmers to be colonizers? I can just imagine the conversations then. “Who do these farmers think they are, trying to grow crops on the beach? Why are they manipulating the sand dunes, which have always been shifting? Why are they messing with nature and our livelihoods as fisher peoples? Now we can’t fish on that 7-kilometer coastline because the huge dune has changed the aquatic ecosystem.” I wondered: Is what was happening in Tamil Nadu 500 years ago playing out on the Oregon Coast today? And then I wondered, when does terraforming the land become colonialism?
Wonderings like this are like peeling an onion. There are just more wonderings beneath, and your eyes sting with the reality of layers of history that have been obscured. My wondering about the dune grass paradox led me to the biggest wondering of all, the wondering that is core to the book I’m writing. What does indigeneity mean? Stay tuned for more when the book is published
But in the meantime, as we all flock to theaters to marvel at Timothée Chalamet and Zendaya’s on-screen chemistry while battling colonizers of the science fiction world of Arrakis, I invite you all to think about colonialism in our real world. What are the stories of the land you inhabit? Who are its indigenous people? Has the land been terraformed, and how has this impacted peoples’ lifeways? Where are you indigenous to?
Aparna, I love this piece and the questions that emerge for you. I think on this idea of indigeneity as it relates to a sense of belonging. Thank you for these musings! -Anil