Marshall Islanders Research Articles

Introduction: Resistance and Survival – The Nuclear Era in the Pacific

ABSTRACT For many decades, historians, researchers, and participants have documented the history of the nuclear era in the Pacific Islands. They have highlighted the legacy of health and environmental impacts of 50 years of nuclear testing by the United States, the United Kingdom, and France between 1946 and 1996. Most official histories of Pacific nuclear testing present extensive technical detail of the development of nuclear weapons, evidence of inter-departmental rivalries, and vivid portraits of the scientists who built the Bomb. This state-sponsored literature, however, makes limited reference to the lived experience of the civilian and military personnel who staffed the test sites, or the Indigenous peoples whose land and waters were used for the testing programmes in Oceania. Despite a growing international literature on the health and environmental impacts of nuclear testing, the history of Pacific Islander resistance to the nuclear testing programmes is more fragmentary. In response, the authors in this special issue have foregrounded the agency of Indigenous activists, rather than the Western allies who campaigned alongside the Nuclear Free and Independent Pacific (NFIP) movement. Their contributions add to a growing body of personal testimony by Indigenous nuclear survivors and resisters from around Oceania. This special issue includes a 1954 petition from Marshall Islanders to the UN Trusteeship Council, an example of the protests by Islanders that began in the 1950s, pre-dating the rise of the wider NFIP movement in the 1970s. Other articles highlight Fiji’s early foreign policy and the importance of the debate over nuclear testing in the formation of the South Pacific Forum; the importance of culture in Pacific anti-nuclear activism, through song, poetry, graphic design, and community theatre; the role of the regional NFIP movement in linking local struggles to the wider regional context, through pan-Pacific, Indigenous-led activism around self-determination; and connections between the NFIP movement and solidarity movements in the Global North.

Culture or commerce? Craft as an ambiguous construction between culture and economy

ABSTRACT Contemporary craft presents a conceptual difficulty for many Marshall Islanders, who struggle to construct definitions that rely on a clear-cut separation between culture and economy, in which craft is perceived to serve either cultural or commercial purposes. However, this article ethnographically illustrates that craft is an ambiguous construction. Its ambiguity stems from conflicting notions of culture and commerce, which is tied to valuations along the commodity – non-commodity spectrum. Marshallese craft was initially conceptualized locally and externally as something akin to tourist art aimed at an external other – that is, as commercial craft – but has since turned inwards to become culturally meaningful. Yet, despite this conceptual separation between commercial and cultural crafts, Marshall Islanders make, use, and circulate craft in ways that muddles such clear-cut categories. Instead, people see themselves and others as catering to economic and cultural needs at different moments using the same artifacts – a contextual alteration that contributes to a gradual shift in valuation. The ambiguity of craft therefore illuminates the continuous conceptual work of keeping culture and economy separated, a work that itself should be understood as a process of cultural production.

In ongoing efforts to vaccinate communities against COVID-19, pharmacists must address fear and misinformation

In ongoing efforts to vaccinate communities against COVID-19, pharmacists must address fear and misinformation

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

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...

From Arrival Stories to Origin Mythmaking: Missionaries in the Marshall Islands

Abstract In December 1857, Protestant missionaries arrived on Epoon Atoll to establish the first mission station in the Marshall Islands. The story of their arrival has historical interest and contemporary importance in the Marshalls because it has been used to form local theology and to shape contemporary identities. Thus, the arrival story of the first missionaries to the Marshall Islands functions as an origin story that serves religiously anchored identity construction on Epoon today. This article illuminates aspects of the arrival story that have been purposefully forgotten by Marshall Islanders and overlooked by academic historians and historically minded scholars.

Wilhelm Knappe’s photo album as an early testimony of German colonization of the Marshall Islands1

Wilhelm Knappe (1855–1910), the first German administrator (imperial commissioner) assigned to the newly acquired Marshall Islands in 1886, created a photo album with pictures, presumably taken by New Zealand photographer Thomas Andrew in the same year. There are at least three existing copies of these albums and a bundle of loose photographs identical to those in the album in question. At the time of Knappe’s arrival in the Marshall Islands, Germany was still in the process of consolidating its newest colonial acquisition. The photographs show both Marshall Islanders untouched by Christian missions and colonial influence, and already ‘civilized’ Indigenous people from various atoll islands of the Ralik- and Ratak-group. The importance of this album results from the fact that it is one of the earliest pictorial records of the Marshall Islands and it probably represents the first documentation of German activities on the eastern Micronesian archipelago. This article highlights the history of the album and the photographs as well as their importance for a reconstruction of Marshall Islands’ history in the late nineteenth century.

COVID‐19 and the Marshallese

<scp>COVID</scp>‐19 and the Marshallese

Making murals in the Marshall Islands and Hawai’i: An exploration of the possibilities and limits of artistic agency in a community arts education project

This article explores the painting of two murals as part of a community arts education project aimed at understanding Marshallese children’s experiences of displacement and belonging. It describes the process and outcome of mural making workshops conducted in two schools: one in Honolulu attended by migrant Marshallese children; the other with a community of Marshall Islanders, internally displaced as a result of the effects of nuclear testing on their home atoll. Engaging with anthropological approaches to art, the article seeks to address important questions around the agency of these murals in the context of community arts education. What do these murals do, both in the process of coming into being, and as finished products? How did the images depicted on them take shape? In what ways were the artist’s intentions, and the children’s input, enabled and limited in this process? Paying detailed attention to these questions, the article argues for a nuanced understanding of what a successful community mural-making process might look like.

Planting Islands: Marshall Islanders Shaping Land, Power, and History

ABSTRACTThis paper reframes encounters between ri-aelōñ-kein (Marshall Islanders) and ri-pālle (outsiders) between the 16th and 19th centuries through a ri-aelōñ-kein cultural lens. It applies a deep ethnographic approach and frameworks of cross-cultural exchange and mutual possession to re-present ri-aelōñ-kein engagements across the beach as purposeful attempts to ‘plant’ ri-pālle on land and within genealogies. It argues that, in addition to violence, ri-aelōñ-kein used ‘gifts’ of land and other exchanges to ‘plant’ ri-pālle within their realms and, in turn, augment their social status. While deployed most often by irooj (chiefs), kajoor (commoner) men and women used similar tactics with some success. Throughout, ri-aelōñ-kein made history by deploying aspects of culture to advance local ambitions through engagements with ri-pālle.

Marshall Islands

Marshall Islands Monica C Labriola For the Republic of the Marshall Islands (RMI), the period under review saw the passing of a number of public servants, community members, and advocates, including several trailblazers in nuclear and climate activism, advocacy, and scholarship. Tony deBrum devoted his life's work to the advancement of the Marshall Islands and to procuring nuclear and climate justice for Marshall Islanders. After serving on the Congress of Micronesia and the Marshall Islands' first Constitutional Convention in the 1970s, deBrum played a key role in securing independence from the Trust Territory of the Pacific Islands and in the negotiations that resulted in the RMI's first Compact of Free Association (cofa) with the United States in 1986 (Walsh and Heine 2011). His government posts spanned decades and included senator for Mājro and Kuwajleen atolls, minister of finance and foreign affairs, ambassador to the United Nations, and RMI climate ambassador (mij, 1 Sept 2017). DeBrum was a staunch advocate for justice for the survivors of the aftermath of sixty-seven nuclear tests conducted by the United States on Pikinni and Ānewetak atolls. He sought to secure a world free of nuclear weapons and in 2014 filed a lawsuit on behalf of the RMI aimed at forcing the world's nuclear powers to reengage in nuclear disarmament talks (mij, 1 Sept 2017). DeBrum was also a leader in the movement to reverse the effects of climate change and was instrumental in the passage of the Paris Agreement of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. In addition to being nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize, deBrum was the recipient of several awards including the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation Distinguished Peace Leadership Award in 2012 and a posthumous Lifetime Achievement Award from the government of Germany in 2017 (mij, 25 Aug, 3 Nov 2017). Weeks before deBrum's passing in late August 2017, the Marshall Islands lost sitting Naṃdik Atoll Senator and Minister Mattlan (Matt) Zackhras. Prior to his service as President Hilda Heine's minister in assistance, Zackhras's portfolio during his four terms in office included the ministries of public works and of resources and development. Zackhras was instrumental in securing funding for local [End Page 170] and national sustainable development projects and was recognized for his work promoting sustainable black pearl farming, the formation of the Namdrik [Naṃdik] Copra Cooperative, and the RMI's first virgin coconut oil processing operation (mij, 11 Aug 2017). In a November 2017 special election, Naṃdik voters opted to keep Zackhras's Nitijeḷā (Parliament) seat in the family by electing his brother Wisely Zackhras to succeed him (mij, 17 Nov 2017). The RMI also lost three longtime nuclear advocates during this period. Lemeyo Abon was one of the last surviving ri-Roñḷap (ri- means person/people of/from) to have lived through the fallout of the Castle Bravo hydrogen bomb test on Pikinni Atoll on 1 March 1954. Abon recounted her experiences in books, films, newspaper articles, and a statement to the United Nations Human Rights Council in 2012; she died in February 2018. A resident of the Marshall Islands for almost fifty years, Bill Graham devoted much of his career to seeking justice and compensation for the survivors of US nuclear testing. Graham served as public advocate for the RMI Nuclear Claims Tribunal for more than twenty years and had recently been appointed to the newly established RMI National Nuclear Commission. Graham died in Honolulu on 1 March 2018, the sixty-fourth anniversary of the Castle Bravo test (mij, 9 March 2018). Nuclear scholar and advocate Dr Robert (Bob) Kiste passed away on 28 November 2017. In addition to publishing The Bikinians: A Study in Forced Migration in 1974 and working as a consultant for the Micronesian Legal Service Corporation in the 1970s, Kiste inspired scores of Pacific Islands scholars as a professor and director of the Center for Pacific Islands Studies from 1978 to 2002 (Lal 2004). Among the many other traditional leaders and prominent community members who died during this period were Mājro aḷap (lineage head) Newi Nathan; Kuwajleen aḷap and Constitutional Convention delegate Stephen "Kodri" Dribo; and Castle Bravo...

Mapping the linguistic landscapes of the Marshall Islands

This paper examines code choices in the written linguistic landscape of the Republic of the Marshall Islands (RMI). Due to a history of language imposition, the Marshall Islanders have long been denied the opportunity to express their linguistic identity in the public domain. A recently proposed bilingual language policy, which requires all public signs to be Marshallese-English bilingual, aims to change this status quo. We map language choices in the linguistic landscape of the RMI at the cusp of this policy with an eye on the stakeholders, production processes, and audiences involved in the creation and reception of the linguistic landscape. State-of-the-art geographical and regression analyses model the factors that govern code choices in the linguistic landscape of the RMI. Our findings allow us to pinpoint niches—both geographical as well as social—where the Marshallese assert their linguistic identity in the public realm.

Neocolonialism and Health Care Access among Marshall Islanders in the United States.

In the Marshall Islands, a history of extensive nuclear weapons testing and covert biomedical research, coupled with the U.S.'s ongoing military presence in the country, has severely compromised the health of the local population. Despite the U.S.'s culpability in producing ill health along with high rates of emigration from the islands to the mainland United States, the large portion of Marshallese who reside in the United States face substantial barriers to accessing health care. Drawing from ongoing field research with a Marshallese community in Arkansas, this article explores the multifaceted impediments that U.S.-based Marshall Islanders face in receiving medical treatment. Calling on an expansive and inclusive notion of neocolonialism, I argue that Marshallese structural vulnerability with regard to health and health care treatment derives from their status as neocolonial subjects and from their limited claims to health-related deservingness associated with this status. [Marshall Islanders, health care access, neocolonialism, radiation exposure, immigrant health] L̗ōmn̗ak ko rōttin̗o: Ilo M̗ajel̗, juon bwebwenato kōn kōmmālmel im nuclear baam̗ ko im ekkatak ko rōttin̗o̗ kōn wāwein an baijin ko jelōt armej, barāinwōt an to an ri tarinae ro an Amedka pād ilo aelōn̄ kein, em̗ōj an jelōt ājmour an armej ro ilo aelōn̄ kein. Men̄e alikkar bwe Amedka in ear jino nan̄inmej kein im ej un eo armej rein rej em̗m̗akūt jān āne kein āne er n̄an ioon Amedka, elōn̄ iaan ri M̗ajel̗ rein rej jelm̗ae elōn̄ apan̄ ko n̄an aer del̗o̗n̄e jikin ājmour ko. Jān ekkatak eo ej bōk jikin kiō, jerbal in ej etali kabōjrak rak kein rōlōn̄ im armej in M̗ajel̗ ro ioon Amedka in rej jelm̗ae ilo aer jibadōk lo̗k jikin taktō. Ilo an kar Amedka jibadōk juon jea eo eutiej imejān lal̗ in, ij kwal̗ok juon aō akweelel bwe apan̄ ko an armej in M̗ajel̗ ikijjeen ājmour im jikin taktō ej itok jān aer kar ri kōm̗akoko ilo an kar Amedka lelōn̄ l̗o̗k etan ilo mejān lal̗ im jān aer jab pukot jipan kein ej aer bwe kōn jōkjōk in.

Offshoring American Environmental Law: Land, Culture, and Marshall Islanders’ Struggles for Self-Determination During the 1970s

This article explores the impact of environmental law in US-controlled Micronesia. Historians have suggested that US environmental legislation and legal activism during the 1960s and 1970s often overlooked issues of environmental racism and injustice. This article establishes the importance of these emerging environmental laws for Marshall Islanders living under American rule and subjected to the harms of nuclear weapons testing. In 1972 the displaced people of Enewetak Atoll—a former nuclear test site—sued the United States hoping to stop a new program of conventional weapons testing on their badly contaminated ancestral atoll. The capacious concept of the environment used in the National Environmental Policy Act of 1969 and the statute’s ambiguous territorial reach offered islanders important new opportunities to articulate their environmental values and to further their struggles for self-determination over ancestral lands and waters. This article argues that environmental law transcended the artificial territorial boundaries between the United States and its Pacific dependencies, opening up an important new venue of negotiation and conflict over the scope and environmental footprint of US offshore power.

American History Unbound: Asians and Pacific Islanders by Gary Y. Okihiro, and: Domination and Resistance: The United States and the Marshall Islands during the Cold War by Martha Smith-Norris

Reviewed by: American History Unbound: Asians and Pacific Islanders by Gary Y. Okihiro, and: Domination and Resistance: The United States and the Marshall Islands during the Cold War by Martha Smith-Norris Monica C. Labriola American History Unbound: Asians and Pacific Islanders. By gary y. okihiro. Oakland: University of California Press, 2015. 520 pp. $39.95 (paper). Domination and Resistance: The United States and the Marshall Islands during the Cold War. By martha smith-norris. Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 2016. 264 pp. $62.00 (cloth). Gary Y. Okihiro's American History Unbound: Asians and Pacific Islanders and Martha Smith-Norris's Domination and Resistance: The United States and the Marshall Islands during the Cold War are two very different books. Whereas Okihiro's is a textbook for students of Asian American history, Smith-Norris's is a historical monograph geared toward U.S. foreign relations scholars. Where American History Unbound considers a broad range of Asian American and, to a lesser extent, Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islander experiences in U.S. history, Domination and Resistance is a case study that focuses on U.S. activities in the Marshall Islands during the Cold War. While Okihiro's text explores Asian American historical positionality as laborers in a capitalist world-system dominated by Europe and the United States since the sixteenth century, Smith-Norris's focuses on Marshall Islanders as victims of U.S. militarism since the end of World War II. That said, several threads tie the two books together, if loosely. First, both contest the theoretical underpinnings of the historical subfields in which they are situated by offering counter-histories that destabilize [End Page 649] familiar narratives and approaches. Okihiro "unbinds" the field of U.S. history—which he contends has overlooked the active presence of Asian Americans, Native Hawaiians, and Pacific Islanders in the United States since before its founding—as well as the hegemonic discourses that have worked to define who counts as American. In its place, Okihiro offers a retelling of American history from "the fringes of [a] national consciousness" that has historically privileged whiteness as the nation's defining feature (Okihiro, p. 18). To do this, he disputes chronologies that overlook the presence of Asian and Pacific Islander migrant laborers in the United States since the mid-eighteenth century, and reveals how racism affected national legislation that defined U.S. citizenship according to race and national origin through the mid-twentieth century. Significantly, he also looks beyond the experiences of Chinese and Japanese Americans to include Koreans, Filipinos, South Asians, Native Hawaiians, and others to construct a history that strives to reflect Asian and Pacific Islander diversity in the United States. Smith-Norris interrupts the field of U.S. foreign relations, which favors top-down realist reconstructions of U.S. global engagements during the Cold War, by focusing on a community often ignored by those narratives. She does this by offering an overview of the devastating consequences of U.S. nuclear and missile testing for several atoll communities in the Marshall Islands. These include Bikini and Enewetak, the test sites for sixty-seven1 nuclear weapons from 1946 to 1958; Rongelap and Utrik, which were disastrously impacted by nuclear fallout; and Kwajalein, the test site for "hundreds of strategic and defensive missiles" over the past several decades (Smith-Norris, p. 6). Smith-Norris explores the removal of ri-Bikini2 and ri-Enewetak from their home atolls; the delayed relocation of ri-Rongelap following the inundation of their atoll by nuclear fallout from the March 1, 1954, Castle Bravo test; the exploitation of these communities as test subjects in radiation experiments and their resulting health complications; and the ongoing displacement of ri-Bikini and ri-Rongelap, whose islands remain uninhabitable to this day. She also considers the social and environmental impacts of the U.S. missile-testing range on Kwajalein Atoll, including resettlement of Kwajalein's mid-corridor residents for [End Page 650] intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) testing; resulting health and economic concerns for people living on overcrowded Ebeye island; the United States' limited compensation for the use of Kwajalein through the 1980s; and the unequal power relationship that influenced Marshall Islands independence and...

Marshall Islands

Marshall Islands Monica C. Labriola (bio) For the Republic of the Marshall Islands (RMI), the period under review saw the passing of several traditional and political leaders and distinguished community members. Most notable was the death of Iroojḷapḷap (Paramount Chief), Senator, and former President Jurelang Zedkaia, who suffered a fatal heart attack in October 2015. In addition to overseeing landholding across Mājro (Majuro) Atoll as its traditional leader, Zedkaia served in the Nitijeḷā (Parliament) for twenty-four years and as the nation’s president from 2009 to 2012 after he was elected to replace Litokwa Tomeing, who had been removed from office by a vote of no confidence. Zedkaia was honored with a month of national mourning and a state funeral attended by thousands (mij, 16 Oct 2015). Several other high-ranking irooj (chiefs) and former members of the Nitijeḷā also passed during this period. Among these was Mājro Irooj and former Senator Wilfred Kendall, who died in January 2016 after a long illness. Kendall’s political career spanned several decades and included accomplishments such as being elected repeatedly to the Congress of Micronesia, serving as minister of education under the late President Amata Kabua and subsequent administrations, and acting as the longest-serving RMI ambassador to the United Nations (mij, 29 Jan 2016). Other deaths included Kuwajleen Aḷap (lineage head) and former Senator Sato Maie, former Arṇo Senator Katip Paul Mack, and Rien Morris, who represented Jālwōj in the Nitijeḷā for twenty years. The Kōle/Pikinni/Ejit (kbe) community also lost two leaders. Nishma Jamore, kbe mayor and outspoken advocate of relocating the kbe community to the US continent, died of apparent complications from kidney disease in August 2015, while Marilyn Lokebol succumbed to cancer in June 2016, just a few months after her first-time election as kbe council-woman. Two respected religious leaders also passed away: United Church of Christ (ucc) Pastor Wendell Langrine of Tucson, Arizona, died in August 2015 during a church conference in Mājro, and Jone Masivou, who came to the Marshall Islands from Fiji as an Assembly of God missionary and founded the Morning Star Church in Mājro in 1995, died in April 2016. Other beloved community members who were lost include Neimon Philippo, wife of former Lae Atoll Senator Tipne Philippo; former v7ab radio announcer Waston Attari; Majuro Middle School special education teacher Asmon Langidrik Jr; and Youth to Youth in Health Director Aluka Rakin. Robert Reimer’s only daughter Minna Pihno, who managed key aspects of Robert Reimers Enterprises, [End Page 111] Inc (rre) for decades, succumbed to cancer in February 2016. The period under review was also one of unprecedented transformation in the realm of politics and leadership at the national and local levels, with the most dramatic events unfolding around the November 2015 elections. These included the controversial Nitijeḷā campaign by former Peace Corps volunteer Jack Niedenthal; the death of Mājro Atoll Nitijeḷā incumbent Iroojḷapḷap Jurelang Zedkaia; the mobilization of the “youth” vote in favor of several younger, first-time senators; the record election of three woman senators as well as several woman mayors and members of local councils; a vote of no confidence just two weeks after the Nitijeḷā’s selection of first-time Senator Casten Nemra of Jālwōj as president; and the subsequent election of Senator Hilda Heine of Aur as the first woman head of state in the RMI or any independent Pacific Island nation (not including New Zealand and Australia). While the election results have inspired some Marshall Islanders to anticipate positive changes for their communities and for their country as a whole, many continue to experience the negative effects of extreme poverty, limited access to health care and other essential services, a floundering education system, extreme weather events, and financial mismanagement at the local and national levels. It remains to be seen whether the new administration and the Constitutional Convention scheduled to take place in late 2016 will bring about the desired changes. The 2015 election season went into full swing in October 2015 when the attorney general’s office dropped its appeal of a high...

Marshall Islands

Marshall Islands Monica C. Labriola (bio) Several issues took center stage in the Republic of the Marshall Islands (RMI) from July 2014 to June 2015, revealing ongoing tensions between the government’s duty to attend to the everyday needs of the Marshallese people and its necessary engagement with macro-level political, economic, and environmental concerns. These tensions were perhaps most apparent in the Marshall Islands’ ongoing lawsuit against the United States and eight other nuclear-armed nations, top leaders’ vocal participation in global climate-change discussions, several controversial government expenditures and continuing financial mismanagement, less-than-desirable rankings on several regional and international reports, and increasing outmigration. That said, government leaders, nongovernmental organizations, educational institutions, and private citizens made noteworthy efforts to address these issues through governmental and institutional policy, direct action, and participation in local, regional, and international organizations. Meanwhile, the run-up to the 2015 election kicked off in September 2014, with local and national elections scheduled for the third Monday in November—recently designated a national holiday by the Nitijeḷā (Parliament). As of this writing, it remains to be seen whom the people of the Marshall Islands will elect to steer their country’s course over the next four years. With the 2015 election looming, a few key issues consistently made headlines during the period under review. Among these were two lawsuits filed in April 2014—one against the United States and eight other nuclear-armed nations (China, France, India, Israel, North Korea, Pakistan, Russia, and the United Kingdom) at the International Court of Justice (icj) in The Hague and the other against the United States in a federal district court in San Francisco (Radio Australia 2014; Lawyers Committee on Nuclear Policy 2015). [End Page 193] RMI Minister of Foreign Affairs Tony deBrum initiated the lawsuits in consultation with the US-based Nuclear Age Peace Foundation—a nonprofit, nonpartisan organization that advocates for a world free of nuclear weapons. The lawsuits charged the nine nations with violating international law and failing to uphold the goals of the 1968 Non-Proliferation Treaty, which aims to prevent the spread of nuclear weapons and to promote nuclear disarmament worldwide. While the “Nuclear Zero Lawsuits” generated widespread attention and the support of the US Conference of Mayors, Archbishop Desmond Tutu of South Africa, and other world leaders, some questioned the lawsuits’ value for the Marshallese people. Among the suits’ most vocal opponents was David Paul, Marshalls Energy Company general manager and one of seven candidates vying for three Nitijeḷā seats for Kuwajleen (Kwajalein) Atoll—where Minister deBrum has held office since 2007. Despite the Marshall Islands’ nuclear legacy, Paul and others questioned the Marshall Islands’ pursuit of the lawsuits when the Nuclear Claims Tribunal, the Changed Circumstance Petition, and leaking radioactive waste on Ānewetak (Enewetak) Atoll continue to affect the health and well-being of Marshall Islanders. Critics also warned of the lawsuits’ potential impact on the Marshall Islands’ relationship with the United States and expressed concern that activists lacking expertise in disarmament law have used the Marshall Islands to advance their cause through means unlikely to yield desired results. This warning seemed to come true in early February, when a US district judge granted the US government’s motion to dismiss that lawsuit on the grounds that it was based on speculative harm and that the court lacked jurisdiction on the issue. Meanwhile at The Hague, only three of the nine nuclear-armed nations—India, Pakistan, and the United Kingdom—accepted icj jurisdiction in relation to the lawsuit, and China declined to accept the court’s authority. The Marshall Islands’ ongoing participation in regional and international climate-change debates also captured headlines, particularly in the weeks surrounding UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon’s Climate Summit in late September 2014. Leading the discussion was RMI President Christopher Loeak, whose “Clarion Call from the Climate Change Frontline” called attention to recent droughts, king tides, and beaches flooded by rising seas. Proclaiming a “full-blown climate emergency,” the president warned that the Marshall Islands is the climate “canary in the coal mine”—if the Marshall Islands is to be devastated by sea-level rise, others will follow (Loeak 2014). The president also...

Climate Change and Accusation

By politicizing the last bastion of “untouched nature,” climate change makes blame ubiquitous and therefore infinitely malleable. Onto this moral blank slate, critical anthropologists and political ecologists inscribe industrial/Northern blame rather than universal/pan-human blame. This article queries what our analytical stance ought to be when our field partners—those who seem to best exemplify the inequity of climate change—disagree with this reading of climate change. The Republic of the Marshall Islands contributes minimally to global climate change yet faces nationwide uninhabitability at its hands. Despite awareness of their tiny carbon footprint, grassroots Marshall Islanders (if not their government) have strongly favored a response of guilt and atonement rather than outrage and protest. I argue that various delegitimizing explanations of this perception—ignorance, denial, performance, false consciousness—are ethnographically untenable or unsatisfying. Instead, Marshallese self-blame should be understood as the local appropriation of global warming discourse in terms of a preexisting narrative of seductive modernity and cultural decline. Such an analysis allows us to appreciate how indigenous climate change self-blame, while undoubtedly problematic in many of its implications, may also carry empowering, postcolonial, counterhegemonic potentialities that should not be discounted by those searching for radical counternarratives of climate change.

Who Closed the Sea? Archipelagoes of Amnesia Between the United States and Japan

There is a profound lack of awareness among younger generations about Japan’s prewar engagement with the Pacific Islands, let alone other colonial sites, yet arguably, this amnesia is not a spontaneous phenomenon. Forgetting about Micronesia and erasing it from the Japanese mass consciousness was a project in which both Japanese and American postwar forces were complicit. Focusing on stories of Japanese amnesia and selective memory in the Marshall Islands, I explore the Marshallese notion of “closing the sea,” how U.S. power has long been a mediating factor in why Japanese forget their Pacific past, and also why Marshall Islanders remember it.

The myth of isolates: ecosystem ecologies in the nuclear Pacific

This article explores how the concept of ecosystem ecologies, one of the most influential models of systems thinking, was developed in relation to the radioactive aftermath of US nuclear weapons testing in the Pacific Islands. Historian Richard Grove has demonstrated how tropical island colonies all over the globe served as vital laboratories and spaces of social, botanical, and industrial experiment in ways that informed modernity and the conservation movement. I propose a similar relationship between the militarized American island colonies of Micronesia and how their constitution as AEC laboratories contributed to both atomic modernity and the field of ecosystem ecology. This was enacted through metaphorical concepts of island isolation and distributed visually by Atomic Energy Commission films that upheld an aerial vision of the newly acquired atolls for an American audience. Finally, the myth of isolation is also at work in the ways in which Marshall Islanders exposed to nuclear fallout became human subjects for radiation experiments due to the idea of the biological isolate.

Promiscuous corroboration and climate change translation: A case study from the Marshall Islands

Public knowledge of global warming depends on the translation of climate science from specialist communities to citizens, and from scientific language to the vernacular; yet, no two cultures or languages being perfectly commensurable, this process of translation necessarily entails a transformation of the climate change concept. I explore this transformation, and the unexpected consequences it spells for local acceptance and understanding of climate science, through a case study in the Marshall Islands, a low-lying nation endangered by sea level rise and other climate change impacts. Various framings of this threat have been communicated to Marshall Islanders via local media, NGO, and government outlets. ‘Climate’ is here translated as Marshallese mejatoto, the closest equivalent in this Austronesian language. Yet mejatoto refers not only to climate/weather but also to the environment or cosmos in general, including the social sphere, a result of the Marshallese conceptual conflation of ‘nature’ and ‘culture.’ As a result, locals point to processes as disparate, and un-‘climatic,’ as a solar eclipse, accelerating time, and weakening tradition as examples of, and evidence for, climate change. In a society already vigorously possessed of narratives of change, this ‘promiscuous corroboration’ makes the prediction of climate change extremely easy to trust. While this ‘mistranslation’ carries with it certain dangers, when viewed instead as a reinterpretation it is rife with opportunity. Climate change communicators both abroad and at home must therefore carefully consider the transformations introduced by various translations of ‘climate change,’ yet also appreciate ‘mistranslation’ for its ability to render concepts meaningful to local actors and to stimulate citizen–scientist dialogue.