Breaking the Shell: Voyaging from Nuclear Refugees to People of the Sea in the Marshall Islands by Joseph H. Genz

Abstract

Reviewed by: Breaking the Shell: Voyaging from Nuclear Refugees to People of the Sea in the Marshall Islands by Joseph H. Genz Julianne M. Walsh (bio) Breaking the Shell: Voyaging from Nuclear Refugees to People of the Sea in the Marshall Islands by Joseph H. Genz University of Hawai'i Press, 2018 BREAKING THE SHELL: Voyaging from Nuclear Refugees to People of the Sea in the Marshall Islands is a study of resilience and courage. Anthropologist Joseph Genz demonstrates the deepest appreciation of a Marshallese navigational community in this innovative and impressive volume. A reemergence of navigational knowledge and canoe-building skills after decades of decline is conveyed in sweeping context, detailed analysis, and personal anecdotes. The collaboration of Genz and Marshallese master navigators and their apprentices is nothing short of inspiring. With seventeen years' engagement (2003–2020) with the navigational community, Genz captures the resilience of a community irrevocably impacted by nearly a century of U.S. strategic interests, including twelve years of nuclear weapons testing. By centralizing the sacrifices, courage, and expertise of Captain Korent Joel, a Marshall Islander from Rongelap atoll (downwind of the nuclear tests), Genz offers a uniquely situated ethnography. Readers accompany Captain Korent as he strives to demonstrate and earn his identity as a master navigator, thus rejecting and reframing an identity imposed by U.S. imperialism and power. The title phrase, "Breaking the Shell" comes from the Marshallese expression, ruprup . Literally, breaking (ruprup) a shell (, also turtle shell), the phrase metaphorically refers to earning the ultimate recognition of accomplishment as a master navigator who comes out of a shell and into his own knowledge, experience, and understanding. Genz describes it as follows: "Through his own ruprup navigational trial, Captain Korent and a small group of surviving mariners from Rongelap and Bikini are, against one of the darkest hours in human history, 'breaking the shell' of their prime identity as nuclear refugees to begin recovering their most intimate connections to the sea" (5). Like the mariners he represents, Genz navigates the text with tremendous skill and knowledge. This volume not only addresses many facets of sailing, canoes, navigation, history, cultural knowledge and identity but also offers complex and competing histories of contact and colonialism; the devastating impacts of nuclear weapons testing; and the continuity of cultural [End Page 194] practices, values, and beliefs through a focus on the agency of Marshallese conveyed in moving accounts of courage. Accessible to a variety of readers, including those unfamiliar with the Marshall Islands, the text begins with a necessary and succinct overview of Pacific Islands settlement theories. The introduction leads to the most relevant conclusion of the volume: Pacific Islands were settled and explored intentionally, over centuries, by skilled sailors and navigators, including the gifted Marshall Islanders, whose unique navigational expertise is examined in later chapters. The notes, drawings, and interactions with Islanders of the early explorers in the region are covered thoroughly and succinctly. The emphasis on detailed foreign accounts recognizes Indigenous ingenuity and the innovation of Marshallese canoe builders, sailors, and navigators, who enabled vessels to sail close to the wind, at great speed, while avoiding being overturned by powerful seas. The unique asymmetrical hull of Marshallese sailing canoes is but one example of impressive Indigenous systems of knowledge (of aerodynamics, ocean physics, meteorology, and astronomy) passed down over generations. The text offers a broad context to appreciate the long trajectory of maritime knowledge and also offers detailed description and analysis of legends, proverbs, creation stories, terms for parts of canoes, navigational chants, sea-marks or signs to convincingly centralize the canoe within Marshallese culture. The canoe's depth and breadth of meaning across all aspects of Marshallese lives is made clear. An even greater accomplishment is the author's ability to lucidly explain the complex science required to navigate ocean wave patterns around and between atolls; the interaction of wind, sea, waves; and the essential components of a canoe and their functions. Breaking the Shell's focus on sailing and navigation is, shockingly, the first of its kind in a text about the Marshall Islands. This volume fills that remarkable absence in a manner that centralizes Marshallese as actors, riding waves caused by the...