On 22 May 1960, just after 3 PM, the strongest earthquake ever recorded shook Valdivia in southern Chile.
Immediately, the ocean began to retreat. Fish flapped on the sucked-out seafloor, and people rushed out to collect them.
Fifteen minutes later, massive tsunamis – with waves up to 25 meters high – pummeled the coastline. Thousands were killed and around 2 million people were left homeless across the country.
At Budi Lake, an Indigenous Mapuche-Lafkenche community just 80 kilometers from the quake’s epicenter, the land dropped a full two meters, causing permanent flooding and connecting the lake with the ocean.
Yet no one was reported dead.
The reason? Their stories.
Mapuche communities have made their home on this shaky ground for millennia.
“[They] knew how to keep calm and protect themselves, thanks to their ancestral seismic culture,” writes seismologist Marina Corradini.
Captured in myth and passed across generations, that ‘seismic culture’ offers insight into how people have understood, withstood and responded to landscape shocks over time – and how we might face those ahead of us, too.
Riding the serpent to safety
In Mapuche cosmology, the connection between seismic events on land and sea is encapsulated in the tale of Cai-Cai and Treng-Treng, two warring serpents that personify the ocean and the highlands.
When an earthquake hits, the story goes, Treng-Treng is pulling himself away from Cai-Cai – and Cai-Cai will quickly retaliate by flooding the land.
“The people of Lake Budi knew that when these two forces fight, you should go up to the hills,” says Edmundo Kronmüller, an assistant professor of psychology at the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile and lead author of an article exploring Indigenous perspectives of the Valdivia quake.
And they did: as soon as the ground stopped shaking, Budi Lake’s residents made their way to hilltops, several of which helpfully bear the forename ‘Treng-Treng’.
That decision saved them. Some of the people in the adjacent town of Puerto Saavedra were not so lucky.
“They saw the sea retreating and they went in [to the seabed], trying to find clams and shellfish,” says Kronmüller. “They ignored the old knowledge, and many drowned.”
For the people Kronmüller interviewed at Budi Lake, the earthquake was catastrophic but not, in a deeper sense, surprising.
“I remember talking to a really old woman,” he recalls. “She said, ‘You know what? Every 100 years or so, we get an earthquake here.’”
He started researching the area’s earthquake history and realized she was right: Charles Darwin’s notebooks report one in the same area around 1848, and colonial administrators track another nearby in 1730.
“I think the earthquake just confirmed something they always knew was there,” says Kronmüller. “[It] was huge in the sense that it literally changed the landscape, but my impression, looking back now, is that it’s just one of the events in the timeline of the culture.”
Meanwhile, on the other side of the ocean…
The 1960 tsunamis didn’t stop at Chile’s shores. They surged across the Pacific Ocean, all the way to its opposite edges in Japan, Alaska and Aotearoa New Zealand.
In this last location, they were reported in more than 120 locations, causing widespread flooding and killing livestock.
At the time, there was no official tsunami warning system, and many curious bystanders put themselves in danger by heading down to the beaches for a closer look.
About three days later, a large aftershock prompted authorities to instigate the country’s largest and most widespread evacuation.
There is evidence that Indigenous Māori had long understood this danger.
Aotearoa is also a hub of seismic activity and a hotspot for tsunamis, and archeologists have found signs that numerous coastal settlements were abandoned in the 15th century in favor of inland and hilltop sites, likely due to tsunami inundation.
That knowledge of risks within a landscape, and flexibility to weather it, extended beyond where not to build and into the principles and techniques that underpin Māori traditional construction.
Houses that hold up
Māori architect and researcher Anthony Hoete, a member of the Ngāti Awa and Ngāti Ranana iwi (tribes) and a professor at the University of Auckland, recently led a team in creating a full-scale wharenui (meeting house) structure using traditional Māori building techniques.
Tested against modern seismic requirements, it proved capable of withstanding major earthquakes.
The central technique they deployed, called mīmiro, entails crafting interlocking structural supports, lashing them together with ropes, and then pulling them tight against the ground (post-tensioning) like a tent for additional strength.
“[Our ancestors] had a deep knowledge of building and creating strength and tension in structures,” said Hoete in a press release, “so we have recreated those techniques that have been lost and use them to give our wharenui greater seismic resilience.”
The technique’s origins come from a different dynamic and dangerous environment: the open Pacific Ocean, which Māori ancestors crossed in waka (boats) on their way to Aotearoa about 700 years ago.
“Before the arrival of Europeans, there wouldn’t have been metal fixings in the country,” Hoete told writer Dale Husband in an interview for E-Tangata.
“So, Māori would have been creating their whare (houses) much like they would’ve been building their waka. They would’ve been lashed together with flax-based rope systems.”
Hoete wants to see these techniques applied more broadly by Māori communities in the future. This is as much a political challenge as a practical one, as colonization has fragmented knowledge and culture, with Indigenous people’s territories taken and their rights undermined.
In 1840, Māori owned almost all the land in Aotearoa; today, just 5 percent is Māori freehold. They’re also more likely to live in substandard, unsafe housing, experiencing severe housing deprivation at four times the rate of New Zealanders of European descent.
Hoete saw a compelling opportunity to build low-cost, seismically-sound housing drawing on traditional techniques alongside contemporary ones.
“We could leverage our Māori position within the forestry world of planting, harvesting and milling, and look towards building a new generation of papakāinga (homes) with much longer spans because of the technique of post-tensioning,” he said.
Knowledge in motion
As Hoete intimates and Kronmüller’s study suggests, the seismic cultures of the Māori and Mapuche are not museum artifacts. They’re practical, relevant and protective, both now and for the future.
Two more recent quakes – the 2010 Maule earthquake in southern Chile and the 2011 Christchurch earthquake in Aotearoa – show that these traditions are still very much alive.
In Maule, the coastal town of Tirúa was one of the worst hit by the tsunami that followed the quake, with some houses found over a kilometer from their original positions once the waters receded.
Yet no-one there was killed, because people knew to move quickly to higher ground as soon as the earthquake ceased.
In and around Christchurch, Indigenous communities organized rapidly following the earthquake, with a national Māori earthquake recovery network set up in the first 24 hours, and the response underway within 48 hours – much quicker than official operations.
“There are lessons that can be learned from that communitarian approach,” says Christine Kenney, who belongs to the Ngāi Tahu, Te Ātiawa ki Whakarongotai and Ngāti Toarangatira iwi and is an associate professor at Massey University’s Joint Centre for Disaster Research.
Kenney believes these types of knowledge are critical not just for Indigenous peoples but for all of us as we face the natural and human-made catastrophes to come.
“For me, the broader picture is a resilient nation, where everyone is involved in bringing their strengths to the table,” she says.
In an era of escalating risk, that resilience may depend less on new solutions than on remembering – and re-empowering – those already embedded firmly in place.