PACIFIC PROMISES

Pacific Peoples' Partnership is proud to announce the launch of a very special edition of Tok Blong Pasifik in the form of an illustrated childrens' book.

A message in a bottle connects 11 year old Lilah of the Cowichan First Nation on Vancouver Island with 11 year old Tia-Moana who finds Lilah's bottle while participating in an Earth Day Beach clean-up on Rarotonga.

The girls write letters and postcards, telling each other about their families, communities and cultures while sharing their hopes and dreams for the future. The one common theme that emerges is the impact of climate change on the social, cultural and economic well-being of their island communities, one in the South Pacific and the other in the North Pacific.

Printed on Vancouver Island on 100% post consumer recycled paper using non-toxic vegetable based inks

Copies are available from Pacific Peoples' Partnership for $20 with all proceeds supporting our Shifting Tides: Indigenous Responses to Global Climate Change climate justice initiative.

About the authors

Stephanie Peter

Stephanie belongs to Cowichan Tribes with ancestry from several Coast Salish communities on Vancouver Island including Songhees and Tsartlip. She holds the ancestral name of Saleliye’naat. In 2002, Stephanie was sent by Pacific Peoples’ Partnership to participate in a six-month internship with the Cook Islands National Environment Service in Rarotonga where she met her friend, Deyna Marsh. Upon her return from the South Pacific, Stephanie completed a degree from the University of Victoria with a double major in Anthropology and Geography. Since then Stephanie has balanced the demands of working for her community on environmental and cultural initiatives that promote sustainable development and language revitalization and raising two daughters, Natalie and Olivia. Inspired by her family, Stephanie co-authored, Sara’s Sunflower, a children’s storybook about sharing and protecting special places in 2006 and she is currently recording a collection of original children’s songs in Hul’q’umi’num’, the language spoken in Cowichan.

Deyna Kiriata Marsh

Deyna was born in New Zealand and raised on Rarotonga, the capital island of the Cook Islands in the South Pacific. Deyna is a self-described “Maori fruit-salad”; her father’s ancestors hailed from the New Zealand Maori Tuwharetoa and Ngaphui tribes and her mother’s ancestors were from the Cook Islands tribes of Mauke and Rarotonga. Deyna attended the University of the South Pacific in 2001-2003 based at the Fiji Campus where she graduated with a double major in Geography and Land Management. While in Fiji, she spent many weeks in coastal villages around the Fiji Islands and saw first-hand the plight of the people and their vulnerable coastal villages to the effects of climate change. Since completing her degree, Deyna has been working for the Education Unit of the Cook Islands National Environment Service. When Deyna is not busy collating a booklet of children’s climate change poems (purua) or developing environmental education materials, she brings her daughter, Tia-Moana, to Cook Islands dance class.