MARSHALL

Westview Case Studies in ANTHROPOLOGY

Series Editor: Edward F. Fischer, Vanderbilt University
ANTHROPOLOGY MAC MARSHALL
This case study examines emigrants from Namoluk Atoll in the Eastern
Caroline Islands of Micronesia, in the Western Pacific. Most members of

NAMOLUK BEYOND THE REEF

the Namoluk Community (chon Namoluk) do not currently live there.
Some 60 percent of them have moved to Chuuk, Guam, Hawai’i, or the
mainland United States (such as Eureka, California). The question is
how (and why) those expatriates continue to think of themselves as c h o n
Namoluk, and behave accordingly, despite being a far-flung network of
Namoluk
people, with inevitable erosions of shared language and culture.
Beyond the Reef
MAC MARSHALL is professor of anthropology at the University of Iowa,
with a secondary appointment as professor of community and behavioral The Transformation of a
health. He is former editor of Medical Anthropology Quarterly and cur-
rently serves as secretary of the American Anthropological Association. Micronesian Community

Cover photograph courtesy of Mac Marshall

Westview Press
5500 Central Avenue
Boulder, Colorado 80301 Westview Case Studies in ANTHROPOLOGY
12 Hid’s Copse Road
Cumnor Hill • Oxford OX2 9JJ
www.westviewpress.com

4c process — Glossy Lamination

All art high resolution on zip.
Match art to disk. D.O. all type overprint to specified color on disk.
Namoluk Beyond the Reef
 Westview Case Studies in Anthropology

Series Editor
Edward F. Fischer
Vanderbilt University

Advisory Board
Theodore C. Bestor Robert H. Lavenda
Harvard University Saint Cloud State University

Tecpán Guatemala: A Modern Maya Forthcoming

Town in Global and Local Context
From Mukogodo to Maasai: Ethnicity
Edward F. Fischer (Vanderbilt and Cultural Change in Kenya
University) and Carol Hendrickson Lee Cronk (Rutgers University)
(Marlboro College)
The Tanners of Taiwan: Life Strategies
Daughters of Tunis: Women, Family, and National Culture
and Networks in a Muslim City Scott Simon (University of Ottawa)
Paula Holmes-Eber (University of
Washington) Urban China: Private Lives and Public
Culture
Fulbe Voices: Marriage, Islam, and William Jankowiak (University of
Medicine in Northern Cameroon Nevada, Las Vegas)
Helen A. Regis (Louisiana State
University) The Iraqw of Tanzania: Negotiating
Rural Development
Magical Writing in Salasaca: Literacy Katherine A. Snyder (Queens
and Power in Highland Ecuador College, City University of New
Peter Wogan (Willamette University) York)

The Lao: Gender, Power, and Livelihood Black Skins, French Voices: Caribbean
Carol Ireson-Doolittle (Willamette Ethnicity and Activism in Urban France
University) and David A. Beriss (University
Geraldine Moreno-Black of New Orleans)
(University of Oregon)

Namoluk Beyond the Reef: The

Transformation of a Micronesian
Community
Mac Marshall (University of Iowa)
 Namoluk
Beyond the Reef
The Transformation of a
Micronesian Community

MAC MARSHALL
University of Iowa

A Member of the Perseus Books Group

 An chon Namoluk monson, ren ttong fiti pwos.

Theophil Saret Reuney, “The Pulling of Olap’s Canoe [excerpts only],” in boundary 2,
Volume 21, No. 1, pp. 254-258. Copyright © 1994, Duke University Press. All rights
reserved. Used by permission of the publisher.

All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. No part of this publica-
tion may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or
mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and re-
trieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

Copyright © 2004 by Westview Press, A Member of the Perseus Books Group.

Published in the United States of America by Westview Press, A Member of the

Perseus Books Group, 5500 Central Avenue, Boulder, Colorado 80301–2877, and in
the United Kingdom by Westview Press, 12 Hid’s Copse Road, Cumnor Hill, Oxford
OX2 9JJ.

Find us on the world wide web at www.westviewpress.com

Westview Press books are available at special discounts for bulk purchases in the
United States by corporations, institutions, and other organizations. For more infor-
mation, please contact the Special Markets Department at the Perseus Books Group,
11 Cambridge Center, Cambridge, MA 02142, or call (617) 252–5298, (800)
255–1514, or e-mail [email protected].

A Cataloging-in-Publication data record for this book is available from the Library
of Congress.
ISBN-13 978-0-8133-4162-0 (paperback)
ISBN-13 978-0-8133-4163-7 (hardcover)
ISBN 0-8133-4162-0 (paperback)
ISBN 0-8133-4163-9 (hardcover)
 Contents

List of Illustrations ix
List of Abbreviations and Acronyms xi
Series Editor Preface xiii
Preface and Acknowledgments xv

1 Openings 1
OPENING DARK SEAS, 1
OPENING A WIDER WORLD, 3
OPENING THE FLOODGATES OF MIGRATION, 6
OPENING MY ARGUMENT, 8
OPENING MYSELF, 14

2 Namoluk Atoll, 1969 17

LAGOON IN THE MIDDLE, 17
THE OUTSIDE WORLD DISCOVERS NAMOLUK, 19
COLONIALISM COMES TO NAMOLUK, 22
DAY-TO-DAY LIFE AT THE END OF THE 1960S, 27
THE FOUR E’S, 34
PRIMORDIAL SENTIMENTS OF SHARED IDENTITY, 35

3 Journeyings 43
ARRIVING AT THE REEF OF HONOLULU, 43
WAVES, 44
COLONIZING MERIKA, 53
BAD TRIPS: BEER AND TURKEY TAILS, 55
VENTURING, 58

v
vi Contents

4 Namoluk People, 2002 61

GETTING THE LEAD OUT, 61
THE MOTORBOAT REVOLUTION, 62
TYPHOON PAMELA: MORE WINDS OF CHANGE, 65
CHANGES IN INFRASTRUCTURE, 67
CHANGES IN SOCIAL STRUCTURE, 68
CONTINUITIES, 70
EXODUS, 74

5 Heading Off to College 77

THE LEGION OF THE COLLEGE-BOUND, 77
CHON NAMOLUK AND COLLEGE EDUCATION, 79
THE XAVIER CONNECTION, 86
FROM COCONUTS TO COCONUTCHAT, 87

6 Heading Off to Collage 89

IT’S A SURREAL WORLD OUT THERE, 89
UNHERALDED, LARGELY FORGOTTEN JOBS, 90
MOVIN’ UP, 94
LIVING IN A COLLAGE, 96

7 Reef Crossings 105

MIGRANTS: THE NEW NAMOLUK, 105
MIGRATION PATTERNS, 106

8 Four Locations Beyond the Reef 113

ROAMING THE GLOBE, 113
WÉÉNÉ: THE FIRST STEP, 114
CHON GUAMOLUK: LIVING WHERE AMERICA’S DAY BEGINS, 117
WILL DREAMS COME TRUE IN BLUE HAWAI’I?, 122
EUREKA! I’VE FOUND IT!, 126

9 Closings: Points of Departure 133

NO ISLAND IS AN ISLAND, 133
POINTS OF ORIGIN, 135
NESTED IDENTITIES, 137
POINTS OF ENTANGLEMENT, 139
YOUR PLACE OR MINE?, 141
THE PERSPECTIVE OF FOLKS ON THE SHORE, 143
CODA, 144
 Contents vii

Glossary 147
Suggestions for Further Reading 151
References 153
Index 161
 Illustrations

MAPS
1.1 Micronesia (Including the Caroline, Mariana, and Marshall Islands) 4
1.2 Chuuk State, Federated States of Micronesia 5
1.3 Namoluk Atoll, Eastern Caroline Islands 9

TABLES
2.1 Namoluk Clans by Number and Percent of De Jure Population,
7/13/2001 37
3.1 Number and Percent of Namoluk De Jure Population by
Location and Year 53
4.1 Locations of Chon Namoluk by Ten-Year Age Cohorts, 7/13/2001 75

FIGURES
1.1 Three Chon Namoluk and a Chon Ettal in the Snow Outside the
Author’s House in Iowa City, Iowa, Thanksgiving 1975 12
2.1 A Typhoon House on Namoluk, March 1970, Constructed After
Typhoon Phyllis in 1958 29
2.2 Namoluk Canoe House (Fáál an Paros), with Two Styles of
Sailing Canoe, May 1970 30
2.3 The Protestant Church on Namoluk, April 1995 31
2.4 Namoluk Canoe House (Fáál an Falukupat), with a Day’s Catch of
Yellowfin Tuna, December 1969 33
3.1 A Second-Wave Namoluk Man Making Coconut Sennit Cord (Lul)
in a Canoe House on the Atoll, May 1970 46

ix
x Illustrations

3.2 Fifth- and Sixth-Wave Namoluk Men at Chuuk International Airport,

Wééné, June 1985 50
4.1 Waaserik Crossing Namoluk’s Lagoon, Bound for Amwes,
January 1970 63
4.2 Motorboat on Namoluk, April 1995 64
4.3 Damage Caused by Typhoon Pamela on Namoluk, May 1976 66
4.4 The Protestant Minister and Deacons Seated in the
Namoluk Protestant Church on Easter Sunday 1995 72
5.1 College-Educated Namoluk Schoolteachers on the Dock on Wééné,
Preparing to Sail to Namoluk, July 2001 81
5.2 Young Namoluk College Student in Great Smoky Mountains
National Park, North Carolina, August 1977 83
6.1 Chon Namoluk in Honolulu Apartment, July 2001
(Note Security Guard Uniform) 94
6.2 Chon Namoluk Dressed for the Sunday Service at
Island Community Church, Portland, Oregon, June 2002 97
8.1 Chon Namoluk Outside One of Their Homes in Iras village on
Wééné, July 2001 115
8.2 Chon Guamoluk in an Apartment on Guam, May 1995 119
8.3 Two Members of the Namoluk Contingent in Eureka, California,
Outside Their House, July 2002 129
 Abbreviations and Acronyms

ABCFM American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions

ASAO Association for Social Anthropology in Oceania
CMA California Maritime Academy
CNA Certified Nursing Assistant
CNMI Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands
COM College of Micronesia
COR College of the Redwoods
FSM Federated States of Micronesia
HSU Humboldt State University
ICC Island Community Church
IBP Iowa Beef Packers
MIPS Micronesian Institute of Pastoral Studies [now PIBC]
MOC Micronesian Occupational College
NIDDM Non-insulin dependent diabetes mellitus
PATS Pohnpei Agricultural and Technical School
PBMOTP Pacific Basin Medical Officer Training Program
PCV Peace Corps volunteer
PIBC Pacific Islands Bible College [formerly MIPS]
PICS Pacific Islands Central School
RMI Republic of the Marshall Islands
SDA Seventh-Day Adventist
UNI University of Northern Iowa
UOG University of Guam
UPS United Parcel Service
USIU U.S. International University
USTTPI U.S. Trust Territory of the Pacific Islands
WHO World Health Organization
WPC Warner Pacific College

xi
 Series Editor Preface

The world is more connected now than ever before. In 1930 a three-minute tele-
phone call between New York and London cost $300; today it can be had for less
than 10¢ a minute. Airfares have likewise fallen, even as planes have gotten faster
and travel times have shortened. What was once the luxury of the “jet set” has be-
come commonplace for a large sector of the middle class in the world’s more de-
veloped countries. In the words of geographer David Harvey, globalization has
brought about a dramatic collapse in time/space distances.
Much has been written about how these processes have transformed Western
societies. But, lest we forget, the West does not have a monopoly on mobility.
Pacific Islanders have been voyaging for thousands of years, keeping in close con-
tact with neighboring islands and regularly mounting long-distance trips. For
them, air travel and the Internet are but new variations of a long-established
theme.
Mac Marshall first traveled to Namoluk Atoll in the Federated States of
Micronesia in 1969 as a young graduate student. At that time, only four chon
Namoluk (people of Namoluk) lived abroad. The rest resided on the five small
islets where their ancestors had lived for centuries. But much has changed over
the last thirty-five years, and Marshall is in a unique position to comment on this
change. One of anthropology’s virtues is long-term fieldwork with a particular
community, but even still the anthropological lens generally only captures a
snapshot of a particular group at a given moment in their history. Marshall’s
decades of friendship with chon Namoluk adds rare depth to his analysis. For ex-
ample, he can tell us not only how children were raised in the late 1960s and early
1970s, he can show us what those children are doing today as adults.
And more likely than not, those adult children do not live on Namoluk. In
2001 there were almost 900 chon Namoluk in the world. Of these, only 337 (39
percent) resided on Namoluk. The rest lived in Wééné (25 percent), Guam (18
percent), the United States (10 percent), and elsewhere around the world. Many

xiii
xiv Series Editor Preface

of the chon Namoluk migrants have found work abroad at McDonald’s and Pizza
Hut outlets; others pursue university degrees, and others still go to be with their
children who have left the islands.
This book focuses on the waves of Namoluk migration during the past thirty-
five years and the ties that bind migrants to their home community. Although
Namoluk lacks regular electricity, gas generators provide power for a few televi-
sions and VCRs that are used to watch video postcards sent by friends and rela-
tives living abroad. By looking at the networks that link Namoluk to Guam,
Hawai’i, and Eureka, California (among other places), Marshall details the
transnational connections in which not only chon Namoluk but many of the
world’s remote peoples are caught up.
This book looks at kinship and social structure, informal networks of sharing
news and gossip (the so-called “coconut telegraph”), the rise in education for
both men and women, and the impact of alcohol and tobacco on native society.
Marshall conveys these and other anthropological facts with a deeply humanistic
sensitivity. Through vignettes and biographical sketches, we get to know chon
Namoluk not from abstract sets of cultural rules and social categories but rather
as individuals, making the best of their lives as they see fit in a globalized world.
We meet women such as Erewhon, who left Namoluk a poor single mother and
now lives a life of relative luxury in Guam. We also meet young men such as
Moses, who left Namoluk with great dreams only to find himself stuck in a series
of low-wage jobs from which he cannot seem to escape.
Marshall’s judicious mix of personalized ethnography and analysis of broader
trends speaks to the world far beyond the reefs of Namoluk. In this way, Namoluk
Beyond the Reef makes an important contribution to the Westview Case Studies
in Anthropology series and to the discipline as a whole. This series presents
works that recognize the peoples we study as active agents enmeshed in global as
well as local systems of politics, economics, and cultural flows. There is a focus on
contemporary ways of life, forces of social change, and creative responses to novel
situations as well as to the more traditional concerns of classic ethnography. In
presenting rich humanistic and social scientific data born of the dialectic engage-
ment of fieldwork, the books in this series move toward realizing the full peda-
gogical potential of anthropology: imparting to the reader an empathetic under-
standing of alternative ways of viewing and acting in the world as well as a solid
basis for critical thought regarding the historically contingent nature of ethnic
boundaries and cultural knowledge.
Namoluk Beyond the Reef addresses current theoretical issues in anthropology
as well as the realities of chon Namoluk living in a globalized world. Marshall
writes in an engaging and accessible style, advancing our understanding of cul-
tural diversity while uncovering the often hidden webs of global relations that af-
fect us all.
Edward F. Fischer
Nashville, Tennessee
Preface and Acknowledgments

The research that undergirds this book has been conducted off and on during a
period of thirty-four years, and it was supported by a number of different fund-
ing sources. I am very grateful to all of them, and they are presented here in
chronological order: for my doctoral research on Namoluk from 1969–1971, a
predoctoral grant and fellowship from the National Institute of Mental Health
(U.S. Public Health Service, MH 11871–01 and MH42666–01) and supplemental
funds from the Department of Anthropology, University of Washington; for field
research on Wééné during 1976, a grant from the American Philosophical
Society (Johnson Fund) and a Faculty Developmental Assignment from the
University of Iowa; for field research on Wééné during 1985, a grant from the
National Science Foundation (BNS–8418908); for a brief visit to Wééné in 1993
following the FSM/WHO Joint Conference on Alcohol and Drug-Related
Problems in Micronesia, held on Pohnpei, a short-term consultancy from the
Western Pacific Regional Office of the World Health Organization; for field re-
search on Namoluk and Wééné in 1995, a grant from the Center for International
Rural and Environmental Health, University of Iowa; for field research with
Namoluk people on Wééné, and in Hawai’i, Oregon, and California during 2001
and 2002, an Arts and Humanities Initiative Grant from the University of Iowa;
and finally, for support in the initial preparation of this manuscript during fall
2001, a University of Iowa Career Development Award.
Writers always are beholden to many other people, and I am no exception.
Numerous colleagues have stimulated my thoughts as I worked on this book, and
I cannot list them all here. Some also have provided me with key bits of informa-
tion, or assisted me in other ways. The following have been particularly helpful:
David Akin, Jane Barnwell, Kate Dernbach, Larry Gabriel, Elizabeth Keating,
James D. Nason, Sarah Ono, Joakim Peter, Jan Rensel, and Samantha Solimeo.
Periods of field research up through 1985 were conducted jointly with Leslie B.
Marshall, and her research skills and contributions of data have enriched this vol-

xv
xvi Preface and Acknowledgments

ume. It is Margery Wolf, however, to whom I owe my greatest debt. Her encour-
agement, critiques of my writing, and love made all of the difference as I com-
pleted this book.
Karl Yambert, senior editor of Westview Press who earned an anthropology
Ph.D., and Ted Fischer, editor of the series in which this volume appears, met my
original book prospectus with enthusiasm, and each of them provided helpful
suggestions on a first draft that have improved the final manuscript.
My debt to Namoluk people is deep and abiding. Nearly all of the adults on
the atoll helped me in myriad ways during my initial fieldwork there, but I have a
special and continuing indebtedness to Sarel and Simako Agrippa and their fam-
ily, who took us in, fed us, and taught us. I fear that in mentioning particular peo-
ple by name, others might feel slighted, and that is certainly not my intent. But
for assistance and communication that relates specifically to the content of this
book, the following chon Namoluk have my profound gratitude: Santer Agrippa,
Seis Arechy, Henry Asugar, Kandhi Elieisar, Amato and Jane Elymore, Miako and
Chris Hengio, Nerleb Likisap, Esekiel Lippwe, Jeem Lippwe, Kiper Lippwe, Kipier
Lippwe, Tiser Lippwe, Herbert Lodge, Nasako and Scott Madsen, Deuter Malon,
Chiteuo Puas, Fierten Rain, Thelma Raynold, Koschy Reuney, Theophil Reuney,
Fiuling Ruben, Jano Ruben, Kino Ruben, Noah Ruben, Randy Ruben, Retain
Ruben, Stem Salle, Repeat and Cathy Samuel, Risauo Samuel, Kasda Sana, Kaster
Sana, Jeff Seladier, Pruta Seladier, Rainlik and Maruko Seladier, Mac Setile, Max
Setile, Mike Setile, Misael Setile, Speeder Setile, Termotis Wilson, and Rioichy
Yechem. As friends such as these have sought to teach me about their community
and their lives, I remain acutely aware of how much I still don’t know. Killisou
chapur ngeni ami monson!
A brief mention of the pronunciation of Mortlockese and Chuukese words is
in order. In general I have followed the orthography laid out in Ward H.
Goodenough and Hiroshi Sugita’s (1980) dictionary, although I provide
Mortlockese rather than Lagoon Chuukese pronunciations and spellings where
appropriate. Readers may find the following of help:

a pronounced like the a of English ‘father’

á pronounced like the a of English ‘hat’
e pronounced like the e of English ‘set’
é pronounced somewhat like the u in English ‘but’
i pronounced between the i of English ‘fit’ and the ee of English ‘feet’
o pronounced like the o of English ‘note’
ó pronounced like the aw in English ‘law’
u pronounced between the u of English ‘put’ and the oo of English ‘boot’
 Preface and Acknowledgments xvii

ú pronounced as a high central unrounded vowel not encountered in standard

English
ch pronounced in Mortlockese like the English sh (hence, chon is pronounced like
the English name Sean)
when a vowel is doubled, this indicates vowel length, which is phonemic in
Mortlockese and Chuukese

Last, I have used pseudonyms throughout for chon Namoluk, except in the
two instances where I cite publications authored by people from the atoll. I am
well aware that this will not hide people’s identity from those insiders who know
the Namoluk community, but at least it offers a measure of privacy vis-à-vis
outsiders.
 1
Openings

Looking for the suitable time, Pukueu

Went to observe the break of day at the other end of the
island.
A steering wind blew, it blew from the east,
His canoe would be pulled out from its headrests:
Yet suddenly came his asipwar
To stop Pukueu’s voyage.
But he did not change his mind; his eager heart sought
the satisfaction
To open up those dark seas.

Theophil Saret Reuney (1994, 254)

OPENING DARK SEAS

We lingered under the coconut palms at Leor to say our good-byes and shake
everyone’s hand before we left to return to Seattle. Quicker than we expected or
wanted, it was time to leave Namoluk Atoll where Leslie and I had lived for the
past two years. As we waded through the warm, crystal-clear water and clam-
bered into the motorboat that would wend through the narrow reef channel to
the open sea where the government ship waited, a few women began to keen as if
we were dead. Others took up the cry, and as our boat moved away from shore,
we were soon overcome by the emotion of a Pacific island parting. Sobbing along

1
2 1. Openings

with us was our fourteen-year-old “daughter,” Maiyumi, who was feeling the
sweet sadness of departure from her home island for the very first time.
We had composed ourselves somewhat before coming alongside the Truk
Islander, and strong arms reached down to help Leslie and Maiyumi up the ladder
and onto the ship’s deck. After handing up our last bits of luggage, I followed
them, and the three of us stood together at the railing as the ship moved slowly
away. Small children ran along Namoluk’s shoreline, and Maiyumi’s mother,
Sabrina, waved a palm frond back and forth in farewell. The ship gained speed,
and before the island faded to a mere speck on the horizon, the flash of handheld
mirrors sent the sun’s rays to us in a final silent good-bye.
As Namoluk disappeared, Maiyumi’s momentary sorrow was soon replaced
by the anticipation of visiting our destination—the urban center in Chuuk, an
overnight voyage away to the north. She had graduated from eighth grade on
Namoluk a few months earlier, and we were about to finalize her enrollment in a
Protestant-run high school that would begin classes later in the month. The cap-
tain decided to spend the night anchored in Losap’s protected lagoon, and the
next morning after off-loading some seedling coconuts and selling a few remain-
ing goods, we set sail for the mountainous volcanic islands of Chuuk Lagoon.
The passage from Losap Atoll to Chuuk is not far, and the ship bypassed the cap-
tain’s own island, Nama, en route, making the journey shorter than usual. To
Maiyumi’s wonder, the tops of Chuuk’s higher peaks came into view even before
we steamed past the outer reef to reach the northeast pass. Once the Truk Islander
slipped through the pass, she no longer rolled with the dark open ocean swells,
and the captain made straight for the dock area on Wééné Island. As we drew
closer, we could see homes scattered along the shoreline road below the rounded
octopus head of Mt. Tonaachaw and then the miscellany of stores and govern-
ment buildings concentrated in the “downtown” area and up on the elevated sad-
dle called Nantakku.
When government field-trip ships come in from outer islands like Namoluk,
they tie up at the main pier to unload. On this day, however, the pier was already
occupied by the Asterion, a large freighter from overseas, so the Truk Islander had
to drop anchor, and everyone and everything had to be lightered ashore on a 60-
foot-long military surplus landing craft. The three of us gathered our belongings
and were soon propelled shoreward to be greeted by a host of Namoluk people
who had come to meet the ship. After chatting awhile, and eager to clean up and
wash off the salt spray from our voyage, I hailed a taxi to carry us to the campus
of Mizpah High School. We would stay there—in small guest rooms up on the
hillside under the massive old mango trees planted by New England
Congregationalist missionaries in the nineteenth century—until Leslie and I re-
turned to the United States in a couple of weeks and Maiyumi moved into her
dorm room almost next door to begin ninth grade.
The taxi I found was typical: a small Datsun pickup truck outfitted with
wooden benches along each side of the bed for people to cling to as it jounced
 Opening a Wider World 3

along Wééné’s mostly unpaved roads at 5–10 mph. The driver helped me load
our possessions into the back, and Leslie climbed up after them. Meanwhile
Maiyumi just stood next to the truck, and Leslie urged her, “Come on, Maiyumi,
get in!” She continued to stand there quietly, looking perplexed, and as I climbed
up into the truck bed so she could ride comfortably in the cab, I said with a trace
of irritation, “What’s wrong, Maiyumi? Let’s go!”
At that, she turned to us with a shy smile and asked, “How do I open it?”

OPENING A WIDER WORLD

Chon Namoluk, “the people or citizens of Namoluk Atoll,” have been learning
how to open new things for more than a century as the colonial powers in
Micronesia have shifted from Spain to Germany to Japan to the United States,
and now to their participation in the independent country of the Federated
States of Micronesia (FSM).1 Of course, like many other Pacific islanders, long
before such external control was imposed, Namoluk people maintained contact
with communities on numerous other islands via sailing canoe voyages using so-
phisticated celestial navigation techniques. Although such regular contacts intro-
duced chon Namoluk to occasional new ideas and objects, for the most part the
other Micronesians with whom they were in contact shared a common pool of
information and materials.
Travel beyond the sphere of traditional voyages and encounters away from the
atoll with foreigners from industrialized societies did not begin for Namoluk
people until the Germans recruited labor for the phosphate mines on Nauru and
Angaur after 1906 (see Map 1.1). None of the Namoluk men who worked in
these mines during the German colonial era before the outbreak of World War I
was still alive when I first went to the atoll in 1969. Although they had “opened”
the door to wage labor and learned to live among people who spoke languages
other than their own, their experiences occurred within a familiar geographic
setting. The number of Namoluk men engaged in such labor increased markedly
during the Japanese colonial period, especially prior to World War II when the
Japanese conscripted island laborers to work the phosphate mines on Angaur and
Fais and to help construct airfields, bomb shelters, roads, and military installa-
tions. Also during the Japanese time, some Namoluk people gained access to a
few years of elementary education. Young women as well as young men left their
island for school on Oneop in the Mortlocks2 and (for some) on Tonowas in
Chuuk Lagoon (see Map 1.2). A small number of chon Namoluk held paid jobs in
the Japanese colony in Chuuk. More doors (and eyes) were opened by these expe-
riences, but once again they were limited to familiar Micronesian locations.
Only well after World War II, with the advent of American colonialism in
Micronesia, did Namoluk people begin to travel farther afield. On my first visit to
the atoll in 1969, only four Namoluk persons resided outside of the U.S. Trust
Territory of the Pacific Islands (USTTPI, or the Trust Territory), a jurisdiction set
SOURCE: Modified from a map prepared for the Center for Pacific Island Studies at the University of Hawai’i at Mānoa, 1997.

Map 1.1—Micronesia (Including the Caroline, Mariana, and Marshall Islands)

 Opening a Wider World 5

Map 1.2—Chuuk State, Federated States of Micronesia

up by the United Nations at the end of World War II under control of the United
States after it defeated Japan (the previous administrative power). These included
a middle-aged woman living on Guam with her second American husband, a
young woman attending her final year of high school on Guam, a young man do-
ing the same as an exchange student in Oregon, and another young woman en-
rolled at Honolulu Community College. At that time, a mere thirty-four years
ago, only one Namoluk person had earned a college degree. As we shall see, these
circumstances have changed markedly over the past three decades. The chapters
to follow illustrate some of the experiences chon Namoluk have had as they em-
braced new places of residence, work, and school.
The remainder of this book focuses on migration from Namoluk and the
openings it has provided for engagement with a wider world. Migration to
Wééné beginning in the 1960s, movement to the United States from the early
1970s, the establishment of roots on Guam commencing in the late 1980s, and
the buildup of a Namoluk network in Hawai’i over the last decade will receive at-
tention, as will occasional migration to other more distant places.
6 1. Openings

OPENING THE FLOODGATES OF MIGRATION

From the dawn of history, human beings have moved around and migrated.
Micronesians—especially the atoll dwellers with their sophisticated deep water
sailing canoes and remarkably accurate star compass—not only migrated origi-
nally to their island homes via sea highways, but they also maintained a high de-
gree of mobility through interisland voyages. Movement, migration, and voyag-
ing beyond the horizon are nothing new to Micronesian people.
During the Japanese colonial period (1914–1945), active efforts were made to
discourage and prevent interisland canoe voyages, although the numerous small
ships that plied among the islands provided an alternative means of moving
about. These efforts were not entirely successful—especially in the Western
Islands of what is now Chuuk State and in the more remote atolls in Yap State,
where the navigational arts continued to flourish (e.g., see Gladwin 1970)—but
they did decrease the frequency of canoe voyaging and contributed to its demise
on many islands such as Namoluk. When the United States replaced Japan as the
colonial power in Micronesia following World War II, it continued the provision
of small interisland “field-trip” ships to carry passengers and cargo back and
forth between the urban centers and outer island communities. Overall, these in-
terruptions to and reductions in direct voyaging among many of the islands,
combined with the availability of field-trip ships, contributed to a center-and-
periphery pattern of transportation and reduced the density of interisland net-
works. For example, in pre– and early colonial times Namoluk people sailed from
their island to Polowat Atoll and back, without intermediate stops. By the
post–World War II period, someone wishing to travel from Namoluk to Polowat
had to catch a field-trip ship to Wééné, Chuuk, and then wait weeks or some-
times months until a different field-trip sailed for Polowat. Such shifts in trans-
portation patterns served to strengthen the importance of the urban center.
Even so, the Trust Territory’s urban centers grew very slowly until the advent
of the Kennedy administration and much larger island budgets in the 1960s led
to an expansion of infrastructure and wage employment. In Chuuk, this growth
of the town center initially had only a modest impact on most outer island com-
munities such as Namoluk, although it stimulated some limited population
movement from the atolls to town in search of short-term employment. Such
communities as Namoluk, then, remained largely “intact” through the mid-to-
late 1960s, in the sense that the great majority of their members continued to re-
side “at home.” The first significant factor that pulled chon Namoluk to the urban
center on Wééné was what Francis X. Hezel (1979) has called “the education ex-
plosion,” a phenomenon that he dates to 1965 and to Truk3 High School’s first
graduating class.
With greater opportunities for a high school education from the late 1960s
onward, the emigration of Namoluk’s people—especially its young people—be-
 Opening the Floodgates of Migration 7

gan in earnest. These opportunities were furthered by the establishment of junior

high schools (ninth and tenth grade) in 1970, with the one for the Mortlocks lo-
cated on Satawan Islet, Satawan Atoll (see Map 1.2). The tremendous increase in
the number of high school graduates in Chuuk from 1965 to 1977 that Hezel
(1979) documented was joined by an expansion of scholarships and other funds
to pursue a college education in the United States.
These resources provided the financial wherewithal for hundreds of Chuukese
high school graduates to enroll in colleges and universities in Hawai’i and on the
U.S. mainland, beginning in the early 1970s. Namoluk students were prominent
among these college migrants, as will be discussed in subsequent chapters.
The next big stimulus to migration from places like Namoluk to Wééné and
beyond resulted from a combination of factors. Many of the college students who
went to the States in the 1970s returned and found salaried jobs, particularly gov-
ernment jobs, in Micronesia’s urban centers. Those who followed just a few years
later, however, returned to find nearly all the available jobs taken, and they grew
restive (Larson 1989 provides a sensitive account of their dilemma). Casting
about for work, some of these young adults moved to Saipan during the early
1980s. Saipan, the capital of the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands
(CNMI), had earlier been the capital of the USTTPI, and consequently people
from elsewhere in Micronesia could freely immigrate there. The CNMI experi-
enced a tourist boom during the 1980s as large numbers of high-end hotels were
built by Japanese corporations to cater to a Japanese market. In addition to jobs
in Saipan’s tourist industry, numerous Micronesians, including a few from
Namoluk, found employment in the two dozen garment factories that were set
up there beginning in 1983 to exploit cheap labor and to find a way around U.S.
import quotas of clothing from foreign countries.
At about the same time that hotel construction and tourism took off on
Saipan, it also began to boom on Guam, notably after early 1984 (see Map 1.1).
By this time job prospects in places like Wééné were poor to nonexistent, but im-
migration of Micronesians to Guam was still tightly controlled. Then things
changed. With the implementation of the Compact of Free Association between
the newly constituted Federated States of Micronesia (FSM) and the United
States on November 3, 1986, “For the first time Micronesians were allowed free
entry into the US and its possessions to live and work without restriction” (Hezel
and McGrath 1989, 49). Not long thereafter, the number of Micronesians who
moved to Guam grew by leaps and bounds, and by September 1988 approxi-
mately 1,100 people from Chuuk State were living there (Hezel and McGrath
1989). Most of this migration was in search of jobs, although better schools and
health care also figured into people’s decisions to move to Guam. At first only a
few Namoluk people were part of this late-1980s flow, but within a very few
years—by 1995—Guam had the third largest number of Namoluk people of any
location (see especially Chapter 8).
8 1. Openings

In the late 1990s, Guam’s economy began to sour, and Micronesians resident
there—along with others from their home islands—went to Hawai’i and the U.S.
mainland in growing numbers. There they joined some of their compatriots who
had gone originally to the United States for college in the 1970s and had never
left. Most such “long-timers” had married Americans and had children, so they
were allowed to stay in the country before the Compact was signed for that rea-
son. During the past thirty years, a number of places in the United States have at-
tracted especially large numbers of people from Chuuk State, for example,
Honolulu; Portland-Salem, Oregon; and Corsicana, Texas, to name but three.
These beachheads in a new Micronesian archipelago now contain three- or four-
generation families, workers, students, and spouses of varied ethnicities. Once
again, as we shall see, chon Namoluk have been fully participant in all of these de-
velopments. By midsummer 2001, more than a quarter of Namoluk’s population
was resident in the United States or its territories, with 10 percent of them in the
fifty states, and another almost 18 percent located on Guam. This book is about
the implications of these profound shifts in population during the past forty
years for individual Namoluk people and for the Namoluk community.

OPENING MY ARGUMENT
In the once-upon-a-time anthropology of an earlier generation, the world was
divided into neatly demarcated sociocultural systems—usually called societies or
cultures—that were located in particular geographic places. The quintessential
examples of this way of ordering the ethnographic world were islands—clearly
bounded mini-worlds such as the Andaman Islands, made famous by A. R.
Radcliffe-Brown, or Raymond Firth’s Tikopia. Times have changed, and concepts
have also changed, and today’s anthropologists think very differently about cul-
tures, societies, places, and boundaries.
It is erroneous to label Namoluk as “a culture” per se. Culturally, socially, and
linguistically, Namoluk is thoroughly intertwined with a number of other
Carolinian communities. The atoll’s closest connection is with Ettal, its nearest
neighbor and the putative source of its present population following the eradica-
tion of Namoluk’s “original” people. As the story is told, a canoe sailed from Ettal
across the 35 miles of open sea to visit Namoluk, but when they arrived, they
found no one there. After checking thoroughly for signs of life, they hurried back
to Ettal to share the news. The result was that members of several Ettal lineages
moved to Namoluk to recolonize the abandoned atoll. Ever since then, the ties
between the two communities have been especially close, and this is expressed by
stating that Ettal is the canoe’s hull and Namoluk its outrigger.
But Namoluk has very strong ties with several other island communities in its
vicinity as well, notably Oneop, Moch, Nama and Kuttu. As with Ettal, these con-
nections are via the settlement of people and the establishment of lineage
branches on another island: from Namoluk to Nama and Moch, and from Kuttu
 Opening My Argument 9

Map 1.3—Namoluk Atoll, Eastern Caroline Islands

and Oneop to Namoluk. So at a minimum, Namoluk is bound up socially and

culturally with at least five other Mortlockese communities. But stopping here
would ignore the numerous relatively recent marriages between chon Namoluk
and spouses from Losap, Satawan, and Lukunoch, three more atoll communities
in the Mortlocks, and it would also fail to account for colonially wrought changes
during the twentieth century that increasingly have bound “the Mortlocks” to-
gether as a sociopolitical unit within what is now Chuuk State, FSM.
My point here is that as one expands outward from Namoluk Atoll, one dis-
covers social, cultural, and linguistic connections that range far afield. For in-
stance, Namoluk has historical trading ties to Peniyésene village on Wééné
Island, Chuuk; links to Polowat Atoll via multiple marriages and a shared lineage;
marital connections with the Mortlockese settlements on the island of Pohnpei;
and linguistic relationships with the speakers of “Trukic” dialects who extend
westward from Chuuk State through all the outer islands of Yap State, FSM, and
the Southwest Islands of the Republic of Palau (Quackenbush 1968). Given such
circumstances, where does one culture stop and another begin?
10 1. Openings

This question underscores the point that we live in a time when anthropolo-
gists no longer view cultures as discrete, bounded units attached to specific places
in the old Murdockian sense. Instead, culture is not bound to place, and in an
ever more mobile world it is carried with migrants as they cross national borders
in search of new opportunities for education, employment, or safety from war-
fare and revolution. With this in mind, perhaps the best way to think of Namoluk
culture is that it is one part of a cultural-linguistic gradient that stretches across
much of the Caroline Islands.
That said, what of Namoluk as a “society” and the atoll as a “place”? I noted
above that as a social entity Namoluk has been wrapped together for quite some
time with several other island populations in a quasi-ethnic, quasi-linguistic
grouping called “the Mortlocks.” If we accept the widespread social science idea
that societies are comprised of multiple communities, then I argue that Namoluk
is one of the communities that make up Mortlockese society and that it is not a
society unto itself. This leaves the matter of place to be addressed.
Namoluk is irrefutably a physical place, a coral atoll made up of five islets lo-
cated at 5 degrees 55 minutes North, 153 degrees 08 minutes East, approximately
125 miles southeast of Chuuk in the Eastern Caroline Islands (see Map 1.3). But to
state this is in some ways to state the obvious. What is more interesting is that hu-
mans imbue particular places with names, with a history, and with emotional at-
tachment. Keith Basso observes that “what people make of their places is closely
connected to what they make of themselves as members of society and inhabitants
of the earth, and while the two activities may be separable in principle, they are
deeply joined in practice. If place-making is a way of constructing the past, a vener-
able means of doing human history, it is also a way of constructing social traditions
and, in the process, personal and social identities” (1996, 7). Places are not just loca-
tions; some places are home, and home is a key to personal and social identity.
Namoluk is a place of this sort: it is home to the members of the named commu-
nity from the atoll who have kinship ties and land rights there, and it is the primary
source of identity for those who are called and call themselves chon Namoluk.
Critiques and discussions of place have been very much center stage in an-
thropology during recent years, but the significance of place for identity has
sometimes gotten lost in the rush to discuss the powerful effects of globalization
and transnational migration. Arjun Appadurai (1988) set this recent discussion
in motion, and his work was followed soon thereafter by two much-cited articles
by Margaret Rodman (1992) and by Akhil Gupta and James Ferguson (1997a).
Urging a reappraisal of the concept of place in anthropology, Rodman con-
tends that places are socially constructed, and she argues that anthropologists
should seek to understand how others constitute places out of their own interests
and experiences. From this Rodman develops the idea of multilocality, in which
places are to be seen from others’ viewpoints, can be analyzed as parts of larger
networks, can be used to highlight the contrasts between the known and the un-
familiar, and can have multiple meanings and be experienced differently by dif-
 Opening My Argument 11

ferent people (1992, 647). She concludes that “By joining multilocality to multi-
vocality, we can look ‘through’ these places, explore their links with others, con-
sider why they are constructed as they are, see how places represent people, and
begin to understand how people embody places” (1992, 652).
Following on Rodman’s suggestions, as our story about Namoluk unfolds we
will have occasion to see how different people from the island construct their im-
ages of home. Some of them maintain a passionate attachment to the land and
surrounding sea, whereas others have all but dismissed their connection to their
home atoll. How these differences relate to personal identities and the mainte-
nance of a “Namoluk community” will be explored in later chapters. The ways
Namoluk fits into larger social networks (e.g., “the Mortlocks,” “Chuuk,” and
“Micronesia”), and the ways that the scattered locales of contemporary Namoluk
people may be said to constitute a viable network also will be examined. Related
to this discussion will be reflections on how unfamiliar places (e.g., Guam or
Eureka) have been “colonized” by chon Namoluk, that is, made into known or
now-familiar places. Through all of this, I will make the case for what Rodman
calls “the inseparability of place and people,” as shared home place (Namoluk)
frames and defines the new transnational boundaries of what continues as a vi-
able community despite its dispersal through migration. In other words, we will
see how Namoluk as a place represents people, “and begin to understand how
people embody places” (Rodman 1992, 652).
In their influential paper on “the field” as a place—as a location for anthropo-
logical studies—Gupta and Ferguson remark on an irony of these times: “that as
actual places and localities become ever more blurred and indeterminate, ideas of
culturally and ethnically distinct places become perhaps even more salient”
(1997a, 39). Invoking Benedict Anderson’s (1983) idea of “imagined communi-
ties,” they picture “displaced peoples cluster[ed] around remembered or imag-
ined homelands, places, or communities in a world that seems increasingly to
deny such firm territorialized anchors in their actuality” (1997a, 39). They go on
to state that “in such a world, it becomes ever more important to train an anthro-
pological eye on processes of construction of place and homeland by mobile and
displaced people” (1997a, 39). As we discuss the transformation of the Namoluk
community during recent decades, our attention will be on the idea of the atoll as
a distinct place that helps people to construct their personal and social identities.
Although such a connection between people and place may be fairly straightfor-
ward and obvious for those who continue to reside on Namoluk, it is less so for
chon Namoluk who have taken up extended residence abroad. It is for this latter
group in particular that the idea of Namoluk as a community rooted in a place
occupies a special prominence.
Gupta and Ferguson discuss anthropology’s history of “the radical separa-
tion of ‘the field’ from ‘home,’ and the related creation of a hierarchy of purity
of field sites,” with exotic sites privileged over those “at home” (1997b, 12).
Even though the primary field site on which this book is based is Namoluk
12 1. Openings

Three Chon Namoluk and a Chon Ettal in the Snow Outside the
Author’s House in Iowa City, Iowa, Thanksgiving 1975

Atoll, my fieldwork with chon Namoluk has been multisited, in George E.

Marcus’s (1998) sense of “multi-sited ethnography,” from the very beginning.
In 1969, while awaiting a ship to carry us to the atoll, I began fieldwork with
Namoluk people then resident on Wééné. Over the years I have continued to
work on several occasions with this urban population of chon Namoluk, but
my “Namoluk field sites” also have expanded well beyond Chuuk State to
Pohnpei, Guam, Hawai’i, and the mainland USA. In a blurring of anthropol-
ogy’s traditional field versus home distinction, the “field” literally came home
to me in Iowa City, Iowa, or at my parent’s homes in Kailua, Hawai’i, or
Coronado, California, as Namoluk friends came to visit or spend school holi-
days with me in these places. More recently, as part of the research for this
book, I have traveled to see chon Namoluk in such places as Pensacola, Florida,
and Honolulu, Hawai’i; Cedar Falls, Iowa, and Lincoln, Nebraska; Portland and
Salem, Oregon, and Eureka, California. Such visits have been richly and regu-
larly supplemented by Internet and telephone communications with a host of
Namoluk folks scattered around the United States. Reflecting the dispersed na-
ture of the contemporary Namoluk community, then, multisited ethnography
has been an essential research strategy from 1969 to the present.
 Opening My Argument 13

Place and identity. Do multiple places then lead to multiple identities? Or is

there a way in which common roots in a shared place reach deep into people’s
lives, entangling them in one another’s affairs until they die? Questions such as
these will occupy us in later chapters, but they are by no means unique to
Namoluk. In describing the centrality of place for the Western Apache, Keith H.
Basso comments that “places possess a marked capacity for triggering acts of self-
reflection, inspiring thoughts about who one presently is, or memories of who
one used to be, or musings on who one might become” (1996, 107). It seems cer-
tain that Namoluk as a place, and the other places across the sea in which
Namoluk people have settled, have all likely inspired such thoughts and musings
as the community has transformed and been redefined in the process.
Anthropologists’ argument over and rethinking of the culture concept is part
of a response to a congeries of intertwined processes variously called “globalism”
or “transnationalism.” These words represent efforts to find a language both to
imagine and to investigate the profound transformations in world commerce,
population movements, and the flow of images and ideas consequent on revolu-
tions in transportation and communication. Much exciting ferment and many
good ideas have resulted from anthropology’s engagement with globalization and
its effects on people’s lives all over our planet. But at the same time, as James L.
Watson reminds us, “local culture” persists in the face of transnational border
crossings and global flows: “Local culture remains a powerful influence in daily
life. People are tied to places, and those places continue to shape particular norms
and values. The fact that residents of Moscow, Beijing, and New Delhi occasion-
ally eat at McDonald’s, watch Hollywood films, and wear Nike athletic shoes (or
copies of them) does not make them ‘global’” (2002, 137).
This book is an attempt to provide insight into how the carriers of one “local
culture” (Mortlockese culture) from one small Pacific Island community
(Namoluk Atoll) have moved with increased alacrity and adventuresomeness
into a wider world. In the pages to follow I discuss how chon Namoluk have be-
come architects of their own history, even as their personal and collective identi-
ties remain tied to a reef-girt set of islets in the far blue Pacific. My discussion is
based upon ethnographic fieldwork with Namoluk people for more than three
decades. During that time, both the conduct and the writing of ethnography have
altered in various ways. Many—perhaps most—ethnographers now endeavor to
show “how the region and beyond is present in the local and how the local can in
turn be. . . in a transcending field of action” (Ulin 2001, 223). And many—per-
haps most—ethnographers now seek new ways to present ethnography to what
we hope will be wider audiences than in years past (e.g., Wolf 1992).
In this book I examine Namoluk as a local place whose people’s lives are now
woven into regional and transnational processes. As I write about the transfor-
mations I see in the Namoluk community, and wonder about its future, I am re-
minded that “the anthropologist as subject is encompassed within the same
14 1. Openings

frame as the subjects of anthropological enquiry, is coeval with them, and is con-
stituted through relations with them” (Moore 1999, 19). Elsewhere (Marshall in
press) I have speculated on the ways this mutual involvement in each other’s lives
has affected my career as an anthropologist; I offer the pages to follow as a testi-
monial to what my Namoluk friends have taught me about their community and
their lives.

OPENING MYSELF
In this final section of the introduction I address the matter of my connections to
different members of the Namoluk community, and I reflect upon my positional-
ity vis-à-vis chon Namoluk. This information allows you, the reader, to better as-
sess what is to come, and it engages with the larger matter of representation and
“who speaks for whom” posed by James Clifford: “How should differently posi-
tioned authorities (academic and nonacademic, Native and non-Native) repre-
sent a living tradition’s combined and uneven processes of continuity, rupture,
transformation, and revival?” (2001, 480). How indeed?
Prior to traveling to Micronesia in 1969, I wrote to the mayor and members of
the island council to request permission to live among them and to conduct the
research for my doctoral dissertation. They agreed to this request, and by the
time Leslie and I first visited the atoll, there already had been a discussion of
where we would live. Four Peace Corps volunteers (PCVs) had been stationed on
Namoluk by that time, and in most cases the PCVs had occupied the municipal
house adjacent to the island’s dispensary and close to the Namoluk Elementary
School where all of them had taught. It was thought that similar accommodation
would work for the visiting anthropologist, but the problem was that a PCV cou-
ple was already living in the municipal house. After considerable negotiation,
which had more political implications than I then realized, Leslie and I arranged
to rent an as-yet not quite finished cement house owned by the island’s health
aide and his wife. In so doing we also gained a set of Namoluk kin, something we
only came to understand upon becoming more familiar with life there.
Our Namoluk family is an extended family, and in principle it involves all
members of the matrilineage on whose land we lived. These general ties have
been reinforced in various specific ways. The health aide, Sergio, and I became
pwiipwi “created siblings,” as did his wife, Sabrina, and Leslie (a discussion of cre-
ated siblings as a part of Chuukese kinship may be found in Marshall 1977). This
tie gave each of us the clan identity of our “sibling”; hence Leslie was Wáánikar
and I was Sór, connecting us to still other people. Later on, Leslie and I muuti
(“adopted”) their eldest daughter, Maiyumi, who we sponsored at Mizpah High
School when the three of us sailed to Chuuk in 1971 (Namoluk adoption is ex-
plained in Marshall 1976). Three years after that, our own son, Kelsey, was born,
and we spent the first summer following his birth living with my parents in
Kailua, O’ahu, while we conducted archival research at the B. P. Bishop Museum
 Opening Myself 15

in Honolulu. That summer we resolved to have him baptized at a ceremony held

in my parent’s home, followed by a big party. Sergio and Sabrina’s firstborn, a
young man named Butch, was a college student in Honolulu then, and he regu-
larly visited my parent’s home on weekends to relax, play music, and go to the
beach. Butch consented to be Kelsey’s godfather and to bear witness at the chris-
tening. Along with these formal ties, in the years since we first arranged to rent
Sergio and Sabrina’s house, various members of their family have visited us in the
United States, and this family has unfailingly hosted us on our return visits to
Chuuk. It is with them that I have my closest personal connections to the
Namoluk community.
Through them, and their spouses and descendants, my Namoluk network
ramifies into several other matrilineages. My network also encompasses many
people from the community, my age or somewhat older, who befriended me and
resolved to teach me what they could while I lived among them. Several of these
people, and some younger than I as well, have become special friends with whom
I routinely communicate by card, letter, e-mail, or occasional phone call. A few of
them, including Theophil Reuney (author of the epigraph that opens this chap-
ter), have earned advanced degrees and comprise a brain trust of men and
women intensely interested in their own community and its place in a larger
world. Some of them, and alas, Theophil among them, are now deceased.
There is a broader sense in which my connection to Namoluk extends to the
entire population. I met and knew nearly everyone in the de jure population be-
tween 1969 and 1971, missing only a few people who already lived abroad or on a
distant island that I was unable to visit. Some of those whom I did not get to
know personally during my original fieldwork I met subsequently, whereas many
of the atoll’s younger children are known to me today only by their names. All of
us are bound together through our connection to Namoluk as a place, although I
am keenly aware that my connection is categorically different from that of some-
one born into a Namoluk lineage. I have been fortunate to be entrusted with cer-
tain kinds of information about the atoll, the genealogies I gathered from old
people now long dead, the land tenure histories in my files with all their contra-
dictions, the ethnographic data that fill my notebooks, and the photographs of
people and places dating back to 1969. This information forms a small part of the
community’s history, and I bear a responsibility to preserve it carefully and to
write about it wisely. This book is a conscious attempt to address my Namoluk
friends and to repay in one small way the friendship, knowledge, and many kind-
nesses they have so generously given me over the years.
When I arrived on Namoluk the first time, I was not quite twenty-six years
old; a husband, but not a father; a graduate student, but not a professor. From a
Mortlockese perspective I was an aluel, “young man,” and I had to work to con-
struct a persona as a mwáán, “an adult man.” I believe that I succeeded in this, in
part because I am a foreigner, and it meant that both my questions and my opin-
ions were taken more seriously than they otherwise might have been. I have
16 1. Openings

maintained more or less continuous contact with Namoluk people from 1969 to
the present, when I am now sixty years old, a father, and a full professor who has
taught at the university level for thirty-one years. Although still a mwáán, my
white beard and bald head signal that soon I will be a chielap, “elderly person.” As
my years accumulated, as I became a father, as Leslie and I divorced and both re-
married, these alterations in my roles have had repercussions on my relationships
with chon Namoluk. Older, but probably no wiser, I am now accorded a measure
of the respect given to old men in Chuuk who remain physically and mentally
vigorous. And so I am presently positioned as an intimate outsider, as someone
who has demonstrated a long-term commitment to the community and who
seeks actively to keep in touch. In this, I resemble a few of the Namoluk migrants
who have been away for twenty years or more, who remain committed to the
place of their birth and connected to other chon Namoluk via the Internet or the
phone, but who are unlikely to take up residence on the atoll again. The differ-
ence, of course, is that they are intimate insiders.
This brings us back to Clifford’s question about how an academic, non-Native
“authority” should “represent a living tradition’s combined processes of continu-
ity, rupture, transformation, and revival?” (2001, 480). I do not pretend to speak
for chon Namoluk about themselves, their history, and their personal experi-
ences. Instead, I try to provide what has been called “the 101st account.”4 What is
meant by this is that if an imaginary anthropologist worked with a community of
one hundred people, each of them would have a slightly different story to tell
based upon their age, gender, marital status, and the like. It is the anthropologist’s
job, according to this idea, to abstract from conversations with and observations
of these one hundred people, to synthesize, dissect, and organize this information
into a separate distinct version of events: in other words, the 101st account. What
follows is such an account, written with respect and affection and intended both
to record and to edify experience.

Notes
1. The FSM is made up of four states: Chuuk, Kosrae, Pohnpei, and Yap, covering most
of the Caroline Islands in the western Pacific (see Map 1.1).
2. The Mortlocks collectively refers to the atolls and islands stretching southeast from
Chuuk Lagoon and including Nama, Losap, Namoluk, Ettal, Lukunoch, and Satawan.
Losap comprises two distinct communities (Losap and Piis-Emmwar), Lukunoch has two
communities (Lukunoch and Oneop), and Satawan consists in four inhabited communi-
ties (Satawan, Ta, Kuttu, and Moch). See Chapter 2 for further information about the
Mortlocks.
3. Truk is an older name for Chuuk, representing a mispronunciation and misspelling
of the Chuukese word. Chuuk means “mountain” in the Chuukese language, and the name
was reclaimed following the establishment of the FSM in 1986.
4. I associate this idea with Roger Keesing, but neither I nor others familiar with his ex-
tensive publications have been able to locate an appropriate citation.
 2
Namoluk Atoll, 1969

Today is a great day to fish. On my island, we usually go

fishing when the rain is really falling hard. The fish go
tame under the rain. That’s why I want to be on my island
just for today. I want to be with the boys of my island
school because I know some of them are fishing this
morning for meat for the school’s dining hall. They al-
ways go out in the rain in the morning to fish.

Kino S. Ruben (1973, 89)

LAGOON IN THE MIDDLE

The name Namoluk (pronounced “Nah-mow-luke”) means “lagoon in the mid-
dle.” This refers to Namoluk’s position midway between the other two islands
that make up what is known as Lukeisel1—Losap and Nama to the north—and
the three atolls that lie to the south, called Nomoi—Ettal, Lukunoch, and
Satawan (see Map 1.2). From 1795, when the English sea captain James Mortlock
sailed past Nomoi in the good ship Young William and humbly bestowed his
name on this atoll cluster, Nomoi has been known to westerners as “the
Mortlocks.”2 In the post–World War II era this name was extended by American
colonial officials to the islands of Lukeisel as well. Lukeisel was called “the Upper
Mortlocks” in contrast to “the Lower Mortlocks” south of Namoluk. Transmuting
“Mortlocks” into the sound pattern of their own language, the denizens of these
islands today refer to themselves as chon Morschlok, or “Mortlockese.”

17
18 2. Namoluk Atoll, 1969

Although today the Mortlocks share a loose sense of connection or together-

ness, prior to European control Namoluk and the southern atolls were divided
into two warring alliances. Namoluk was allied with Ettal, Oneop (in Lukunoch
Atoll), and Moch (in Satawan Atoll) in the marau against Lukunoch (in
Lukunoch Atoll), Satawan, Kuttu, and Ta (all in Satawan Atoll) in the chin (see
Map 1.2). Losap and Nama were not usually involved in battles to the south, al-
though they occasionally fought against each other. When they did so, Ettal and
Namoluk joined together with Nama against Losap. These precolonial alliances
continue to shape relative feelings of closeness among the different communities,
and they are reflected in the history of intermarriages and the level of mutual vis-
iting.
Linguists recognize Mortlockese as a distinct language and not just a dialect of
Chuukese (Goodenough and Sugita 1980), and this shared language further bol-
sters the idea of a Mortlockese unity. But during the past half-century, as
Mortlockese migrants to Chuuk Lagoon have accommodated their speech to that
of the numerically dominant population there, much traditional Mortlockese vo-
cabulary has fallen into disuse. For most purposes today the Mortlockese and
Chuukese languages are mutually intelligible, and a clear linguistic convergence is
underway. Nevertheless, as with the Deep South of the United States, there is an
immediately identifiable Mortlockese accent, and when Mortlockese speakers
venture to Chuuk proper, they must learn new words, new stress patterns, and
new paralinguistic cues. Having learned Mortlockese on Namoluk before I con-
ducted fieldwork in Chuuk, I became keenly aware of these language differences.
Whenever I spoke in Chuuk, people would ask me where in the Mortlocks I had
lived, and I found that I had to learn many new words to substitute for the
Mortlockese ones I had so painstakingly memorized. To this day, my speech is
deeply inflected by a Mortlockese accent.
Namoluk’s name may have been bestowed by ancient Carolinian navigators in
reference to the atoll’s position midway between the Lower Mortlocks and the
Nama-Losap cluster. This idea gains support from Jan S. Kubary (1880), who ob-
served that Namoluk was sighted or visited without fail on voyages from the
Lower Mortlocks to Chuuk. On the other hand, Max Girschner (1912) claimed
that Namoluk is the European name, and another name by which Namoluk once
was known to its people—Nomoilam, “deep place in the sea” (from nom, “la-
goon,” and lam, a contraction of le mataw, “the open sea”)—is the atoll’s native
name. This is quite conceivable because Namoluk is the name for the atoll’s
largest islet. Early foreign visitors may have put ashore and asked the name of the
place, only to be given the name of the islet they were on. But it may be signifi-
cant that the first anthropologist to work in the Mortlocks doesn’t mention
Nomoilam at all, making reference only to Namoluk (Kubary 1880). Although
the name Nomoilam is no longer in regular use today, the delegates to the
Namoluk Constitutional Convention included it on the official seal of the
Namoluk Municipal Government. One knowledgeable chon Namoluk told me
 The Outside World Discovers Namoluk 19

that “‘Loilam’ and ‘Nomoilam’ are the same. The root word is ‘lam’, which means:
1) light or bright[,] 2) deep thoughts of good nature. The prefix ‘lo’ means a calm
body of open water encircled by a continuous reef. It also means ‘body oil’ (usu-
ally thought of as coconut oil). The other prefix ‘nom’ means the same as ‘lo’.
They are both referred to as ‘deep lagoon’. ‘Loi’ and ‘Nomoi’ are the possessive
forms of the two words. ‘Lo’ (or oil) has another connotation in traditional
Namoluk. It also means ‘peace’, ‘calm’, and ‘harmony’. . . . Nomoilam—‘The deep
lagoon of good thoughts and wishes for a flourishing people, the land, and the
sea’” (e-mail message from Kendrick, 19 March 2003, pseudonym substituted).
Located across 35 miles of open sea from the Lower Mortlocks, Namoluk
stands alone in the sea, with Losap Atoll another 65 miles to the north. No matter
in which direction one looks from Namoluk, nothing but the wide, heaving ex-
panse of the Pacific stretches to the horizon. Along with this relative isolation,
Namoluk is the smallest—after Nama Island—permanently inhabited island in
Chuuk and Pohnpei States of the FSM. Its five islets have a combined total land
area roughly equivalent to a nine-hole golf course (only .322 square miles, or ap-
proximately 206 acres), and the lagoon these islets encircle covers just under 3
square miles (Manchester 1951, 237). Measuring 42 fathoms at its center,
Namoluk’s lagoon is among the deepest in the Pacific, and the dark seas sur-
rounding the atoll plunge quickly to depths of more than 400 fathoms only a
mile offshore. Typical of coral atolls wherever they occur, the highest point of
land on Namoluk is no more than 8 feet above sea level, although the coconut
palms and other trees, when fully grown, may reach 100 feet in height.
Long before foreign intrusion, Namoluk voyaging canoes sailed as far away as
Nukuoro to the east and Polowat to the west (Riesenberg 1965, 158). Open ocean
voyages from Namoluk are now largely a thing of the past, although trips are
made back and forth to Ettal in outboard motorboats using a Western-style com-
pass. The last canoe voyage from Namoluk to Chuuk was more than eighty years
ago, and no Namoluk canoe (or motorboat) has traveled to the Upper Mortlocks
since a canoe was lost on such a trip in 1950.

THE OUTSIDE WORLD DISCOVERS NAMOLUK

Perhaps due to its small size, its relative isolation from other islands, and the dif-
ficulty of spotting an atoll from the sea until one is quite close, it was not until
1827 that the first documented sighting by a westerner appeared. In that year,
Captain Richard Macy, of the Nantucket whaleship Henry, sailed past, although
from his account it is certain that he made no contact with chon Namoluk (Day
1966, 171; Sharp 1960, 217).
It was only a year later, however, that Namoluk people had their first direct
contact with foreigners. Early in 1828, Fedor (Frédéric) Lütke visited Namoluk
aboard the Senyavin while on a Russian scientific cruise around the world.
Having just spent several weeks in the Lower Mortlocks, Lütke stopped outside
20 2. Namoluk Atoll, 1969

Namoluk’s reef for a few hours, there being no deep water passage into the la-
goon. Lütke’s own words convey his impressions of chon Namoluk: “We traveled
to the northeast of the Etal group, when the islands that we were searching for
appeared right in front of us. . . . We then hove to in order to receive visitors who
were already coming toward us in their canoes. . . . All of them asked to come
aboard to explore the ship; none of them undertook on his own to go anywhere
without permission, even less to touch anything. We could but find them very
nice people, even after having seen the people of Lukunor [Lukunoch]. . . . After
exchanging gifts, we parted in friendly fashion, and set our course to the north”
(1835, 88–91). Given the unhappy initial contacts with Europeans of many other
Pacific Islanders, this amicable first meeting was an auspicious beginning for
chon Namoluk in their encounters with the outside world.
An interesting sequel to this early Russian contact with Namoluk occurred ex-
actly 140 years later. In 1968, a Russian oceanographic research vessel from
Vladivostok arrived off Namoluk at night. Seeing the lights, the men of Namoluk,
who were out of cigarettes, thought that it was a Japanese fishing boat and despite
a high wind, resolved to paddle out to the ship and ask for tobacco. Upon ap-
proaching the vessel, their anticipation turned to fear when they recognized the
flag of the USSR. Unable to return to Namoluk because of the wind, the men hes-
itantly climbed the rope ladder let over the side for them. Once aboard they were
treated to a feast, vodka, and a warm dry place to spend the night. The next
morning the ship again came close to the reef, and after exchanging gifts and
good wishes, the men paddled back to Namoluk, and the Russians continued on
their expedition.
Whalers and traders began to frequent Micronesian waters soon after Lütke’s
visit, and several of them have left records of contact with Namoluk and its peo-
ple. In 1830, Captain Benjamin Morrell, aboard the Antarctic out of Stonington,
Connecticut, sailed past the atoll and later published this brief account in a com-
pendium of his voyages:

May 14th [1830]—On the following day we discovered three small

low islands, being each from three to five miles in circumference,
and almost entirely covered with cocoanut [sic] and bread-fruit
trees. They were well inhabited with much the same kind of people
as the western part of Bergh’s Group [Chuuk]; having also the
same description of canoes, war implements, fishing utensils, and
wearing apparel. The islands are all surrounded and connected by
a coral reef. They furnish biche-de-mer, pearl and tortoiseshell, and
many curious and beautiful shells, valuable for their rarity. These
islands extend about ten miles east and west, and about five miles
north and south; being situated in lat. 6º 4'north, long. 153º 21'
east; and as we could not find them on any chart, or see them
mentioned in any epitome of navigation, we concluded that they
 The Outside World Discovers Namoluk 21

were new discoveries, and gave them the name of Skiddy’s Group,
in honour of that worthy and enterprising navigator. (Morrell
1832, 388–389)

In 1833, the American whaler Hashmy, under Captain Harwood, called at

Namoluk. An extract from the Hashmy’s log that was printed in newspapers in
Australia and the United States makes it clear that members of Harwood’s crew
went ashore. They were the first westerners to do so: “In coming down from
Japan, fell in with a group of islands, not laid down in the charts, in latitude 5º 45'
north, and 152º 35' east longitude,—about 50 miles N.W. of Young William’s
Islands [the Lower Mortlocks]; the tops of the trees of the islands were visible a
considerable distance at sea. I had the crew of the Hashmy on them, refreshing,
who were treated with great kindness by the natives. The islands are very thickly
inhabited, with plenty of cocoa nuts, vegetables, and such refreshments as are
necessary for crews coming from Japan with the scurvy” (Ward 1967, 3–4).
Apparently, Lütke’s kind treatment of chon Namoluk five years before was recip-
rocated by them when the first outsiders stepped ashore for “refreshment.”
The available historical sources suggest that chon Namoluk’s interactions with
westerners in the late 1820s and 1830s were friendly and profitable on both sides.
Both Lütke and Harwood specifically mentioned the kindness of Namoluk peo-
ple, and both wrote of receiving gifts and refreshments, presumably in exchange
for articles they had to trade such as the axes discussed by Lütke (1835). More
traders ventured into the Mortlocks area by the 1840s, although the Lower
Mortlocks received much more contact from them because of the deep water
passes that allowed for safe anchorage in Lukunoch or Satawan lagoons. Andrew
Cheyne was one of these early traders, and in 1846 he visited Namoluk and jotted
the following short passage in his journal:

Hashmy’s Group [Namoluk] consists of five low islands, covered

with cocoa-nuts and bread-fruit trees, and connected by coral
reefs, forming a lagoon inside, to which there is no passage
through the reef. The group is fifteen miles in circumference, of a
circular form, and may be seen twelve miles from a ship’s deck.
The reef may be approached to within 300 yards, as no hidden
dangers exist. These islands are thickly inhabited by a light com-
plexioned race, who although wearing the mask of friendship, are
by no means to be trusted. I touched at this group in July, 1846,
and made the centre in lat. 5º 47' N., 153º 6' E., by two good
chronometers measured from Hong Kong. (Cheyne 1852, 129)

On the basis of his account alone it is difficult to determine what sort of re-
ception Namoluk’s inhabitants accorded Cheyne. Because he does not mention
open hostility, it appears that they were at least still somewhat friendly toward the
22 2. Namoluk Atoll, 1969

foreigners who intruded on their lives. Cheyne’s suspicion that they were not to
be trusted is one he held of many other Micronesian peoples and hence may re-
flect his suspicious nature as much as that of the islanders. But it may also reflect
chon Namoluk’s second thoughts about foreigners based upon a visit of which we
have no record.
After Cheyne’s visit, there is nearly a thirty-year gap in the historical record
before Namoluk is mentioned again. We know that numerous outsiders were in
the Carolines during this time, and it seems safe to assume that at least a few of
them must have found their way to Namoluk during the 1850s and 1860s.
Perhaps it is as a result of such a visit that the missionary Luther Gulick (1862)
was able to offer the first recorded population estimate of 300 people for the atoll,
although he did not cite the source of his information. Namoluk’s historical
thread was picked up again in 1874 by another Congregationalist missionary, E.
T. Doane, who called at the atoll aboard the mission ship Morning Star from
Pohnpei via the Lower Mortlocks. In striking contrast to earlier visits in which
Namoluk canoes hurried out to greet visiting ships, Doane reported that no ca-
noes came out, and “as the Star passed along to the lee shore, groups of natives
were seen sitting beneath the trees, watching the approach of the vessel. . . . This
cautiousness of the people not to launch a proa [canoe], and ‘come off ’, indicated
fear; and so it was, for here were found those who had been kidnapped by the
Carl, and taken to a Fiji plantation” (Doane 1874, 204). This reference to kidnap-
ping—blackbirding, as it was called in the Pacific—makes it obvious that chon
Namoluk had lost their innocence in their contact with the West. Even so,
“Perceiving their unwillingness to come to the Star, a boat was sent to them.
Three friendly natives from Satoan [Satawan] accompanied, and going up to the
group, told them who the strangers were—friendly missionaries. A few threw
aside all fear, came to us and shook hands, heard a message, bartered a little, and
then with a friendly ‘good-bye,’ were left” (Doane 1874, 204). Regrettably, Doane
did not elaborate on whether the kidnapped men he found on Namoluk were
themselves chon Namoluk or whether they were from another island, nor did he
provide any information on how they reached Namoluk from Fiji. But on the ba-
sis of this cursory evidence it appears that the blackbirder, Carl, known to have
taken men from Satawan and Lukunoch (Hezel 1973, 67–68), may also have
raided “the lagoon in the middle” sometime in the late 1860s or early 1870s and
carried a number of Namoluk men off to Fiji. If so, there was no recollection of
this in Namoluk’s oral history by 1969.

COLONIALISM COMES TO NAMOLUK

Protestant mission activity began in the Lower Mortlocks in 1873, the year before
E. T. Doane stopped by Namoluk. Pohnpeian teachers, under the supervision of
New England missionaries sponsored by the American Board of Commissioners
for Foreign Missions (ABCFM)—the same mission that evangelized Hawai’i be-
 Colonialism Comes to Namoluk 23

ginning in 1820—established congregations on Satawan and Lukunoch Atolls

and were received with enthusiasm (Missionary Herald 1876, 309). It took more
than another five years before a young Pohnpeian mission couple, Julius and
Lora, landed on Namoluk on December 1, 1879 (Missionary Herald 1880a, 175).3
Perhaps colonized more than anyone else on our planet, Micronesians en-
dured four different colonial powers over the space of one hundred years.4 The
parade began with the Spanish period in Micronesia (officially 1886–1899), a
time that wrought few changes on outer islands like Namoluk. Save for the
growth of Protestant mission activity described above, life on the atoll followed a
relatively undisturbed pattern during the late nineteenth century. In some meas-
ure Namoluk’s geography protected her people from the diseases that ravaged is-
land populations elsewhere in the Pacific, such as smallpox, measles, and in-
fluenza. With no close neighbor islands, with no ship passage into the lagoon,
and with natural surge channels in the reef difficult to maneuver even by boat,
Namoluk was never a regular port of call for the whalers and traders who fre-
quented the Carolines. Add to this the proximity of the spacious anchorages of-
fered by Lukunoch and Satawan Atolls a mere 50 miles to the southeast, and it is
little wonder that few ship captains bothered with Namoluk. For similar reasons
the major commercial ventures in the Mortlocks during the late nineteenth cen-
tury—notably the Jaluit Gesellschaft—concentrated on the Lower Mortlocks,
and Namoluk escaped their direct influence relatively unscathed.
Following the initial period of conversion and success in the Mortlocks, the
ABCFM encountered a period of decline there that coincided with a focus of
mission activity on the much larger new field of Chuuk Lagoon beginning in the
early 1880s, political hassles with the German colonial government, and depleted
operating funds. Despite this reported downturn in mission attention to the
Mortlocks, the Namoluk church was able to support its own pastor by 1901, al-
though the church building was said to be in a dilapidated condition (Missionary
Herald 1901, 413, 415). But shortly thereafter a religious revitalization movement
swept Namoluk, and Christianity reached its low point following its introduction
a quarter of a century earlier. With but one-third of the Mortlocks population
numbered as church members by 1903, the pre-Christian religion remained very
much alive and influential (Missionary Herald 1903, 159).5
During the German colonial period (1899–1914) a trader, remembered by
chon Namoluk only as Jack, set up shop on the atoll, buying copra6 in return for
trade goods. It seems probable that Jack staffed the tradepost that the Jaluit
Gesellschaft opened on Namoluk around 1904 (Hezel 1995, 103). By 1907, a
Frenchman, Pierre Nedelic, actively plied the Mortlocks in his eight-ton
schooner, making periodic stops at Namoluk to trade. The Germans encouraged
men to sign on as contract laborers to mine phosphate on Nauru and Angaur,
and quite a few Namoluk men did so. But while some men traveled far away to
shovel petrified guano, and while contact with missionaries and colonial govern-
ment officials increased, the atoll community continued to operate in much the
24 2. Namoluk Atoll, 1969

same way as it had in the precolonial period. It was also during the German ad-
ministration that the first anthropological research was carried out on the atoll
(Girschner 1912; Krämer 1935).
In 1911, two German Capuchins arrived on Lukunoch Islet, Lukunoch Atoll
(at the opposite end of the lagoon from Protestant mission headquarters in the
Lower Mortlocks), thereby inaugurating Catholic mission activity in what is now
Chuuk State (Hezel 1991, 123). Although the Catholics made substantial head-
way in many Mortlockese communities (e.g., Lukunoch, Ettal, and Moch), they
were more or less shut out of many others for a long time. It was thus with a great
deal of opposition from the Protestants, who did not have a full-time pastor at
the time, that the Catholic Church finally was established on Namoluk in 1949.7
By 1969, with a Namoluk man as catechist, approximately one-third of
Namoluk’s population had converted to Catholicism.8 A nice cement block, A-
frame style church building had been erected on the atoll in the early 1960s, and a
priest visited periodically by ship to hold Mass and hear confession.
Right at the end of the German colonial period in Micronesia, the Namoluk
church came under the influence of the Liebenzell Mission, a German Christian
Endeavor organization that supplanted the ABCFM in Chuuk after 1907 (Kohl
1971). In 1914, a couple from the Protestant mission headquarters for the
Mortlocks on Oneop (Lukunoch Atoll) went to lead the Namoluk church, and
they remained there until their deaths around 1918. They were succeeded by an-
other Oneop couple, Edgar and Louella, and Edgar headed the Namoluk church
until he died in 1947.9 Namoluk’s church was then led on an interim basis for
several years by a chon Namoluk who perished at sea in a sailing canoe accident
while en route to Oneop in 1955 for ordination as a pastor. Two years later, in
1957, a man from Piis-Emmwar (Losap Atoll) and his wife from Wééné assumed
pastoral duties on Namoluk, which they continued until the mid–1970s.
In sharp contrast to the two earlier colonial administrations, changes that
came about during the Japanese period (1914–1945) were direct, rapid, numer-
ous, and enduring. Regular shipping schedules were established, and a cash econ-
omy was introduced in place of barter. Travel throughout Micronesia accelerated
for Namoluk men, with many of them sent to work for the Japanese on Angaur
or Pohnpei. For the first time, non-Micronesian foreigners resided on the atoll
for long periods of time, married Namoluk women, and produced offspring.10
Access to material goods and store-bought foods dramatically increased, and
such things as rice became dietary staples. The Japanese established an appointed
chief to run the island’s local government, ushering in the slow but steady decline
of traditional leadership on the atoll. With the inauguration of a cash economy,
the buying and selling of land for money appeared. Education—even though it
was limited—was made available to substantial numbers of young men and
women who left Namoluk to attend Japanese-run elementary schools on Oneop
and on Tonowas Island, Chuuk, during the 1920s and 1930s. Two Namoluk men
 Colonialism Comes to Namoluk 25

achieved the highest education attainable under the Japanese, graduating from
the special carpentry school on Koror, Palau. In short, the Japanese began to in-
troduce Namoluk to the modern world.
Following precedent, the Japanese concentrated their attention primarily on
the Lower Mortlocks, and Namoluk remained a mere way station between those
atolls and the more important center on Chuuk. Commercial activity remained
negligible on Namoluk throughout the Japanese era, and it consisted only in a
copra-buying concession and a small-scale lumber mill operated by Nanyō Bōeki
employees who married on the atoll. No Japanese military garrison ever was sta-
tioned on Namoluk, nor were fortifications of any kind erected.11
Namoluk had only two direct contacts with World War II. In the first instance,
in 1942, fifty men from a Japanese ship torpedoed near Kapingamarangi reached
Namoluk and were cared for by the community until they could be picked up
and returned to Chuuk. As a reward for their helpfulness, the community was
presented with one of the steel lifeboats with oars, and this was used to haul co-
pra until 1949 when rough seas broke it up on the reef. The second direct contact
occurred when American fighter aircraft dropped three bombs on the reef and
strafed a sailing canoe in the lagoon during the extensive aerial campaign against
Chuuk and the Lower Mortlocks in June 1944. Although it frightened people
badly, this unprovoked and unnecessary attack fortunately caused no deaths or
injuries and only minor damage to property. The heaviest inroad of World War II
on Namoluk was through conscript labor for the Japanese elsewhere than
Namoluk. Constructing roads, airstrips, and bomb shelters and growing food
crops for military garrisons, several Namoluk men died and others were debili-
tated by the long, extremely arduous physical labor required of them.
From a purely local perspective, the most significant event during the Japanese
colonial period was the abandonment of Amwes Islet as a habitation site.
Although no archaeological data are available, Namoluk oral history records that
both Amwes and Namoluk Islets had been inhabited from first settlement of the
atoll. These two islets are close in size (77 and 69 acres), and both have good-sized
taro excavations.12 Each islet’s community boasted a church, two named villages,
several canoe houses, and its own localized descent groups. Despite these similari-
ties, Namoluk Islet has always had a larger population, and unlike Ettal Atoll
(Nason 1970), Namoluk Atoll never has been divided into two political districts.
Over the short span of about two years (from 1937 to 1939), an infectious dis-
ease epidemic (probably tuberculosis) inexorably moved through the Amwes set-
tlement, resulting in the deaths of fifty to sixty people comprising at least 80 per-
cent of the Amwes population. The survivors, along with some who were to die
soon afterward, straggled over to Namoluk Islet, bringing the infection with
them. As a result, many people there became ill and died, although the disease did
not run rampant through the entire settlement as it had done on Amwes.
Salvaging what they could, the people of Amwes abandoned their home to the
26 2. Namoluk Atoll, 1969

weeds, the birds, and the pigs. The large taro swamp fell into disuse until it filled
with a thick, thriving stand of trees. As of 1969, Amwes had not been recolonized.
Commencing with the end of World War II, the American colonial period es-
sentially followed the Japanese example on a reduced scale. The cash economy,
with copra as its mainstay, was continued, as was government-provided shipping
service to and from Chuuk to the outer islands, providing trade goods, passenger
service, and copra buying. Christian mission activity received a new impetus in
the postwar period, and educational opportunities increased sharply, including
the establishment of an elementary school on Namoluk (first through eighth
grade), staffed by trained Namoluk teachers. By the late 1960s, a few especially
worthy students left the atoll to attend high school on Chuuk. A Namoluk man,
trained as a Navy corpsman, was employed on the atoll as a health aide and su-
pervised a dispensary in which he saw patients and dispensed a limited array of
Western medicines. A government-trained midwife returned home to Namoluk
to practice her skills in delivering babies. Namoluk had a municipal government
modeled after local governments in the United States, with a mayor, an island
council, and assorted other offices all democratically elected by the atoll’s adult
men and women.
Paralleling the epidemic on Amwes as the most significant local event of the
Japanese colonial period, the typhoon that smashed Namoluk in 1958 occupied a
similar place during the American administration. On May 24 and 25, 1958,
Typhoon Phyllis, packing winds over 100 mph, passed just north of Namoluk and
caused extensive damage. Information provided by the U.S. Navy indicated that
approximately 90 percent of the coconut palms were destroyed on the atoll
(Slusser and Hughes 1970). The physical destruction on Namoluk was as follows:
“Practically 75% of all trees were completely uprooted. The remaining 25% were
mere stumps sticking 15 or 20 feet into the air. The damage to homes and commu-
nity buildings was complete. Fortunately, only one person was lost [died] during
the storm. Destruction of the islands’ canoes was complete” (Davis 1959, 13).
Prior to Phyllis, the last typhoon to strike Namoluk was sometime in the nine-
teenth century. In Phyllis’s aftermath, almost 100 percent subsistence was pro-
vided to Namoluk’s people by the USTTPI government in the form of rice, flour,
and C-rations for well over a year. Soon after the typhoon, traditional ties and
obligations brought canoes from Ettal and Oneop, laden with taro and coconuts.
Moch and Kuttu in Satawan Atoll and Lukunoch Islet in Lukunoch Atoll also sent
taro and breadfruit via the Catholic mission ship. At the behest of the late Petrus
Mailo, then mayor of Wééné, several islands in Chuuk Lagoon shipped taro, pan-
danus, and preserved breadfruit down to Namoluk.
As restoration and recovery began, the Agriculture Department on Chuuk
started a gardening and coconut replanting program on Namoluk, and the gov-
ernment provided materials to rebuild forty-three homes, a school, a government
house, a community building, and an island office. A deeper boat channel was
blasted in the reef, and Namoluk people had their first direct experience with
 Day-to-Day Life at the End of the 1960s 27

Americans living on their island. Several Agriculture Department employees,

along with their families, spent up to six months on the atoll in 1958 assisting in
reconstruction and replanting. Eight months after the typhoon, the following
status report was issued: “Progress. . . at Namoluk has been extremely fast. . . .
The replanting program is well under way and is ahead of schedule. The ‘two
year’ rebuilding program will be completed in one year. The morale of the
people. . . is extremely high—partly because they have made such excellent
progress on their canoe rebuilding, which means so much to them. Namoluk has
completed nine large sailing canoes” (Davis 1959, 14).
A severe cyclonic storm such as Typhoon Phyllis on Namoluk may be thought
of as giving people a clean slate on which to redraw their lives. This idea of a ty-
phoon providing a new beginning—of a storm accelerating the pace of changes
already in motion—was explored in detail by William Lessa (1964) for Ulithi, an
atoll in the Western Carolines much like Namoluk (see Map 1.1). The degree of
physical damage on both atolls was very similar, but what is of real interest is that
many of the social changes that occurred on Ulithi after the typhoon in 1960 had
their exact counterparts in the immediate post-typhoon years on Namoluk.
On both islands women abandoned the traditional dress style—topless with a
wraparound skirt—in favor of Western-style dresses that covered their breasts.
On both islands imported lumber, corrugated metal, and cement replaced home-
grown wood and thatch as the standard building materials for people’s homes.
On both islands the residence pattern for houses shifted from one of dispersed
homesteads to settlements clustered together. On both islands the typhoon en-
gendered greater reliance on store-bought foodstuffs, especially rice, flour, and
canned meats, possibly as an outgrowth of the relief food that had been provided.
On both islands the importance of cash increased strikingly in the local economy,
and the number of small stores grew apace. On both islands a realignment of po-
litical power was set in motion, with younger men taking an increasingly active
role in local politics. On both islands greater inequalities in wealth than hitherto
had been present sprang up in conjunction with the rising importance of cash.
Finally, on both islands a trend toward advancing the interests of the nuclear
family over that of wider, extended kin groups was intensified. In sum: “The
winds and waves of the. . . typhoon. . . not only caused widespread physical
changes on the tiny atoll but also dramatically transformed the social organiza-
tion and traditions of the islands. They swept away old ways as well as trees. In
doing so they stimulated social changes already in progress before the storm and
at the same time provided a more dynamic way of life to cope with the program
of reconstruction” (Lessa 1964, 46).

DAY-TO-DAY LIFE AT THE END OF THE 1960S

By the time that Leslie and I first stepped ashore on Namoluk on October 5, 1969,
the social changes that had been accelerated by Typhoon Phyllis a decade before
28 2. Namoluk Atoll, 1969

had become the day-to-day norm. Even so, it must be remembered that the ty-
phoon came on the heels of a much longer process of change stimulated by exter-
nal events. By 1969, chon Namoluk had had direct experience of foreigners for
more than 135 years. Occasional visits by whalers and traders early on, followed
by resident mission teachers and the coming of Christianity, access to the first
formal schooling, and the ever greater encroachment of colonial governments all
contributed to the atoll’s slow but inexorable involvement with the world beyond
the Mortlocks and beyond Micronesia.
A paradox between dependency and self-sufficiency framed the Namoluk
community in 1969. Although chon Namoluk depended upon a variety of serv-
ices provided from the district center13 port town on Chuuk, the atoll was in
many ways still a self-contained unit. Namoluk could and did easily feed itself,
and in this sense it was still in a subsistence economy. Known throughout Chuuk
State as an island rich in fish and other seafood, the atoll also produced a lot of
breadfruit and taro, the two staple crops. In addition to these basic foods, a mis-
cellany of condiment foods was available, such as bananas, papaya, soursop,
limes, bitter oranges, and pandanus fruit. For special feasts or notable meals, pigs
or chickens were killed and eaten with gusto, and occasionally a large sea turtle
would be captured and devoured. Despite this cornucopia of local foods, by 1969
Namoluk people also had come to rely on store-bought foods imported from
abroad. First and foremost among these was rice, followed closely by enriched
flour, and both of these were purchased in 25- to 50-pound bags. Along with
these starches, chon Namoluk—like most other Pacific Islanders—were accus-
tomed to tinned fish (especially mackerel), canned meats (notably Spam and
corned beef), cooking oil, dried noodles (such as ramen), salt, sugar, canned soft
drinks (consumed warm), powdered milk, soy sauce, and assorted crackers and
cookies. For these foods they relied on visits from the government field-trip ship
every one to two months.
The paradox of intertwined self-sufficiency and dependency in regard to food
is well illustrated by a description of fishing. As Namoluk’s Kino Ruben writes in
the epigraph that begins this chapter, chon Namoluk love to fish, and they have
numerous techniques to catch their quarry. However, the fishing paraphernalia
that was in use on the atoll in 1969 was a mix of homemade and industrially
manufactured gear. In October 1969, there were still no outboard motorboats on
Namoluk, although that was soon to change (see Chapter 4). Drop-line fishing in
the lagoon or off the outer reef face was done from small, one- or two-person
paddling canoes called waafatil, whereas open-sea trolling for big game fish like
yellowfin and skipjack tuna, jacks, wahoo, yellowtail, and barracuda was done by
dragging handheld lines behind the large sailing canoes, or waaserik. But even
though the canoes were made in the time-honored way from local trees, and held
together by coconut sennit14 cord and breadfruit sap caulk, the cloth sails, nylon
fish lines, and metal fishhooks were bought from stores that had acquired them
from overseas. Big nets were used to surround schools of fish in the lagoon, but
 Day-to-Day Life at the End of the 1960s 29

A Typhoon House on Namoluk, March 1970,

Constructed After Typhoon Phyllis in 1958

where these once were handwoven from local fiber, the nets in use by 1969 were
made of nylon and manufactured in Japan, Taiwan, or South Korea.
Likapich, “spearfishing,” had been practiced on Namoluk from time immemo-
rial, but in the old days it was difficult and relatively inefficient, done without
goggles and by thrusting with a long, multipronged wooden spear. Spearfishing
gear in 1969 included imported swimmer’s goggles, barbed thin metal spears
made from reworked rebar and other scrap metal brought down from Chuuk,
and a “shooter” made of heavy surgical tubing that powered the spear. From age
eleven or twelve, Namoluk boys developed ever greater skill at likapich, and this
technique provided most of the reef fish that people consumed. So even as basic a
subsistence practice as fishing on a coral atoll contained a paradoxical mix of lo-
cal ingenuity and knowledge and imported material goods.
By October 1969, Namoluk’s population was consolidated fully on Namoluk
Islet, clustered together in three named but otherwise indistinguishable village
sections (Pukos, Lukelap, and Sópwonewel) on the northeastern end of the islet.
The community had a thriving elementary school and was divided into both
Protestant and Catholic church congregations. Most people slept in the neat,
square wooden houses with corrugated metal roofs that were erected in the after-
math of the 1958 typhoon. These houses were raised about 3 feet off the ground
30 2. Namoluk Atoll, 1969

Namoluk Canoe House (Fáál an Paros),

with Two Styles of Sailing Canoe, May 1970

on wooden pilings, providing a dry storage place underneath for miscellaneous

household goods. A few of the wealthier community members had built cement
houses, some sporting linoleum floors and glass louver windows, but other fami-
lies still lived comfortably in traditional thatch homes with coral-pebble floors.
Everyone did their meal preparation in a separate mosoro, or “cookhouse,” typi-
cally made of thatch and containing an earth oven, a fire pit, and a place where a
small single-burner kerosene stove could be used. Chickens and cats, not to men-
tion small children, wandered in and out of the mosoro, while women and teen-
aged girls assembled and cooked the family’s food there.
Seven large, thatched A-frame fáál, or “canoe houses,” lined the lagoon shore,
each owned by one of the island’s major clans or subclans (a discussion of the
kinship system follows below). The fáál served as gathering and sleeping places
for men and boys and as storage places for the atoll’s canoes, keeping them pro-
tected from the strong tropical sun and frequent rains. The large cement
churches were the most imposing structures on Namoluk, with the Protestant
Church rebuilt after Typhoon Phyllis and the Catholic Church—modeled after a
fáál—erected in 1968. Also reconstructed post-typhoon, the big cement commu-
nity meeting house was the focal point for weekly island-wide meetings, island
council meetings, and other community events.
 Day-to-Day Life at the End of the 1960s 31

The Protestant Church on Namoluk, April 1995

The dispensary and the “municipal house” that contained a shortwave radio
transceiver for communication with Chuuk and other islands in the Mortlocks
were in structures identical to people’s wooden dwellings. These were located
near the elementary school complex, an array of two wood and corrugated metal
classroom buildings and two smaller cookhouses surrounding an open grassy
playing field. Walking past when school was in session, one heard the children en-
thusiastically reciting their lessons in unison, while preschool kids and a few
older adults lounged about outside, listening and watching. Namoluk had seven
locally owned and operated general stores in 1969, most of which were run out of
their proprietor’s home. The owners of these stores purchased most of their stock
from the field-trip ships and then sold it to community members at a small
markup. Commonly, the stores carried canned foods, cloth, matches, flashlight
batteries, candy, soap, kerosene, cigarettes, instant coffee, and other by-then es-
sential items.
In 1969, copra was the mainstay of most Namoluk people’s limited participa-
tion in a cash economy. At that time, nearly everyone on the atoll lived mainly in
a subsistence economy, with money and the goods it could buy treated as a sup-
plement rather than as the primary means of survival. All who were able regu-
larly gathered, husked, and split coconuts, and then removed the oily meat with
deft strokes of a sharp kitchen knife. The meat would then either be laid out to
32 2. Namoluk Atoll, 1969

dry in the sun on pandanus mats or, preferably, would be heated over a slow fire
in a copra-drying oven introduced during the Japanese period (and called by the
Japanese name, kansopa). Once dried, the copra would be put in bags provided
by the trading companies on Chuuk who bought all the copra when the field-trip
ship came. It was then stored in a dry place until ship day. Much time and effort
and approximately 300 ripe coconuts resulted in one 100-pound bag of copra
that earned $5.50. No one on Namoluk ever got rich making copra.
The atoll’s municipal government included an elected magistrate (or mayor),
a secretary, a treasurer, a municipal court judge, three police officers, and a six-
person council (see Marshall and Borthwick 1974 for a technical analysis of these
political positions). In addition to these offices, three men served as elected vil-
lage foremen, or “bosses,” and in 1969, chon Namoluk still elected their own rep-
resentative to the Truk District Legislature. Although traditional clan chiefs—
samol an ainang—continued to command respect and to exercise a modicum of
influence in island affairs, they possessed no effective decision-making or admin-
istrative power in the political arena.
Idle time—a certain monotony—poses a problem for communities like
Namoluk, and the repetitive boredom of outer island existence is among the rea-
sons young people give for their eagerness to experience the energy and enter-
tainment offered by Wééné and other bigger places. On a typical day, one or two
bingo games were in full swing at a nickel a card, while players listened as radio
station WSZC in Chuuk blared American country-western music, alternating
with Chuukese love songs15 and local announcements. A group of men who’d
just returned from an early-morning troll for tuna in the open sea divided and
distributed their catch from one of the canoe houses. Looking tired, a man and
his adult son lugged a basket of ripe breadfruit they had picked with long poles
and dropped it off at their mosoro before going to bathe. In the mosoro women
cooked the day’s food—breadfruit, taro, or rice—for the major evening meal,
while yet others hiked out on the reef flat at low tide in search of octopi or shell-
fish to accompany dinner. Two sisters and their husbands prepared to sail across
the lagoon to Toinom Islet to gather and husk copra nuts, spend the night in a
small thatch lean-to shelter, check to see if any breadfruit were ripe there, and
catch some delicious land-dwelling coconut crabs to roast on the fire. Infants and
toddlers, accompanied by slightly older siblings assigned by their mothers to
child-care duty, wandered freely about, exploring their green world and playing
at children’s games. The pace of everything, work or play, was leisurely, slow, and
relaxed. No one hurried.
Bars, pool halls, movie theaters, and the general hubbub of urban life all ap-
pear attractive when seen from a distance and when one has not yet tried them.
Although illegal on Namoluk in 1969, the consumption of alcoholic beverages
was comparatively common by men—particularly young men—and occasional
fisticuffs and wrestling fights ensued. At that time, drinking and the challenge it
posed to the local powers-that-be were very much caught up in a struggle be-
 Day-to-Day Life at the End of the 1960s 33

Namoluk Canoe House (Fáál an Falukupat),

with a Day’s Catch of Yellowfin Tuna, December 1969

tween younger and older generations for control of the island’s municipal gov-
ernment (Marshall 1975b). The usual drink was yiis, “yeast,” a rather unpleasant
brew of sugar, baker’s yeast, and water allowed to ferment for a day or so in a glass
container or a big tea kettle and sometimes flavored with coffee or canned fruit
syrup before it was consumed. The time on people’s hands was a major reason
that the mindlessness of bingo was endured hour after hour by Namoluk adults,
even though most of them consistently lost money at this game. Bingo offered an
excuse to socialize, gossip, and while away the time.
This monotony was shattered whenever a ship or canoe visited the atoll.
Announced by a loud, “Waaa-Ho!”—called akkapwas—the arrival of a vessel
from outside produced a commotion: frenzied activity, anticipation over who
might be coming or going, possible new merchandise or visitors, money from co-
pra sales, and mail and other news from the world beyond. Everyone rushed
down to Leor—the landing spot—to observe the proceedings. And then, in no
more than a day and usually after just a few hours, the ship gathered up its pas-
sengers and its copra and sailed on, and life on Namoluk resumed its slow repeti-
tive pace.
34 2. Namoluk Atoll, 1969

THE FOUR E’S

Education, employment, entertainment, and excitement: these “four E’s” already
acted as significant “pull factors” in 1969, beginning to pull Namoluk people to
the urban center on Wééné, Chuuk. Anyone who passed the competitive high
school entrance examination, and who thus qualified for one of the limited num-
ber of spots then available to continue schooling beyond the eighth grade, had to
move to Chuuk to do so. In those days there were three high schools in Chuuk:
Truk High School, where most students enrolled; Mizpah High School, spon-
sored by the United Church of Christ-affiliated Protestant Church;16 and Xavier
High School, a highly selective Jesuit-run institution that drew students from all
six of the USTTPI’s districts. Both Mizpah and Xavier required their students to
pay tuition, but Truk High was a free public school.
Beginning in July 1962, during the Kennedy administration, the U.S. govern-
ment greatly increased the USTTPI’s budget in response to United Nations criti-
cism over U.S. neglect of its trusteeship. Soon thereafter, hundreds of PCVs were
sent to Micronesia, and many new public works programs were initiated in the
district centers. It became clear by the early 1970s that the combination of money
and PCVs was a calculated way for binding the islands more closely to the United
States (Hezel 1995), but the sudden infusion of funds created a rapid profusion
of jobs, in other words, employment, the second “E.” Some Namoluk men and
women emigrated to Chuuk at that time to avail themselves of the new opportu-
nities to earn a salary in the emergent wage economy.
Part of the lure for these people was the pull of entertainment of various sorts
in the urban center and also the sheer excitement of living in the polyglot and
semi-anonymous world that Wééné offered. Unlike the slow, repetitive day-to-
day life back home, Wééné had automobiles, motorboats, jet aircraft landing sev-
eral times a week, and huge freighters and oil tankers tying up at the main wharf.
The town contained people from every community in Chuuk State, and from
most other parts of Micronesia, plus dozens of foreign workers (principally
Americans and Filipinos) and legions of tourists (many of them from Japan).
The pace of life on Wééné seemed nearly the opposite of that back on Namoluk.
Those who remained on the atoll were not unaffected by the increased growth
and development occurring on Chuuk. In addition to “the four E’s,” Namoluk
people looked to the district center for health care services, particularly when
hospitalization was required. For radio news, mail, shipping, a market for their
copra, and a stream of material goods, the district center was the source to which
chon Namoluk turned. When government field-trip ships were delayed, as they
often were, felt needs on Namoluk became acute. Cigarette smokers had to
skimp, hoard, or do without. Bottle-fed infants faced a threat of no powdered or
canned milk. Underwater spearfishing at night halted for want of flashlight bat-
teries. School was reduced to half-day sessions because there was no U.S.
Department of Agriculture rice and flour to feed the children lunch.
 Primordial Sentiments of Shared Identity 35

Anthropologists fretted because there was no mail. Life on Namoluk, as it was

lived in 1969, was predicated on regular contact by ship with the district center.

PRIMORDIAL SENTIMENTS OF SHARED IDENTITY

Anthropologists long have viewed kinship as the “primordial sentiments of
shared identity,” and this is an especially apt way to think about kinship on
Namoluk because for most of its history, the atoll has been a genealogically inter-
locked kin community (see Marshall 1972 for illustration of this). These numer-
ous genealogical connections among Namoluk people, such that most of them
have at least distant kin ties to each other, contribute to their strong sense of
shared group identity and mutual solidarity. Although this book is not about the
details of kinship relationships and organization, it is necessary to have a basic
understanding of Namoluk ideas of kinship in order to understand fully much of
what follows in later chapters about migration and identity. For the same reason,
it is also pertinent to comprehend the nature of marital relationships and the
prescriptive system of marriage that governed most spousal choices on the atoll
until quite recently.
Kinship organization on Namoluk, and throughout Chuuk State, is quite dif-
ferent from the way kinship is structured in the United States and other Western
countries. Whereas most westerners have what anthropologists call a bilateral
(two-sided) system of reckoning descent, and do not privilege one side over the
other, chon Namoluk calculate descent unilineally. More specifically, Namoluk
people have a matrilineal descent system, meaning that their strongest and closest
kin ties come through their mother’s side or “line.” Unilineal kinship systems typ-
ically organize people into named kin groups such as clans and lineages. In
Namoluk’s case these named matrilineal kin groups are called ainang, or “clan.”
The eight clans represented on Namoluk in 1969 are localized parts of widely dis-
persed groupings found in much of Chuuk State and on many of the outer island
atolls of Yap State. Some of them also exist in the century-old migrant
Mortlockese communities that were established on Pohnpei in 1907 after a terri-
ble typhoon ravaged the Lower Mortlocks and the Germans relocated
Mortlockese people there. Clans are named and dispersed kin groups whose
members should not marry or engage in sexual intercourse with each other (i.e.,
they are exogamous). Clans provide links of hospitality when people travel to
other islands, even if the people involved have never met before. Members of the
same clan consider themselves to be distant kin by virtue of their shared clan
name, but they cannot trace genealogical connections to one another.
Typically, in specific communities such as Namoluk, large clans may be di-
vided into a number of subclans whose members are known or believed to share
closer genealogical connections with one another than to other members of the
same clan, even if they cannot reconstruct the precise kinship links. Clans and
subclans ultimately are composed of lineages whose members actually know how
36 2. Namoluk Atoll, 1969

they are related genealogically. Large lineages, in turn, are made up of multiple
descent lines, tetel en aramas, that usually consist in a set of brothers and sisters (a
sibling-set) and the offspring of the sisters. The connections among siblings are
considered to be the closest and most binding kinship relationships on Namoluk
(see Marshall 1981 for details), and they figure into marriage, adoption, and fos-
terage patterns in ways that will be touched upon briefly below.
Even though clans, subclans, and lineages are unfamiliar to most Westerners,
they provide the fundamental connections that organize and regulate Namoluk
people’s access to land, to sexual and marital partners, and to what David
Schneider (1968) called “diffuse, enduring solidarity.” Descent lines and lineage
ties are much more likely to be associated with such solidarity than subclan or
clan ties, although this depends on a host of contextual and individual factors.
Diffuse, enduring solidarity on Namoluk must be demonstrated by loving, nurtu-
rant acts of mutual caring: tumwunuu ffengen, “take care of or look after one an-
other”; alillis ffengen, “cooperate”; and tipeuo ffengen, “agree or be of one mind.”
Close kin who fail to demonstrate ttong— “love, pity”—for each other may cease
to function as kin, although such a case would be highly unusual.
Lineages, subclans, and clans are headed by samol an ainang, “clan chiefs,” who
adjudicate disputes among their members, distribute use rights to shared prop-
erty (especially land, taro patches, and sections of reef), and represent the group
vis-à-vis others. Normally, the samol an ainang is a man—the eldest living son of
the eldest female ancestor in the group—although on rare occasions a woman
may occupy the chiefly role in the absence of any suitable adult male. Namoluk
clans are ranked by order of their arrival on the atoll, with the first to arrive ac-
corded makal, or “atoll chief,” status. The highest ranked clan on Namoluk is
Wáánikar, which is divided into five subclans, one of which holds the makal title.
Namoluk’s other seven clans are named Sór, Katamak, Fáánimey, Sópwunupi,
Souwon, Inemaraw, and Imwo.17 The overall population is divided roughly in
half between Wáánikar people and the other clans, who are known collectively as
tola, “all [the rest]” (see Table 2.1).
Wáánikar’s five subclans vary in size and number of lineages. The largest,
hereafter called W2, has three large lineages (a fourth died out in 1999), number-
ing slightly more than one-quarter of the community’s total de jure population. A
second Wáánikar subclan, W1, is made up of three lineages and almost seventy
members; a third, W4, has nearly as many members, but all of them today are in a
single lineage. The remaining two Wáánikar subclans, W3 and W5, effectively
contain a single lineage each18 and number between thirty and forty individuals.
People who have matrilineal descent give priority to the female line, but one
should not thereby assume that patrilateral relationships, those with the
father’s side, count for nothing—quite the contrary. These relationships to
father and his lineage, subclan, and clan are known as afakúr ties on Namoluk.
People who are afakúran eu ainang, “descendants of a clan’s men,” are consid-
ered to be siblings by virtue of this shared relationship and as such they are
 Primordial Sentiments of Shared Identity 37

Table 2.1—Namoluk Clans by Number and Percent of

De Jure Population, 7/13/2001a

Name of Clan No. Persons Percent of Total

Wáánikar 434 50
Katamak 142 16.5
Sór 135 15.5
Fáánimey 72 8
Souwon 46 5
Sópwunupi 25 3
Imwob 15 2
TOTAL 869 100
a
Until the deaths of its last two members during the late 1990s, Namoluk’s clans also included
Inemaraw.

b
Imwo clan is represented in the Namoluk population by some of the children and grandchildren
of the wife of the atoll’s Protestant minister, who served the Namoluk church from 1957 until the
1970s. He was from Piis-Emmwar and she was from Wééné. No members of Imwo resided on
Namoluk in July 2001, although they are considered to be chon Namoluk.

enjoined from marrying or having sexual intercourse. On Namoluk and else-

where in the Mortlocks, it is common for children to inherit land and other
property from their father in individual ownership. Such patrilateral gifts are
very highly valued and jealously guarded and add strength to the father-child
relationship. An adult child who fails to show ttong toward her or his father
may be cut off from such an expected inheritance when the old man dies, so the
ability to grant or withhold the patrilateral gift serves as a kind of “social secu-
rity” for men as they age.
At the time I lived on Namoluk between 1969 and 1971, most of the marriages
I recorded in genealogies followed what anthropologists call “preferential rules,”
meaning that they were arranged between people in certain specific relationships
to each other. For starters, 86 percent of the nearly 1,000 marriages were between
members of Namoluk matrilineages, in other words, the community was highly
endogamous—marriages took place within it, rather than with outsiders. Second,
more than three-fourths of all marriages were sibling-set marriages, meaning
that one set of brothers and sisters married another such set.19 A third preferen-
tial rule that shaped Namoluk marriage choices is that nearly two-thirds of all
Namoluk marriages through 1971 were between actual or classificatory cross-
cousins, that is, the children of opposite-sex siblings (mother’s brother and
father’s sister). Finally, in more than half of the cases where Namoluk persons
38 2. Namoluk Atoll, 1969

married more than once, they married a “sister” or “brother” of their first spouse.
Anthropologists refer to such marriages as the sororate and the levirate. Thus,
historically, the Namoluk community operated largely as a “closed” marriage
market, in which marriages were arranged between sibling-sets and their cross-
cousins. This was done so as to keep resources in land and people circulating
back and forth between matrilineages over time, as one generation and set of
marriages was succeeded by the next (see Marshall 1972). So-called alliance sys-
tems of this sort were common to societies that practiced unilineal descent in
many different parts of the world.
By 1972, this system had begun to alter in the sense that the post–World War
II years had seen an increase in out-marriage, particularly with spouses from is-
lands in Chuuk Lagoon. During the approximately 120 years represented in the
1972 genealogies, more than half of all out-marriages had been with other
Mortlockese, and only a fifth had been with those from Chuuk proper. By the be-
ginning of 1973, however, 40 percent of the then-current out-marriages were to
partners from Chuuk Lagoon, and comparable marriages between chon
Namoluk and spouses from the Mortlocks had declined to 32 percent. Largely,
this shift in the primary location of off-island marriage partners was a result of
“the four E’s” migration to the urban center on Wééné by Namoluk people dis-
cussed above, notably by those of marriageable age who went there for high
school or wage work.
The number of current off-island marriages at the end of December 1972 was
one-third of all out-marriages recorded for Namoluk’s population in the genealo-
gies, and most of the then-current marriages had occurred since the end of World
War II. Moreover, the total number of out-marriages—both current and past—by
chon Namoluk alive on December 31, 1972, was nearly half of all such marriages
known to have ever occurred. Off-island marriage from Namoluk was increasing
by 1972, and increasingly such marriages occurred with spouses from Chuuk
rather than the other Mortlocks. Generally speaking, marriages of this sort did not
follow the preferential marriage system rules that were sketched above.
Namoluk kinship and marriage is grounded in land and related resources,
which henceforth will simply be referred to as land.20 To survive on an atoll one
must have access to land, for it is the source of food. To have no land is to have no
food and therefore to be destitute. This equation of land with food is explicit in
the way chon Namoluk refer to land—these resources are often called mwéngé,
“food; to eat.” People have access to their shared lineage lands by virtue of birth
into that matrilineage, and their use rights to particular plots are assigned by the
samol an ainang. Most people also have lands that they control individually,
which they have received from their father or father’s lineage. Some people ac-
quire land (especially such things as breadfruit trees or coconut palms) as com-
pensation from others to right a wrong, for special care or favors, or as payment
for such things as traditional medical treatment. As is common throughout
Micronesia, and in many other parts of the Pacific, kinship is commingled with
 Notes 39

land. Just as with shared blood, to share land with someone is ipso facto to share
kinship. This equation of “mud and blood”21 is pertinent here because it helps us
to understand the passionate attachment that most Namoluk people have to the
atoll as a physical place—pieces of land—that in turn help define who they are as
individuals and as a people.
Compared to Western societies, adoption and fosterage of children is ex-
tremely common throughout most of the Pacific Islands (Brady 1976; Carroll
1970). Namoluk is no exception to this pattern. More than two-thirds of the
households on the atoll in 1971 contained at least one foster child, and there
was at least one adopted child in 41 percent of the households (Marshall 1976).
Nearly all adoptions are by close kin, and almost nine out of ten are by the
child’s parents’ siblings—aunts and uncles. These adoptions reinforce lineage
and afakúr ties among the adults involved, as well as for the children, and they
also strengthen an adoptive child’s “sibling” connections to people Americans
would call cousins. Adoptions also occasionally convert distant kinship rela-
tionships into closer ones, and sometimes they are used to create kin out of
non-kin. Another means for making distant kin into closer relatives, or for
transforming unrelated people into relatives, is via the pwiipwi, or “created sib-
ling,” bond (see Marshall 1977 for details). The key thing to understand is that
all kinship ties, including adoption and created siblingship, are founded on and
maintained through acts of sharing, whether that sharing be of biogenetic sub-
stance, land, nurturant acts, or understandings about mutually chosen bonds
of committed caring.

Notes
1. Lukeisel literally means “middle of the rope” in reference to the imaginary line that
ties Chuuk together with Nomoi in traditional sailing directions. Girschner (1912) stated
that only Nama and Losap were included in Lukeisel, but use of the term today includes
Namoluk. Lukeisel may be referred to in local parlance as Morschlok Soulong, “the Upper
Mortlocks,” and Nomoi as Morschlok Souou, “the Lower Mortlocks.”
2. Hezel (1983, 82) claims that Captain Raven, aboard the British merchantman
Britannia, first sighted the Mortlocks in 1793, although pride of place generally is ac-
corded Captain Mortlock of the Young William two years later.
3. By that time, chon Namoluk had erected a church building and had sought mission
teachers for more than a year. Julius and Lora were hampered by ill health, but they had
good success on Namoluk: the Protestant Church numbered thirty-six baptized members
and four deacons by the end of 1880. A year later, church membership stood at fifty, but
poor health forced Julius and Lora to return to Pohnpei at the end of 1881, to be replaced
by another couple from the Pohnpei mission training school. By 1886, Joram from
Pingelap Atoll (see Map 1.1) became the mission teacher on Namoluk, where he remained
until 1888. After a year, a mission teacher from Satawan replaced him. (See Missionary
Herald 1879, 218; 1880b, 265; 1881a, 18, 269, 271; 1882, 221; 1886a, 311, and 1886b, 337;
1888, 300; 1891, 370).
40 2. Namoluk Atoll, 1969

4. An excellent historical account of this is provided by Hezel (1995).

5. Further evidence for this comes from Girschner (1912), who carried out anthropo-
logical research on Namoluk circa 1910, during which time he collected considerable data
on traditional religious beliefs. (See also Goodenough 2002 concerning traditional reli-
gion in Chuuk.)
6. Dried coconut meat.
7. Hezel (1991, 192) reports that the Namoluk Catholic Church was founded in “c.
1950,” but chon Namoluk assert that this occurred in 1949.
8. In the 1950s a Namoluk man who had converted to Seventh-Day Adventism (SDA)
on Chuuk mounted a futile effort to establish an SDA church on the atoll. When he failed
to make inroads into either the ranks of the Catholics or the Protestants, he abandoned his
attempt and subsequently returned to the Catholic Church.
9. This woman’s matrilineage remains important on Namoluk to the present day, with
some of its members considered chon Namoluk and others chon Oneop.
10. Two Japanese men employed by Nanyō Bōeki Kaisha (the South Seas Trading
Company) married and fathered children on Namoluk in the 1920s and 1930s, and an
Okinawan employee of Nanyō Bōeki married and lived on Namoluk for more than ten
years. He and three of his five children by his Namoluk wife perished while trying to es-
cape Chuuk aboard ship during the Allied bombardment of 1944.
11. Richards (1957, 17) erroneously reports that eighteen Japanese naval personnel
were removed from Namoluk in October 1945 by a U.S. search and evacuation party.
Conversations with numerous chon Namoluk present on the atoll at that time confirm
that no Japanese military were on Namoluk when the Americans came ashore after the
war’s end.
12. Taro is a root crop grown in freshwater swamps and is a staple of the Namoluk diet
(see below).
13. The USTTPI was divided into six administrative districts (Marianas, Marshalls,
Palau, Ponape [Pohnpei], Truk [Chuuk], and Yap), each of which had a district center that
was the headquarters for governmental and commercial establishments. Chuuk’s district
center in 1969 was on what was then called Moen Island. Moen was a mispronunciation of
Mwáán, a primary village on the island that Chuukese know as Wééné. After the FSM
came into being in 1986, the correct name of Wééné (often Anglicized as Weno) was re-
claimed, and it continues as the capital and urban center of Chuuk State.
14. Sennit is a cordage made from coconut husk fibers that are rolled into strands
called lul (see Figure 3.1).
15. Love songs and other forms of vocal and instrumental music in Chuuk, including
Namoluk, are discussed by Marshall, Gabriel, and Peter (1998).
16. The United Church of Christ (UCC) is the Congregational church that originally
sent missionaries to Micronesia under the ABCFM aegis beginning in 1852 on Pohnpei
and 1873 in the Mortlocks. Mizpah High School was eventually taken over by the state
government and operated as a public junior high school.
17. Some descendants of the wife of the atoll’s protestant minister, who served the
Namoluk church from 1957 until the 1970s, are considered to be chon Namoluk. They be-
long to Imwo clan and are originally from Wééné; none of them resided on Namoluk in
July 2001. The Inemaraw clan became extinct on Namoluk in the 1990s for want of de-
scendants in the female line. When Girschner did his fieldwork on Namoluk early in the
twentieth century, Inemaraw had only six living members. At that time, the ainang named
 Notes 41

Tum also was present on Namoluk, but it had died out completely by 1969. The Katamak
clan was not yet established on the atoll when Girschner was there (1912, 128).
18. W5 has a second lineage that has only one living member, an elderly man, so it will
die out upon his passing.
19. It is necessary to keep in mind that in Namoluk’s kinship system, one has several
kinds of siblings: “real” brothers and sisters who share the same mother and/or father, and
“classificatory” brothers and sisters of different sorts—those in one’s lineage/subclan/clan,
those who are descended from men of the same lineage/subclan/clan, and those created
through adoptive and pwiipwi ties (see Marshall 1976 and 1977 for further details).
20. In addition to dry land parcels, called fanu, such related resources include pwól,
“taro swamp plots”; set, “named sections of the reef flat”; mae, “stone fish weirs con-
structed on the reef ”; mei, “breadfruit trees”; and nu, “coconut palms.”
21. For more on this, see Marshall (1999, 121–125).
 3
Journeyings

Using the rising Orion we will sight Ochopwot

And then use Corvus to reach Kapitau.
Mesarew and Antares sleep in a lagoon west of Anpout.
We passed by west of Sau,
And by using the Southern star we will arrive at the reef
of Urouran.

Theophil Saret Reuney (1994, 257–258)

ARRIVING AT THE REEF OF HONOLULU

Three times a week the “Island Hopper” jet operated by Continental Air
Micronesia leaves Guam, and using a different form of navigation than the star
compass of Carolinian palu, touches down at Chuuk, Pohnpei, Kosrae, Kwajalein,
and Majuro, before arriving on the reef runway at Honolulu International
Airport at 2:30 AM. Although Honolulu is a very busy airport, with planes land-
ing at all hours from many different time zones, there isn’t much happening at
2:30 AM, and hardly anyone is around. But on the nights that the Island Hopper
comes in, the baggage claim area outside the international immigration desks is
alive with people. The first hint that these might not be typical foreign tourists is
given by the baggage that begins to tumble out of the conveyor belt tunnel. It in-
cludes suitcases to be sure, but as much as half of it is composed of large plastic
ice chests and heavy-duty cardboard boxes, taped tightly, with people’s names
written on them with Magic Markers. As these items drop onto the baggage

43
44 3. Journeyings

carousel, they are quickly grabbed up by muscular young men clad in slacks or
jeans, T-shirts, and zori (thonged sandals).
Because nearly everyone who is “local” in Hawai’i wears such garb, the cloth-
ing doesn’t necessarily distinguish these young men. But a glance at the young
women in the waiting area suggests that they may not be local. Many of them
wear brightly colored skirts with a scalloped fringe sewn along the bottom, while
others are in dresses with fitted bodices and full skirts made of equally bright ma-
terial. A few of these women sport jeans and shirt tops, and all have beautiful,
long, shiny black hair. Some of these clues (like the clothing) might suggest that
the young women are not local, but others don’t particularly set them apart. For
instance, most people in Hawai’i have black hair, and many women wear it long.
The giveaway is when one stops looking and begins to listen. These young people
aren’t speaking Da Kine, Hawai’i’s local pidgin. Instead, they’re chatting in soft-
sounding, almost musical, and decidedly unfamiliar languages. Pohnpeian.
Marshallese. Chuukese. Kosraen. Honolulu’s Micronesian community is there to
meet the Island Hopper and welcome their relatives and friends to Merika,
“America.” Once the new arrivals and their baggage have been cleared and col-
lected, they are spirited away to Micronesian households spread around
Honolulu and its suburbs.
Although one can fly to the U.S. mainland via Guam and Tokyo, bypassing
Hawai’i entirely, most Micronesians bound for the mainland first reach “Merika”
on the Island Hopper in the middle of the night. Even though Hawai’i is some-
what cooler and considerably less humid than Micronesia, the warm tropical
breeze, the scents of plumeria and ginger, and the surrounding dark sea breaking
on the reef are all familiar. But whizzing traffic on the H–1 freeway, the high rises
of downtown Honolulu, and the wealth everywhere apparent are not, reminding
new Micronesian arrivals that they are definitely somewhere other than home.

WAVES
Ocean waves are always moving to and fro. Whereas Westerners see one wave as
pretty much like the next, Micronesians are much more keenly attuned to the sea.
Islanders identify different kinds of waves that reveal such information as an ap-
proaching storm or the proximity to land. One kind of wave chon Namoluk rec-
ognize—large, rounded ocean swells seen as one approaches land—is named nóó
popo, literally “pregnant wave.” The waves of Namoluk people who’ve left their is-
land home are like nóó popo—they well up as chon Namoluk approach new lands,
whether these be the high islands of Chuuk Lagoon or the flat prairies of the
American Midwest. These waves also are pregnant with future prospects, both for
the migrants themselves and for the children they bear far away from Namoluk’s
sandy shores.
Namoluk men, and much later Namoluk women, have left the atoll in a series
of waves during the twentieth century. These waves of people grew in size and
 Waves 45

reach with each passing decade. As with all waves, they remain in constant flux,
always moving, never ceasing, filled with promise. Nóó popo.

The First Wave

Prior to 1900, during Spain’s nominal control of Micronesia, Namoluk naviga-
tors regularly ventured to other nearby islands in their sailing canoes, as they had
from time immemorial. Nearly all of these destinations were inhabited by people
who spoke the same or a closely related language. It was not until the German
colonial period in the Carolines that the first Namoluk men traveled by ship be-
yond the traditional sailing routes of their forefathers. As was noted in Chapter 2,
the Germans hired islanders to work in the phosphate mines on Nauru and
Angaur. Interviews I had with elderly people on the atoll during my initial field-
work indicated that only about a dozen chon Namoluk signed on for this work,
and they were the first wave—the pioneers of travel abroad beyond the tradi-
tional voyaging network.

The Second Wave

When I arrived on Namoluk in October 1969, two dozen men were alive who were
born before 1921. They comprised the second wave of migrants that emanated
from the atoll, and they too worked in the phosphate mines on Angaur, but this
time for the Japanese between the 1920s and the early 1940s. All had also visited
the islands of Palau and Saipan on their journeys back and forth. About half of
them were aboard ships that stopped en route at Woleai and Fais as well, and six-
teen had worked as conscript laborers on Japanese military installations on
Pohnpei during the 1930s (see Map 1.1). The experiences of these men were more
widespread and of greater duration than was the case for those in the first wave.
For instance, one worked on Angaur for a total of six years between 1930 and 1943
in five different trips, as well as more than a year on Tonowas during World War II.
Another spent three years working on Angaur, a year and a half on Pohnpei, and a
similar length of time on Tonowas. A third man went to Angaur four times for a
total of twenty-six months, worked a year on Pohnpei, labored six months on
Tonowas, and was employed for three months on Satawan. Four men in the sec-
ond wave moved away from Namoluk in early adulthood to reside with women
they’d married from other islands—Ettal, Oneop, Wééné, and Pohnpei.
Travel to work elsewhere in Micronesia during the Japanese colonial period
was the norm for Namoluk men, but the situation was different for women. Very
few Namoluk women of that generation had opportunities to travel beyond
Chuuk. Of the twenty Namoluk women alive in 1969 and born before 1921, only
two had traveled outside of Chuuk State (both to Pohnpei and one to Guam). So
whereas the second wave affected more men than did the first wave, as with the
latter it hardly involved women at all. People’s destinations in both of these waves
were limited to other Micronesian islands, and their primary reason for travel
was wage employment in colonial enterprises.1
46 3. Journeyings

A Second-Wave Namoluk Man Making Coconut Sennit Cord (Lul)

in a Canoe House on the Atoll, May 1970

The Third Wave

Matters changed somewhat for those in the third wave. Most of the fifteen men
and eleven women born between 1921 and 1931, who were alive in 1969, were
children or teenagers at the outbreak of World War II. Consequently, the boys
were too young for conscript labor, and the primary reason for travel away from
Namoluk by third wavers was for schooling. After the League of Nations granted
Japan a mandate over Micronesia following World War I, a limited elementary
education system for Micronesians was put in place. The nearest such school that
 Waves 47

Namoluk students could attend was located on Oneop. This was the first formal
schooling available to chon Namoluk, other than the basic literacy taught by
Protestant mission teachers in earlier years. Just more than half the third wave
men and about a quarter of the women attended the Japanese school on Oneop.
It was for a maximum of only three years, and the teachers chose very few
Micronesians to proceed beyond that level. It is therefore significant that three
Namoluk men went on to finish fifth grade on Tonowas, two of whom were then
selected for the special carpentry school the Japanese ran in Palau. One man
studied there for three years, and the other for a year and a half. Soon after World
War II ended, three third wavers obtained vocational training from the U.S. Navy,
as a teacher, a health assistant, and an agriculture agent. One of these men also
finished ninth grade on Wééné following the war.
Third wavers differed from their predecessors in terms of off-island travel. All
but one woman and a third of the men had only traveled elsewhere in Chuuk
State as of 1969, and the eleventh woman had never left Namoluk. But at that
time three third-wave men had visited Guam and Saipan; two each had been to
Hawai’i, Palau, Yap, Nukuoro, and Kapingamarangi; one each had visited the U.S.
mainland and Japan (as sailors aboard ships); and yet another had been to
Pohnpei.2 The two who worked as sailors had traveled widely throughout the
USTTPI. Thus some men of this generation ventured much farther afield than
anyone from Namoluk had ever done before. Another difference was that some
of these trips were made on airplanes rather than by ship. Still, by 1969, the pri-
mary off-island travel experiences of chon Namoluk then in their late thirties or
older remained other destinations in Micronesia. Formal educational opportuni-
ties of any sort also continued to be very scarce. In the years since, both of these
things altered dramatically for Namoluk people, especially for those born after
1931.

The Fourth Wave

The fourth wave from Namoluk—those born between 1932 and 1941—reached
maturity early in the American colonial era after World War II, first under naval
administration, and then under the Department of the Interior after June 1951.
There were twenty-three men and twenty-three women alive in this age group
when I began my fieldwork. All the men had finished sixth grade, and most had
completed junior high school or more. About a fourth of them were graduates of
the Pacific Islands Central School’s (PICS) three-year high school program, three
went through a full four years of high school, and in the mid–1960s one went on
to obtain the first college degrees (an AA and a BA) to be earned by a Namoluk
person.
That pathbreaking achievement heralded many other breakthroughs by mem-
bers of the fourth wave. Several of these men acquired specialized training as
teachers, nurses, radio broadcasters, or librarians at such places as the East-West
Center and the College (now University) of Guam (UOG), and they have held
48 3. Journeyings

jobs of high responsibility. For instance, the first college graduate has served as
director of the Chuuk State Public Affairs Office, as state election commissioner,
and was acting governor of the Truk District government before independence.
Four men became school teachers, and two served as principal of Namoluk
Elementary School (which covers first through eighth grade). Two worked in ra-
dio, and for many years one of them was FSM’s broadcasting information spe-
cialist. Another was a stringer with the Micronesian News Service, and yet one
more assumed major responsibilities for nursing administration at the Chuuk
Hospital. Two of these men were elected to the Truk District legislature during
the Trust Territory period, and two worked as language teachers for Peace Corps
volunteers in Key West, Florida (1966), and in Hawai’i (1967). One worked as
FSM liaison officer with the Guam Police Department, assisting in cases that in-
volve FSM citizens on Guam. Finally, another fourth waver received a BA from
the University of Hawai’i–Mānoa in 1985. Even though all of the fourth-wave
women attended elementary school (usually through the sixth grade), only one
went beyond that by completing midwifery training in Chuuk. Several of these
women have worked in the wage economy on Wééné, and more recently on
Guam, mostly as store clerks, cooks, and hotel maids.
Given all of this, it should come as no surprise that the fourth-wave men and
women have traveled much more widely than any of their predecessors. Even
though nine of the men have never left Chuuk State, the others expanded the
travel horizon and worldly experience of Namoluk people in major ways. Taken
collectively, members of this latter group have been all over the FSM, to the
CNMI, Palau, the Republic of the Marshall Islands (RMI), Guam, and Hawai’i.
But one or more of them also has visited other parts of the Pacific region and be-
yond, to include Nauru, Kiribati, Tuvalu, Tonga, Sāmoa, Fiji, Cook Islands, New
Zealand, Australia, Japan, South Korea, the U.S. mainland, and Israel. A few of the
fourth-wave women have been to Pohnpei and Pingelap (see Map 1.1), and dur-
ing the 1990s, half a dozen of them have taken up residence on Guam or have
stayed there for extended visits with their adult children and grandchildren. In
recent years three fourth-wave women have traveled to Hawai’i and two to the
U.S. mainland.
Expanded educational options provided the springboard, for fourth-wave
men in particular, to go away to school and then find wage employment that let
them explore the wider world well beyond Micronesia. Women of this generation
did not have educational or employment opportunities equal to men’s, so their
travel has been more circumscribed. Despite this, in July 2001, four men and four
women from the fourth wave resided outside of Chuuk State.3

The Fifth Wave

Namoluk’s fifth wave includes those born between 1942 and 1951, in other
words, during World War II and its aftermath. Even the oldest members of this
group grew up under the U.S. colonial administration, and by the time they
 Waves 49

reached high school age in the 1960s, profound changes had begun to occur in
Micronesia’s educational system. Many in this group completed high school at a
time when U.S. government loan programs first were extended to Micronesian
students in 1972, giving them a chance to pursue postsecondary education.
In October 1969, this age group had thirty-nine men and thirty-one women.
Their subsequent educational accomplishments are striking when compared to
Namoluk’s earlier generations. Twenty-five of the men are high school graduates,
and sixteen of them attended college for at least a year, mostly in the United
States. Nine have earned bachelor’s degrees, and three hold master’s degrees. Two
(one of whom subsequently earned a BA) successfully completed the two-year
nurse training program at the Trust Territory School of Nursing, which was then
located on Saipan. Four others finished vocational training programs at the
Micronesian Occupational College (MOC) in Palau, and one completed a com-
puter school in Oregon. Nine of the women are high school graduates, and four
went on to attend at least a year of college. Two have earned bachelor’s degrees,
and a third has an associate of arts degree and also graduated from Hawai’i
Business College. Another completed her training at the Trust Territory School of
Nursing.
Commensurate with the more advanced educational achievements of this age
group, they have found a variety of important positions as well. Nine men have
taught school in Chuuk State, two have been school principals, and two others
have held administrative posts in the state’s Department of Education. One has
directed mental health services for Chuuk, another supervised the Medex pro-
gram4 in rural communities, and a third worked for years as the chief records
clerk at Chuuk State Hospital. One was a journalist, became clerk of the FSM
congress, and is now an FSM congressional representative. Another has been
Chuuk’s deputy chief of police, and a Namoluk age-mate has overseen the state
government’s computer operations. One college graduate has held several ad-
ministrative jobs at the College of Micronesia (COM)–Chuuk Campus, while an-
other has worked in the public defender’s office. Two with master’s degrees have
held various important positions in national and state government, and in the
private sector, including FSM health statistician, Chuuk State’s finance officer,
and the manager of Bank of Guam branches in several different parts of
Micronesia. One fifth waver has been on active duty in the U.S. Army for twenty-
two years and has yet to retire. And finally, one of these men served in the Chuuk
State legislature. Fifth-wave women also have held responsible positions: five
have been school teachers, one has worked as a nurse, and three have been em-
ployed in the private sector.
Members of the fifth wave have traveled widely, primarily in the Pacific region
and in the United States. Three-fourths of the men have traveled beyond Chuuk
State, at least to other parts of Micronesia. Two spent their senior year of high
school on the U.S. mainland and graduated there. Several lived in Hawai’i or the
U.S. mainland for four or more years while attending college or graduate school,
50 3. Journeyings

Fifth- and Sixth-Wave Namoluk Men at

Chuuk International Airport, Wééné, June 1985

and one attended law school in Papua New Guinea. Some have taken business
trips to Japan, South Korea, and China, and two have served in the U.S. Army,
with tours of duty in such places as Italy and Germany. Although about half of
the fifth-wave women have not traveled beyond Chuuk State, fifteen of them
have been elsewhere in Micronesia, mainly to Guam, where several have lived for
more than a decade. Three have been to Hawai’i and to the U.S. mainland. One—
married to an American—has lived for extended periods in Thailand and
Switzerland and now resides in California. In July 2001, seven fifth-wave men and
five women were located outside of Chuuk State.5

The Sixth Wave

The sixth wave of Namoluk migrants, born between 1952 and 1961, are now in
their forties or very early fifties. Their group shows the continued effect of ever-
greater educational opportunities for Micronesian students that prevailed during
the 1970s and 1980s, especially for women. When I began tracking their progress
in 1969, this wave numbered forty-nine males and forty-three females. They had
some special advantages not shared by members of the earlier waves. For exam-
ple, during elementary school, they were taught, in part, by American PCVs and
 Waves 51

by Leslie Marshall, so their English-language skills were honed by teachers who

were native speakers. But they also benefited from a cornucopia of financial aid
programs that became available to Micronesian high school graduates, allowing a
great many of them to further their education in the United States beginning in
the 1970s.
More than half of the men went to college for at least a year, primarily on the
U.S. mainland. Three earned associate’s degrees, seven obtained bachelor’s de-
grees, and one completed a master’s degree in Australia. Nearly all of those who
attended college, whether or not they got a degree, found wage employment on
their return to Chuuk, and some have moved into positions of major responsibil-
ity. Seven have become teachers, and one (a graduate of the Pacific Basin Medical
Officers Training Program) is a doctor at Chuuk State Hospital. Two are
Protestant ministers, and another is in training for that role. One has supervised
nutrition programs for the state government and also has served as the state’s
election commissioner for recent national elections. One man is kept busy as a
co-owner of a small private business; he also works as a legal assistant. Another
member of the group is the state’s fire chief, while his age-mate serves as Chuuk’s
senior land commissioner.
Eleven sixth-wave women attended at least a year of college at COM–Pohnpei,
the UOG, or various schools in Hawai’i and on the U.S. mainland. One holds a
bachelor’s degree, four earned two-year associate’s degrees, and one finished
Hawai’i School of Business. Many women in this age group have been employed
in the wage sector in Chuuk, on Guam, and in the United States.
Perhaps a stronger indicator of the impact of education and international
travel is the fact that quite a few sixth-wave men have lived and worked outside of
Chuuk State for most of their adult lives. For example, one was a noncommis-
sioned officer in the U.S. Navy for twenty years and resided in Norfolk, Virginia,
until 2001. Another met and married a Palauan woman while attending college
in the States and worked at Palau Community College on Koror for many years.
One man, who went away in the 1970s and has never returned to Chuuk, owned
and operated a martial arts studio in Texas. Three of these men live and work on
Guam, two in Hawai’i, and seven in the mainland United States.
Not to be outdone, many more sixth-wave women have lived and worked
abroad than those who came before them. One left for college in the mid–1970s
and has never returned to Chuuk; another did the same but has been back for a
couple of brief visits over the years. Both of these women have been married
twice to American men and have children who live in the States. As of July 2001, a
total of five sixth-wave women were on Guam, three each were in Hawai’i and on
the U.S. mainland, and two resided elsewhere in Micronesia.6

The Seventh Wave

The last wave to be discussed—the seventh—includes those born between 1962
and 1971. It is considerably larger than any of the previous waves. Forty-eight
52 3. Journeyings

males and thirty-eight females had been born by October 1969; twenty-four
more males and ten more females were born by the end of 1971.7
Nearly everyone in the seventh wave attended high school, and the great ma-
jority of them graduated. What is especially striking about these chon
Namoluk—in their thirties in 2001—is how physically mobile they have been: at
the time of my July 2001 census, three-fourths of the men (48/65) and two-thirds
of the women (31/48) were located somewhere other than Namoluk. Taken to-
gether, thirty members of this age group were on Wééné, twenty-five on Guam,
eleven in the mainland United States, eight in Hawai’i, three on Pohnpei, and two
on Saipan. Fully 70 percent of the members of this wave were away from the atoll.
Not only do the seventh wavers demonstrate the emphatic off-island migra-
tion of large numbers of Namoluk people, but they also illustrate a fundamental
shift in the reasons for such movement. Most of this group finished their school-
ing or graduated from high school in the mid- to late 1980s, by which time there
were fewer funds available to attend college in the United States and fewer jobs
available in Wééné’s wage economy. Fortuitously, these changed conditions coin-
cided with the implementation of the Compact of Free Association in November
1986, which allowed FSM citizens open access to the United States and its territo-
ries. Almost from that moment onward, emigration accelerated from the FSM,
especially to Guam, where the economy was booming.
Relatively few seventh wavers have completed a college degree, if they’ve even
gone to college at all. Part of the reason for this is that Pell and other grants be-
came scarcer due to changes in the U.S. economy and related policies, but also
many saw that several years of college education did not necessarily lead to a
cushy job back on Wééné for those a few years their senior. Several men from this
group got vocational Job Corps training in the United States and parlayed that
into wage work there. Some seventh wavers went to the States to attend college,
did so for a year or so, and then dropped out to work full-time. A lot of them
have since married and had children and have remained outside Chuuk State,
and it seems highly unlikely that they will return to school. On the other hand,
five men and a woman from this wave finished baccalaureate degrees, and three
of these men plus the one woman went on to earn master’s degrees.
Those Namoluk people born after 1971—what would be the eighth, ninth,
and tenth waves—have grown up in a very different world from that of their
older siblings and their parents. A great number of them spent their childhood
on Wééné or Guam, rather than on the atoll, because their parents were em-
ployed there in the wage economy. Whereas some of these children were fostered
or adopted by grandparents or aunts and uncles and grew up and went to school
back home, most of them became accustomed to the “bright lights” and found
the atoll boring when they visited for any length of time. In more recent years, a
substantial number of new chon Namoluk have been born away from their home
island—in the hospital on Wééné, at Guam Memorial Hospital, or still farther
afield in the United States. Some of these younger Namoluk people, born and
 Colonizing Merika 53

TABLE 3.1—Number and Percent of

Namoluk De Jure Population by Location and Year

Date of Namoluk Census

1/1/1971 1/19/1976 4/1995 7/13/2001
Location No. % No. % No. % No. %
Namoluk 272 70.5 224 48.4 312 40.9 337 38.8
Wééné 69 17.9 132 28.5 204 26.7 213 24.5
Guam 4 1.0 1 0.2 121 15.9 155 17.8
U.S. Mainland 3 0.8 20 4.3 27 3.5 52 6.0
Hawai’i 1 0.25 3 0.7 7 0.9 45 5.2
Other Chuuk State 28 7.25 65 14.0 54 7.1 37 4.2
Other Micronesia 9 2.3 17 3.7 36 4.7 30 3.5
Other Countries 0 0 1 0.2 2 0.3 0 0
TOTAL 386 100 463 100 763 100 869 100

raised abroad, have never seen their native (is)land. But even those who have
been to the atoll, or who have lived there for awhile as young children, are much
more likely to seek schooling, jobs, adventure, and residence outside the FSM.
They are part of the move to “colonize” America, and they can do this relatively
easily because the Compact of Free Association between the FSM and the USA al-
lows FSM citizens to enter the U.S. freely without a visa and to work there with-
out a green card or other restrictions.

COLONIZING MERIKA
Less than thirty-five years ago, exceedingly few chon Namoluk had visited or lived
in the United States, including the U.S. Territory of Guam. Not until the
mid–1960s did a Namoluk person first reside on the U.S. mainland for an ex-
tended period (while attending his last two years of college in Illinois), although
by that time perhaps half a dozen men from the atoll had taken some college
classes on Guam. Still, when I completed my first census of the island’s de jure
population in early 1970, only four chon Namoluk were located on Guam and in
the United States, all but one for schooling. At the beginning of 1971, there were
still only eight Namoluk people—just 2 percent of the population—in these
places (see Table 3.1). All of that was soon to change.
The number of chon Namoluk located in the United States and its territories
tripled from 1971 to 1976, although the actual number of people involved back
then was still quite small (only two dozen in 1976). During the next two decades,
54 3. Journeyings

however, those who journeyed from Namoluk to America and its possessions
grew dramatically, so that there were 155 of them—fully one-fifth of the atoll’s
citizens—by April 1995 (see Table 3.1). At that time, the primary site Namoluk
people had “colonized” was Guam, which is where close to 80 percent of these
migrants were then located. Although Guam has remained an important place
for chon Namoluk to settle, it also has served as a stepping-stone to migration far-
ther away—to Hawai’i and the U.S. mainland. Many of these migrants to Hawai’i
and the mainland had lived for awhile on Guam, gaining important firsthand ex-
perience with American culture and institutions and improving their English-
language skills in the process.
From the beginning of this migration to “Merika,” a few people decided to cast
their lot with the new world that had opened up before them. Marriage to an
American provided one way for survival, especially if one wasn’t enrolled in
school. Quite a number of such marriages have occurred over the years, although
most have ended in divorce because of fundamental differences in expectations
about kinship obligations, spousal relationships, and child-rearing practices.
Another means to survive, for those who decided to remain in the United States,
was to enlist in the armed forces.8 A half-dozen Namoluk men have followed this
path.
In the early 1970s, one of them, Steemer, attended a prestigious private high
school located on the Big Island of Hawai’i on a scholarship, after which he
briefly enrolled at the University of Hawai’i before he gained admission to the
California Maritime Academy (CMA). Approximately two years into his college
studies at CMA, this man succumbed to a recruiter’s siren song and decided to
“join the Navy and see the world.” He ended up making the Navy a career, rising
through the noncommissioned ranks, serving for twenty years, including partici-
pation in the 1991 Gulf War. During this time, he married an American wife, by
whom he fathered a child; divorced; and married another American, by whom he
had another child and from whom he is also divorced. Now retired from the
Navy, until recently he worked for a private firm in Virginia that handles Navy
contracts. From his departure for high school, he did not return to Chuuk—let
alone Namoluk—for twenty-three years, finally going back for a visit in 1994. As
with a couple of others who’ve been away from Namoluk for a very long time, he
found that he could still understand Mortlockese when spoken to, but that re-
sponding in his own language was difficult, at least at first.
This has become quite common among those chon Namoluk who’ve been
away for a long time. Internet chat rooms such as “coconutchat” have provided
one venue for refreshing language skills, as the following e-mail passage that I re-
ceived that mixes Chuukese and English indicates: “Now I am a pro, I could speak
Chuukese language just as good as they are. . . heheheheh. By the way do you still
know how to speak Chuukese language or do you forget it too? Iwe eli epwele
pwal ina mo chok pun iei akan tam ach poraus nge I have to go and check on who
is in the chatroom today so I would keep up with what’s going on on the islands.
 Bad Trips: Beer and Turkey Tails 55

Take care and I will fos ngonuk again next time” (e-mail from Kaylee, 28
December 2000; pseudonym substituted). In 2001, Steemer moved to Guam for
some months, and in 2002 he married a woman from Chuuk whom he had met
on the Internet. They have taken up residence on Pohnpei, where she is em-
ployed.
Another Namoluk man—Jasper—who went to Oregon for college in the late
1970s, also dropped out of school to join the Navy. Like Steemer, he fought in the
1991 Gulf War as an enlisted man aboard an aircraft carrier, but unlike his age-
mate, he chose to leave the Navy after four years. Instead of returning home,
however, he moved back to Oregon, resumed college, earned his BA degree,
found a job, and recently married a fellow Mortlockese who has lived in Portland
for eighteen years. Jasper sponsored or attracted a number of other chon
Namoluk to the Portland-Salem area, and along with a multitude of other
Mortlockese and Chuukese who reside there in 2003, they have established their
own churches and social networks as they have begun to put down deep roots in
the Pacific Northwest (see Chapter 6). Jasper has not been back to Namoluk since
he left there in 1976, although he has made one or two short visits to Wééné over
the years.
By July 2001, the number of chon Namoluk in Guam and the fifty states ex-
ceeded those on Wééné and elsewhere in Chuuk State for the first time, and this
migration outside of Chuuk State is a growing trend. The implications of this for
individual and group identity will be taken up in detail in subsequent chapters.
Before doing so, however, we will explore another side of the journeyings of
Namoluk people away from their home island—a side that doesn’t have happy
endings. These “bad trips” are caught up in broader processes of modernization
that characterize the sites to which chon Namoluk have relocated.

BAD TRIPS: BEER AND TURKEY TAILS

In their long encounter with the outside world Namoluk people have been ex-
posed to changes in diet, modes of transportation, levels of physical fitness and
stress, and previously unavailable psychoactive substances. These lifestyle
changes—taken singly and in combination—have produced new ways of dying,
to accompany the infectious diseases and other sorrows that long have afflicted
island peoples. Dietary changes are among the more dramatic alterations in
lifestyle that have contributed to this process.
Before outside trade goods began to affect life on the atoll in the early twenti-
eth century, chon Namoluk consumed a typical Pacific Islands diet of “fruits and
roots,” accompanied by many kinds of fish and other seafood products, such as
clams, octopus, and spiny lobster. The main fruits were coconut, breadfruit, and
banana, and the major root crop was taro in several varieties. Supplemented by
the occasional consumption of pork, chicken, and sweet potato, this diet pro-
vided all of the major nutrients necessary for healthy growth and development.
56 3. Journeyings

Fatty foods—those that were meyi iwi, “greasy”—were relatively rare and highly
prized. Because everyone did hard physical labor in food production and walked,
swam, and paddled to get around the atoll, there was little, if any, obesity.
During the Japanese colonial era between the two world wars, polished rice
and tinned fish entered and became staples of the Namoluk diet, and these are
mainstays of contemporary meals. Nowadays, the “Calrose” rice comes from
California’s central valley, and the canned mackerel is caught in Micronesian wa-
ters, processed in Japan or Taiwan, and shipped back to line the shelves of
Wééné’s numerous stores where it sells for approximately a dollar a can. From a
dietary point of view, these two new items are inferior to the foodstuffs they re-
place (breadfruit, taro, and fresh fish), but by themselves they aren’t primarily
responsible for the diet-related health problems that now beset chon Namoluk
and other Micronesian peoples. Those problems derive from the heavy consump-
tion of high-fat foods and much greater amounts of sugar and salt.
During the 1960s, Namoluk people, especially those in the urban center, began
to consume more fatty meats, and this trend has continued and increased as the
standard of living has risen during the latter forty years of the twentieth century.
Canned corned beef; Spam; and similar high-salt, -fat, and -cholesterol tinned
meats now compete with frozen beef, chicken, and pork for the consumer’s dol-
lar. Often these foods are fried, absorbing still more fat as they are cooked. When
Namoluk people settle on Guam, Hawai’i, or the U.S. mainland, they seek out
and are right at home in America’s fast food restaurants, such as McDonald’s or
Kentucky Fried Chicken (see Chapter 6). However, a few introduced foods that
are sought by Micronesians, including chon Namoluk, truly set them apart. The
most notable of these is turkey tails.
By the 1960s, U.S. exporters already had discovered that they could sell what
Americans deem less-desirable, fatty cuts of beef and pork to the islanders, and
that Micronesians would pay top dollar for these. When, precisely, one of these
exporters also discovered that Micronesians would pay good money for frozen
turkey tails is not known, although it happened after the ready availability of
frozen meats that began in the late 1960s on Wééné. In any case, turkey tails,
those wonderful globlets of pure turkey fat—the ultimate “greasy” food—have
been a part of Chuuk’s cuisine for almost two generations.9 Those in Merika pe-
riodically buy and eat them because, as one woman told me on the phone, “they
remind me of back home.” Most people cook these delicacies, but some actually
make “sashimi” from the raw tails, such is the lust for fatty foods. Unfortunately,
there is a price to be paid for this aside from the money at the supermarket.
During the past four decades, Micronesian people have undergone the “epi-
demiological transition.” This technical phrase describes a major change in what
people die from—the causes of death. Specifically, the shift is from infectious dis-
eases as the primary cause to chronic, noncommunicable diseases, such as cancer,
heart attacks, and non-insulin dependent diabetes mellitus (NIDDM).10 A diet
high in fat, sugar, and salt is a major risk factor that contributes to these “diseases
 Bad Trips: Beer and Turkey Tails 57

of modernization.” Such a diet and a lack of exercise typically produce excessive

weight gain. The resultant obesity symbolizes the health problems that trigger
new ways of dying. Chon Namoluk and other Micronesians have come to call
these multiple new threats to their well-being “turkey tail disease.”
Used in this generic sense, “turkey tail disease” already has taken a toll on
Namoluk’s population. Two-thirds of the deaths during the past thirty years11
recorded for the group born between 1932 and 1971 have come from causes,
many of which can be thought of as “turkey tail disease.” For example, two men
and a woman died in their early fifties from NIDDM,12 and two other men—
both also in their fifties—died of heart attacks. But the toll from noncommuni-
cable diseases is exacerbated—especially for men—by sometimes heavy beer
drinking and by regular cigarette smoking. Consumed to excess, alcoholic bever-
ages are well-known contributors to heart disease and some cancers (not to men-
tion obesity), and tobacco use also increases the likelihood that one will die of a
heart attack, stroke, lung cancer, or other respiratory ailment such as emphy-
sema. Drunkenness, and its associated disorientation, also significantly raises
people’s risk of death from road traffic crashes, brawls, and accidents.
When I look over my Namoluk data, it is striking that premature deaths have
overwhelmingly affected males. A major reason for this disparity is that men are
at much greater risk for alcohol-related and tobacco-related harms than are
women, few of whom drink or smoke. At the end of 1971, Namoluk’s population
had 183 males and 145 females who were born between 1932 and 1971. Thirty
years later, at the time of my July 2001 census, twenty-seven (15 percent) of these
males had died, whereas only four (2.5 percent) of their female counterparts were
deceased. Fully a third of the male deaths were alcohol-related, as was one of the
three female deaths (she was killed in a drunk-driving crash on Guam). With a
single exception, these were all people in their twenties and thirties. The deaths of
three more men who died in their fifties were almost assuredly a consequence of
heavy smoking.
Before foreign contact in the nineteenth century, and for much of the twenti-
eth century, Namoluk people had little or no access to alcoholic beverages and to-
bacco. As with other Pacific Islanders, they did not manufacture alcoholic bever-
ages traditionally, and colonially imposed prohibition laws kept most Namoluk
people from experiencing the pleasures and sorrows of drink until the early
1960s. When drinking became legal in Chuuk approximately forty years ago,
commercially manufactured alcoholic beverages were available in the urban cen-
ter, but only very rarely did these make their way to such outer islands as
Namoluk. Young men on the atoll would occasionally brew a pot of “yeast,” but
the quantity and the ethanol content was always limited. But as more Namoluk
men frequented and then moved to the developing urban center on Wééné be-
ginning in the 1960s, more of them experimented with alcohol. Binge drinking
together in groups also occurred among some of the young men who went to the
United States in the 1970s for college, and to Guam and the United States in the
58 3. Journeyings

1980s and 1990s in search of jobs. The drinking style was “drink to get drunk,”
and when money was available, men would often go on group binges that lasted
two or three days.13
Beer—which is the overwhelming beverage of choice among Micronesian
men—is related to Namoluk deaths in a variety of ways. Of the nine Namoluk
men whose deaths can be linked to alcohol,14 two were killed in drunk-driving
crashes (at ages 23 and 34), two died in other alcohol-related accidents (at ages 23
and 33),15 two were murdered by others who had been drinking (at ages 26 and
27), two died of an alcohol overdose (at ages 31 and 45), and one died from alco-
holic cirrhosis (at age 51). As mentioned above, the sole alcohol-related woman’s
death (at age 31) was an unfortunate passenger in a car crash where the male
driver was heavily intoxicated. The “bad trips” and events that precipitated all ten
of these deaths happened to people who had journeyed away from Namoluk: five
occurred on Wééné, three on Guam, one in outer island Yap State, and one on the
U.S. mainland. Alcohol abuse—either by the victim or by someone else—is a new
way of dying for chon Namoluk.

VENTURING
Kenneth and Micky were in their seventies, and until the 1990s neither had ever
traveled outside of Chuuk State. Two of their five sons reside in Oregon, and
when one son and his American wife sent them plane tickets begging them to
come and visit their grandchildren whom they had never met, they decided to go.
Hopping through Micronesia on the Island Hopper, they stayed but briefly in
Honolulu and then continued on to Portland, where they were met by their fam-
ily. Kenneth made everyone laugh when he told them he looked down from the
jet between Chuuk and Pohnpei, after they had reached cruising altitude, and saw
snow spread out below them. “That wasn’t snow,” said their son Kurt, “those were
just fluffy clouds.” But Kurt took his father to Mt. Hood a few days later, and the
old man did get to see and feel snow. Best of all, once he did so, he could return to
the less frigid temperatures of the Willamette Valley, relishing the experience and
the stories he would tell his other grandchildren when he got back home to
Namoluk.
Kurt and his wife, Sally, resided at the end of a cul-de-sac in a development of
pleasant tract homes, all of which looked much alike. A few days after the old
folks arrived, Kurt and Sally left for work, and Kenneth and Micky decided they
would go out for a walk in the neighborhood. When they reached the connecting
street, they noted a bright red car parked at the corner, which they agreed would
provide them with a good marker to find their way back. They walked around for
forty-five minutes or so, enjoying the sights, the fresh air, and the chance to
stretch their limbs. Eventually, Micky said she was getting a bit tired, and they
agreed it was time to return home. They walked and looked, and looked and
walked, but the red car was nowhere to be seen. Getting somewhat worried, they
 Venturing 59

continued to search for the right street, until it became clear that they were thor-
oughly lost. At that point, Micky began to cry. Soon thereafter, a friend of Kurt
and Sally’s happened by in her car. When she saw Micky weeping, she slammed
on the brakes and asked what was wrong. That did little good because neither
Kenneth nor Micky spoke English. The friend quickly concluded that they were
lost, urged them into her car, and took them safely back to their son’s house.
As this brief episode indicates, by 2002 Namoluk people—even Namoluk’s
elders—have ventured abroad as never before, and as later chapters will show,
some have gotten lost in the process. This venturing beyond the reef raises the
question of the conditions back on the atoll: Who remains there? What is life like
for those who have stayed at home or have returned home? The next chapter de-
scribes everyday life on the atoll in 2002 for those who have remained there or
who have returned home after living elsewhere. Specific things that have changed
or that have stayed the same from 1969 to 2002 will be highlighted.

Notes
1. All twenty-four men and all twenty women of the second wave had died by July
2001.
2. Only four third-wave men and five women remained alive in July 2001.
3. Eight of the men and one woman in the fourth wave were deceased by July 2001.
4. Medex is the name given to graduates of a mid-level practitioner training program,
similar to a physician assistant or a health officer. To expand and upgrade the skills of
nurses and health assistants in the FSM and RMI, the Medex training program com-
menced in the mid- to late 1970s. The program was a collaboration between the World
Health Organization (WHO) and the University of Hawai’i (WHO 2001). The program in
Chuuk included two chon Namoluk among its trainees.
5. Ten fifth-wave men and one woman were deceased in July 2001.
6. Three sixth-wave men had died by July 2001, but all of the women were still alive
then. One more man from this wave died in the spring of 2003.
7. At the time of my July 2001 census, six of the seventy-two males were dead, as was
one of the forty-eight females. Half of the males died in their first year, whereas the other
three, plus the woman, met untimely deaths in their twenties and early thirties. Their
deaths—as with many members of the fifth and sixth waves—are part of a dark undertow
associated with migration off the atoll that is discussed in more detail below.
8. An article in the Santa Rosa, California, Press Democrat (3 April 2003, p. A6) stated
that “More than 37,000 noncitizens serve in the military; their numbers have grown about
30 percent since 2000.” In a discussion on the listserv of the Association for Social
Anthropology in Oceania (ASAO), commentators noted the significance of service in the
British Army by Fijians, in the U.S. armed forces (especially the Marines) by American
Sāmoans, and in the New Zealand military by men from the former New Zealand colony
of Western Sāmoa (now just called Sāmoa). During this online discussion, participants
mentioned Palauans from the Southwest Islands, chon Chuuk and Pohnpeians who have
served in the U.S. military, and Craig Severance raised the question of whether Carolinians
may have “seen this as an avenue of mobility, and access to [the] GI Bill.”
60 3. Journeyings

9. E-mail correspondence with anthropological colleagues confirms that turkey tails

are consumed throughout the FSM, in the RMI, and in the Republic of Palau (personal
communication with Laurence M. Carucci, Suzanne Falgout, Karen Nero, and Alice
Oleson, January 2002).
10. This list of diseases now also includes HIV/AIDS. One Namoluk man perished
from AIDS during the 1990s when in his late thirties.
11. Twenty males and three females.
12. Quite a few chon Namoluk have been diagnosed with and are being treated for
NIDDM, and access to proper healthcare for this disease has been a factor motivating mi-
gration for several of them. Another Namoluk man, age 66, died in early 2003 of NIDDM.
13. I have written extensively elsewhere about patterns of drinking in Chuuk State
(e.g., Marshall 1975b, 1979a, 1990a, 1990b, 1990c; Marshall and Marshall 1990). As with
all human behavior, the manner of drinking and how Chuukese men behave when intoxi-
cated have changed over the years, and nowadays some have tempered the more rowdy
and violent aspects of “weekend warfare,” especially when drinking in the United States.
14. A tenth man from Namoluk, born in 1931 just ahead of the group under discus-
sion, died in 1970 of an alcohol overdose at age 39.
15. While inebriated, one was struck and killed almost instantly by a locomotive in
Florida in 1993, and the other was paralyzed completely by a several-story fall from a bal-
cony while drinking on Guam in 1990. The second man lived for five more years before
succumbing eventually to his injuries and debilitation.
 4
Namoluk People, 2002

We, the people of Namoluk, the succeeding heirs and

guardians of the land of our ancestors by the blessings of
the Almighty God, do hereby pledge in these words our
solemn wish to make a more perfect community of peace
and harmony for all our peoples throughout the genera-
tions. . . .

With this Constitution, we affirm our desire to respect

and uphold our traditions and customs, protect and pro-
mote our natural heritage and the social bonds we have as
a people, now and forever.

Preamble to Namoluk Constitution 1991

GETTING THE LEAD OUT

The new boat with its 25-horsepower outboard motor was his pride and joy.
Only the second motorboat on the atoll, he had saved his money for a long time
before commissioning one of Chuuk’s best-known boatbuilders to construct the
wooden hull. And the motor! A brand new Johnson that had cost him a pretty
penny. But there it was!
Although a boat and motor cost considerably more than a waafatil or
waaserik, a boat connoted prestige, modernity, and the power of the purse. A
man curious about the world around him and the world writ large, an innovator
who had brought the first personal radio to the atoll and the only one on the is-

61
62 4. Namoluk People, 2002

land who owned and knew how to use a throw net, Sergio was immensely pleased
with his new boat. One major advantage that motorboats have over canoes is that
the former can be used to go out trolling for tuna and other delicious big fish of
the open sea even when there is no wind. And Sergio’s boat was being used suc-
cessfully to bring home takou, angarap, póllai, serau, and ichich on almost a daily
basis. Of course, this took quite a bit of gasoline, and gasoline was a limited and
prized commodity on Namoluk. It was imported in 55-gallon drums whenever
the field-trip ship came, and occasionally the smaller mission boats would carry a
drum. The boat’s heavy use for fishing and trips across the lagoon to the unin-
habited islets eventually meant that the engine began to act up for a lack of main-
tenance. In those early days of motorboat use men like Sergio were still gaining a
familiarity with how this new technology worked and what one had to do to keep
it going.
Somehow, in an attempt to clean the motor, the threads for the spark plug
were damaged. The plug began to leak oil around its base, and matters quickly
got worse. The motor was not producing full power, and it didn’t seem safe to
take the boat out in the open ocean until it could be fixed. But Sergio the innova-
tor hit upon an idea: he would repair the spark plug threads by melting some lead
fishing sinkers, carefully “puttying” the lead into the hole for the plug, and then
screwing in the plug before the lead fully hardened. Yes, that would solve the
problem!
The deed was done, the boat was launched, and I was asked to accompany him
on a test run across the lagoon. The motor roared, the boat zipped away from
shore at full throttle, and Sergio had a grin on his face from ear to ear. We
jounced across the lagoon’s small waves for about 500 yards when there was a
loud, “Pop!” Looking aft, Sergio and I both watched the spark plug describe a
perfect arc as it blew out of the engine head and dropped into the depths below. It
was an ignominious paddle back to shore.
In the years since the first chon Namoluk purchased a motorboat and brought
it to the island in October 1970, life on the atoll has been transformed in a host of
ways. By 2002, new ideas, new products, new government, and new opportunities
to migrate all contributed to changing day-to-day life. But other, deeper rhythms
continued to frame these innovations, overpowering some, tempering others,
and embracing a few. This chapter provides a glimpse of what life on Namoluk
was like at the beginning of the twenty-first century.

THE MOTORBOAT REVOLUTION

Until October of 1970, paddling canoes—waafatil—and sailing canoes—
waaserik—were the atoll’s sole means of transportation. These sleek and ingen-
iously designed craft were still made of local materials, with only the woven pan-
danus sails of old replaced by imported sail cloth or canvas. The first man to buy
and bring an outboard motorboat to Namoluk—Malcolm—inaugurated a “mo-
 The Motorboat Revolution 63

Waaserik Crossing Namoluk’s Lagoon, Bound for Amwes, January 1970

torboat revolution”1 that was complete in less than a generation. In just fifteen
years the fleet grew to thirteen boats. Of the nine waaserik that sailed out to troll
for tuna when I first lived on Namoluk, eight were completely gone by the time of
my visit to the atoll in 1995. All that remained were their rotting hulls lying about
near the old canoe houses, monuments to a hallowed past. No Namoluk man in
1995 could rightfully call himself a palu, “navigator,” nor had anyone managed to
learn canoe-building skills before the old men who had this mastery died, their
knowledge dying with them.
Micronesian sailing canoes were technological masterpieces—they embodied
the epitome of a nautical people’s oneness with the sea. Fast, of shallow draft for
skimming over submerged reefs, seaworthy, sailing canoes carried Micronesian
peoples to their islands in voyages of initial settlement. Canoes were critical to the
maintenance of interisland trade connections, visits among kin, and food pro-
curement from open ocean trolling and visits to uninhabited islands and reefs.
Among Micronesian atoll dwellers, the sea was a man’s domain, and sailing ca-
noes both symbolized and were vehicles of masculinity. They encoded skill, bold-
ness, strength, and adventure. By comparison, a motorboat is a sorry substitute.
And yet today on Namoluk it is motorboats all the way down. Why should this
be? Motorboats may not symbolize masculinity in the same way as waaserik did,
but they do represent modernity and success in a monetized world. It takes
money and the savvy to earn it to buy a boat and a motor. Outboards can be op-
64 4. Namoluk People, 2002

erated whether or not there is a wind, and they can carry somewhat larger loads
than all but the largest sailing canoes. Although Micronesian sailing canoes
amazed the first Europeans who saw them with their speed, motorboats are faster
still. Islanders correctly saw them as the wave of the future.
And yet outboard motorboats have some serious drawbacks. Whereas sailing
canoes were designed and built on islands like Namoluk by local men and out of
local materials, motorboats are of foreign design and made of imported materi-
als. Although Namoluk’s first motorboats were wooden and crafted by boat-
builders in Chuuk Lagoon, the boats in use today have fiberglass hulls that are
molded overseas and shipped to stores on Chuuk. The outboard motors are man-
ufactured in the United States or Japan, and when parts are needed they, too,
must be imported. But the biggest weakness of the motorboat revolution is the
dependency it has fostered on outside energy resources. Gasoline and oil must be
brought to Chuuk in large tankers and then sent out to places like Namoluk in
55-gallon drums. The price of fossil fuels is fixed by market forces far beyond the
control of Micronesian people, so once canoes have been forsaken, as on
Namoluk, motorboat owners are at the mercy of transnational oil companies
that exist only to make profits for their shareholders. And few, if any,
Micronesians hold shares in Texaco, Mobil, or Chevron.
Belatedly, thoughtful sailors of Micronesia’s younger generations realize that
they have lost—or nearly lost—a thing that helped to distinguish them as a peo-

Motorboat on Namoluk, April 1995

 Typhoon Pamela: More Winds of Change 65

ple. Aware of the revival in open ocean voyaging that has followed the riveting
1976 journey of the Hōkūle’a from Hawai’i to Tahiti (Finney 1979), Micronesians
also have begun programs to resurrect sailing canoes and the star compass navi-
gational techniques of their ancestors. Fortunately, in the Western Islands of
Chuuk State and the outer islands of Yap State the requisite knowledge has sur-
vived, so the possibility of reintroducing waaserik to Namoluk is still there.
Whether through the atoll’s present and historical kinship ties to Polowat, or
through a recent program begun through the Chuuk Campus of the College of
Micronesia, it remains to be seen whether chon Namoluk may yet resurrect sail-
ing canoes. Pukueu would be elated if they did.

TYPHOON PAMELA: MORE WINDS OF CHANGE

Just as the destruction caused by Typhoon Phyllis in 1958 spurred changes on
Namoluk and led to new houses, public buildings, and the physical layout of the
community, another major typhoon—Pamela—that struck in May 1976 was a
literal force for change. After developing northeast of Chuuk on May 13th, the
storm grew in intensity as it moved southwestward during the next two days.
After curving back southeast of Chuuk in the vicinity of the Lower Mortlocks,
Typhoon Pamela’s winds reached full typhoon velocity of 75 mph as it passed be-
tween Namoluk and Losap on May 16th, after which it went on to hit Guam on
May 21st.
All eleven communities in the Upper and Lower Mortlocks were damaged by
Pamela, but not all to the same extent (see Marshall 1979b for details). Namoluk
was among the six communities that suffered especially severe destruction—no-
tably from the storm surge that pushed high waves ahead of the typhoon itself.
Along with Ettal and Kuttu, Namoluk was submerged completely by ocean waves
that swept across the islet for fifteen to eighteen hours. The salt water entered the
taro swamps and killed all of the taro plants, and a high percentage of breadfruit,
coconut, and banana trees perished outright from the combination of salt, wind,
and wave. Equally devastating was the substantial damage to the atoll’s reefs and
reef organisms, many of which serve as a regular food source. Nearly all trees
were denuded of vegetation, knocked down or snapped off in the typhoon, but
the most startling rearrangements of the landscape were a result of wave action.
Tons of coral rubble and sand were carried ashore to a depth of several feet on the
ocean side of the islet. Much of this ended up in the taro swamp, requiring that it
be re-excavated before it could again be planted after rain eventually neutralized
the salt that taro plants cannot tolerate. A huge sandbar was deposited along a
stretch of the outer reef shelf, comprised of material that had once been part of
Namoluk Islet. And last, but certainly not least, a new islet was created by the
storm. The long narrow tip of Amwes that points toward Namoluk Islet was cut
across by waves, leaving a smallish new islet that local wags immediately named
“Paméla.”2
66 4. Namoluk People, 2002

Damage Caused by Typhoon Pamela on Namoluk, May 1976

Typhoon Pamela knocked many houses off their foundations or badly dam-
aged their roofs (ironically, a majority of these houses were built following
Typhoon Phyllis eighteen years earlier). In the aftermath of the typhoon a relief
effort was mounted by the USTTPI government and the International Red Cross
for the affected communities. As a member of the initial damage assessment
team, I visited all eleven communities in the Mortlocks—including Namoluk—
very soon after the storm abated, and I made a second voyage in a similar capac-
ity six weeks later. Between May 22 and July 7, 1976, Namoluk received 17,125
pounds of rice, 16,466 pounds of flour, and 3,464 pounds of canned meat
(mostly chicken with some corned beef and a small amount of mackerel) to sup-
port the then-resident population of about 275 people. The community also re-
ceived tools, lumber and plywood, metal roofing, tents, cooking pots, utensils,
plastic water jugs, and used clothing to help them begin to reconstruct their lives.
Pamela’s winds and waves altered the atoll’s physical appearance, as had
Typhoon Phyllis in an earlier time. But perhaps more than Phyllis, Pamela accel-
erated processes already in train that further altered both Namoluk’s infrastruc-
ture and its social structure. As a result, by 2002 a number of things on the island
looked very different from before.
 Changes in Infrastructure 67

CHANGES IN INFRASTRUCTURE
Second Homes
One thing that Typhoon Pamela demonstrated to chon Namoluk was that cement
houses withstood such storms much better than wooden ones. Consequently,
even though not everyone could afford to build a more substantial dwelling post-
typhoon, many people did or resolved to do so in the future once they had the
money. Thus Pamela stimulated further migration to Wééné as men went in
search of wage work so they could purchase cement, rebar, lumber, and the other
materials necessary to build a stronger house. Many of these migrants, then in
their thirties, forties, and early fifties, worked for a year or two in Chuuk and then
returned to the atoll. But others—particularly young men and women in their
twenties or early thirties who did not qualify for high school or did not have the
resources for postsecondary training once they graduated from high school—
found the faster pace of life and the things money could buy on Wééné more to
their liking, so they took jobs there and stayed.
While Pamela’s devastation to Namoluk’s housing triggered construction of
larger and more substantial homes in the late 1970s and early 1980s, the contin-
ued emigration of chon Namoluk for education and employment produced yet
another interesting consequence “back home.” By the mid- to late 1980s, an ever-
growing number of Namoluk people had found wage work in town and in the
new FSM government headquarters on Pohnpei. By then a small number of
Namoluk citizens also had settled in such places as Saipan, Guam, Yap, Palau,
Majuro, and the U.S. mainland. Some of these salaried workers decided to erect
new homes back on the atoll too, even though they themselves would not live in
them regularly.
Most such homes, built from the mid–1980s onward, are of cement and have
numerous amenities not found on Namoluk before. Several have two stories,
with cement staircases to the upper floor. Most have glass louvered windows,
linoleum floors, a place to cook inside the house, and consumer goods never be-
fore seen on the island. Some people on the atoll own private radio transceivers,
allowing them to communicate directly with kin on Wééné. A couple of these
homes boast solar panels with battery arrays to run lights and an assortment of
small D/C electric appliances.
Many of the new houses built by nonresident chon Namoluk are occupied by
the owner’s elderly parents or by a sibling and her or his family who have re-
mained on the atoll. These homes mark social status, are a physical symbol of
claim on and commitment to the island, and are a place to stay when those who
paid for them go home for a visit. Amazingly, a few of these “fancy” houses lie va-
cant for much of the year, serving only as vacation homes for their owners when
they come back for a short visit.
68 4. Namoluk People, 2002

Failed Projects
Two substantial efforts to alter the physical landscape of Namoluk during the
1980s and 1990s ended in failure, each for different reasons. The first of these was
the reconstruction of a cement and coral rock seawall along a major portion of
the lagoon shore of Namoluk Islet that had been erected as a community devel-
opment project just a few years before Typhoon Pamela hit. The purpose of the
seawall was to prevent erosion of the land there, although Typhoon Pamela de-
molished the wall and ate the land anyway. But the result of this effort to control
nature—as so often happens in human affairs—was an unintended consequence:
what had always been a wide, sandy beach that sloped gently into the lagoon was
turned into a “non-beach” with a rocky bottom. The seawall and its post-typhoon
replacement altered wave and current patterns, which then swept away the lovely
sandy beach on which generations of Namoluk children had romped.
The second major effort to alter the landscape collapsed before it was finished.
In the early 1990s, $100,000 out of what was to be a $300,000 government project
was appropriated to build a small airstrip on Amwes. In order to orient the strip
correctly to the prevailing winds, the consulting engineer said that it would have
to cut diagonally across the islet, right through the old, overgrown taro swamp.
Not only were the taro plots highly prized, but the middle part of the islet also
harbored numerous giant old breadfruit trees, coconut palms, and other mwéngé.
Almost all of the $100,000 was paid to landowners to free their property for the
airstrip. Many trees were felled, and the site was partially cleared. Then, facing a
combination of bickering over land rights and a lack of additional financial ap-
propriations, the project was put on hold in late 1994 and has languished ever
since. Moreover, the small airline that served the outer islands of Chuuk State
during the 1990s, and which would have used the airstrip, has ceased operation,
and no replacement is in sight. By 2002, the scar from the clearing that occurred
had finally begun to heal.

CHANGES IN SOCIAL STRUCTURE

The physical structures built in Namoluk’s recent housing boom—including the
local variants of “trophy houses”—reveal a profound shift in the community’s
social structure. Namoluk today is ever more affected by social class differences,
resulting in a split between the haves and the have-nots. This class division comes
to a society that was profoundly egalitarian as recently as the 1960s.
Before large numbers of chon Namoluk gained access to a high school educa-
tion, and before they began to emigrate to paid work in the district center and
destinations beyond, the main economic difference among the island’s people
was in the amount of land and related resources they controlled. Kin obligations
and the myriad crosscutting ties among the atoll’s citizens muted even these dif-
ferences. When I first arrived on Namoluk in 1969, there was only a handful of
 Changes in Social Structure 69

cement houses, and most people continued to occupy the wooden homes erected
as part of the reconstruction following Typhoon Phyllis a decade before. A
household survey of material possessions that I conducted at that time showed
relatively few differences in what various people owned, although those with
salaried jobs as teachers, health aide, and agriculture agent were somewhat better
off than most. Still, the similarities in accommodation and possessions were far
more striking than any variability. This is no longer the case.
The Namoluk community in 2002 is crosscut by social class differences. These
are based primarily upon differences in monetary wealth that result, in turn,
mainly from greater or lesser educational achievement. Nearly all of those in
what I call Namoluk’s new elite have a stable wage job in a skilled occupation, and
most of them have at least an associate’s degree or its equivalent in vocational
training. With very few exceptions, these men and women do not reside on the
atoll, even if they have built a nice new house there. With even fewer exceptions,
these people see themselves as modern, forward-looking, even cosmopolitan is-
land citizens. Even though they cling tenaciously—even fervently—to their
Namoluk identity (and to their land rights on the atoll), they see themselves as
part of other emergent, more encompassing identities as well. In later chapters
we will explore these nested identities in greater detail.
As is true the world over, social class differences often become self-perpetuat-
ing, and the Namoluk situation seems no different. When once the atoll’s school
led all of its competitors in Chuuk State in the number of its students who passed
the high school qualifying examination, by 2002 this was no longer the case.
Indeed, to the consternation of the former principal and several former teachers,
Namoluk elementary school’s eighth-grade graduates had fallen to near the bot-
tom of the pack in qualifying for high school.3 But a moment’s reflection helps
explain the major reason for this: Namoluk experienced a “brain drain.” During
the past thirty-five years, the atoll’s most able young people went on to high
school and then postsecondary training in goodly numbers. With a few excep-
tions who took teaching jobs back home, these were precisely those people who
led the migration to Wééné and other destinations. As they completed their
training, found jobs, married, and had children, most of their children attended
school where their parents lived.
Beyond this, during the 1980s and 1990s, there was a proliferation of new
private, church-based schools on Wééné. These schools had a reputation for of-
fering a more rigorous education than the public schools, but they charged tu-
ition for each student. The new elite had the money to send their children to
these private schools, and they did so. Namoluk’s have-nots continued to send
their kids to the free public schools, whether on the atoll or in town. As the mi-
gration destinations of chon Namoluk shifted to Guam in the early– to
mid–1990s, and then to Hawai’i and the U.S. mainland in the late 1990s and
early 2000s, it was especially the children of Namoluk’s elite who entered these
U.S. public schools.
70 4. Namoluk People, 2002

CONTINUITIES
The sun, the sea, the cycle of plants—natural rhythms continue to shape, even
dominate, the daily round on Namoluk. These rhythms echo back through the
generations, connecting people with their past even as they live in the present and
the future. Roosters still herald the first light in the eastern sky, awakening sleepy
Namoluk children and urging their parents to greet and meet the new day. People
stir before sunup and carry out their morning ablutions in little bathhouses next
to their homes, at freshwater wells in the island’s woodsy interior, or at the la-
goon-side beach. In a timeless pattern, older children shepherd their younger sib-
lings, gently keeping them on task. Families gather around the bowl of leftover
taro or rice from the previous evening’s meal, and adults clutch cups of lukewarm
instant coffee to which they have added copious amounts of sugar. Despite ty-
phoons and heavy out-migration, the daily round on the atoll begins and pro-
ceeds much as it always has.
As their forefathers did with sailing canoes, half a dozen men right at daybreak
wade out to two motorboats anchored in the shallows off the lagoon shore.
Instead of a sail, they carry two full tanks of gasoline, along with heavy nylon
fishline, and lures they have made from white chicken feathers and carefully at-
tached to 2-inch-long double hooks purchased on Chuuk. Full of anticipation,
but with muted voices, the men hike themselves into the boats, arrange their gear,
and pull up anchor. One stands astern clutching a 10-foot pole with which he
smoothly pushes the boat through the shallows until they reach the channel that
has been dynamited in the reef to provide access to the open sea. The water is
deep enough there to position the motor, rev it up, and snake slowly through the
channel to the dark seas that lie just beyond the barely visible white line of break-
ers striking the outer reef face.
Once free of the channel, the throttle is opened up and practiced eyes search
for pwá, the telltale flocks of noddy terns and other seabirds swarming over and
diving into schools of til—”small minnows.” Spotting a pwá, the helmsman steers
in that direction while the other two men play out their lines, one on either side
of the boat. Shortly, they approach the pwá, and the excitement mounts. Scores of
terns swirl and dive in a ballet of movement, creating a frenzy on the sea’s surface.
The men know what lies beneath. While the birds feed on the til from above, the
tuna and other big game fish dash in to gobble the til from below. The boat runs
right through the flock of birds, momentarily swallowed up and surrounded by
silent wings dipping and soaring.
Then it’s past the pwá, and the fishermen begin jerking their feather lures to
imitate til as the lines are pulled through the school of minnows. Chiurume! The
shout goes up as the man on the left sets his hook and begins pulling in the line,
hand over hand. Chiurume! Now the man on the right has a bite! Soon the first
glistening, 20-pound takou is flopping in the bottom of the boat, while the sec-
ond man continues to bring in his line. They can see this one as it draws close to
 Continuities 71

the boat, and it’s a big ngel, the most delicious fish of all. Just before the ngel is
flung into the boat, a swift, dark shadow passes close astern. The man on the right
heaves his line, and all that is left is the head of the ngel, hook still protruding
from its mouth. Sharks have to eat too.
Back on the island, before the morning sun gets too high, a few men and
women set out to weed their taro plots, knee-deep in wet mud, and to harvest
some corms for the big meal that will come in late afternoon or early evening.
Finding a taro of the right size, they uproot it with a digging stick, cut the leafy
top off with a machete, and leave a small portion of the corm attached. This they
replant in the rich muck to grow another root for another meal six-to-twelve
months later. By this time the island’s kids from approximately six years and
older have assembled in the schoolyard, tummies full and minds open to the
day’s lessons. The cacophony of shouts and laughter settles down as the teachers
arrive and call them into their classrooms. Younger children poke about close to
their homes, watched over by their mother or an aunt. One woman sweeps leaf
litter from her yard with a stiff broom made of coconut leaf midribs, and the
sound attracts a mother hen and her chicks, who hope for a beetle or a food
scrap. The chicks discover a coconut that had its top cut off for drinking, and one
or two crawl right inside to peck at the soft flesh—benunu—that drinking nuts
contain. Mid-morning, a bingo game gets underway, spiced with gossip and ac-
companied by music from WSZC, broadcast from Wééné. As always on
Namoluk, the pace is slow and easy.
Behind this activity is a steady dull roar. Like white noise for atoll dwellers, this
sound is so much a regular part of life as to disappear from consciousness. It is
the bass note struck by the continuous army of huge ocean swells that rise up and
pound on the outer reef. Life on an atoll is lived amid the perpetual sound of
breakers always breaking. Most days it is also lived in heat, and as the sun rises
higher in the sky, people seek shade in the fáál, under breadfruit trees, or beneath
the gnarly old kul and amoleset trees that line the lagoon shore above the high-
water mark. Normally, a tradewind makes the heat tolerable, and occasional
quick downpours cool things off momentarily before the raindrops warm up and
add to the omnipresent high humidity. Wind and rain can actually make it chilly
on Namoluk, especially during the rainy season—from August to December—
when as much as 5 inches might pour down in a single day.4
As the afternoon advances, the children are let out of school, and with whoops
of glee the younger ones race for the lagoon-side beach to frolic and splash and
burn off their pent-up energy. Teenaged boys gather up their spears and goggles
and head for the reef edge to likapich, hoping to bring home a fat sea bass or a
snapper for dinner. Old men sit in the canoe houses, telling stories while making
sennit cord by rubbing strands of coconut husk fiber on their inner thighs.
Around 4:00 PM the empty steel oxygen tank gongs sound for the daily service,
and women pick up their bibles and shuffle respectfully toward church.
Christianity is an active presence on the atoll every day—the two churches,
72 4. Namoluk People, 2002

Catholic and Protestant, remain the most compelling social institutions in the
community. As if to underscore this point, Resolution Number 3, passed during
the second meeting of the Namoluk Constitutional Convention in March 1992,
specifies that “Christianity has become part of Namoluk’s culture” and that
“Namoluk Municipality shall be recognized as a Christian Municipality”
(Namoluk Constitution 1991).
By 2002, Namoluk’s churches were thoroughly indigenized and deeply rooted.
A sixth waver, Sampson, the Protestant minister, was born into the community,
graduated from high school on Wééné, spent about a year in college on the West
Coast during the 1970s,5 and then returned to Chuuk. He married a distant
cross-cousin from the atoll, became a schoolteacher on the island, and continued
his education during summers via college extension courses, eventually earning a
bachelor’s degree. Meanwhile he devoted himself to Bible study and rose in the
church hierarchy, a most appropriate path for the grandson of Edgar and Louella,
the Oneop couple who headed Namoluk’s Protestant church throughout most of
the Japanese colonial period. Moreover, when he became minister, he succeeded
his own father in that role. During the summer of 2001, a jubilee was held to cel-
ebrate the centennial of Christianity on the atoll.

The Protestant Minister and Deacons Seated in the

Namoluk Protestant Church on Easter Sunday 1995
 Continuities 73

The Catholic church on Namoluk is headed by a katekista, a lay leader from

the community who oversees regular services but cannot hear confession or say
Mass. Those latter tasks are handled by Mortlockese or Chuukese priests who
visit the atoll periodically for that express purpose. The bishop of the Diocese of
the Caroline and Marshall Islands is now a man from Moch, and priests are able
to reach outer island communities such as Namoluk to give Mass more fre-
quently because of an increase in the number of small interisland ships.
Back in 1969–1971, only two nongovernment vessels, neither of which was
very large, visited the Mortlocks: the Catholic mission’s Star of the Sea and the
Protestant mission’s Chen. One or the other of these church-operated boats,
along with the more sizeable government field-trip ships, averaged a visit to
Namoluk approximately every six weeks in those days. Even so, Leslie and I expe-
rienced two stretches while we lived on Namoluk when the atoll was without a
ship for nearly three months. Uncertainty about ships to the outer islands—when
they will sail and where they will go—provides a continuity from the past into
the twenty-first century. But on the positive side there are now many more non-
government vessels that ply the waters from Chuuk Lagoon, down through
Lukeisel and Namoluk to Morschlok Souou.
In 2001, one of these, a former South Korean longliner that was confiscated
by the FSM’s Maritime Authority for illegally fishing in the FSM’s territorial
waters and auctioned off, belonged to Horatio, one of Namoluk’s more distin-
guished citizens. Part of the fifth wave, this man graduated from high school on
Wééné, worked several years as a journalist, married a fellow Mortlockese, be-
came clerk of the FSM Congress, and was later elected to the congress itself. He
acquired the 65-foot fishing boat for a song and operated it on the cheap. The
same pattern obtained with most of the other small private ships: they were ac-
quired already used, run for a few years with minimal maintenance, and then
abandoned when they finally broke down. But for Catholic priests and other
passengers alike, their presence has made circular migration from the outer is-
lands to Chuuk’s urban center much easier in the 2000s than it was in the 1960s
and 1970s.
Along with the more frequent movement of people back and forth from the
outer islands to the administrative center, products, ideas, and visitors all now
move more frequently as well. How else to explain the fact that at least three chon
Namoluk now use Grecian Formula to keep their hair black? How else can chon
Namoluk get the parts and the fuel so that they can rely totally on outboard mo-
torboats for open ocean fishing and for moving about the atoll? How else do
those children who reside on Namoluk and only visit Wééné briefly learn first-
hand about automobiles, cable television, telephones, ATMs, and the noise made
by commercial jetliners? And how else do members of Namoluk’s new elite find it
possible to visit their home atoll for short vacations from their jobs in Oregon,
Guam, or Pohnpei?
74 4. Namoluk People, 2002

EXODUS
The exodus from Namoluk that occurred during the last decades of the twentieth
century has had different destinations. Between 1971 and 2001 Namoluk’s de jure
population more than doubled, but its geographic distribution shifted markedly.
Back at the beginning of 1971, nearly 96 percent of the atoll’s population was lo-
cated in Chuuk State, with 70.5 percent still living on Namoluk itself (see Table
3.1). Five years later, 91 percent of chon Namoluk were still to be found in Chuuk
State, but the percentage residing on the atoll had dropped to less than half of the
de jure population. At that time most migrants had moved to Satawan or espe-
cially Wééné, either to attend school beyond the eighth grade or to find wage em-
ployment in the urban center. Only two dozen Namoluk people were outside the
USTTPI in January 1976, most of them attending college in the United States (see
Table 3.1).
In the mid–1990s, the exodus from Namoluk took a dramatically different
turn. Although the actual number of people on the atoll was greater in April 1995
than it had been in 1971 or 1976,6 the proportion of the total population that was
resident on the atoll had dropped to 41 percent (Table 3.1). Chon Namoluk who
were located in Chuuk State—including Namoluk—had dropped to 75 percent,
whereas the number who had moved to Guam had exploded to 121 people—16
percent of the de jure population. When I took my midsummer 2001 census, yet
another change in the exodus from the atoll was revealed. At that time fewer than
40 percent of Namoluk citizens were to be found on the atoll, and the number lo-
cated on Guam had grown to 155. But what was most notable in 2001 was that
the number of Namoluk people in the United States had shot upward from just
six years earlier.
By July 2001, more than 11 percent of the atoll’s population was to be found in
the fifty states. Although the number on the U.S. mainland had almost doubled
during that time over what it was in 1995, the primary new destination of choice
had become Hawai’i. As Table 3.1 shows, from 1995 to 2001 there was a six-fold
increase in the number of Namoluk people in Hawai’i, and their total nearly
matched the number in the other forty-nine states combined. Meanwhile, only
two-thirds of all chon Namoluk remained in Chuuk State in July 2001.
The vignette at the end of Chapter 3 illustrates that the establishment of
Namoluk families on Guam, in Hawai’i, and on the U.S. mainland has opened
the travel horizons of even the atoll’s senior citizens. While most of those over age
70 continue to reside on the atoll, many of them now take trips far afield to visit
their children and grandchildren. Indeed, the exodus from the atoll has affected
different age groups in different ways.
The easiest way to describe this is to talk in general terms about the geo-
graphic distribution of ten-year age cohorts as of July 2001 (see Table 4.1). More
than two-thirds of Namoluk people between the ages of 20 and 59 were some-
where other than the atoll at that time. A glance at Table 4.1 shows that the high-
 Exodus 75

TABLE 4.1—Locations of Chon Namoluk by

Ten-Year Age Cohorts, 7/13/2001

Age Cohort Top Five Locations from Highest Number to Lowest Number in Cohorta
1 2 3 4 5 Percent of Cohort
Off Namoluk

0–9 N G W H C 51
10–19 N W G C H 55
20–29 N W G M H 70
30–39 N W G M H 68
40–49 W N M G H/Cb 74
c c
50–59 W N C G/M G/M 69
60–69 N W G H C/M/Od 60
e e e
70+ N C/M/G C/M/G C/M/G 18

a N=Namoluk; W=Wééné; G=Guam; H=Hawai’i; M=U.S. mainland; C=other Chuuk State; O=other
Micronesia (FSM, RMI, CNMI, and Palau).
b Hawai’i and Other Chuuk State have the same number of persons from this cohort.
c Guam and the U.S. mainland have the same number of persons from this cohort.
d Other Chuuk State, U.S. mainland, and other Micronesia all have the same number of persons from
this cohort.
e Other Chuuk State, U.S. mainland, and Guam all have the same number of persons from this cohort.

est percentage of those adults ages 40 to 59 resides on Wééné. For the most part,
these are people who found government jobs after they returned from a few years
of college in the States, or who met and married a spouse from Chuuk Lagoon or
elsewhere in Chuuk State and settled in the town. Even though the second high-
est percentage of chon Namoluk ages 20 to 39 is located on Wééné, the most
striking thing about people in these cohorts is that substantial percentages of
them are on Guam (20 percent), the U.S. mainland (10 percent), and Hawai’i (7
percent). Thus more than one-third of these young adults resides in the United
States and in Guam.
This, in turn, helps to explain the relatively high proportion of chon Namoluk
under age 20 found on Guam in 2001 (and in the States to a lesser extent). A full
25 percent of the 0–9 age cohort lived on Guam in 2001, and another 5 percent
76 4. Namoluk People, 2002

were to be found in the fifty states. Sixteen percent of those ages 10 to 19 were on
Guam, and 6 percent were in Hawai’i or on the U.S. mainland. Most of these chil-
dren or teenagers—especially those under age 15—live in these places with their
parents, attend American schools, and experience a lifestyle similar in many re-
spects to that of someone growing up in Long Beach or Dallas. They watch TV,
eat fast food, play computer games, listen to America’s top hit songs, and speak
English like someone from Des Moines. They shoot hoops, dance hip-hop, com-
plain about homework, and yearn for a set of wheels. Some of these children have
been sent to live with aunts, uncles, or older cousins so that they can attend free
public schools in places where their parents expect they will receive a better edu-
cation than if they remained on the atoll or on Wééné.

Notes
1. This phrase is a takeoff of Pelto’s book title, The Snowmobile Revolution (1973).
2. This islet subsequently has reconnected to Amwes and is no longer a separate entity.
3. In 1970, there were openings for only one in five eighth graders in Chuuk State to at-
tend Truk High School, and Xavier and Mizpah—the other two high schools at that
time—could only enroll a few additional students. Hence competition for high school was
very keen, and Namoluk’s consistent success in moving its pupils on to high school speaks
very well of the quality of its teachers and its student body.
4. Sergio and I maintained a rain gauge and a min-max thermometer on Namoluk
from January 1, 1970, through July 31, 1971. The atoll received almost 140 inches of rain
during 1970 and 108 inches during the first seven months of 1971. On three occasions the
24-hour rainfall exceeded 4 inches. The average high temperature during those nineteen
months was 91 degrees Fahrenheit, with an average low of 78 degrees.
5. In May 1970, Sampson found a bottle containing a note that had washed ashore on
the ocean side of Toinom, about fourteen months after a passenger threw it overboard as
the S. S. Monterey crossed the equator at 158 degrees West. The note contained an address,
and I helped Sampson prepare and mail a letter to the person who had set the note adrift.
That initiative began a correspondence that eventually led Sampson to enroll in a commu-
nity college near the note-dropper, with the latter and his wife serving as Sampson’s host
family while he was in California.
6. De facto population counts on Namoluk date back to 1900, and from then until 1971
the eight actual head counts fluctuated between 238 (in 1946) and 341 (in 1925). (See
Marshall 1975a, 169.)
 5
Heading Off to College

Towards the end of August each year, the Truk [Chuuk]

airport regularly overflows with swarms of young people,
decked out in their Sunday best and heaped with
mwaramwars, bidding a tearful goodbye to their parents
and friends before they leave Truk, most of them for the
first time. They are the latest crop of the college-bound
and their number has become legion of late.

Francis X. Hezel (1979, 172)

THE LEGION OF THE COLLEGE-BOUND

The two young women made a striking pair as they exited the plane and stepped
down the ramp to the tarmac at the Cedar Rapids Airport in eastern Iowa.
Wearing matching holokū in a bright lavender, green, and white tropical print,
their shiny waist-length black hair blowing in the breeze, each walked self-con-
sciously in unfamiliar high-heeled sandals. They had just journeyed nearly
halfway around the world to begin college classes in Michigan. Getting to Iowa
was not without mishap.
Maiyumi and Luanne graduated from high school in Chuuk in June 1975, and
each was admitted to a community college in Michigan. Leslie and I had finished
our PhDs a few years before and had accepted positions at the University of Iowa
in Iowa City, about 30 miles south of Cedar Rapids. Knowing that Maiyumi and
Luanne would be traveling abroad for the first time, we helped them arrange way
stations en route to Michigan. When they arrived at Honolulu International

77
78 5. Heading Off to College

Airport, my parents and youngest sister were there to meet them, and they stayed
at my parents’ home in Kailua for a couple of days. Mom and Dad put them on a
flight to Denver, with an intermittent stop in Los Angeles. Because they didn’t
have to change planes in L.A., my parents emphasized that they should simply re-
main on board, if possible, during the layover. Then, when they arrived in
Denver, Eldon Flowers, a college classmate who had been best man in our wed-
ding ten years before, placated Leslie and me by agreeing to make sure they got
onto the correct flight bound for Cedar Rapids.
As Eldon related it to us, Luanne and Maiyumi were easy to spot when they
got off the plane from L.A., and he immediately identified himself and men-
tioned our names to reassure them. They had almost a two-hour wait before the
Iowa flight, and he asked if they were hungry. Both nodded in assent, so they sat
down in one of Stapleton Airport’s restaurants to get a bite to eat. The young
women found the menu somewhat puzzling, so Eldon inquired whether they
liked Mexican food. They said they did, and he ordered a mix of tacos, enchi-
ladas, and chile rellenos, plus soft drinks for three. The food came—piping hot
and spicy, neither of which characterized food back home in Chuuk. Luanne took
a tentative taste and made a face; Maiyumi poked at her enchilada but didn’t re-
ally want to eat it. Eldon ended up eating for three.
After walking around the airport a bit, Eldon escorted them to the gate for their
flight to Cedar Rapids via Des Moines, reminding them that “Mac and Leslie will
meet you in Iowa.” In those early days of Namoluk people’s contact with the
United States, “Merika” was conceived of as a single place, not unlike such big is-
lands as Pohnpei or Guam or Hawai’i. When you got there, you were there. The
same was true of named places in Merika, like Iowa; they were imagined to be sin-
gle locations, perhaps comparable to the districts on Wééné like Iras or
Peniyésene. Again, once you’d arrived, you’d arrived. So when Maiyumi and
Luanne had flown for an hour and a half, and the flight attendant announced that
they were beginning their descent into Des Moines, IOWA, it was “Iowa” that rang
a bell for them. After all, Eldon had made clear to them that Mac and Leslie would
be waiting for them in Iowa. So they hatched a plan. They decided to try to hide
from us after they got off the plane, and then sneak up behind us and surprise us.
The plane landed in Des Moines and taxied to the gate. Luanne and Maiyumi
gathered their small hand-carry bags and entered the corridor to the terminal af-
ter the aircraft had docked. Peering out, and not seeing us, they headed for the
baggage claim area, slipping behind pillars as they approached, so we wouldn’t
see them and spoil the surprise. Other passengers gathered, and the luggage came
off, but Mac and Leslie were nowhere to be seen. They watched for their bags, but
they didn’t appear either. Finally, getting a bit nervous, Maiyumi screwed up her
courage and asked a uniformed airline employee about their missing luggage.
The employee asked to see their tickets, and said, “You’re in the wrong place—
this is Des Moines, and you’re supposed to be on the flight for Cedar Rapids,
which is about to leave.”
 Chon Namoluk and College Education 79

Laughing about it later, they said that they just looked at each other and pan-
icked. They took off their high-heeled sandals, hitched up their holokū to just
above the knee, and took off running barefoot as fast as they could go back to the
gate where they had arrived. The door to the corridor was closed, and their hearts
sank. With tears in their eyes, they approached the check-in staff at the counter,
who were busy with their final tallies in preparation for the flight’s departure.
The staff looked at these clearly distressed and exotic young women, phoned the
plane, and reopened the corridor and the plane’s door to let them back aboard.
Sheepishly, they returned to their seats. Half an hour later when they arrived in
Cedar Rapids, the two young women made a striking pair as they exited the plane
and stepped down the ramp onto the tarmac. Mac and Leslie were there to meet
them, and this time they made no attempt to hide. Welcome to Merika!

CHON NAMOLUK AND COLLEGE EDUCATION

The very first chon Namoluk to enroll in college did so with a Trust Territory
scholarship at what was then the Territorial College of Guam (later to become the
University of Guam) in June, 1961, majoring in social science. Now in his late six-
ties, this man earned an AA degree there and then transferred to a small college
in Illinois, from which he received a bachelor’s degree in political science two
years later. Upon graduation, he returned to Chuuk, married a woman from
Wééné, and entered a series of state government jobs before he retired recently
after approximately thirty years of public service. Including this man, only three
men born before 1942 attended college; two earned bachelor’s degrees and one
an associate’s degree via extension classes offered on Wééné.1
At the beginning of the 1970s, four Namoluk young people were selected as
foreign exchange students to attend their senior year of high school in the United
States. One went to Wisconsin, two to Oregon, and the fourth to Minnesota.
Returning home when they finished high school, all four of these students subse-
quently attended college in the States, two of them in Oregon. One drowned while
back in Chuuk, one dropped out after a year or so and enrolled in a business
school to learn computer skills, and two eventually earned bachelor’s degrees.
It was not until the early– to mid–1970s that more than a handful of chon
Namoluk came to America. The extension of U.S. government financial aid pro-
grams for needy college students to those from the USTTPI opened the door of
educational opportunity, and people now in their forties and fifties like Luanne
and Maiyumi were the first ones to walk through it. A few came as early as 1972,
and by January 1976 twenty chon Namoluk were attending colleges on the U.S.
mainland, with another two enrolled in Hawai’i. Half of these students matricu-
lated at colleges in Oregon and California, but Maiyumi and Luanne were among
five who attended schools in Michigan. Most of these students were male:
Maiyumi and Luanne were among the first young women from Namoluk to
study at U.S. colleges.
80 5. Heading Off to College

From the educational journey of the atoll’s initial college graduate in the 1960s
to that of the chon Namoluk enrolled in college in 2003, a surprising variety of in-
stitutions has contributed to the atoll’s knowledge pool. Namoluk students have
enrolled in schools in nineteen different states, on Guam, in the CNMI, at the
College of Micronesia campuses on Pohnpei and Chuuk, in Australia, and in three
South Pacific countries (Fiji, Papua New Guinea, and Sāmoa). Many of these
schools are community colleges, but they also include such well-regarded institu-
tions as Gonzaga University, the University of California–Berkeley, the University
of Hawai’i–Mānoa, and the University of Iowa. My records indicate that chon
Namoluk have matriculated in more than fifty different institutions of higher
learning in the United States, five in Micronesia (including Guam), and four in
other Pacific countries (including Australia).
For a community numbering fewer than 900 people, Namoluk has had re-
markable educational success. During approximately fifteen years from the late
1960s to the early 1980s, Namoluk Elementary School led all others in Chuuk
State in the percentage of its graduates who passed the competitive examinations
for admission to high school. Three different chon Namoluk have been valedicto-
rians of their high school classes. But perhaps the most impressive statistic is the
number who have earned college degrees. Drawing upon my records and field-
notes, and brainstorming with Malcolm and several other informed Namoluk
people, members of the community have earned more than thirty-five associate’s
degrees, almost fifty baccalaureate degrees, and ten master’s degrees. Given that
36 percent of the atoll’s de jure population in 2001 were under age fifteen, and
that another 6 percent were over age sixty, and therefore mostly did not have the
opportunity to attend college, these degrees were earned by the remaining 58
percent, or around 500 people. Thus 10 percent of those from the age groups that
have had the opportunity, and from a population that only had its first college
graduate in the mid–1960s, now hold bachelor’s degrees, and 2 percent hold an
advanced degree. Easily a third of those chon Namoluk between the ages of six-
teen and fifty-nine have at least a semester or more of college education, and
quite a number have attended classes for several years, accumulating many cred-
its but never graduating.
A majority of Namoluk people who attended college in the United States dur-
ing the 1970s eventually returned to Micronesia, some with degrees, and others
without. At that time relatively few chon Chuuk had college degrees, and as a con-
sequence many of those who gained experience in the States were able to parlay it
into wage employment—mostly government jobs—back home. This is reflected
by the fact that the highest percentages of those chon Namoluk in their forties
and fifties as of July 2001 were located in Chuuk’s locus of state government and
urban center on Wééné (see Table 4.1).
But not all those who came to America in the 1970s returned home to jobs in
the islands. The journey provided some with a different kind of opening—a
chance to marry and live and work abroad. Six of the twenty-two Namoluk stu-
 Chon Namoluk and College Education 81

College-Educated Namoluk Schoolteachers on the Dock on Wééné,

Preparing to Sail to Namoluk, July 2001

dents who were in the States in January 1976 were still there twenty-five years
later. Four of them had remained in the United States for nearly that entire pe-
riod, marrying Americans (or a German, in one case); two have had careers in the
U.S. armed forces that span more than twenty years of service. During the late
1970s and 1980s, quite a few members of the sixth and seventh waves joined their
older brothers and sisters in the States, and many have remained there to bolster
the number of Namoluk people who have settled in the States. They will receive
explicit attention in the next three chapters.

Case 1: Hans
Hans’s birthday falls right in the middle of the decade covered by the sixth wave.
A graduate of Xavier High School on Chuuk in the late 1970s, he pursued a
rather peripatetic but typical path as he combined academics with adventure.
Initially, Hans attended two different community colleges in Iowa, rooming for
awhile with another chon Namoluk a few years his senior. He did well in his
courses at these schools, which allowed him to transfer his credits and enroll in
the University of Iowa. While there, he lived in a dormitory and spent quite a bit
of time with my family and me, living with us during the summer of 1979.
82 5. Heading Off to College

Perhaps in part because we left for a two-year stint in Papua New Guinea, and in
part because of loneliness for more familiar surroundings, Hans went first to
Kansas City—a major mecca for Micronesian college students over the years—
and then back to Chuuk and Namoluk for more than a year, hoping to find a job.
He managed to land a teaching position at a Catholic elementary school, and a
year later, in May 1982, he flew to Honolulu and enrolled at the University of
Hawai’i for summer session. He shared an apartment with another chon
Namoluk (and his Hawaiian girlfriend), and two young women from
Namoluk—in Hawai’i for school—also lived in the same building.
By fall term, Hans switched schools again, this time to Hawai’i Pacific College,
then located in Honolulu. His roommate had moved in with a Mortlockese
woman (whom he subsequently married), so Hans was on his own briefly. But as
so often happens among Micronesians in the United States, he soon found others
from back home with whom to share expenses and company. By mid–October he
was rooming with two other chon Namoluk also in Honolulu for schooling. And
by then he could write that “I’m doing pretty good in my studies here. I think be-
cause the college I’m going at is not as tough as U. of Iowa. It’s pretty easy.
Besides, I eat lots of angarap, takou, mon and likeriker [all fish species] from the
sea, not from rivers.” By January 1983, Hans told me on the phone that he hoped
to graduate with an accounting major in the fall, go back to Chuuk for a year or
so to save money, and then return to Honolulu to finish a master’s degree. Four
months later, he was still rooming with one of his Namoluk relatives, and they’d
added two more roomies from other islands in Chuuk State.
But when fall 1983 rolled around, Hans was still in Honolulu, still taking
classes, and now rooming with several other Mortlockese. By March 1984, he had
accumulated additional classes at Hawai’i Pacific in business, economics, and
computer science, but he still didn’t have a degree. That June he told me on the
phone that he just needed a couple of more classes to earn a business degree. But
he also told me that he didn’t really want to return to Chuuk since he really liked
Hawai’i. At that time he shared an apartment with three other Mortlockese, and
they divided the monthly rent of $415. Within a year he was back on Wééné, still
sans degree.
In the fall of 1985, Hans went to Guam and enrolled at UOG, and that same
fall he married a woman from Chuuk Lagoon whom he met on Guam. Six years
later, after teaching elementary school on Saipan for several years, he was still
chasing the elusive baccalaureate degree—this time via the UOG extension pro-
gram on Saipan. By then he also had three children to support. Hans eventually
moved back to Guam, and by 1995, he had finally earned his degree in education
from UOG. He has been gainfully employed on Guam ever since.

Case 2: Maiyumi
Having finished high school in 1975, Maiyumi—a sixth waver—was among the
first ten Namoluk women to venture to the States for college. She enrolled at a
 Chon Namoluk and College Education 83

community college in Michigan that had a number of other Micronesian stu-

dents, and she was close enough to Iowa City, where Leslie and I lived, that she
could spend her school holidays with us. Studying hard, playing volleyball hard,
and traveling through parts of the midwestern and southeastern United States
with us during summer break, Maiyumi saw the Great Smoky Mountains,
Charleston, the Atlantic Ocean, and the wonders and monuments of
Washington, D.C. In May 1977 she received her AA degree in Michigan, and the
following fall she enrolled at Eastern Oregon State College (EOSC) in LaGrande,
Oregon. EOSC probably has awarded more bachelor’s degrees to students from
Chuuk State than any other college. Not only did a great many chon Chuuk enroll
in courses on its campus at the foot of the Blue Mountains, but EOSC also ran a
college extension program on Wééné for several years during the 1980s. The ex-
tension program allowed many who had not finished school in the States to com-
plete their degrees while working back home. At least half a dozen chon Namoluk
have been EOSC students, and three hold degrees from that institution.
Maiyumi continued to apply herself in class, and she accumulated three more
semesters of coursework—just one or two semesters shy of finishing her BA de-
gree. She also met her Mortlockese husband at EOSC, and their son was born in
LaGrande. Soon thereafter, word came that her father had died, and the three of

Young Namoluk College Student in Great Smoky Mountains National

Park, North Carolina, August 1977
84 5. Heading Off to College

them flew home for the funeral. This unexpected expense left them financially
unable to return to college immediately, so they remained on Wééné for about a
year, where her daughter was born. Once they had saved up sufficient funds, they
returned to LaGrande with both of their children in hopes that they could com-
plete their college degrees. Not long thereafter, another family crisis required
their presence back in Chuuk, and once again they scraped airfares together and
island-hopped home. This expense, and the burden of two young children,
proved too much of a financial obstacle, and they never returned to LaGrande.
Maiyumi spent about six months looking for work before she began a very re-
sponsible position with the state judiciary. Her husband, also just a few credits
away from his BA, obtained a teaching job on Wééné for the 1982–1983 school
year, and they settled into town life as a dual-career, two-income family.
Maiyumi’s husband enrolled in the EOSC extension program during the next
three years and finally earned his bachelor’s degree. Unfortunately, the press of
work and family obligations prevented Maiyumi from doing the same. They have
lived on Wééné ever since, although she travels quite a bit in connection with her
work to such places as Saipan, Guam, Pohnpei, and Hawai’i, and she spent a cou-
ple of months in the U.S. mainland in the late 1990s while being treated for a
medical condition.

Case 3: Moses
Moses represents the seventh wave who headed off for college in the United
States. Actually, upon graduating from high school in 1985, he enrolled for a year
at the COM campus on Pohnpei because—despite his sterling academic
record—he had not yet received the state government scholarship he’d been
promised. In January 1987, however, he sent me a letter from Corsicana, Texas,
where he was then a student at Navarro College, along with more than eighty
others from Micronesia. Like many community colleges in the States, Navarro ac-
tively recruited Micronesian students, who were eligible for Pell grants and simi-
lar U.S. federal funding, because the colleges received matching funds for each
such student they enrolled. Navarro College continues to have a substantial
Micronesian enrollment, and Corsicana has become an “island” in the “archipel-
ago” of Micronesian settlements in America. In fact, Corsicana hosts a major
week-long Fourth of July celebration every year, to which other Micronesians
come from as far away as Oregon and North Carolina. Competitions are held in
baseball and basketball, much fish is eaten, much beer is quaffed, and many sto-
ries are told.
Moses was still in Corsicana when I visited him there in February 1988, by
which time he claimed that more than 100 Micronesians were enrolled or living
there, mostly from the FSM, but also including some from Palau and the RMI.2
He told me that Navarro College had only accepted about half the hours he had
accumulated at COM as transfer credits, and consequently he would not com-
plete his AA degree in pre-law until May 1988. While he attended Navarro
 Chon Namoluk and College Education 85

College, Moses sent application forms to two of his age-mates from Namoluk,
both of whom enrolled there the following fall.
By then Moses had applied to Cleveland State University, Northeast Missouri
State University, and Southeast Missouri State University as possible places to
continue his studies. During my visit, I suggested that he also look into the
University of Northern Iowa (UNI), and I gave him the relevant contact informa-
tion. As it happened, he moved to Cedar Falls, Iowa, in August and occupied a
dorm room with an American roommate who had never heard of Chuuk, and
who didn’t have a clue where Guam was either. That fall, as a first semester junior,
Moses took Spanish, Quantitative Methods of Business, Humanities I, Elements
of Physics, and Judo—a total of sixteen credit hours. He also rode the Greyhound
bus down to Iowa City to spend Thanksgiving with me.
A year later Moses continued to plug away at his degree, although he had
moved out of the dorm and into an apartment by himself. His academic per-
formance was good, and he had become involved in a local Baptist Church,
which provided most of his social interactions. In conversations with me he com-
plained that he’d gotten very few letters from home, although he was in contact
via telephone (and at least one visit to Washington State) with chon Namoluk
who were elsewhere in the States. He had switched from judo to tae kwan do and
prided himself on his developing martial arts skills.3 By May 1990, he had
changed his major to business, and he was looking forward to a trip down to
Corsicana once school was out. At that time he saw himself as on schedule to
graduate in August 1991. And then things fell apart.
Moses took a full load of classes during fall semester 1990, but the financial
aid promised him from the Chuuk State government was delayed once again, and
he was not allowed to enroll for spring term until this funding issue was clarified.
Classes had begun, and Moses was in limbo, awaiting word on his combination of
scholarship, Pell grant, and work-study. He resided again in a UNI dorm, where
he watched TV with three other foreign students on the evening of February 4,
1991. One of those students was a Palauan whom Moses had known and had
some run-ins with at Navarro College.4 Moses and the Palauan had both been
drinking. Words were exchanged. The two men grappled with each other, and to
the horror of the Indonesian and Chinese students looking on, the Palauan
stabbed Moses four times with a large folding knife he had hidden in his pocket.
When Moses reached the hospital emergency room that, fortunately, was but a
five-minute ambulance ride away, his blood pressure was in the 70s, he was in
shock, he was unresponsive to pain, and he had lost an enormous amount of
blood. The most serious stab wound—to the abdomen—severed his bowel and
led to surgical removal of a kidney. Recovery took months and several more op-
erations, including a major one later in the year to reinsert his colon and remove
a colostomy. Needless to say, Moses never enrolled that semester, although he did
continue to take classes at UNI and via University of Iowa correspondence
courses over the next year or so.
86 5. Heading Off to College

The sad thing is that after amassing more than 120 college credits, this high
school valedictorian has never completed his studies and obtained a bachelor’s
degree. Showing the efficiency of the “coconut wireless,” right after Moses was
stabbed, two of his first cousins—both married to American women and living in
Oregon and Washington—caught a bus and rode all the way across country to
visit him in the hospital. Another close relative phoned him long distance from
Pohnpei, full of concern. I drove up to visit several times, and once Moses was fi-
nally released, he moved in to recuperate with a nurse and her family in Cedar
Falls whom Leslie knew via her teaching in the University of Iowa College of
Nursing. Eventually, he moved into his own apartment and began a series of jobs
far beneath his education and his strong intellect: a minimum wage cook at
Hardee’s in 1993; a busboy and dishwasher at a Village Inn restaurant at
$4.95/hour in early 1994; a nonunion hog butcher on the killing floor at Iowa
Beef Packers (IBP) beginning in January 1995, starting at $6.00/hour (see
Chapter 6). Seventeen years after coming to the States for college, Moses has yet
to go back to Namoluk, let alone Wééné, for a visit. His one-time dream of earn-
ing a master’s degree and working as a diplomat seems far away, indeed.

THE XAVIER CONNECTION

Beginning in the 1950s, Xavier High School on Wééné, operated by the Jesuits,
drew students from all over the USTTPI, many of whom went on to assume ma-
jor leadership positions in the CNMI, FSM, RMI, and Republic of Palau.5
Referred to only half in jest as “the Harvard of Micronesia,” Xavier accepted “the
best and the brightest” and challenged them with a demanding curriculum. Not
surprisingly, a high percentage of Xavier High School graduates went on to col-
lege. Eleven chon Namoluk have graduated from Xavier over the years, and it is
instructive to look at what they have accomplished in their postsecondary educa-
tion, where they reside, and whom they have married.
All eleven went off to college. One stopped after earning an AS degree, but the
other ten all completed bachelor’s degrees. Of those ten, three went on to finish
master’s degrees. In July 2002, five lived in the States (four on the mainland and
one in Hawai’i), one each was resident in Guam, Pohnpei, Toon Island, Chuuk,
and Wééné, and one was deceased (he worked and died on Wééné). Only one was
back on Namoluk, teaching in the elementary school there. Nine of the eleven
were or had been married, whereas two had never married. All nine were married
to spouses from Chuuk State, but only one spouse was from Namoluk (five were
from the Lower Mortlocks, and three from islands in Chuuk Lagoon).6 These
marriage patterns are highly pertinent to new, emerging identities among
Mortlockese and Chuuk State migrants living abroad. “Mixed” marriages create
connections to more than one home community and foster “mixed” identities
among their resultant offspring. In the contexts of places outside of Chuuk State,
 From Coconuts to Coconutchat 87

for example, Pohnpei, Guam, and the United States, such identities as
“Mortlockese” or “Chuukese” come more to the fore.

FROM COCONUTS TO COCONUTCHAT

Most Micronesian students who went to Guam, Hawai’i, or the U.S. mainland for
college from the late 1980s onward were introduced to computers, the Internet,
and the World Wide Web as a part of their education. As with most other college
students in America, they received free access to e-mail and the Web so long as
they were enrolled. These students soon taught their siblings and their friends
how to log on, and for those who weren’t in school, word spread rapidly about
the free e-mail service provided by hotmail.com and yahoo.com. Rather quickly
then, in the 1990s, chon Namoluk and other Micronesians in the States and on
Guam began to communicate regularly using the Internet. For example,
“Paulina” posted the following note on Microislands.com:

I’m trying to contact my best friend, Berekita Walter. We went to

High School together and last time I saw her was August of 94
which was the month after our graduation. She is probably 24 or
25 yrs. old now. She was born in Oct. second week of Oct. She’s
around 5’2” and she has a very pretty smile. I missed her and I
want to contact her as soon as possible and I would like to say
Happy B-day to her. She lives in Guam (Guahan) and that all I
know [sic]. She is from the Island of Namoluk (Namoilam) in the
State of Chuuk. Please email Paulina should you have any helpful
information that might help her find her friend. (http://www.mi-
croislands.com/loslov.htm; 2/13/2000)

Beginning in 1996, the Internet arrived in the FSM and the RMI, and the
number of local subscribers continues to grow. Gene Ashby and Giff Johnson
(2001) report that by the end of 2000, there were nearly 1,500 users in the FSM
and 545 in the RMI. Both countries have upgraded their links in terms of speed,
new modems, and greater bandwidth, and the Internet’s advent has provided is-
landers living abroad with inexpensive and instantaneous news from home. More
significantly, however, “Internet chat rooms on Web sites devised especially for
Marshallese and Federated States of Micronesian citizens link hundreds of people
daily from every corner of the United States and the islands for mere pennies”
(Ashby and Johnson 2001, 27). Among the best-known and most heavily used of
these chat rooms for a number of years was coconutchat.
Conducted in a free-wheeling, multilingual format, coconutchat mixed
English with several different Micronesian languages in a rapid flow of “conversa-
tion,” contributed to by many aficionados, while others (myself included) simply
88 5. Heading Off to College

logged on, lurked, and tried to keep track of the players without a program.
Although serious matters having to do with island politics or life in the United
States periodically surfaced, coconutchat served primarily as a place to find other
Micronesians in the booming, buzzing confusion that is America. It also was a
wonderful place to flirt. Because such flirtations were necessarily public—often
occasioning comments by others—nearly everyone used a pseudonym when par-
ticipating.7 Part of the fun of the game was to try to guess who was hiding behind
which name. Sometimes this could be clarified by signaling the other to exit the
main chatroom and to enter a private chatroom together. Quite a few flirtations
progressed in this way, and if the two people discovered via private chat that they
were compatible and “interested,” then the relationship might grow offline.
Several recent Namoluk marriages involve couples who first met on the Internet,
flirted (some might say, courted) online, and eventually arranged to meet in per-
son. The Internet is rapidly becoming Micronesia’s new marriage mart.

Notes
1. The other two bachelor’s degree-earners received their degrees during the 1980s
when they were in their late forties.
2. Hezel (2001, 150) reports “500 to 600” Micronesians to be living in Corsicana, and
one assumes that this figure refers to the year 1999 or 2000.
3. Many, perhaps most, young men from Namoluk who’ve moved to the States have
studied one or more of the martial arts, which have a Carolinian counterpart called bwang
(see Lessa and Velez 1978). One Namoluk man, resident in Texas for more than twenty
years without returning to the islands, was married to a Korean woman, and the two of
them owned and operated a tae kwan do school there. Another Namoluk man, who has
lived for more than fifteen years in California and who only returned home to visit for the
first time in summer 2003, has risen to a very high rank in several martial arts and helps
teach these skills to others.
4. Young men from Chuuk and Palau have a history of aggressive competition and of-
ten get into fights with each other. Essentially, young men from these two island groups
both think that they’re the best, the bravest, and the strongest, and they’re forever chal-
lenging each other to prove it.
5. Wendel (1998) completed an anthropology doctoral dissertation about Xavier High
School graduates that provides much more information about the impact of this remark-
able institution.
6. This includes the deceased individual whose wife was from Chuuk Lagoon.
7. My moniker was Litopuler, or “wolf spider,” a name I thought most appropriate for
one who—like his namesake—just lurked in a corner and watched what happened.
 6
Heading Off to Collage

. . . that we are living more and more in the midst of an

enormous collage, seems everywhere apparent.

Clifford Geertz (2000, 85)

. . . the men and women with hands and muscles are still
there, laying bricks, sweeping cafeteria floors, making
hotel beds. They are the army of manual workers doing
the unheralded, largely forgotten jobs that also make the
nation go. . . . In recent years immigrants. . . have filled
many of these manual jobs, especially the low-end, low-
est-paying positions.

Steven Greenhouse (2002, 3)

IT’S A SURREAL WORLD OUT THERE

Clifford Geertz’s observation that our world more and more resembles an enor-
mous collage—a pastiche of tastes, patterns, ethnicities, languages, religions, and
the like—captures the plight and the promise in which chon Namoluk find them-
selves as they venture forth from their small atoll to ever-more cosmopolitan
places. A collage is a mixture of elements in incongruous relationship, originally

89
90 6. Heading Off to Collage

developed as a kind of surrealist art, a movement characterized by its irrational,

noncontextual arrangement of material. For Namoluk people away from home,
especially for those outside of the FSM, the world they encounter is a surreal
place, filled with incongruity, irrationality, and diversity. They are just one more
small piece in the collage.
In his stimulating essay “The Uses of Diversity,” Geertz makes the further ob-
servation that “if it is in fact getting to be the case that rather than being sorted
into framed units, social spaces with definite edges to them, seriously disparate
approaches to life are becoming scrambled together in ill-defined expanses, social
spaces whose edges are unfixed, irregular, and difficult to locate, the question of
how to deal with the puzzles of judgment to which such disparities give rise takes
on a rather different aspect” (2000, 85). How do chon Namoluk cope with the
surreal experience of living in a collage? How do they navigate through the seri-
ously disparate approaches to life they encounter every day in the United States?
How have their own living patterns become scrambled into new, irregular social
spaces? What puzzles of judgment must they confront daily in order to survive,
or put otherwise, how do they make a living as new immigrants to a foreign land?
These and related questions are explored in this chapter, with a particular focus
on the movement to Guam and the United States during the past fifteen years in
search of jobs. Most of these jobs are of the “unheralded, largely forgotten” vari-
ety—the “low-end, lowest-paying positions” of which Steven Greenhouse writes
in the epigraph above. Save for those who have obtained college degrees, such
employment is about all that is available to recent immigrants with minimal
skills. Common bottom-end jobs taken by chon Namoluk have been as workers
in the fast food industry, as housekeepers, as certified nursing assistants (CNAs),
and as security guards. After a short discussion of each of these occupations, a
description will be provided of some of the better-paying jobs that Namoluk im-
migrants have located.

UNHERALDED, LARGELY FORGOTTEN JOBS

Whoppers and Big Macs
Where once America was thought of as “Mom and apple pie,” today the more ap-
propriate operative phrase might be “Coke and a Big Mac.” Fast food has come to
symbolize America internationally, with attacks on McDonald’s serving as a sur-
rogate for an attack on American culture.1 In a compendium devoted to anthro-
pological studies of McDonald’s in East Asia, James L. Watson notes that “The
Golden Arches have become. . . an icon of international business and popular
culture, recognized nearly everywhere on the planet” (1997, vi). That said, it is
certainly the case that fast food also is a part of nearly everyone’s experience in
the United States. One after another, fast food restaurants line urban and small-
town strips, and they are also found in airports, university student unions, and
 Unheralded, Largely Forgotten Jobs 91

some public buildings. They even pop up in what once were thought of as out-
of-the-way places like national parks. McDonald’s. Pizza Hut. Burger King. KFC.
Hardee’s. Denny’s. Village Inn. Sizzler Steakhouse. These are among the firms
where chon Namoluk and other Micronesians have found work on Guam and in
the States. What could be more American?
What could be more American, indeed? In his exposé of this industry, Eric
Schlosser comments that the fast food chains “rely upon a low-paid and unskilled
workforce,” and that “the vast majority lack full-time employment, receive no
benefits, learn few skills, exercise little control over their workplace, quit after a
few months, and float from job to job. The restaurant industry is now America’s
largest private employer, and it pays some of the lowest wages” (2002, 6). On
Guam, in Honolulu, in Portland, and in Cedar Falls, Namoluk people and their
Micronesian brethren slog away in this sort of work, with little hope of advance-
ment under what might be called a “styrofoam ceiling.” Finding work as new im-
migrants in these exploitative job circumstances, chon Namoluk are hardly alone.
When fewer baby boom teenagers were available to hire, the fast food chains
turned to “other marginalized workers: recent immigrants, the elderly, and the
handicapped” (Schlosser 2002, 70). Schlosser makes it clear that obedient, docile,
unskilled workers are exactly what the fast food industry seeks, and these unfor-
tunates now comprise the largest group of low-wage employees in the United
States—about 3.5 million strong.

Meat, Fish, But No Poultry

Beef is the ultimate “all-American” food, and the fast food restaurants that special-
ize in it—steak and burger joints—have had much to do with influencing basic
changes in the cattle raising and meatpacking businesses. This influence results
from their requirements for a uniform product that can be processed in assembly-
line fashion and from the fast food industry’s great purchasing power. Schlosser
argues that “these changes have made meatpacking—once a highly skilled, highly
paid occupation—into the most dangerous job in the United States, performed by
armies of poor, transient immigrants whose injuries often go unrecorded and un-
compensated” (2002, 9). At least two Namoluk young men have worked at such
jobs for IBP,2 and several others have worked in the fishing and fish processing in-
dustry, which has only a slightly better track record in terms of job-related in-
juries. Interestingly, unlike their Marshall Islands neighbors, no chon Namoluk,
and few if any FSM nationals, have settled in Springdale, Arkansas, and nearby
communities to work in Tyson Food’s poultry processing plants.3 Although this is
also “dirty” meatpacking work, which often results in injuries, these facts have not
discouraged as many as 4,000 RMI citizens from settling in the Ozark foothills. In
Springdale, their children now make up 5 percent of the school district’s students,
and about one-third of the 460 production line workers at Tyson’s Cornish hen
plant are Marshallese (Roche and Mariano 2002a).
92 6. Heading Off to Collage

Making Beds, Emptying Bedpans

Although some have worked at these jobs in the States, it is especially in Guam’s
tourist-oriented economy that young and middle-aged Namoluk women have
been hired as housekeepers by hotels and motels. They engage in such domestic
cleaning tasks as changing bed linen and towels, vacuuming, and scrubbing toi-
lets and shower stalls. Housekeeping jobs are notoriously poorly paid and usually
do not include benefit packages of any sort. Similar to jobs in the fast food indus-
try, such work is unskilled, often part-time, has a high rate of turnover, and addi-
tionally is typically performed by women, notably those at the bottom of the eco-
nomic pecking order. Recent immigrants, such as those from Micronesia, fit this
profile almost perfectly.
Related to housekeeper work is employment as a CNA in a nursing home for
senior citizens. Like housekeepers, CNAs are involved in cleaning, with a notable
difference that CNAs clean not only bed linens, dishes, and bathrooms but also
the nursing home residents themselves. Lori Jervis, an anthropologist who has
studied CNAs as part of her research in a U.S. nursing home, holds that such
work is stigmatized because of its association with pollution via contact with
elimination and bodily wastes. She concludes that “like other dirty work in
America, aide [CNA] work remains for the most part devalued socially, if not
downright invisible. The occupation’s lowliness, however, is not only the result of
its association with bodily waste, but also derives from the gender, race, and class
backgrounds of its workers. That women, people of color, and those who are eco-
nomically disadvantaged are overrepresented in nursing assistant work is hardly
surprising. As a stigmatized occupation, aide work draws those with few alterna-
tives” (2001, 94). Nursing home operators have great trouble finding Americans
to take these low-paying jobs washing, grooming, feeding, and emptying the bed-
pans of elderly residents. Young women and men from the FSM and the RMI, in-
cluding at least a dozen from Namoluk, are increasingly prominent among CNAs
in the United States.
How did Micronesian young adults end up working as CNAs in American
nursing homes? Beginning in 1998, several recruiting outfits—what Walter F.
Roche Jr. and Willoughby Mariano call “body brokers”—contracted to provide
nursing home companies that operate facilities all over the United States with
Micronesian workers to take positions as CNAs.4 Micronesians were selected be-
cause the Compact of Free Association allows them to enter the United States
and work without a green card, making them easier to process through the
Immigration and Naturalization Service. The recruiters received a fee of as
much as $5,500 for each worker they provided. Most of these recruits had little
idea of the obligation they were assuming, and many were still teenagers, often
lacking even a high school diploma. With limited English-language skills, and
with equally limited experience at living in a collage, they were told that they
were going to work as nurses or could attend college, were signed up, and were
 Unheralded, Largely Forgotten Jobs 93

flown from such places as Chuuk and Pohnpei to such places as Ashburn,
Georgia, or Cynthiana, Kentucky. Typically, they found themselves “working the
graveyard shift at a nursing home, [and] emptying bedpans for $5.50 an hour”
(Roche and Mariano 2002b). According to a list I obtained from the FSM
Embassy in New York, by the end of 1999, more than 250 FSM nationals had
been recruited as CNAs, and in the years since, their numbers have grown con-
siderably.
If even half of what Roche and Mariano report in their series of newspaper ar-
ticles is accurate, it is clear that the young Micronesians recruited for U.S. nursing
homes were misled about the work they would do and what their obligations
would be. Once in the United States, many discovered that they were almost like
indentured servants, tied by legal contracts that forced them to pay damages of
up to half a year’s wages if they left their job before the contract was up. A lot of
them were cowed and felt trapped and served out their contracts, but others sim-
ply quit and fled. The “Micronesian archipelago,” bound together via telephone
and the Internet, offers numerous sanctuaries for such “castaways.” I am aware of
at least three women who left what they call their “slavery” and moved in with fel-
low islanders many states away from where they had worked as CNAs. Another
way out of such bondage taken by some is to marry an American and cease work-
ing, a path followed by at least one young Namoluk woman. Roche reported in
the Orlando Sentinel on April 3, 2003, that both the FSM and the RMI govern-
ments have taken formal steps “to regulate so-called ‘body brokers’”, following a
proposal to that effect by the United States during negotiations to extend U.S. aid
to the two countries.
Despite the stigmatized, difficult work, bad press, and low wages, some chon
Namoluk continue to seek CNA certification. Kaylee, who came to the States for
college more than twenty years ago, provides a case in point. She spent not quite a
year at a community college in North Carolina, married an American, had two
children, divorced her husband, married another American, worked part-time in
a truck stop restaurant, and then divorced her second husband, who was abusive.
She lived for a time with a third American man before she moved to a different
state and began to share housing with a cluster of people from islands back
home, most of whom had been her friends in high school. Needing work, and
suffering from some chronic health problems, she has resolutely taken the neces-
sary classes to qualify as a CNA. Her view is that, yes, it’s hard work, but it’s hon-
est work, and it provides her with a modest income that can be stretched because
she shares expenses with her housemates. So some Micronesian CNA workers
have been in the States for quite awhile, have taken CNA jobs with their eyes wide
open, and have learned to live in a collage.

Securing Premises
Yet another line of work pursued by numerous chon Namoluk—particularly
men—is to hire on as a security guard. Although wages and benefits are not a
94 6. Heading Off to Collage

Chon Namoluk in Honolulu Apartment, July 2001

(note security guard uniform)

great deal better than in the occupations discussed above, the uniforms security
guards wear and the possible element of danger should they have to apprehend
someone appeal to a pan-Chuuk macho masculinity. Those who work as security
guards on Guam do so mostly on the grounds of the big tourist hotels that line
Tumon Bay. In Hawai’i, several work in shopping malls or for large chain cloth-
ing stores. In one group living arrangement of several Namoluk people in
Honolulu during the summer of 2001, three different men held security guard
jobs, pooling resources to pay the rent and utilities, buy food, and cover other
shared expenses.

MOVIN’ UP
Although the majority of Namoluk people who are employed on Guam and in
the States work at low-end, low-paying jobs, not all of them do so. By dint of per-
sonal talent, diligent effort, some postsecondary education, a bit of luck, or a
combination of these, a growing number of chon Namoluk have escaped the
dulling trap of minimum-wage jobs with no benefits and no opportunity for ad-
 Movin’ Up 95

vancement. The more experience they gain at living in a collage, the more they
learn to deal with the disparities and the puzzles of judgment that such living en-
tails. They may be said to develop a degree of “collagiality.” As a result, they have
moved up and into a host of better-paying and more responsible positions. Here
is a sampler of some of these more desirable jobs.
Unsurprisingly, given the sorts of qualifications usually required for “middle-
class jobs” in the United States, the more remunerative positions have gone to
those who headed off to college and completed a degree before deciding to settle
in the States. One seventh waver with a bachelor’s degree is employed by the FSM
Foreign Affairs Department and is stationed at the FSM Embassy in New York,
and another—equally well educated—works as an adjuster for an insurance
company in Honolulu. Two seventh wavers with master’s degrees are employed
in the States: one runs a small childcare business out of her home in Lincoln,
Nebraska, whereas the other is an elementary school teacher in Honolulu. Others
with bachelor’s degrees have done quite well in the employment sweepstakes: one
sixth waver works in a business management position in Flagstaff, Arizona; an-
other sixth waver has a nursing career in Honolulu; yet a third is employed in a
staff position by a small college in Portland, Oregon; a final sixth waver with a BA
works for the Guam public schools. Associate’s degrees also have helped some
chon Namoluk land better-paying jobs. One such is a seventh waver in Eureka,
California, who works as a unionized driver for United Parcel Service (UPS). His
fellow seventh waver and Eureka resident manages an apartment building there
and works in a well-paid job at a local lumber yard. A sixth waver with an AA de-
gree used to own a small martial arts business and now works for Dell
Computers in Texas.
Others with some college training but without degrees have managed to move
up the economic ladder in spite of this handicap. As I mentioned in Chapter 3,
two—a fifth waver and a sixth waver—enlisted in the U.S. armed forces and have
had careers spanning more than twenty years each. One is now retired (and
drawing his Navy retirement pay), while the other remains on active duty in the
Army. Yet another seventh waver, resident in Eureka, along with a younger coun-
terpart, both have good salaries from jobs in local lumber yards there. Another
Namoluk man works part-time in a white-collar bank office job while he studies
accounting at a community college in Salem, Oregon. A sixth waver held several
responsible low-level business management positions on Guam before he immi-
grated to Hawai’i.
Finally, the Namoluk connection to Continental Micronesia bears mention.
Six different chon Namoluk—four men and two women, none with college de-
grees—have worked for the airline (a subsidiary of Continental Airlines) in vari-
ous capacities, and all of these have been well-salaried jobs with benefits. All but
two of these “Air Mike” employees held their jobs on Guam (the others worked
on Wééné, and one then shifted to Guam after several years).
96 6. Heading Off to Collage

LIVING IN A COLLAGE
Church at the Center
Christianity is an integral part of nearly all Pacific Islands societies, and Namoluk
is no exception. Ever since initial missionization 124 years ago, the role of the
church in people’s lives has increased in significance. The Protestant and Catholic
churches are central institutions in day-to-day life on the atoll, and religion fig-
ures importantly in the lives of migrants as well. On Wééné, for example, chon
Namoluk have been especially active in the Berea Evangelical Church, affiliated
with the Liebenzell Mission. A Namoluk man has served as one of Berea’s minis-
ters, and two have been deacons of the church. Another Namoluk man served for
several years as the principal of Berea School (first through twelfth grades), and
at least half-a-dozen college-educated chon Namoluk have taught there. Last, but
not least, several Namoluk people have worked there in staff positions or on the
construction of new church and school facilities.
Church involvement is important for most Namoluk people who migrate out-
side of Chuuk State. Half a dozen of them have been sponsored by missions for
college and graduate theological training in the States (or, in one case, in Fiji).
Some have helped to establish student church fellowships on Guam, and others
have worked for the Catholic mission there. Church attendance remains an inte-
gral part of the lives of many chon Namoluk who live in the United States itself.
Those who live by themselves—with no other people from Chuuk close by—of-
ten become deeply involved in a local church, as Moses did, for example.
Typically, when there are small clusters of people from Chuuk State in the same
community, they will all attend the same church together. But the true measure
of “church at the center” is found in those locales where substantial numbers of
Mortlockese or other chon Chuuk have settled.
Only a handful of places in the States have a sufficient “critical mass” of people
from Chuuk State to support a church of their own, comparable to the
Marshallese and Sāmoan church communities in America of which other an-
thropologists have written (e.g., Allen 2002; Janes 1990). In June 2002, I visited
one such place—Portland, Oregon—and, along with close to 150 others, attended
a Sunday service at the Island Community Church (ICC). The ICC rents a pleas-
ant new assembly hall from Warner Pacific College (WPC), “an urban Christian
liberal arts college dedicated to providing students from diverse backgrounds an
education that prepares them for the spiritual, moral, social, vocational and tech-
nological challenges of the 21st century” (Warner Pacific College 2001, 5).
Founded as Pacific Bible College in Spokane, Washington, in 1937, WPC moved to
Portland three years later, where it remains affiliated with the Church of God.
The preponderance of worshippers and clergy at ICC during my visit were
Mortlockese, especially people from Lukeisel, although a smattering of Lagoon
Chuukese also were in attendance. Parishioners ranged in age from newborns,
presented for confirmation, to elders in their sixties and seventies, and they ar-
 Living in a Collage 97

rived from all over the greater Portland metropolitan area and as far away as the
state capital in Salem, an hour’s drive to the south. Sunday church service at ICC is
at once a religious experience, a social event, and an assertion of ethnic identity.
The assembly hall was filled with metal folding chairs on two sides of a central
aisle, allowing for a “men’s side” and a “women’s side” as is typical of church serv-
ices back home. One side of the hall was mostly glass, allowing cheerful morning
sunshine to fill the space. The chairs all faced a speaker’s podium, fitted with a
microphone, and covered by a drape reading “Rejoice” in English. Familiar
church music and related tunes came from an electronic keyboard and an ampli-
fied acoustic guitar. People began to assemble around 11:00 AM, although the
service itself did not get underway until a little past noon. Most hymns were sung
in Mortlockese, but a few were done in English. The prayers, sermons, and an-
nouncements were all in Mortlockese. When the formal service ended at 3:00
PM, the congregation ate a hearty meal together of rice, a beef-carrot-cabbage
stew, fresh watermelon, and water to drink.
As is true of services back in Chuuk State, children wandered about during the
proceedings, and teenagers and young adults made eyes at one another. Those in
attendance arrived in some very nice late model vehicles (e.g., several new vans, a
big Dodge sedan, and a shiny Chevy Suburban), underscoring the point that not

Chon Namoluk Dressed for the Sunday Service at Island Community

Church, Portland, Oregon, June 2002
98 6. Heading Off to Collage

everyone in this growing community was a fast food worker or a CNA. The
Portland-Salem area and corridor is now home to several thousand people from
Chuuk State, a population that adds new immigrants almost weekly. In addition
to ICC, which is thought of primarily as a Mortlockese church, the facilities for a
second congregation are located just outside the small town of Aurora, Oregon,
about two-thirds of the way from Salem to Portland. Known as “The Missionary
Memorial Church Beyond the Reef,” this congregation consists mostly of people
from Chuuk Lagoon. Nestled in a rural setting, it occupies several acres of an old
summer camp, with numerous cabins sheltered under big shade trees, several
rather institutional one-story main buildings—one labeled “Tabernacle”—and
some houses off on the periphery of the property. Along with the ICC, the
Beyond the Reef Church provides a venue for people from Chuuk State to meet
regularly in a familiar church setting, with services conducted in their own lan-
guage. At the same time, people catch up on information from each other about
others in their immigrant network, learn of new arrivals to the area, flirt with and
court one another, and provide mutual emotional—and occasionally financial—
support. Just like back home, church lies at the center of this dispersed immi-
grant community.

Virtual Kinship
As has been noted above, Namoluk is a face-to-face community in which every-
one knows everyone else, and in which most people are related to each other.
Historically, chon Namoluk either lived together on their own atoll, or they lived
on nearby islands elsewhere in the Mortlocks or in Chuuk State. Those who lived
away from the island didn’t live so far away that they couldn’t come home for a
visit fairly often, so kinship ties and community bonds were reinforced regularly
via direct interpersonal contact. But now that 60 percent of the populace reside
somewhere other than Namoluk, with many of them located hundreds or even
thousands of miles away, direct person-to-person visits are more difficult to
arrange. It is in these circumstances that chon Namoluk have harnessed the won-
ders of the transportation-communication revolution to maintain their kinship
connections.
Transportation, in the form of jet travel, has foreshortened time and distance
across the Pacific, whether it be the 550 miles from Chuuk to Guam or the 5,500
miles from Chuuk to Los Angeles. If they can afford the airfare, relatives travel
back and forth for visits from Wééné to Guam, or to Hawai’i and the U.S. main-
land. Such visiting is the twenty-first century analogue to nineteenth century in-
terisland voyaging in which, among other things, kin ties were reaffirmed. These
days, as we saw in the vignette at the end of Chapter 3, it is not at all unusual for
elderly grandparents from Namoluk to catch a small ship to Chuuk, board an Air
Micronesia island-hopper to Honolulu, and then proceed to some location on
the mainland where their adult children and grandchildren reside. Such travel by
Namoluk seniors is increasingly common, as is the prospect that the old folks
 Living in a Collage 99

may settle down with their offspring in such places as Salem, Oregon, or
Honolulu, Hawai’i.
But “virtual kinship” is something other than this. In our age of diasporas and
large-scale transnational migrations, virtual kinship is practiced by many people
around the world today. It is also relied upon by many Americans to maintain
their family ties in such situations as they live and work in California, while their
parents remain in Iowa, and their siblings are scattered in several other states.
Virtual kinship is kinship of the “reach out and touch” sort that draws on com-
munication breakthroughs. It makes use of satellite technology that permits di-
rect-dial long distance telephone calls, and it thrives on e-mail messages.
Arguably, it extends as well to two-way radio conversations.
Namoluk does not have telephones or computers; indeed, the atoll lacks elec-
tricity except for that produced by a few small gasoline-powered generators and
some solar panels. Such generators allow a few people to operate VCRs and small
radio transceivers. The former already had become quite the rage on Namoluk by
1985: there were four VCRs on the atoll by then. Videocassettes containing “fam-
ily photos” are shipped to the atoll by chon Namoluk on Wééné, who either film
them themselves or receive them by mail from relatives living elsewhere. Viewed
over and over again, these images reinforce kinship at a distance by capturing im-
portant life events such as weddings, graduations, or funerals that may occur far
from home.
Of course, the second largest concentration of Namoluk people after those on
the island itself now live in the urban center, and most of them have regular ac-
cess to telephones. In emergencies, and sometimes just for fun, phone calls come
from chon Namoluk living outside Chuuk State for relatives on Wééné, and the
essence of these conversations is then relayed via two-way radio to family mem-
bers on the atoll. Relatively few chon Namoluk on Wééné have their own comput-
ers at work or at home, but there are two facilities there that make Internet access
available for a fee. Unfortunately, that fee is beyond the reach of all but a few of
the more prosperous Namoluk citizens. Students enrolled at COM’s Chuuk cam-
pus have some limited access to the World Wide Web at little or no cost to them.
So communication media of various sorts help sustain a certain amount of vir-
tual kinship between Namoluk people abroad and those in Chuuk and back on
the atoll.
It is among those Namoluk people who live on Guam or in the States, how-
ever, that virtual kinship really comes into its own. They may be separated by
great distances, like the proverbial American family mentioned above, but they
keep in touch with each other via phone calls and e-mail to a remarkable de-
gree.5 And news from one conversation or message is passed along in the next,
so chon Namoluk who live apart continue to share a great deal of up-to-date in-
formation about each other. They know who’s just had a baby, who’s gotten
married (and to whom), who’s arrived from the islands, or who’s gone back
home. They hear quickly when someone from the atoll dies, and they gossip
100 6. Heading Off to Collage

about one another’s foibles and affairs as intimates everywhere do. For those
who live on the U.S. mainland, communication via phone or e-mail allows them
to set up periodic visits by car. Those attending college in Los Angeles may rent a
car and drive to Portland for a long weekend. Those working in Louisville will
hop in their jalopy and drive to western Iowa to visit kin. Others will take a
Greyhound bus, as Moses’s cousins did when he was stabbed (see Chapter 5).
Those with the means will fly across country to see a sister or a son.
Videocassettes are mailed back and forth among themselves, as well as back and
forth to kin in Micronesia, including Guam. And cell phones have recently en-
tered the picture as well. In this regard, the following e-mail message came to me
from a chon Namoluk in the Los Angeles area: “Today I received an e-mail from
my sister Beulah [on Wééné] and she said our folks are fine out there on
Namoluk. After. . . I called Jed’s cell-phone [in Honolulu] and we had a good
time just reminiscence [sic] about Loilam [Namoluk]. Waioo was always our
conclusion. I will give you his cell-phone # so you can ask him to locate
Seraphim there in Hawaii. . . . Just yesterday he called me just to ask when will I
be in Hawaii [for Easter]. I believe when Loilamese [chon Namoluk] meet there
will always be new jokes from the Islands” (e-mail from Harold, 14 April 2003;
pseudonyms substituted).

Long-Timers
Thirty years after the first substantial movement of Namoluk people to the
United States, three patterns have emerged. In the first, typical of many in the
fifth and sixth waves, migrants went to the States for college, stayed from one to
six years, and then returned to take jobs somewhere in Micronesia, including
Wééné and Guam. The case of Hans, discussed in Chapter 5, illustrates this. In
the second pattern, migrants moved to the States and have lived there for at least
seven years, but they return to Wééné or Namoluk every year or two for a visit.
The final pattern forms the primary focus of this section: those chon Namoluk
who left for college or work and have lived abroad—in some cases without ever
coming back for a visit—for fourteen years or more. The vignette provided of
Moses in Chapter 5 shows this way of being. Those who have been away from
Namoluk and Chuuk for fourteen or more years are here called “long-timers,”
and three brief examples of their circumstances are provided below because this
pattern becomes more common every year. Of eleven men and three women who
qualify as “long-timers,” eight of the men and all three of the women have mar-
ried “foreigners.” In most cases these have been American spouses, but one is
German and one Korean. Clearly, marriage to someone “outside the system”
makes it more difficult to sustain regular visits home. “Long-timers” resemble
what chon Chuuk call apeipei, “drift logs.” Like apeipei, “long-timers” float along
far from the place they began, and no one knows exactly when or where they will
wash up on the beach again.
 Living in a Collage 101

Trina. As of 2003, Trina holds the Namoluk record for having been away for
the longest time: thirty-four years. She went to Honolulu for college in 1969,
and after several years of school, she met and married an American physician.
Due to his work with the World Health Organization, they lived for some years
in Bangkok, and later in Geneva, Switzerland. Eventually, they moved their fam-
ily to southern California—her husband’s home—so that their two children
could grow up and attend school in the States. Trina’s son, now a college gradu-
ate, once accompanied her on a short visit to Namoluk when he was very young,
but her daughter, a college senior in 2003, has never been to the atoll. Neither of
Trina’s offspring speaks or understands Mortlockese, although they are well
aware of their island heritage and have met some of their Namoluk kin in the
States. Trina and her college-aged daughter flew to Florida in summer 2002 to
attend the wedding of her brother’s daughter, an event that also was attended by
several other Namoluk relatives.

Roxanne. Roxanne came to the United States for college twenty-eight years ago
and traveled all the way to Florida to enroll in a community college there with
several other young Mortlockese women, including a close cousin from
Namoluk. It is not clear whether she obtained her AA degree, but what is clear is
that she just “disappeared.” She ceased to write to her family back on Namoluk,
and she did not engage in the widespread telephone conversations with friends
and relatives in the States as did most of her peers. Her family has made efforts
to track her down via the FSM Embassy in New York, thus far to no avail. Once
or twice over the years, snippets of information about Roxanne have entered the
Namoluk gossip chain. Apparently, she is married to an American and has sev-
eral children. Supposedly, she moved from Florida to Georgia, where she has
lived for many years. Certainly, she is unusual in the degree to which she has cut
herself off from her Namoluk kin.

Kurt. Kurt’s case is somewhat more typical than the two above. He moved to
Oregon for college in 1983 and attended Western Oregon University for a couple
of years, although he has yet to finish his bachelor’s degree. While in school he
met and married his American wife, from whom he is now separated and by
whom he has a son and a daughter. Neither she nor either of his children has
ever visited Namoluk or Chuuk, and none of them has any facility in his native
language. Except for a two-month hiatus in 1994—after eleven years in the
States—when he returned to Namoluk and Wééné for a visit, Kurt has lived and
worked in Oregon. In June 2002, when I stopped in at his apartment, he told me
he never plans to do more than visit the islands because his children and his job
are in the States. At the time of my visit, he shared a large apartment with a
younger brother, his elderly mother, another brother’s junior high–aged daugh-
ter, and a sister’s fifteen-year-old son. His mother had come several times for
102 6. Heading Off to Collage

visits, when a significant health problem and the need for good medical care led
her to remain. His niece and nephew illustrate an ever-more-common phenom-
enon. Where thirty-five years ago a few Namoluk students were sponsored by
American families for their senior year of high school in the United States, now
Namoluk people “sponsor” their own relatives. Kids are sent, often when still in
grade school, to live with their relatives on Guam or in the States where they can
obtain a better education and improve their English-language skills and future
job prospects. This “sponsorship” will receive further attention in Chapters 7
and 8.
With the exception of Roxanne, all of Namoluk’s “long-timers” have kept in
regular contact with their relatives via letters, phone calls, and in more recent
years the Internet. Most of them visit other Namoluk people who live somewhat
near them, and in some cases they travel over long distances for reunions with
kin who reside elsewhere in the States (e.g., Trina’s case above). They remain
committed to the broader Namoluk community and eagerly share or ask for
news about others. Namoluk as a place—as their “source”—continues to figure
importantly in their self-conceptions.

Isolates, Clusters, and Networks

Namoluk migrants have not formed nucleated communities away from the atoll,
even on Wééné, where they reside in seven of that island’s nine traditional dis-
tricts. Instead, they either live as isolates—like Moses in Cedar Falls, Iowa—or in
small clusters—like that in Eureka, California, to be discussed in Chapter 8. Even
so, the Namoluk community remains linked in a remarkably strong network that
is bound together by face-to-face visits, telephone calls, shared video- and audio-
tapes, digitized photographs, e-mail messages, and letters. As noted above when
discussing the ICC congregation in Portland, Oregon, dispersed quasi-communi-
ties have formed around Chuukese-language churches, not only in Portland, but
also in Guam and Honolulu. These networks involve at least weekly face-to-face
meetings during Sunday services as well as a fair amount of socializing outside of
church events themselves. Small groups of Namoluk people often live in different
units of the same apartment complex or else in housing that is within walking
distance of each other. This promotes informal visits, shared resources, and mu-
tual use of vehicles, computers, and telephones.
Many of the clusters of Namoluk people are integrated with people from
other island communities in the Mortlocks or from elsewhere in Chuuk State,
for as I pointed out in Chapters 1 and 2, Namoluk is merely one community in a
larger Mortlockese society. That larger society operates in the migration context
just as it does back home, but it has been strengthened by many more intermar-
riages in recent years. With thirty years of a decided Namoluk presence on
Wééné, and a greater number of marriages between chon Namoluk and people
from Chuuk Lagoon than ever before, it is no stretch to see the Mortlocks (in-
cluding Namoluk) as simply one component of a “greater Chuukese society.”
 Notes 103

This takes on special meaning in the context of overseas migration, and it relates
importantly to matters of place and ethnic identity to which we will return in
Chapter 9.

Notes
1. See Watson (2000, 127–129) for a discussion of McDonald’s as a target for the ire of
anti-American demonstrators in more than fifty different countries.
2. The dangerous and problematic nature of work in the meatpacking industry has
been critically studied and eloquently presented by anthropologist Deborah Fink (1998),
based upon her firsthand fieldwork in an IBP plant in Iowa.
3. One of the men who later worked for IBP spent the better part of a year in
1999–2000 employed by a chicken processing plant in Charles City, Iowa.
4. Much of the information I present in this section is drawn from a series of newspa-
per articles by investigative reporters Walter F. Roche Jr. and Willoughby Mariano. These
articles appeared in mid-September 2002 in the Baltimore Sun and the Orlando Sentinel
under the general title “Indentured in America.”
5. Although I am not a chon Namoluk, they have plugged me into this communication
network to some degree. I message and talk by phone with various community members
regularly, and I visit with them occasionally if I’m near where they live (or vice versa).
Computers also make it possible to quickly distribute digitized photographs, such as those
I received of a funeral held on Wééné in April 2003.
 7
Reef Crossings

. . . the funniest thing was she was using her full name as
her chatroom nickname. . . . I kept on trying to get her
attention and even threw at her my real name and still she
won’t respond, and after that I signed out and changed
my nick again to another nick. . . . Oh, I also chatted
with Herman (Olofat), Mary (My-Star), and Toshiro
(Pinkaweiwei). It is so much fun to meet my family on
mecha and speak to them in pichin Chuukese language,
and now I’m back as a Chuukese person again, I speak a
lot better because I spent most of my time in chatroom
and learn. There were many of the chatters that already
got so huffy with me said that since I was from Chuuk why
not speak Chuukese, and when they said that I got so mad
with them.

(E-mail from Kaylee, 28 December 2000; pseudonyms

substituted)

MIGRANTS: THE NEW NAMOLUK

Kaylee, and the many others like her, represent “the new Namoluk”—the 60 per-
cent of the community’s members who have crossed the reef and who are now
dispersed in multiple sites across thousands of miles. When they can’t manage
face-to-face visits away from the atoll, these migrants remain connected via the
telephone and the Internet. There they “meet” and “speak together” in “pidgin

105
106 7. Reef Crossings

Chuukese”—a mixture of their own language and American English—sharing

news and gossip about their friends and relatives. In this chapter and the next one
we will examine more closely those people who have moved away from Namoluk,
even as they remain ineradicably tied to it.
Members of all twenty-six of Namoluk’s lineages have participated in the exo-
dus from the atoll, but they show different migration patterns. For example, in
July 2001, five lineages retained half or more of their members on Namoluk,
whereas 80 percent or more of another five had moved away from the island. Half
or more of the members of four lineages lived on Wééné, and the same propor-
tion of another four Namoluk lineages resided on Guam. At least 20 percent of
yet another four lineages resided in Hawai’i or on the U.S. mainland in July 2001.
In other words, there was no single template for emigration from the atoll.
Different hopes for different folks.
To study the new Namoluk is to study continuous movement and flux, an on-
going, unfolding migration process. I offer here a typical example of such move-
ment to underline this point: on July 2, 2001, the Eekmwar arrived on Wééné
with eleven passengers from Namoluk.1 She sailed back down to the Mortlocks
the next morning carrying sixteen people bound for Namoluk. On July 9, the
Eekmwar returned with twenty-four passengers from Namoluk. They included
two chon Namoluk whose primary residence is the U.S. mainland, one who has
lived on Pohnpei for the past twenty years, and four who’ve resided on Guam
since the early 1990s. All of these people had been home for a visit and were in
the process of returning to their places of residence and work. The ship also car-
ried a Namoluk man in his forties who flew on the Island Hopper to Hawai’i for
the first time a couple of days later. Back when the Eekmwar arrived on July 2, her
Namoluk passengers included yet another man who has lived on the U.S. main-
land for a dozen years who accompanied his teenaged niece. By the end of the
month, the two of them flew from Chuuk to Portland, Oregon, for him to return
to work and for her to enroll in junior high school.
Such access to more frequent interisland transportation makes the regular cir-
cular movement of people almost routine now. And this links Namoluk and the
chon Namoluk resident on Wééné much more closely together than in previous
years. These small private ships also make it possible to travel directly from
Namoluk to the Lower Mortlocks without having to pass through the urban cen-
ter, thus strengthening intercommunity bonds that date to precolonial times.
There is now a regular ebb and flow of Namoluk people to and from their atoll
and the new places they have colonized.

MIGRATION PATTERNS
Certain general migration patterns exist for chon Namoluk. In the past three
decades, these reef crossings—migrations away from Namoluk—have expanded
 Migration Patterns 107

and repositioned where members of the community reside. The new Namoluk is
a multisited, transnational community.
As we saw in Chapters 3 and 5, beginning in the early 1970s, migration outside
of Chuuk State by members of the fifth and sixth waves was motivated primarily
by a search for college education. Few of those who attended a year or more of
college—particularly those who obtained a four-year college degree, or especially
a graduate degree—have returned to live on Namoluk. A few examples will illus-
trate why.
A member of the fifth wave, Molly graduated from high school in 1972, left
Chuuk a few months later for San Diego, and was the first Namoluk woman to earn
a four-year college degree. With hard work and good focus, she completed a bache-
lor’s degree in education at U.S. International University (USIU) and then returned
to Chuuk, where she married a man from Satawan and began teaching at the junior
high school located there. She has lived and worked on Satawan ever since.
Lincoln, another fifth waver, graduated from Xavier High School in 1971,
earned an associate’s degree at Maui Community College, and then completed a
bachelor’s degree and a master’s in business administration in 1976 at USIU.
After working for the FSM government on Pohnpei, he moved to the private sec-
tor in the early 1990s to work for the Bank of Guam. First he managed the Chuuk
branch, then the Ebeye branch in the RMI, and finally the Palau branch on Koror.
At the end of the 1990s, he began to work for the Chuuk State Government—tak-
ing several business trips to Hawai’i and the U.S. mainland—endeavoring to help
get the state’s financial house in order. In spring 2001, he became administrator
of a joint UOG-Chuuk State Government project on Wééné designed to teach
small business skills of bookkeeping and financial management. Over lunch dur-
ing my 2001 stay on Wééné, he told me that his Mortlockese wife and their chil-
dren were in Honolulu so that the kids could enroll in school there.
Lindsey is a sixth waver who graduated from Truk High School in 1977. As
with most in his age cohort, he went off to the States for college—in his case a
community college in Texas—which he attended with a Namoluk classmate to
whom he was related on his father’s side. Texas didn’t appeal, and after a semester
there, he transferred to Honolulu Community College. He attended that school
for awhile, living with some other Namoluk young men, working in a store, and
soaking up the polyglot multicultural Hawai’i experience. Although Lindsey ac-
cumulated quite a few credits, he never received an AA degree. Instead, he re-
turned to Chuuk, graduated from a special fire prevention school on the U.S.
mainland and the Micronesian Public Safety Academy in Palau (a part of MOC),
and became a state police officer in the 1980s. He married a Mortlockese woman
from a politically important family, established a home on Wééné, and has risen
to the position of state fire chief.
Last, Lurline left Chuuk after high school to pursue a college education, stud-
ied at the University of Hawai’i–Mānoa, and finished a bachelor of science in
108 7. Reef Crossings

nursing there in the mid– to late–1980s. Wishing to contribute to her home is-
lands, she went back to Chuuk to work at the state’s hospital. Unfortunately,
Chuukese gender role expectations collided with Lurline’s knowledge and ability,
and she found herself marginalized and often frustrated at work. Eventually, she
decided to move to Honolulu, where she has lived for the last eight years, working
as a nurse in a large urban hospital. Lurline has traveled around the U.S. main-
land, and her household in Hawai’i is full of younger relatives there to attend
public schools or college.
From the late 1980s onward, the main stimulus for migration off the atoll and
outside of Chuuk State has been primarily to find wage employment, and sec-
ondarily for healthcare or to visit kin who have moved away from Chuuk. As the
above examples show, many of those from the fifth and sixth waves who went
away for college were able to obtain work—usually a government job—in Chuuk
State or in the national capital on Pohnpei. But those who came late in the sixth
wave, or in the seventh or subsequent waves, have had few employment opportu-
nities in the FSM, and consequently more and more of these young adults have
moved away.
Markita is a case in point. She and her Namoluk husband established them-
selves on Guam in the late 1980s, and all five of their children were born there.
Both spouses had well-paying jobs, and other members of her lineage resided
with them to go to school or when visiting from Chuuk. But Guam’s economy
soured in the late 1990s, and so did the relationship between Markita and her
husband. They separated, and he moved to Honolulu in search of work. Not long
thereafter, she moved to Missouri and took a CNA job. Soon after that, her
mother brought Markita’s children and joined her in 2002. Grandma and the
kids arrived in St. Louis with only a single suitcase and the clothes on their backs.
Starting in the mid– to late–1960s, Namoluk people began to settle and marry
on Wééné. As some chon Namoluk came back from college and found jobs there,
a community began to form in the urban center. By 2003, Wééné had become a
“second home” for Namoluk people: just as every lineage is still represented by
members living on the atoll, every lineage also has members who reside in the ur-
ban center. Luanne is a good example of this. She finished high school in 1975
and joined her older sister at Suomi College in Michigan, which she attended, but
never finished her degree. She married a man from Chuuk Lagoon whom she
met in the States, and they moved to Oregon, where they remained until the end
of 1978. The next year they returned to Wééné, where she worked in a store until
the mid–1980s when she landed a state government job, a source of employment
that has continued. She and her husband have had six children and have made
Wééné their home.
Others who have settled in the urban center include Butch and Kendrick. A
fifth waver, Butch began at Maui Community College, and then transferred to
Kapi’olani Community College and on to Chaminade University in Honolulu,
where he earned his bachelor’s degree. He married a woman from Losap, re-
 Migration Patterns 109

turned to Wééné, graduated at the top of his class from the Micronesian Public
Safety Academy, and rose to the position of deputy chief of the Chuuk State
Police. On the side, Butch began a small security business with one of his
Namoluk cousins, and subsequently he has entered the business world full-time.
He has traveled widely around the U.S. mainland, to Guam, Japan, and elsewhere.
Kendrick began college in a small town in Alabama, and not long afterward he
transferred to Western Michigan University in Kalamazoo, a school that enrolled
numerous chon Chuuk at that time. He accumulated quite a few college credits,
and had many good times, but he received no degree. After several years in the
States, he returned home with an American bride. She didn’t last long, after
which he married his Namoluk cross-cousin and kicked around between the atoll
and Wééné, somewhat bored and underemployed. Fortuitously, the Pacific Basin
Medical Officers Training Program (PBMOTP) was begun on Pohnpei, cospon-
sored by the University of Hawai’i and the University of the South Pacific.
Kendrick’s father, Sergio, had been the health aide on Namoluk, and Kendrick
had worked at that job for awhile after he returned from the States. Seizing the
opportunity, he entered the PBMOTP, graduated, and returned to begin work at
Chuuk State Hospital. In 2001, he was the head of Primary Health Care for the
state.
Most, but not all, Namoluk families have established family enclaves on
Guam, and increasingly on Hawai’i and the U.S. mainland. Although Namoluk
people may be said to comprise a loose-knit community on Guam, elsewhere
Namoluk migrants live in small clusters, or even as isolates, and network with
each other via telephone and the Internet. As is typical of younger generations
from Namoluk, only one of Lindsey’s six siblings has remained on the atoll. His
three sisters live outside of Chuuk—one on Pohnpei (where she taught school
and married a member of the Pohnpei Mortlockese community);2 one in
Portland, Oregon (where she works at a Wal-Mart and took computer classes);
and one who very recently moved to Honolulu (after she married a Euro-
American whom she met on Guam while he was stationed there in the Marine
Corps). This last sister’s husband was sent to Iraq in early 2003, so she flew from
Wisconsin to Honolulu and moved in with an older female cousin. Both of them
worked and shared living expenses while she waited for her husband to return
from the war. Two of Lindsey’s three brothers, Evan and Richard, graduated from
high school on Chuuk and then moved to Eureka, California, to attend commu-
nity college. Now some years later both have jobs in Eureka; are married; and,
with their Mortlockese spouses (one of whom is from Namoluk), share a house
together (see Chapter 8 for more details).
After she graduated from high school in 1976, Oprah, a sixth waver, spent a se-
mester at a community college in Portland, Oregon. That did not work out, and
she returned to Wééné and married a guy from Kuttu. That didn’t work out ei-
ther. A couple of years later she married a Kosraen she met on Guam in the early
1990s, where she had moved to work. Her firstborn, a daughter, married a man
110 7. Reef Crossings

from Chuuk Lagoon, and by July 2001, that couple had had three children, all
born and living on Guam.
Kaylee, also from the sixth wave, finished high school on Chuuk in 1979,
boarded the Island Hopper, and flew all the way to a community college campus
in North Carolina. She attended that school for a year, during which time she met
and married a Euro-American, by whom she had a daughter and a son. They
lived in North Carolina, but difficulties arose in the marriage, and she and the
children moved out. His parents, eager to maintain a link to their grandchildren,
helped support her while she took some business school classes and taught aero-
bics. She then met and married another Euro-American, and they moved just
across the state line to a tiny town in Virginia. When Kaylee speaks English, it is
with a decided southern drawl. Homesick for her family in Chuuk, Kaylee con-
vinced her second husband to fly to Wééné for a visit. They arrived with their
kids, a suitcase full of gifts, and Kaylee full of excitement. But the trip didn’t turn
out quite as she had hoped. During a 1995 visit to their house in Virginia, I asked
her kids what they remembered of their trip. Their response was twofold: “The
food was yukky, and there was no McDonald’s”; and “Everybody was always
touching me.” Clearly, these were chon Namoluk of a new sort, an issue to be ad-
dressed in Chapter 9.
Today, a growing number of chon Namoluk are born and raised away from
their home island, and in recent years this has meant outside of Chuuk State as
well. Concurrently, an ever-greater number have a father who is not from
Namoluk. In some instances, the combination of these things makes it difficult
for the children to feel that they are a part of the Namoluk community (see
Chapter 9). For instance, Kaylee’s half Euro-American children grew up and
graduated from high school in Virginia. Her daughter is employed in Columbus,
Ohio, and her son lives with his father, works, and attends college part-time in
Norfolk. Neither speaks Mortlockese nor identifies with Namoluk.
Nothing stays the same; no one stays put. In the two years since my July 2001
census of the full Namoluk population, some people have made bold migration
moves. Laurel is a case in point. Born on Wééné, Laurel lived and attended school
in Chuuk’s urban center until she was fourteen. In 1995, she went to stay with her
mother’s younger sister and family, who had established themselves on Guam
quite a few years before. Laurel was sent so she could get a better high school ed-
ucation than was available to her on Chuuk; she graduated from George
Washington High School in 1999. After attending UOG for a year, she joined her
mother in Honolulu and enrolled at Kapi’olani Community College for approxi-
mately another year. Then, in March 2002, she traveled to join her Namoluk hus-
band-to-be in Eureka, California, where she was living when I visited there in
June 2002 (see Chapter 8).
Laurel illustrates a recent trend to send children to live with kin who have mi-
grated to Guam or the States to attend school there. In Honolulu, Lurline, the
graduate nurse who had migrated to Hawai’i, provided a home for three of her
 Migration Patterns 111

sisters’ children while they attended school there in 2001. The hope is that the
kids will develop greater facility in English and acquire a superior education than
they would if they remained in Chuuk State. An unexamined consequence of the
practice is that many of these children are “seduced” by American life and do not
wish to return to their island home (see Chapter 9).
Crusoe may represent this risk. As with many others, in 1986 he went to live
with a relative so he could obtain a solid education in the United States. Although
he lettered in wrestling at his North Carolina high school, once he graduated, he
fell in with a bad crowd, and his life became troubled and complex. In 1990, he
returned for a visit to Wééné, and then went back to Virginia. He got a job there
for a couple of years, and bought a car, but the quality of his friends didn’t im-
prove, and his problems continued. One day he simply packed up and left his rel-
ative’s house, without word or warning. They discovered that he’d sold his car for
cash when they saw it in a local used car lot. Although no one in the family knew
for sure, it appeared that he had set out for Florida where another relative was
then living. That turned out to be the case, and by August 1992, he had a job
there. But his problems continued, and late one night in 1993, while intoxicated,
Crusoe had an encounter with a locomotive. He lost. Papers on his body led the
authorities to notify family members back home, and he was flown to Chuuk,
taken down to Namoluk, and buried on his ancestral land.
Starting in the 1990s, travel outside of Chuuk State began to cut across all
Namoluk age groups. Young and middle-aged adults traveled in search of work
or school. Teenagers and young children either accompanied their parents in mi-
gration or were sent to live with relatives abroad. Seniors traveled to visit their
children and grandchildren. A retired school teacher named Ledyard provides a
classic instance of this. He has visited Guam, Pohnpei, Hawai’i, California, and
Oregon on his journeys. Even though he has been to Hawai’i and the U.S. main-
land to see several of his children and other members of his lineage family who
reside there, Ledyard has spent much of the past six years in Honolulu in order to
obtain medical treatment for hypertension and related ailments. In April 2003, he
flew from Honolulu to Chuuk so that he could go down to the atoll because he
wanted to eat traditional food at Namoluk’s Easter feast. A member of his family
told me on the phone that when Ledyard returned in June, he would bring his
eighteen-year-old granddaughter with him to Eureka, California, where she
would enroll in school.
We turn now, in Chapter 8, to look at some of the communities where the mi-
gration patterns discussed above have played out.

Notes
1. Another Namoluk man joined the journey to Chuuk when the Eekmwar called at
Moch.
2. Her husband is Molly’s husband’s brother, hence two “sisters” married two “broth-
ers” in sibling-set marriage.
 8
Four Locations
Beyond the Reef

Ledyard just went there [Eureka, California] last sum-

mer, 2000 to go and visit his sons. He is retired and is
roaming the globe. About one month later, Hyacinth,
one of his daughters sent for Janelle. And so Lobelia ac-
companied Janelle to Honolulu to baby-sit Hyacinth’s
baby while she goes back to work. Yes, lots of Namolukese
are all over, large number of them is also in Honolulu.

(E-mail message from Maiyumi, 31 October 2000;

pseudonyms substituted)

ROAMING THE GLOBE

Material presented in earlier chapters shows that—taken collectively—members
of the post–World War II populace of Namoluk Atoll truly have begun to roam
the globe. At least one person from the island has been to Australia, East and
Southeast Asia, Europe, the Middle East, North America, the Caribbean, and all
over the Pacific Islands, including New Zealand. The only inhabited continents
not visited by chon Namoluk by the spring of 2003 were Africa and South
America. But although globe-trotting has not yet become the norm for Namoluk
people, travel to certain specific destinations has now become a normal part of
the contemporary life of community members of all ages. These destinations

113
114 8. Four Locations Beyond the Reef

have been mentioned in earlier chapters, as waves of people have spread out from
“the lagoon in the middle.” Four of these locations are highlighted below, along
with a discussion of who is there, when they arrived, and what sort of life they
live in their new surroundings. Chon Namoluk are on Wééné and Guam in suffi-
cient numbers to form true migrant communities; in Hawai’i and Eureka,
California, they live in clusters, and their numbers are not yet high enough to
constitute actual expatriate Namoluk communities. We will see, however, that
more encompassing identities than simply being a Namoluk person operate in
such locales.

WÉÉNÉ: THE FIRST STEP

Other than a visit elsewhere in the Mortlocks, the only place one can reach by
ship from Namoluk is the urban center on Wééné in Chuuk Lagoon. Even
though its demographic numbers are quite small by international standards, with
its urban lifestyle and Pacific port town characteristics, Wééné is a world apart in
scale and modernity from a rural outer island such as Namoluk. Just as it was for
Maiyumi in the story with which this book begins, Wééné is the first big step and
the first main stop beyond the reef. Between 1958 and 1989, the town’s popula-
tion nearly quadrupled from 4,367 to 15,622 (Gorenflo 1995, 64), and it rose
slightly again to 16,121 by the time of the 1994 national census (FSM 1996, 2).
Few Namoluk people were there in 1958, but in the mid–1990s approximately
200 of them resided in the urban center. This was not much more than 1 percent
of Wééné’s overall population at that time, but it constituted more than 25 per-
cent of Namoluk’s people, and it was the largest concentration anywhere of chon
Namoluk, other than those still resident on the atoll (see Table 3.1). With an FSM
population in 1994 of 105,506 (FSM 1996, 1), Wééné had 15 percent of the total
national population, and nearly a third that of Chuuk State, which in turn
claimed half of all FSM citizens. So everything is relative, and Wééné is a “big
place” among Micronesia’s “little islands.”
For chon Namoluk Wééné served as both a window on modernity and a
jumping-off point for travels abroad. A few people from the atoll lived there dur-
ing the 1960s, but the development of Wééné as chon Namoluk’s second home
took place during the 1970s and early 1980s. Table 3.1 shows that the number of
chon Namoluk located there grew from 69 at the beginning of 1971 to 213 a little
over thirty years later. That table also shows that since the mid–1970s, approxi-
mately one-fourth of Namoluk’s total population has been in the urban center.
During these three decades, a number of Namoluk people have managed to ac-
quire land on which to erect homes on Wééné. In some cases they have been able
to purchase it, while in others they have gained access via marriage to a spouse
from that island. There are now several places where numerous chon Namoluk
live within a few minutes’ walk of each other, or right next door on occasion.
 Wééné: The First Step 115

Chon Namoluk Outside One of Their Homes in

Iras Village on Wééné, July 2001

Although Namoluk people on Wééné were second in number only to those

who remained on the atoll, not all age groups were represented equally in town.
In July 2001, the number between the ages of 40–49 and 50–59 was higher on
Wééné than anywhere else, reflecting the state government employment found
by many of those in the fifth and sixth waves when they returned from college.
The urban center ranked second to Namoluk in the number of persons in the
10–19, 20–29, and 60–69 age groups, and it was essentially tied with Guam for
second place among those aged 30–39 (see Table 4.1).
Those chon Namoluk who are located on Wééné at any moment are of three
sorts: those who live and work there more or less permanently; those who are vis-
iting from the atoll to see kin, seek medical care at the hospital, or just to sample
the “bright lights”; and those who have come back for a visit from abroad. Often,
when someone plans a short visit from the U.S. mainland, for example, her rela-
tives on the atoll will ride the ship to Wééné, have their reunion, and then return
home after she flies off again to the United States.
Chon Namoluk on Wééné reflect the nascent social class divisions that were
mentioned in Chapter 4. Quite a few people from the island have had the talent,
education, and good fortune to occupy responsible, well-paying jobs in the state
116 8. Four Locations Beyond the Reef

government for years, and in many cases their spouse also is employed. The result
is that they have enough money to purchase land and build a home; to own a car
or a small pickup truck; to have a range of modern conveniences such as a tele-
phone, a TV, and a VCR; and to afford the tuition and fees necessary to enroll
their children in private church-sponsored schools. The greater resources that
these new elite have also permit them and their children to buy expensive tickets
for travel outside of Chuuk. It is also these people who take vacations or shop-
ping trips to Guam or Honolulu, or even Bali, in one case. And many of them, of
course, travel at government expense on business and are able to combine busi-
ness with pleasure.
It was noted in Chapters 1 and 2 that one of the bigger “pull” factors that drew
Namoluk people to Wééné was secondary school. This continues to be the case.
Even with the development of the junior high school for ninth and tenth grades
on Satawan, Namoluk young people must travel to Chuuk to complete their high
school education. The mixing and meeting with students from other parts of
Chuuk State that occurs during high school and at an age of sexual awakening
has contributed to the significantly higher number of marriages between chon
Namoluk and spouses from Chuuk Lagoon during the past thirty years. In the
great majority of such marriages, the couples either reside on Wééné, elsewhere
in the Lagoon, or abroad; rarely do they move to Namoluk for more than a brief
while, if at all.
To be on Wééné is to walk to two rhythms at once. The slow, steady pace of is-
land life continues—especially in the outlying districts of the island such as
Wiichap or Sópúúk—even as it is crosscut by a more frenetic imported beat.
People pick breadfruit, weed taro plots, and fish the adjacent reefs while they also
buy bags of rice, shop in grocery stores, and purchase frozen chickens. Some
Western Islanders visiting the town may wear traditional wraparound skirts and
go topless while other Chuukese women home from Kansas City or Seattle may
wear tight jeans, sandals with inch-high heels, and a bare midriff top. Young men
in church may sport Chicago Bulls T-shirts and wear Tevas instead of a white
shirt and zori. The local radio station plays Chuukese music, but it also plays rap
tunes, reggae, and country western songs. Groups of foreigners arrive at the air-
port to scuba dive on World War II Japanese shipwrecks; they have virtually no
contact with local people. Groups of local people depart from the airport to go
live on Guam, attend college in West Virginia, or seek their fortune in Honolulu
or Corsicana. Wééné is a fascinating perpetual bundle of contradictions.
One such contradiction in the 1990s was that it was a center without a core.
Among Wééné’s problems was a worsening government financial crisis and an
insufficient number of jobs for its young and burgeoning populace. Out-migra-
tion from Chuuk to Guam began in earnest as Chuuk State’s economy began to
hemorrhage in the 1990s. Larry J. Gorenflo reported that wages in Chuuk were
“markedly lower than elsewhere in the federation, exacerbated by 23 percent un-
 Chon Guamoluk: Living Where America’s Day Begins 117

employment in the early 1990s” (1995, 103–104). This was made worse by the
step-down in U.S. Compact funding to the FSM in 1996, which put the FSM’s
economy “into a sharp decline,” and “the last five years [1996–2001] saw business
expansion come to a halt” (Hezel 2003, 3). Heavy migration in search of wage
work from Chuuk to Guam continued through the mid– to late–1990s, at which
point tourism and business on Guam also took a turn in the wrong direction.

CHON GUAMOLUK:
LIVING WHERE AMERICA’S DAY BEGINS
Guam bills itself as “the place where America’s day begins,” a way of emphasizing
that it has been a U.S. possession since it was wrested from Spain during the
Spanish-American War in 1898. Save for a short three-year interlude from
1941–1944, following the Japanese invasion at the onset of World War II, Guam
has remained connected to the United States ever since. The island was adminis-
tered by the U.S. Navy prior to World War II, and this was continued once the
Japanese were defeated there in 1944. When it became a U.S. territory with pas-
sage of the Organic Act in 1950, “the island government’s responsibilities ex-
panded to correspond approximately to those of a tiny U.S. state with direct civil-
ian links to the Congress and the executive branch” (Rogers 1995, 224). By 2003,
in a “white paper” designed to lure greater military presence and investment, the
chair of the Guam Chamber of Commerce, Carl Peterson, could claim that
“Guam has an English-speaking, fast-food and shopping-mall culture familiar to
U.S. military personnel” (Brooke 2003, A14). When McDonald’s and the
Micronesia Mall open in Dededo, America’s day truly begins.
With 150,000 people on a land mass of 209 square miles, Guam dwarfs all
other islands in the Micronesian region. With a climate much less pleasant than
Hawai’i’s, and located in an area subject to frequent damaging typhoons, Guam is
an odd mix of a Third World country and a southern California suburb. Larry
Mayo (1992) notes that the military is responsible for the island’s modern infra-
structure, and much of its employment, but even the U.S. military can’t keep the
power on all the time or prevent the traffic gridlock on Marine Drive. For at least
a dozen years beginning around 1984, Guam’s economy “took off.” Japan’s and
other Asian economies were thriving then, and millions of yen were invested in
upscale tourist facilities, ranging from first-class hotels and duty-free shops to so-
phisticated restaurants and affordable golf courses. It was during this time that
the “fast-food and shopping-mall culture” really embedded itself on Guam.
Although this growth provided abundant employment, it also led to protests by
some Chamorro rights activists against the military’s size and control over land
because tourism appeared to offer an economic alternative.1 But as the Asian
economies faltered in the late 1990s, fewer new tourist facilities were built, and
fewer new tourists arrived from Japan, Taiwan, and South Korea. By 2002, ac-
118 8. Four Locations Beyond the Reef

cording to James Brooke (2003), Guam’s hotel occupancies were down to 55 per-
cent of capacity, and Guam’s government began to actively court the military
once again to increase its presence.
Prior to and throughout the unfolding of these events on Guam, the island’s
social mix more and more began to resemble Hawai’i’s ethnic potpourri. In 1940,
there were 22,290 people on Guam, 90 percent of whom were indigenous
Chamorros (Mayo 1992, 234). Although the raw number of Chamorros grew to
an estimated 55,000 by 1986, at that time they comprised only 46 percent of the
island’s 120,000 people. The remainder of the population included approxi-
mately 30,000 “Statesiders” (principally Euro-Americans), 25,000 Filipinos
(many originally imported to work for the military), 3,000 Chinese, 3,000 South
Koreans, 3,000 “Micronesians” (including people from Palau, the FSM, and the
RMI), and 1,000 Japanese (Mayo 1992, 235). It was into this polyglot and poly-
ethnic collage that chon Namoluk began to move shortly after the formal ap-
proval of the Compact of Free Association between the USA and the FSM.
For many chon Namoluk, Guam was their first exposure to the positive and
negative aspects of American culture. They sampled (and worked for) KFC and
Little Caesar’s Pizza. They went to the sleazy strip joints that catered to Asian
male tourists and horny, homesick sailors. They shopped at K-Mart and watched
the races at Guam’s Greyhound Park. Along with Tony Roma’s ribs, they tasted
Japanese and Korean food. Some learned to chew betel the Chamorro way. A few
drank at Planet Hollywood in Tumon Bay. And, of course, cable TV carried ad-
vertisements urging viewers to patronize places such as the Micronesia Mall,
which Brooke (2003) called “a turquoise-colored temple of American con-
sumerism.” At least one Namoluk woman even took a job there.
Following the signing of the Compact of Free Association by the USA in 1986,
many FSM citizens—and especially people from Chuuk State—moved to Guam
in search of work. Even though at that time the FSM’s economy was still growing
by more than 4 percent per year (Hezel 2003, 3), work was difficult to come by,
and wages paid on Guam were far above what could be earned in Pohnpei or
Chuuk. Upon finding work in Guam’s then-thriving economy, the young men
(and some young women) who were the first to arrive soon attracted other fam-
ily members, and migrant communities began to form. The number of FSM citi-
zens resident on Guam increased nearly threefold from September 1988 to
September 1992, with the number from Chuuk State more than tripling during
those four years (Hezel and Levin 1996, 93).
More pertinent to our concerns, Chuuk State citizens made up close to three-
fourths of the nearly 5,000 FSM nationals living on Guam in 1992. Among these
Chuuk State citizens on Guam were chon Namoluk, many of whom were seventh
wavers. By April 1995, Guam had the third largest concentration of chon
Namoluk, after the atoll and Wééné. I refer to them as chon Guamoluk (Marshall
1996). By the summer of 2001, almost one-fifth of Namoluk’s de jure population
resided on Guam (see Table 3.1). This section chronicles the growth of the
 Chon Guamoluk: Living Where America’s Day Begins 119

Chon Guamoluk in an Apartment on Guam, May 1995

Guamoluk community since 1986 and notes how it has also served as an incuba-
tor or way-station for many who subsequently have moved to Hawai’i or the U.S.
mainland.
Some members of this community began to marry on Guam, in a few cases to
non-Chuukese spouses; give birth to their children there (thereby giving them
the option of U.S. citizenship when they reach the age of majority); and send
their school-aged children to Guam’s heavily Americanized public schools. There
have been a total of fifty-two marriages among the chon Namoluk who have been
or are a part of the Guamoluk migrant community.2 Almost half of these (N=24)
were with spouses from islands in Chuuk Lagoon, nine were with people from
elsewhere in Chuuk State (eight from the Mortlocks), and only five were between
two Namoluk people. So nearly three-fourths of these marriages have been with
other “Chuukese.” At the same time, from another perspective, one in four of
these marriages has been with a foreigner: six with Chamorros; two with
Kosraens; and one each with spouses from the Marshall Islands, Palau, Pingelap,
Pohnpei, the Philippines, and Ulithi. And from yet a different point of view, less
than one in ten of the marriages made by chon Guamoluk were with someone
from their own island. It seems, then, that Guam provides a more diverse pool of
potential marriage partners, and/or it attracts people from Chuuk State who have
married outside their own communities of origin.
120 8. Four Locations Beyond the Reef

Guam is not just a destination for migrants from Namoluk; it is now the
birthplace of at least 8 percent of the members of Namoluk’s 2001 de jure popula-
tion. My count, which may be a slight undercount, showed that by mid–July
2001, at least seventy-one Namoluk young people had been born on Guam.3 The
great majority of them were also being raised there. The earliest birth among
these children of which I have a record was in January 1985, and sixteen had been
born there by the end of 1990. As of the summer of 2001, I had records of at least
seven chon Namoluk who had graduated from Guam high schools. This number
will grow markedly over the coming years as the many Guamoluk children now
in elementary school and junior high complete their high school educations.
It is also instructive to look at the demographic profile of the Guamoluk com-
munity in comparison to the number of chon Namoluk located on the atoll, on
Wééné, and in the United States. Guam had the second largest number of 0–9
year olds after the atoll, the third largest number of 10–19 year olds and 60–69
year olds after the atoll and Wééné, and was nearly tied for the second largest
number of 30–39 year olds with Wééné (Namoluk had the most; see Table 4.1).
The two cohorts that were notably small on Guam, when compared to the other
locations of Namoluk people, were the 40–49 year olds and 50–59 year olds. In
both of these cases, the greatest number were on Wééné. For the 20–29 year olds,
more were in the United States in July 2001 than were on Guam (N=31 versus
N=26), although slightly higher numbers of this age group were on the atoll and
on Wééné. What this reveals is that the Guamoluk community is composed
mainly of adults in their twenties and thirties in 2001 (seventh and eighth wa-
vers) and their young children, many of whom were born on Guam.
The Guamoluk community numbered 155 persons in July 2001, and it was a
strikingly young bunch. Eighty-seven percent were under age forty. Fifty-nine
percent were under age twenty-five; 45 percent—nearly half—were younger than
fifteen years of age. Of those aged fifty-five or older, eight of nine were women.
This reflects both women’s greater longevity and also older women’s economic
usefulness as babysitters for their grandchildren. Guam is an extremely expensive
place to live, and few Namoluk couples could survive there comfortably without
jobs for both spouses. Thus grandmothers were essential to household economic
success in many cases.
When chon Namoluk first began to move to Guam, its population was ten
times more than Wééné’s, and this offered the lure of urban anonymity. For a few
Namoluk women who were somewhat marginalized and impoverished on the
atoll, because they had several children to support and no husband, Guam pre-
sented an attractive place to begin again, without the negative aura that sur-
rounded them back home. This had not dawned on me until I carried out my
fieldwork with chon Guamoluk in 1995, at which point I observed that nearly all
such women had moved from the atoll to Guam. While a couple of them picked
up a husband on Wééné en route, most vaulted from the atoll all the way to
Guam with but a brief interlude in Chuuk’s urban center. In most cases they fol-
 Chon Guamoluk: Living Where America’s Day Begins 121

lowed their young adult children, who had preceded them in search of work.
Even though such “movin’ out” didn’t mean they had cut their ties to Namoluk, it
did suggest that Guam provided a new freedom to these women.
I found one of them—a fourth waver named Erewhon—who as a divorcée
and single mother had been hard-pressed to feed and clothe her kids on
Namoluk, living a life of comparative luxury when I interviewed her in 1995. She
had followed her sixth-wave son and seventh-wave daughter (the eldest and the
youngest of her four children) to “the place where America’s day begins,” and a
new day truly had begun for her. Living in an upscale apartment in Yigo with her
daughter and her daughter’s Chamorro husband,4 Erewhon cared for their two
toddlers and two other children whom she had adopted and brought to Guam
for schooling.5 Her daughter and son-in-law both had good jobs (as a sales-
woman in a duty-free shop and as a cook at a hotel), and their combined income
allowed them to pay the rent of nearly $1,000/month plus other living expenses.
The apartment was filled with nice furniture and appliances, and it was a far cry,
indeed, from Erewhon’s typhoon house and earth oven back on Namoluk.
Erewhon said that she felt fulfilled and supported by children and grandchildren
on Guam. In addition to her daughter with whom she lived in 1995, her son and
daughter-in-law (from Namoluk) had been there since 1986 and 1987, and all
three of their children at that time were born on Guam. Moreover, her “brother’s”
eldest daughter, and this woman’s Chuuk Lagoon husband, had lived on Guam
since 1990. All three of their children also were born on Guam, and Erewhon had
stayed with them in Dededo to baby-sit when she first arrived. Only one of her
four natural children was on Namoluk in 1995, so if she wanted to be with most
of her family, Erewhon needed to be on Guam. Escaping from relative poverty
and stigma was an added bonus.
The rapid migration of FSM citizens to Guam—particularly those from
Chuuk—produced a culture-clash and a certain amount of strain on Guam’s so-
cial services. This became known as the “Compact impact,” and Guam’s represen-
tatives in Washington argued strongly for federal assistance to pay for the addi-
tional financial load. This political brouhaha led a number of social scientists to
focus on both the Compact impact and the prejudice of some people on Guam
toward chon Chuuk (e.g., Dobbin and Hezel 1996). Despite the heated rhetoric
and unfair stereotypes surrounding this issue, I discovered in my short field trip
during May 1995 that a majority of Namoluk adults on Guam were gainfully em-
ployed. My information about chon Guamoluk led me to conclude that if they
were “at all typical of other FSM migrants, then the presumed Compact impact is
largely a myth. Only one Guamoluk family received regular public assistance, and
this was to help care for a young disabled child born on Guam prematurely who
required special breathing equipment and other medical assistance. One other
chon Guamoluk was on regular dialysis at Guam Memorial Hospital for late-stage
diabetes mellitus. Twenty-two Guamoluk children attended the public schools,
but the costs of their education were more than offset by the taxes and other con-
122 8. Four Locations Beyond the Reef

tributions their parents and kin made to Guam’s economy” (Marshall 1996,
10–11). The persistence and greater integration of the Guamoluk community in
the years since my 1995 visit suggest that most of these people have quietly gone
about their work and lives, contributing positively to Guam’s economy and rich
cultural mixture.
Part of Guam’s attraction for FSM migrants is its proximity. Chuuk is but an
hour away by jet, and this allows for a lot of visiting and for circular migration.
People from Chuuk, including chon Namoluk, now take short vacations on
Guam or go there for Christmas shopping. The airfare is not prohibitive, and
they have kin with whom they can stay for free once they arrive. Guam’s proxim-
ity means that Wééné is to Guam as Namoluk is to Wééné, that is, the Guamoluk
community has in some senses become an extension of the Namoluk communi-
ties on the atoll and in Chuuk’s urban center. In the 1960s there was considerable
movement between Namoluk and Wééné, but not much beyond Chuuk.
Beginning with the Compact in 1986, considerable movement began among peo-
ple on Namoluk and their relatives on Guam, as well as on Wééné. To take but
one example, Sabrina, a fourth waver, now routinely moves among these three
venues. One of her daughters told me on the phone that, “Going to Guam for
Mama now was just like going to Amwes [across Namoluk’s lagoon] before.”
Sabrina comes and goes, but here are a few time and place markers of her move-
ments: In April 1995, she was on Wééné; in July 1999, she was back home on
Namoluk; in April 2000, she went to Oneop for Easter; two years later she was on
Wééné again, and she sailed down to Namoluk while I was in Chuuk; in
November 2002, she was on Guam, where she stayed until April 2003, when she
flew back to Wééné to help care for her eldest daughter, who was ill. In all of these
places she visits and stays with her children and grandchildren.
As early as the mid–1990s, and then increasingly by 2003, Guam’s economy
peaked and then began to struggle. As this occurred, some chon Guamoluk de-
cided to strike out for greener pastures in Hawai’i or on the U.S. mainland. The
job skills, savvy about American life, and facility in English they’d acquired on
Guam stood them in good stead as they moved farther away from home.
Hawai’i—especially Honolulu—has taken on a particular attraction of late. But
even so, the bittersweetness of moving ever farther from “the lagoon in the mid-
dle” is captured in what Seraphim told me when we met on Guam in 1995: “I
don’t like Guam, but there was no work in Chuuk and I came here to provide my
kids with better schools and to make a living. I get homesick for Namoluk, and
think about going fishing, but my kids probably would never be happy down
there because they’re being raised on Guam.”

WILL DREAMS COME TRUE IN BLUE HAWAI’I?

Seraphim has since separated from his wife, left Guam, and moved to Honolulu;
his wife and kids also have left Guam to try a new life in the American Midwest.
 Will Dreams Come True in Blue Hawai’i? 123

Feeling somewhat blue, he hopes, as the song has it, that his dream of better
times will come true “in blue Hawai’i.” Before people like Seraphim came to “the
islands,” Namoluk people first began to spend time in Hawai’i around 1970, al-
though there was never more than a handful of them there at any one time until
the late 1990s. Back in the beginning, those who came arrived for one of two
reasons: either to go to college or to receive medical care. Although a dozen or
more chon Namoluk attended community colleges on Maui and O’ahu, and
later at several of Hawai’i’s four-year institutions, at least as many came to
Hawai’i in search of better healthcare. Kula Sanitarium. Straub Clinic. Queen’s
Hospital. Tripler Army Medical Center. These were the places to which chon
Namoluk were referred for treatments that they could not get from the hospital
on Wééné.
Table 3.1 shows just how recent the migration of Namoluk people to Hawai’i
has been: in April 1995, only seven of them were there; by July 2001, this had bal-
looned to forty-five.6 Five of the seven who were in Hawai’i in 1995 were still
there in 2001, and they lived in several clusters scattered around Honolulu and its
suburbs. Many of the migrants who came during that six-year period were re-
lated to them and joined these clusters. For instance, by 2001, Lurline’s household
(she was all by herself in 1995) included six others: her sister’s son in his early
twenties; her brother’s twelve-year-old daughter; two of her sisters’ daughters
(one in her late teens and one a grade-schooler); and two young women in their
twenties, both of whom were her mother’s “brother’s” son’s daughters.
As with chon Guamoluk, those who were in Hawai’i in 2001 were on the
young side. Eighty-seven percent were under age forty-five, 76 percent were un-
der age thirty-five, and just over half (23/45) were between fifteen and thirty-four
years old. Perhaps because the move to Hawai’i had been so recent, there only
had been two births to Namoluk women there at the time of my 2001 census, a
number that doubtless will grow in the years to come. All five people over age
fifty were there to visit their children or to help care for their grandchildren. By
spring 2003, at least three more seniors were there in this role.
It’s interesting to examine where those who moved to Hawai’i between 1995
and 2001 were in 1995. The largest number (fourteen) were then on Namoluk,
another eleven were in Chuuk Lagoon, seven were on Guam, and three were on
Pohnpei. One each was on the U.S. mainland and in Sāmoa. Of course, five of the
forty-five were already in Hawai’i, and three of those in Hawai’i in 2001 were as
yet unborn in 1995 (one was born on Guam in 1998, and two in Honolulu in
2000 and 2001). Of the fourteen who were located on Namoluk in 1995, five went
to Hawai’i explicitly to live with relatives and to attend school there (including
college). Two more went to Honolulu primarily for medical care for themselves
or a child (a third person accompanied his mother as a companion). Three sen-
iors were in Hawai’i visiting children and grandchildren. The remaining three
people who had been on Namoluk in 1995 were all working or looking for work
in Honolulu in 2001.
124 3. 8. Four Locations Beyond the Reef

Those eleven who were located in Chuuk Lagoon in 1995 represented the
same range of reasons for moving to Hawai’i: to attend school, to seek treatment
for a health problem, to accompany parents who moved, to visit children and
grandchildren, and to find employment. Four of the seven who had been on
Guam, including Seraphim, found better job prospects in the Aloha State; one of
the other three came for college, one married an American in Hawai’i, and the
last accompanied his mother. All three who were on Pohnpei in 1995 had gone
there for school: two at COM–Pohnpei, and the other at the Pohnpei Agricultural
and Technical School (PATS), run by the Catholic Church. The former two com-
pleted their associate’s degrees on Pohnpei and transferred to Hawai’i to work on
their bachelor’s degrees. The one who was at PATS entered the Job Corps training
program in Hawai’i, from which he graduated by 2001. A woman who was on the
U.S. mainland for college in 1995 moved with her husband to Hawai’i by 2001; a
man who attended the University of the South Pacific extension campus in
Sāmoa in 1995 relocated to Honolulu by 2001.
I know of at least ten more chon Namoluk who were in Hawai’i in April 2003.
Four of them were on Guam in 1995, three on Namoluk, two on Wééné, and one
on the U.S. mainland. Three of the ten are in their mid- to late sixties and were in
Honolulu to be with their adult children, although one of them, Ledyard, also
was there due to a chronic health condition. The other seven were all between
twenty-seven and forty-one years old, and all came to find jobs.7 Six of them
joined existing households comprised of other Namoluk people, but the others
established their own. In at least one case, where the Namoluk man’s wife is from
Chuuk Lagoon, members of her family also moved to Honolulu and shared that
household.
Namoluk people in Honolulu have begun to name these household clusters
after places on their own island. For instance, one is called Lemaur, another is
known as Somas, and still a third is identified as Urowa. “Home place” thus is
mapped onto “new place” in a manner analogous to the way immigrants be-
stowed place-names on the United States derived from Mother England or conti-
nental Europe (e.g., Birmingham and Cambridge). To name a place, what Keith
Basso (1996, 5) calls “place-making,” even if it’s a rented venue, is to invoke a kind
of “cultural possession” over it and implies an intention to remain and put down
roots. This process also is a way for “identity-making,” as “Deliberately and other-
wise, people are forever presenting each other with culturally mediated images of
where and how they dwell. In large ways and small, they are forever performing
acts that reproduce and express their own sense of place—and also, inextricably,
their own understandings of who and what they are” (Basso 1996, 110). By nam-
ing household clusters in Honolulu, chon Namoluk “localize” a foreign place,
thus reproducing and expressing “culturally mediated images” of home.
Whether named or not, the various Namoluk household clusters are in fairly
regular communication among themselves, and many of their members get to-
gether for church services or for weekend recreation. When they do so, the serv-
 Will Dreams Come True in Blue Hawai’i? 125

ices, cookouts, and games frequently include other Mortlockese or people from
elsewhere in Chuuk State. There are many more persons in Hawai’i from Ettal
than from Namoluk, for example, and the close ties between these two communi-
ties have been reinforced in Honolulu. Some of the early Namoluk migrants lived
with people from Ettal, and at least one Namoluk-Ettal marriage has resulted
from such arrangements. Chon Namoluk in Hawai’i are not known as such, nor
are they known as Mortlockese. Instead, in Hawai’i’s complex ethnic declension,
they are labeled either as “Micronesians” or as “Chuukese.” These more encom-
passing identities also operate on the U.S. mainland, as we’ll see in the next sec-
tion, and they are important for comprehending Namoluk people’s changing
senses of personal and cultural identity in the twenty-first century—a matter to
which we’ll return in Chapter 9.
Hawai’i is a crossroads, a transit point between the U.S. mainland and the is-
lands further west, whether Guam, Pohnpei, or those of Chuuk State. As chon
Namoluk who reside on the mainland pass through Honolulu coming and going,
they are now met by their kin or fellow islanders at the airport (see Chapter 3).
Some who’ve lived and worked in Hawai’i for awhile have used it as a spring-
board to migrate to the mainland. For example, one unmarried seventh wave
woman from the Katamak clan moved to Hawai’i in 1994, accompanied by
Malcolm, her father, who had attended university there years before. After several
years of work in Honolulu, she moved to Portland, Oregon, where she got an
apartment near her lineage brother, Jasper, and his Mortlockese wife. There she
rooms with two other Mortlockese women, all of whom are employed. Others
use Hawai’i as a place to meet with family members, as is true of the grandpar-
ents from Namoluk who come for visits with their kids and grandchildren.
Among local people who live in Hawai’i, O’ahu is known as “the gathering
place,” and it has become that for chon Namoluk too. Members of the
Wáánikar–2 subclan illustrate this “coming together” on O’ahu. In the fall of
1994, Horatio and his wife were in Honolulu, visiting from Pohnpei, where they
both worked. While there, they got together for Thanksgiving dinner with their
two daughters (then in school in Hawai’i); Horatio’s sister Dominique’s son,
Oliver (then a student at the University of Hawai’i–Hilo campus); and Horatio’s
sister Janelle’s son, Oscar (who flew out for the holiday reunion from his work-
place in Eureka, California). Other kinds of gatherings occur among Namoluk
people in Honolulu as well. On an invitation from some members of the Hawai’i
contingent, Harold (a member of the Wáánikar–1 subclan) flew there from Los
Angeles to celebrate Easter 2003 with a group of Namoluk Protestants who live in
the various household clusters and worship together on Sundays. O’ahu: the
gathering place.
Another gathering place of a quite different sort lies 2,700 miles further to the
east, along the rocky northern coast of California. Where Honolulu is tropical
and balmy, Eureka is temperate and foggy. Where Honolulu has four or five
dozen chon Namoluk, Eureka had only half a dozen of them when I visited there
126 8. Four Locations Beyond the Reef

in June 2002. But other Namoluk people had lived there, some quite recently;
other chon Morschlok made up part of Eureka’s cluster; and still others from
Namoluk had visited there over the years. Eureka offers a good example of the
sorts of living situations in which chon Namoluk find themselves on the U.S.
mainland.

EUREKA! I’VE FOUND IT!8

Namoluk’s “Eureka moment” began in August 1985 when Rex, an eighteen-year-
old high school graduate and seventh waver, arrived by himself to attend the
College of the Redwoods (COR), a community college located on the southern
outskirts of Eureka, California. The spacious modern campus lies opposite the
Humboldt Bay National Wildlife Refuge in the heart of northern California’s
redwood country.9 Over the ensuing eighteen years, as of this writing, a cluster
of Namoluk residents has formed and been sustained in Eureka, even as some
have come and gone. Although it is a bit off the beaten path, the Eureka cluster
has had its share of Namoluk visitors over the years, and the Eureka bunch
themselves make periodic trips to see relatives up north in Portland and Salem,
Oregon. When family members fly in from Chuuk or Honolulu for a visit,
Namoluk’s “Eurekans” wind their way down the 300 miles of Highway 101 by
car to the airport in San Francisco or Oakland, meet their plane, and drive them
back up the coast.
Less than a year after Rex arrived, one of Namoluk’s Xavier graduates, Wilbur,
followed him to COR. They took a short trip to Texas that summer to visit
Wilbur’s brother, one of Namoluk’s “long-timers” who’d moved there in 1977
and had not returned to Chuuk even once as of 2002. Upon their return to
Eureka, both applied themselves to their studies, and each eventually received an
associate’s degree. At that point Rex transferred to Humboldt State University
(HSU), just up the road in Arcata, and Wilbur went to work in the construction
industry for five or six years “when [he] just burned out.” A Palauan friend,10 also
resident in Eureka, told him of an opening at a big lumber mill in Scotia, and he
hired on there for three years until the mill experienced a series of layoffs. He
then got a good job with full benefits at another smaller lumber company, located
in Arcata. Earning between $25,000 and $30,000 a year at the mill, Wilbur also
managed the twelve-unit apartment building in which he lived, which added fur-
ther to his income. At the time I interviewed him in 2002, Wilbur hadn’t returned
to Wééné or Namoluk for a visit in the sixteen years since he moved to Eureka.11
Rex followed a different path. In a phone conversation we had in March 2003,
he told me that “I really wanted my degree,” and so he persevered in his studies.
When he transferred to HSU, he worked construction jobs during the summers
to help pay for tuition, and he joined the Apostolic Faith Church, where he met a
young woman whose father was the minister there. In 1990, Rex received a BS in
finance from HSU and married the preacher’s daughter. After a trip back to
 Eureka! I’ve Found It! 127

Wééné by himself in 1991, the young couple moved to Honolulu in 1992, where
Rex went to work for an insurance company and enrolled as a part-time graduate
student at the University of Hawai’i’s Mānoa campus. Of his visit home, he told
me in a December 1991 phone conversation that it was “hard when I went
back—it was too slow—I’m more used to the fast-paced life.” However, when I
casually asked him whether he found it difficult to readjust to Chuukese food
again, he replied, “Oh, no! That was the best part! I ate fish every day until I was
almost sick.” Rex and his wife had a baby in Honolulu, and in 1994, they moved
back to the west coast, first to Sacramento, and then up to Salem, Oregon. They
remained there until late summer 2001, when they and their three children
moved to Wééné for Rex to take up a special position with the state government.
This was the first time that his Euro-American wife and their kids had been there,
so there were many adjustments to be made and many relatives to meet. The
family remained on Wééné for approximately a year, and then all five of them re-
located to Honolulu in October 2002, joining the growing Namoluk contingent
that has assembled there.
At Rex’s encouragement, Evan arrived in Eureka in the fall of 1987, and like
his predecessors, enrolled at COR. Also like them, he finished an associate’s de-
gree there. But while he has taken some classes at HSU in the years since, he
found a good job with UPS and settled into a comfortable lifestyle in Eureka. In
the fall of 1991, his younger brother, Richard, also a member of the Katamak
clan, was the fourth chon Namoluk to join the growing cluster. Richard spent
two semesters at COR while he also worked full-time at Pacific Choice Seafood
down on Eureka’s waterfront. All of this proved too much to handle, and since
he had bills to pay, he quit school and began a series of jobs in lumber mills that
eventually led to his working in the same Arcata mill that hired Wilbur. In 2002,
Wilbur was without a vehicle, and so the two of them rode together back and
forth to work in Richard’s 1992 Mazda pickup. After he’d been in Eureka for a
couple of years, Richard returned for a two-week visit to Wééné in 1993; since
then, he hasn’t gone home. However, he did travel all the way back to upstate
New York in the summer of 2001 to be present when his younger sister married
an American marine whom she had met on Guam. Interestingly, it was at that
function that he first encountered his fellow chon Namoluk, Steemer—Steemer
had left Chuuk for school in Hawai’i the same year that Richard was born (see
Chapter 3).
By 1991, then, the Eureka cluster was made up of four young men, all seventh
wavers. Soon thereafter, Rex and his wife moved to Honolulu, and no one else ar-
rived in Eureka until Oscar showed up in January 1994, having moved there from
Portland, where he’d worked for the previous two years.12 Oscar immediately
found a job as a board grader in a different lumber yard from where Wilbur and
Richard worked, and he has stayed at that company ever since. In November 2001
he married Gwynne, a young woman from Losap, at ICC in Portland, which is
where they first met, and she moved to Eureka with him.13
128 8. Four Locations Beyond the Reef

In September 1996, after Rex and his wife and Horatio’s daughter all had left,
and before Oscar got married, Oscar’s younger brother, Gawain—also from the
Wáánikar–2 subclan—arrived in Eureka, bringing the number of then-resident
chon Namoluk to five. An eighth waver, Gawain graduated from high school on
Wééné in 1995 and attended COM-Pohnpei during the next academic year.
When he got to Eureka, he enrolled at COR, but they would not accept many of
the COM credits that he sought to transfer, and he essentially had to start all over
again on his degree objective. He continued in school for three semesters until fi-
nancial obligations overwhelmed him, so with five semesters of college work and
no degree to show for it, he went to work full-time. Initially, he found employ-
ment at Pacific Choice Seafood, but he then switched to a cafeteria job, where he
worked for $7.50/hour and no benefits when I saw him in June 2002. While on a
trip to Portland for the big Easter fete at ICC in spring of 2000, he finally met in
person a young woman from Kuttu with whom he first became acquainted on
coconutchat. Kara had been recruited from Chuuk as a CNA and worked in a
nursing home in Maryland before she “escaped” and went all the way across
country to Portland. Immediately after the ICC Easter service, Kara moved to
Eureka to be with Gawain, and they share a two-bedroom apartment with Oscar
and Gwynne.
Before either Oscar or Gawain got married and brought their Mortlockese
wives to Eureka, another Namoluk person, Helen, arrived to attend COR in 1999.
She was Wilbur’s sister’s daughter and also related to Oscar and Gawain as mem-
bers of the same subclan. From the eighth wave, born on Wééné and a graduate
of Berea High School, Helen spent three semesters at COR without finishing a
degree. During part of that time, she lived in an apartment in the building man-
aged by Wilbur, although later she moved in with a Marshallese boyfriend. In
March 2002, Helen traveled from Eureka to Florida—the same month that Laurel
arrived from Honolulu to stay with Richard, her husband-to-be.14 She worked in
Florida briefly as a CNA and most recently popped up in western Iowa, living
with a Namoluk boyfriend.
While Helen still lived in Eureka, and before Laurel joined the others there, yet
another Namoluk person came and went. From the Wáánikar–2 subclan, like
Richard and Oscar, Tamara was already something of a wanderer. A member of
the seventh wave, she spent her early years on the atoll, lived a number of years
on Wééné, and then by 1990 moved to Guam. There she married a man from
Chuuk Lagoon with whom she had three children, all born on Guam, and from
whom she divorced. She next married a Pohnpeian on Guam and had a daughter
by him. Tamara next surfaced in my fieldnotes in October 1999, at which time
she lived in Honolulu with lineage mates there. In June 2000, she came to Eureka,
where she held various jobs as a housekeeper, a CNA, and a counter person at
Burger King. In January 2002, Tamara headed for Georgia to stay with another
subclan “sister” there who had married an African American and had had a
young baby. Most recently, Tamara drifted from Georgia to Louisville, Kentucky,
 Eureka! I’ve Found It! 129

where she stayed near an older subclan “sister” and her husband and children
who had moved there from Guam in 2002.
Thus the Eureka cluster has grown and shrunk over the past eighteen years,
reaching its maximum number of six chon Namoluk between 2000 and 2002. But
the cluster included more than just chon Namoluk: by June 2002, it also included
four other Mortlockese (one of them from Namoluk), all married to Namoluk
men. In addition to Gwynne, Kara, and Laurel, Evan had married a woman from
Moch named Sylvia, and their daughter was born in Eureka at the end of 2001.
These people live in three separate households: Wilbur lives alone; Evan and
Sylvia and their baby share a small house with Richard and Laurel; and Oscar and
Gwynne live together with Gawain and Kara.

Two Members of the Namoluk Contingent in

Eureka, California, Outside Their House, July 2002
130 8. Four Locations Beyond the Reef

Even though Eureka is not the most accessible community in America, the
Namoluk Eurekans are hardly cut off from other chon Namoluk. In addition to
their access to virtual kinship, they travel the seven and a half hours via Crescent
City, over to Grants Pass, and then up I–5 to Portland-Salem several times per
year. They have also had quite a few guests over the years. The first visitor was
Malcolm,15 Evan and Richard’s father, who spent a month with Evan, Rex, and
Wilbur during the summer of 1991. Within the next year, Nathan—then a theol-
ogy student in Los Angeles—rented a car and drove up to see the sights and to
“play” with his Namoluk age-mates. Soon thereafter, Ross, from the Wáánikar–1
subclan and also a student in Los Angeles, also drove up to Eureka. He and Evan
then drove on to Portland, where they took the elderly Kenneth (see Chapter 3)
through downtown Portland and to see the Clackamas Mall. Evan said that “his
eyes got big,” and, “It was really fun for me to do that and watch his reaction.” The
year 1997 saw many Namoluk visitors to Eureka. Richard and Evan’s parents both
came all the way from Namoluk, and so did Gawain and Oscar’s lineage
“brother,” Oliver, from Hawai’i. The next year—accompanied by his wife—
Richard and Evan’s older brother, Lindsey, flew from Wééné to San Francisco and
spent a month in Eureka. During that time, they drove up to see Jasper in
Portland. In 1999, a different lineage brother of Oscar and Gawain’s, Kendrick,
passed through for a few days while he was in the States on business, and Richard
and Evan’s parents returned for another visit. This time they, too, drove up to
Portland to visit Jasper and their daughter who lived there. As the epigraph to this
chapter indicates, while “roaming the globe,” Ledyard stopped through to visit in
the late summer of 2000.16 Less than a year later, Oscar and Gawain’s mother—
then living with their sister Hyacinth and her family in Honolulu—caught a
flight to San Francisco, got to walk across the Golden Gate Bridge, and then spent
nearly three months with her sons before returning to Hawai’i. Kurt and his
entourage from Salem, Oregon (including his elderly mother, Micky, his younger
brother, and two still younger kin), also drove to Eureka for a visit in 2001. Then
in March 2003, Malcolm, who had gone back to Namoluk from Portland for a
visit, landed in Oakland, was met by his sons, and went up the coast to Eureka to
see everyone there.17
Today, Eureka has so entered chon Namoluk’s collective cultural conscious-
ness that a Namoluk couple resident on Wééné, who had never been to
California, named their daughter “Eureka.” They’ve got it! The new world in-
habited by chon Namoluk extends all the way to the North American continent.
Who knows? Perhaps fifteen years from now Eureka from Namoluk Atoll will
enroll in college in Eureka, California. And the question as to what the identity
of such young women as Eureka might then be is the matter to which we turn in
the final chapter.
 Notes 131

Notes
1. Chamorro are the indigenous people of Guam (Guahan) and the other Marianas
Islands, and during the 1990s, activists among them initiated a Chamorro rights move-
ment, modeled somewhat on the Native Hawaiian sovereignty movement. Land alienation
was a key issue in the Chamorro rights movement, and because the U.S. military is the
largest landholder on Guam, protestors urged that the military presence on the island be
reduced. They justified the inevitable loss of jobs such a reduction would produce by
pointing to the robust tourist economy.
2. This includes marriages that subsequently ended in divorce.
3. Of the wave that washed from Namoluk to Guam, we certainly can say that it was
popo, “pregnant”!
4. Reflecting Guam’s ethnic diversity, this man’s father was a Filipino and his mother
was a Chamorra with a German father. Thus, genetically, his children by his Namoluk wife
are a cosmopolitan mixture reminiscent of many people in Hawai’i who are the product of
multiple ethnic intermarriages.
5. One was her six-year-old granddaughter by a daughter who remained in Chuuk, and
the other was her “brother’s” eighteen-year-old daughter whom she brought to Guam
from Wééné in 1994 to finish high school on Guam.
6. Incomplete data that I have acquired via telephone calls and e-mail correspondence
in the spring of 2003 suggest that the number of chon Namoluk in Hawai’i by then proba-
bly exceeded sixty.
7. One moved to Honolulu to resume college, having begun but not completed his
studies at COM. He dropped out of Kapi’olani Community College after one semester to
take a job at a Burger King.
8. “The Greek expression for ‘I have found it,’ associated with the great geometrician,
Archimedes, has common currency in Western civilization. As a geographical term it ap-
parently originated in California. . . . The motto became popular after the California con-
stitutional convention on October 2, 1849, approved the great seal of the state, with the in-
scription ‘Eureka’” (Gudde 1969, 105).
9. Eureka has a population of 26,000, but it is just a few minutes by car to Arcata, which
has 17,000 people. Adding in those who live in smaller towns nearby, the area has about
60,000 residents.
10. A number of Palauans, a Pohnpeian, and several “Hawaiians” resided in Eureka,
many of whom worked in the lumber mills, and some of whom play basketball every week
with a few of the chon Namoluk. Given the place-name Sāmoa on the barrier island across
Humboldt Bay from Eureka, it is fitting that there also are Sāmoans living and working in
Eureka. One or two other students from Chuuk State, and at least one from the RMI, also
came to the College of the Redwoods and Humboldt State after 1986, obtained degrees,
and then moved elsewhere.
11. I learned in July 2003 that he finally returned home for a visit in June of that year,
after seventeen years away.
12. In August 1993, Horatio’s daughter—herself a chon Lukunoch—arrived and at-
tended COR for a semester and a half. Evan, Richard, and Wilbur, then in Eureka, were all
132 8. Four Locations Beyond the Reef

related to her father. While she was in Portland over Christmas 1993, she convinced her
cross-cousin, Oscar, to accompany her back to Eureka, which he did. She left Eureka in
spring 1994 to attend her mother’s brother’s funeral on Wééné, after which she relocated
to Hawai’i and enrolled at Honolulu Community College. Horatio told me that the main
reason she didn’t continue her schooling at COR was that it simply required more money
than he could afford.
13. Although Losap is Gwynne’s home island, her life path mirrors that of many
younger chon Namoluk. Born and raised on Wééné, she has only been to Losap for short
visits. At age sixteen she went to stay with relatives on Maui, from whence she moved to
Honolulu and graduated from Roosevelt High School there in the early 1990s. She lived in
Honolulu for several years, and then in 1997 flew to Las Vegas to stay with a sister. After six
months in Vegas, she shifted to Portland, Oregon, where her father was a pastor at ICC and
where she took a job at Wal-Mart. Gwynne and Oscar met each other at ICC.
14. Laurel is a member of the Souwon clan and is profiled in Chapter 7.
15. Evan and Richard’s father, Malcolm, retired and moved around among his
Katamak clan children, most of whom live away from the atoll. He stayed with his sons in
Eureka on several occasions and drove down from Portland (where he stayed with another
son and his wife and a daughter) for Father’s Day 2002. He brought with him a video of
the Namoluk Protestant Church jubilee—held in August 2001.
16. Ledyard is Oscar and Gawain’s father and Evan and Richard’s mother’s “brother”;
he is also related to Wilbur somewhat more distantly.
17. Sadly, Malcolm passed away just a couple of months later in 2003.
 9
Closings: Points of Departure

. . . sense of place roots individuals in the social and cul-

tural soils from which they have sprung together, holding
them there in the grip of a shared identity, a localized
version of selfhood.

Keith H. Basso (1996, 146)

The phrase “point of departure” has special significance

in islands with deep and active seafaring traditions. It
refers to both metaphorical and physical spaces from
which seafarers launch their journeys. In Chuukese tra-
ditions of seafaring, this point of departure is called
“Muir,” steering point, and also connotes “home” or “is-
land.” Travellers set their course by using the point of
departure, or the home/island, as a guiding point.

Joakim Peter (2000, 255)

NO ISLAND IS AN ISLAND
The author of the second epigraph above, Joakim “Jojo” Peter, is president of the
COM–Chuuk campus, a chon Ettal with graduate degrees in Pacific history and
Pacific Islands Studies from the University of Hawai’i, a professional colleague,

133
134 9. Closings: Points of Departure

and a personal friend. His sister is married to a chon Namoluk, and she, her hus-
band, and their children have lived and worked on Guam for at least the past
decade. Jojo himself is a traveler to Guam, having completed his undergraduate
studies at UOG once he graduated from Xavier High School. He knows inti-
mately about points of departure and about how it is to be a chon Ettal in the
Mortlocks, a Mortlockese in Chuuk, a Chuukese on Guam, a Micronesian in
Hawai’i, and a Pacific Islander scholar among his international academic col-
leagues. Points of departure and shifting identities are among the topics I will ad-
dress in this final chapter.
Also to be discussed is the matter of place, as we have encountered it in the
form of a small, outer island atoll community in Chuuk State, FSM. This place,
Namoluk, is very clearly illustrative of “the local” when set against “the global” in
the debates that have gripped scholars during the past fifteen years. Namoluk is
an island community, to be sure, but as the preceding chapters show, in the year
2003 the Namoluk community is no longer just located on an island.
Paraphrasing poet John Donne,1 “no island is an island,” a fact that Namoluk ex-
emplifies well. But if Namoluk has never been only an island, the atoll provides
the essential material for what Harri Englund calls “emplacement:”
“Emplacement refers to a perspective in which the subject is inextricably situated
in a historically and existentially specific condition, defined, for brevity, as a
‘place’” (2002, 267; italics in original). From this perspective, at the beginning of
the twenty-first century, chon Namoluk find themselves situated in specific his-
torical circumstances “that are as much embodied as they are discursively imag-
ined” (Englund 2002, 263). Their personal identities derive from a collective
community identity that is rooted in a place: their island home. They carry
Namoluk with them when they move—wherever they move.
This relationship between person and community, identity and local place, is
widespread, even in a world overtaken by global flows and transnational migra-
tion. Englund (2002) documents it for Malawi in southern Africa. Joe Jorgensen
(1990; cited in Sahlins 1999, viii) reports it for an Eskimo village in the far north
of Alaska. Edward M. Bruner (1999) discusses it for the Toba Batak of Sumatra,
Indonesia. James L. Watson describes it for the members of a Chinese lineage
from the New Territories (lecture presented at the University of Iowa, November
12, 2002).2 And whether they remain on their own land or migrate overseas, the
literature insists that local places play a particularly important role in identity
formation for Pacific Islanders (e.g., Diaz and Kauanui 2001; Howard 1999;
Howard and Rensel 2001; Linnekin and Poyer 1990a; Spickard et al. 2002; Wilson
2000). This emphasis on the centrality of place poses a challenge to those who ar-
gue that place is relatively unimportant or even that it no longer matters in a de-
territorialized, postlocal world of diaporas and transnational population flows.
What can chon Namoluk who have moved “beyond the reef ” teach us about this?
And how does the Namoluk case fit in with other material about the importance
of place for Pacific Islanders?
 Points of Origin 135

POINTS OF ORIGIN
As explained in Chapter 1, chon means “a person or citizen of ”; hence, chon
Namoluk refers to the people or citizens of the Namoluk community. In preced-
ing chapters we have seen that for the past thirty years, members of this once
largely endogamous community increasingly have married outside the chon
Namoluk category. Although this has made the Namoluk population more di-
verse, it also provides an opportunity to rehearse what is known of the historical
heterogeneity of this community and the variety of ways by which people have
become chon Namoluk.
That place matters to Pacific Islanders has been known for a very long time.
Indeed, notions of kinship that are widespread in Oceania are predicated as
much on shared land rights in a particular place as they are on shared biogenetic
substance. Elsewhere, this linkage of person (as kin) and place (as land) has been
discussed for Micronesian societies at some length (Marshall 1999, 121–125).
Suffice it to emphasize here that people’s most intimate personal identities con-
currently involve relationships to those who produced them (their “blood” rela-
tives) and that which sustains them all (their land, from which they obtain food)
(see Chapter 1). People are not only related to each other, but they are also related
to their land—their place. This is summed up beautifully by the Indo-Fijian
Pacific historian Brij V. Lal: “Place matters. It gives us identity, shapes our imagi-
nation and experience and informs our understanding of the world around us. It
is both matter as well as metaphor, a source of material as well as of cultural and
spiritual sustenance. It can be ‘home’ or ‘away’” (in press). Whether they be at
home on their little atoll in the wide sea, or away on larger islands or distant con-
tinents in a wide world, chon Namoluk are who they are because of where they
are from.
Members of the eight clans represented on the atoll in 1969 (see Table 2.1 and
footnote) immigrated to Namoluk from at least ten other islands: seven in the
Mortlocks, two in Chuuk Lagoon, and Polowat Atoll. This diversity of back-
ground is typical of Carolinian atoll communities and is hardly unique to
Namoluk. The crucial issue for an immigrant clan is access to land—without
land rights on the atoll, they cannot claim to be chon Namoluk. Land is the fun-
damental basis of the chon Namoluk identity. Unless. . . The “unless” is equally
important in the decisions people make concerning whether someone else is or
isn’t a chon Namoluk. Here is how it was taught to me: “The concept of ‘Namoluk
citizen’ is a complex of factors that includes birth, residence, land rights, mar-
riage, clientship, adoption, and, sometimes, official government registration and
employment” (Marshall 1975a, 172). Let’s explore this concept in greater detail.
First, birth. Where one is born geographically is of little consequence, but in
keeping with matrilineal kinship, if one’s mother is a chon Namoluk, one is a
member of a Namoluk matrilineage by birth and thereby a Namoluk person. If
one’s father is a chon Namoluk, and one’s mother is from another island in
136 9. Closings: Points of Departure

Chuuk State, one usually will become a “citizen” of their mother’s home island.3
When one’s mother is from someplace outside the compass of Chuuk’s clan sys-
tem, one is more likely to be considered beyond the pale, and this clearly is what
has occurred for most of the children that Namoluk men have sired by American
women (see “Your Place or Mine?” below). Nevertheless, at least in theory, if such
children received a gift of land on the atoll from their father, and someday de-
cided to move to Namoluk and live on their land, the potential exists for them to
be incorporated as chon Namoluk.
In most cases, if either of one’s parents is from Namoluk, one will inherit
rights to land on the atoll, and this is another way to distinguish “Namoluk citi-
zens” from noncitizens. As noted above, those who inherit such property matri-
lineally are automatically chon Namoluk by birth because they belong to a local-
ized matrilineage. If one has land rights on Namoluk from one’s father, however,
in and of itself this isn’t sufficient to count oneself a Namoluk person. Only when
such land combines with lengthy residence on the atoll might one thereby be-
come a chon Namoluk, but this does not commonly happen.
Some people become chon Namoluk through marriage to a Namoluk person
and subsequent long-term residence on the atoll. This is by no means a given,
“and a spouse from another island may never consider himself a ‘Namoluk citi-
zen’ in spite of years of residence on the atoll. Likewise, some ‘Namoluk citizens’
may refer to such a spouse as a ‘Namoluk citizen’ whereas others may not.
Normally in such situations, however, outside spouses are converted to the
‘Namoluk citizen’ category” (Marshall 1975a, 173). In-marrying spouses typically
become client members of a Namoluk lineage.4
Adoption offers another path by which a person might become a chon
Namoluk. Most adoptions are by relatives—usually aunts, uncles, and grandpar-
ents—and so the child is likely to already be a member of the Namoluk commu-
nity. But occasionally a child born as a citizen of another island is adopted by
chon Namoluk and becomes a “Namoluk citizen” that way.
For governmental purposes, the island on which one pays taxes and votes in
local elections is one’s “home island.” It is possible to alter one’s home island by
changing one’s official tax and voting registration, and this is often done when
one’s affiliation already has been altered by one of the means discussed above
(e.g., marriage to a chon Namoluk and long-term residence there).
The last way to become a “Namoluk citizen” is by way of employment. The
only instance of this known to me concerned the former Protestant minister
(from Piis-Emmwar) and his family (from Wééné). They are considered chon
Namoluk even though they didn’t become client members of a Namoluk lineage
and only acquired limited landholdings on the atoll. Long-term residence of close
to twenty years, and a strong commitment to the local community, seemed cru-
cial in this case. It may be significant that only the minister’s five younger chil-
dren are referred to as chon Namoluk. The five older ones never moved to the
 Nested Identities 137

atoll with their parents and don’t consider themselves to be “Namoluk citizens,”
nor are they so viewed by Namoluk people.

NESTED IDENTITIES
Namoluk people evince a phenomenon that is widespread in many parts of the
world: their identities shift from very narrowly focused to broader, more inclu-
sive categories, depending upon the situation and setting in which they find
themselves. I alluded to this at the beginning of this chapter in regards to Joakim
Peter. Namoluk has three named villages, and when chon Namoluk are on their
home island, they identify themselves by the village in which they live and with
which they’re affiliated. Hence, on the atoll, people may identify as chon Pukos,
chon Lukelap, or chon Sópwonewel. In relation to people from the other commu-
nities that comprise the Mortlocks, they are chon Namoluk, and this is a self-
identity that they claim and retain wherever they go in Chuuk State. In most situ-
ations in Chuuk State, Namoluk is a known place; however, for some specific
purposes in relation to other collectivities that make up this political jurisdiction,
chon Namoluk may self-identify or be lumped together with their neighbors as
chon Morschlok, or “Mortlockese” (see Chapters 1 and 2).5 Generally, when peo-
ple from Chuuk State, including those from Namoluk, move outside of that
state’s borders, they identify and are identified by others as chon Chuuk, or
“Chuukese.” This is definitely the case elsewhere in the FSM; in the RMI, CNMI,
and Palau; on Guam; and to some degree in Hawai’i. It is more likely in Hawai’i,
however, that someone from Chuuk (including chon Namoluk) would identify as
“Micronesian,” and this identity is widely understood there to include all of the
inhabitants of the former USTTPI.
On the U.S. mainland, matters become more complex. Most people there are
quite poorly informed about “the Pacific,” and very few know where Chuuk is (al-
though the older generation who lived through World War II as adults certainly
have heard of Truk!). Chon Namoluk who’ve lived on the mainland and con-
fronted this problem give me a variety of answers to the question of how they
present themselves to others in terms of identity. Some say, “I’m from the Pacific
Islands.” Others respond, “I’m from the Micronesian Islands.” But even these gen-
eral labels don’t always work, and sometimes in frustration they’ll just tell their
questioner, “I’m from Hawai’i.” That usually works since most people on the
mainland know about Hawai’i nowadays.6 This is similar to what Alan Howard
and Jan Rensel (2001) report for Rotuman migrants to Australia and New
Zealand. Because others in those countries didn’t know the category “Rotuman,”
the islanders generally identified themselves as Fijian or Polynesian.
Shifting identities are understood by and affect people located on the atoll. As
noted in Chapter 7, young children may be taken by their relatives directly from
Namoluk to such places as Guam, Hawai’i, Kentucky, or Oregon to enroll in
138 9. Closings: Points of Departure

school there. These kids are almost immediately confronted with having to “rede-
fine” themselves for others. And many people who reside on the atoll have spent
considerable time—sometimes years—abroad, during which they’ve become fa-
miliar with identities necessitated by and created as a consequence of their em-
placement in new situations and conditions. The point is that the continuing
flow of people to and from Namoluk implicates the atoll’s residents in the nested
identities that may develop far beyond the reef.
Depending on where Namoluk people end up on the mainland, however, oth-
ers may ascribe an inappropriate identity to them based on assumptions about
their appearance. Some in North Carolina or who live in the Southwest are
misidentified as Native Americans. Others find themselves being addressed in
Spanish by Mexican Americans in California or by Hispanics in Florida. One
trashed a bar in Alabama when a white guy called him by the “N” word. Through
all of these locations and all of these episodes, however, chon Namoluk are very
clear that they are “the people or citizens of Namoluk Atoll.” Problems arise only
when their personal identity lies beyond the ken of some of those with whom
they must interact when far away from their island home.
Matters of ethnic, cultural, and individual identities for Pacific Islands mi-
grants to New Zealand have received much greater attention than for islander mi-
grants to the United States. Contributors to a recent collection edited by Cluny
Macpherson, Paul Spoonley, and Melani Anae (2001a) address a host of identity
issues that have arisen in New Zealand that may presage the future for chon
Namoluk and other Pacific peoples in America. Pacific Islanders are much more
“visible” in New Zealand, making up close to 6 percent of that country’s popula-
tion of about 3.3 million people (Cook, Didham, and Khawaja 2001, 45), whereas
such immigrants comprise about 1.5 percent of the USA’s 275 million people.
New Zealand’s islander migrants moved there mainly in the 1970s, but they have
now matured such that a majority who were recorded in the 1996 census had
been born in New Zealand (Bedford and Didham 2001). As discussed in
Chapters 3 and 5–8 above, the migration of chon Namoluk to the United States
commenced in the 1970s for educational reasons, but the overwhelming majority
of those fifth and sixth wavers returned to Chuuk State after a few years away.
Only with the leap to Guam beginning in the late 1980s did substantial numbers
of Namoluk people begin to take up residence outside of the FSM, and the moves
to Hawai’i and the U.S. mainland have for most people been more recent still (see
Chapters 7 and 8). Thus as of 2003, relatively few chon Namoluk had been born
in the United States, although their number continues to grow.
Macpherson, Spoonley, and Anae (2001b) focus on the formation of “transna-
tional island societies,” some members of whom have never left their home is-
lands, whereas others have never been in them. They are concerned with the
“process in which a given ‘cultural identity’ no longer rests on a more or less ho-
mogeneous set of shared social experiences in a single location,” and explore “the
diverse identities that result from being a Pacific person in the many places in
 Points of Entanglement 139

which Pacific peoples are now found” (2001b, 13). They also give attention to the
“new identity options, and issues” for those who have mixed ancestry (2001b,
14). They and their contributors discover a set of emergent identities among
young Pacific Islanders born and raised in New Zealand that cut across but do
not elide ethnic categories. For these young people, “Their knowledge and under-
standing of the worldviews, lifestyles and languages of their ancestral homes will
vary greatly as will their commitment to them. Just as their knowledge of their
ancestral ‘culture’ and language varies, so too will their associated identities”
(2001b, 13).
All of these circumstances obtain for chon Namoluk as well. There are many
who have not yet left Chuuk State, and there are some who have yet to visit those
islands. The children of chon Namoluk on Guam, in Hawai’i, or on the U.S.
mainland are learning what it means to be “a Micronesian” or “a Pacific person”
in these new settings, and their identities will vary accordingly. The influence of
public schools, peer groups, television, and myriad other experiences make their
socialization very different from their kin who are still reared on the atoll. Those
of mixed ancestry, those who only speak English, those who know little or noth-
ing about Chuukese society and culture must forge new identities in the United
States, comparable to what their Pacific Islander counterparts have created in
New Zealand. It may come to pass for chon Namoluk in the United States, as
Macpherson argues it has for Sāmoans and Tongans in New Zealand, that various
and divergent identities will result, “in turn nested within an emerging Pacific
identity which embodies certain common experiences of growing up as a person
of Pacific descent” (2001, 67). Indeed, Anae shows that the “PI” (Pacific Islander)
identity is claimed mostly by young, New Zealand–born Pacific Islanders not flu-
ent in a Pacific language, who find that it offers a broader identification than, for
example, Tokelauan, and a larger peer group with whom to interact. It seems
more likely to me that a “PI” identity might develop among islander youth on the
U.S. mainland rather than in Hawai’i or on Guam, but only time will tell.

POINTS OF ENTANGLEMENT
All of this notwithstanding, with only a handful of exceptions discussed in
Chapters 5 and 6, Namoluk people remain heavily entangled in one another’s
lives. They are in regular communication with each other through a variety of
different media; when they are far apart, they often go out of their way to arrange
face-to-face visits; and if they live near each other, they stop off frequently to chat
or eat. Even among the few exceptions to this pattern, only Roxanne has truly
“disentangled” from the Namoluk network (see Chapter 6). Other long-timers
keep in touch with Namoluk kin and friends, even if they stay away from Wééné
and Namoluk for years and years. And, sooner or later, most of these folks return
for a visit (e.g., Steemer in Chapter 3 and Kaylee in Chapter 7). Like the huge
apeipei, “drift logs,” carried by currents from Oregon and California to lodge on
140 9. Closings: Points of Departure

Micronesian reefs, these people eventually find their way home to the lagoon of
Nomoilam. But they “drift” home on a stretch–737 and a small interisland ship
like the Eekmwar.
Namoluk people are entangled in each other’s lives, regardless of where they
are located, but they are also increasingly entangled in the lives of people from
elsewhere in the Mortlocks and Chuuk Lagoon. This is an old pattern for the
Mortlocks, but much newer for Chuuk proper (see Chapters 2, 7, and 8). As more
marriages with people from other communities in Chuuk State occur, and as
more people from Chuuk State live near each other and worship together away
from Chuuk, these entanglements serve to strengthen more inclusive emergent
identities as “Mortlockese” or “Chuukese” (see Chapter 6).
I am always astonished when I speak with chon Namoluk on the phone by how
quickly news spreads among them. When an adult from the community dies, the
“coconut wireless” hums. When someone moves from Guam to Kentucky or
Missouri, other community members learn that within days or weeks. Word trav-
els like people: If Ledyard visits Eureka, that becomes known to chon Namoluk in
Tennessee, on Guam, in Honolulu, and in Portland. Although there is no
Namoluk website comparable to the one that Alan Howard (1999) helped estab-
lish for Rotumans, chon Namoluk now inhabit the same sort of “virtual commu-
nity” as Rotumans. Of the latter, Howard writes that “it now transcends national
boundaries and has become increasingly diffuse,” but that “it is a community
whose focal point is the island itself, in which membership depends on. . . an in-
terest in Rotuman history, language, and culture. More important, it is a commu-
nity defined by a common interest in one another’s lives by virtue of kinship,
marriage, friendship, or shared experience” (1999, 171). Chapters 2–8 above doc-
ument a similar set of links, processes, and ideas for the Namoluk community,
even as it is now dispersed in multiple sites across thousands of miles.
Nearly fifteen years ago, in a widely cited volume, Jocelyn Linnekin and Lin
Poyer suggested Westerners’ and Pacific Islanders’ “views are characterized by
fundamentally different theories about the determination of identity,” and they
proposed “an Oceanic theory of cultural identity that privileges environment, be-
havior, and situational flexibility over descent, innate characteristics, and un-
changing boundaries” (1990b, 6). As an important corollary, they noted of
Oceanic groups that “their theories of affiliation consistently emphasize context,
situation, performance, and place over biological descent” (1990b, 11). Place
rears its head once again. More recently, the literary and cultural studies scholar
Rob Wilson, focusing especially on Hawai’i, sought “to understand these localist
drives and place-based orientations as part of a complex Pacific and Asian affilia-
tion that does not fully fit the Eurocentric. . . model” (2000, ix). As his book un-
folded, he examined “the cultural dynamic, within the Asia-Pacific, to reclaim
place and locality as basis of subnational identity” (2000, 104). Place again!
The drum beat about place in the Pacific goes on. In a recent collection it re-
ceives particularly eloquent expression from David Welchman Gegeo, the
 Your Place or Mine? 141

Solomon Islander scholar. Writing about his home place, Kwara’ae, Malaita,
Gegeo delineates nine aspects of place that, taken together, mark indigeneity:
“for us, Indigenous encompasses the place from which we see the world, inter-
act with it, and interpret social reality” (2001, 493). Gegeo goes on to distin-
guish place from space, and he defines the latter as having “to do with the loca-
tion where a Kwara’ae person may be at any given time as necessitated by
contemporary conditions (such as going to an urban area to get a job to meet
basic needs, or going overseas in pursuit of an education)” (2001, 494; italics in
original). From this distinction he argues that “because of the possibility of
space, a person can be anywhere and still be inextricably tied to place. Place is
portable” (2001, 495). Following Gegeo, I maintain that Namoluk identity also
is portable. Chon Namoluk may live in a space far from home, but their place-
based identity travels there with them. So long as they continue to interact with
other community members meaningfully, in the sense of shared interpretations
of reality, they remain chon Namoluk. But this view of place and identity poses
a dilemma.

YOUR PLACE OR MINE?

The dilemma is a consequence of greater out-marriage from the community,
which combined with greater residence off-island poses identity conflicts (or
options) for the progeny of these marriages. If Mom is from Namoluk, Dad is
from Toon, and junior grows up in Kansas City, junior may be more likely to
identify as chon Chuuk than anything else. Of course, if he was born in the
United States, barely speaks Chuukese, and has never visited those islands, he
may think of himself as an “American,” too. And at age eighteen he could claim
American citizenship by virtue of his birthplace (Russell 1993). But the dilemma
of place and identity is heightened and literally embodied by those children and
young adults born and raised in the United States to a Namoluk mother and an
American father.
When I’ve asked Namoluk people whether or not they consider such children
to be chon Namoluk, the answer is always an emphatic “Yes.” But when I have
spoken with these young people about their identity, none of them thinks of
themselves as “a Namoluk person”; instead, they say they are “Americans.” Even
though they are aware of their island heritage, and most of them have met a few
of their Namoluk relatives in the United States, they have been socialized and en-
culturated as Americans. None of them speaks and understands Mortlockese,
and most of them only know a handful of words, if that. Many of them have
never been to Wééné, let alone the atoll (see Chapter 7). Returning to Gegeo’s
analysis of the links among place, identity, and “indigeneity,” these young people
lack a crucial component of his definition of place: “place means knowing cul-
tural models, and having a Kwara’ae cultural framework such that even if one is
born and raised in another space, on going to Malaita one can quickly make sense
142 9. Closings: Points of Departure

of and acquire depth in aspects of Kwara’ae cultural knowledge that one previ-
ously did not know” (2001, 494). Although these young people are genetically
connected to Namoluk’s matrilineages via their mother, they are minimally con-
nected to the atoll socially, culturally, and linguistically.
We should not be surprised that these children reared far away from Namoluk
in a different sociocultural system do not identify as chon Namoluk.7 If we em-
ploy the “Oceanic theory of cultural identity” discussed by Linnekin and Poyer
(1990b), none of the important Oceanic criteria for theories of affiliation—con-
text, place, situation, performance, and behavior—is met. All that’s left is biologi-
cal descent. What Keith H. Basso calls “sense of place” as a crucial component of
personal identity is “locked within the mental horizons of those who give it life,”
and it “issues in a stream of symbolically drawn particulars—the visible particu-
lars of local topographies, the personal particulars of biographical associations,
and the notional particulars of socially given systems of thought” (1996, 144).
Without these particulars about Namoluk as a physical place, Namoluk as a kin-
community, and Namoluk as one part of a broader Mortlockese or Chuukese
culture, people don’t think of themselves as chon Namoluk.
This issue of place and identity is also manifest in the numerous offspring
Namoluk men have produced in the United States, in and out of marriage. In all
but one or two cases of divorce that have resulted in a joint custody arrangement,
these children have remained with and have been reared by their American
mothers. A couple of them have accompanied their fathers to Chuuk for a brief
visit, and a few more have met some Namoluk relatives in the States. But the
overwhelming majority of these young people—especially those born out of
wedlock—have Namoluk genes, but nothing else. They do not identify as chon
Namoluk and in fact know next to nothing about their father’s homeland. But
when Namoluk people discuss these children, they think of them as chon
Namoluk, at least somehow. The rub is in the “somehow.” Like the children of
mixed marriages with Namoluk mothers discussed above, biological descent pro-
vides the only link. And biology is not enough.
A canoe that breaks its moorings and is carried off by wind and current is said
to waapas, “to drift away.” The increased number of marriages and relationships
resulting in children between chon Namoluk and non-Chuuk State persons has
produced a group of people who have drifted away. Potential members of the
Namoluk community by virtue of their birth, the great majority of them drift
away, instead identifying as Marshallese, American, or something else. In these
situations, the anchor that is missing is place. Lacking knowledge of the atoll’s
physical environment, lacking involvement in ongoing Namoluk relationships,
lacking facility in the Mortlockese language, and lacking a “Chuukese cultural
framework” by which to understand the world, these young people have no
mooring that ties them to the atoll community, let alone Chuuk more broadly
construed. And so they drift away: waasééla, “drift voyagers.”8
 The Perspective of Folks on the Shore 143

THE PERSPECTIVE OF FOLKS ON THE SHORE

Nearly twenty years ago, Sherry Ortner wrote that “the attempt to view other sys-
tems from ground level is the basis. . . of anthropology’s distinctive contribution
to the human sciences. It is our capacity, largely developed in fieldwork, to take
the perspective of the folks on the shore, that allows us to learn anything at all—
even in our own culture—beyond what we already know. . . . Further, it is our lo-
cation ‘on the ground’ that puts us in a position to see people not simply as pas-
sive reactors to and enactors of some ‘system,’ but as active agents and subjects in
their own history” (1984, 143). This book has been an effort to look at the
Namoluk community in this way, presenting as best I can in a “101st account”
“the perspective of the folks on the shore.” In this case, the shore certainly in-
cludes Pieman and Namoluk’s other sandy beaches, but Namoluk folks stand on
other shores as well. They visit the beach at Newúwé on Wééné. They work and
gain perspective on the shore of Guam’s hotel-lined Tumon Bay. They swim and
picnic at Ala Moana Beach Park in Honolulu. And there are many shores on the
U.S. mainland, even including some where Pacific Islanders meet the Atlantic
Ocean. No matter what shore they stand on, chon Namoluk are active agents in
their own unfolding history.
Namoluk people today form part of what Marshall Sahlins calls a “translocal
community”: “symbolically focused on the homeland, whence its members de-
rive their identity and their destiny, the translocal community is strategically de-
pendent on its urban outliers for material wherewithal. The rural order extends
itself into the city, inasmuch as the migrant folk are transitively associated with
each other on the bases of their relationships at home” (1999, xix). But unlike
many other translocal Pacific Islander communities in the United States, New
Zealand, or Australia (e.g., the Tongans and Sāmoans, whom Sahlins clearly has
in mind), chon Namoluk do not send large remittances home on a regular basis.
In this respect they more resemble migrants from the RMI who also settled in the
USA following the Compact of Free Association in 1986 (Hess et al. 2001). The
main reason for a lack of remittances is the high cost of living in places like
Hawai’i and California, and the same applies to Guam. By the time they’ve paid
rent, bought food, purchased gasoline for their car, covered their utility bills,
picked up some occasional new clothes, and saved a modest amount for recre-
ation, there’s nothing left for the migrants to send home. This is doubly so for
those who are employed in the “unheralded, largely forgotten jobs” discussed in
Chapter 6.
For centuries Westerners have romanticized and imagined Pacific Islands as
“paradise,” and images of paradise have been exploited to market destinations
like Hawai’i, Tahiti, and Fiji to wealthy tourists from First World countries.
Although Chuuk only recently appeared on tourist maps, Micronesian islands
conform to the Western myth of paradise: palm trees, sandy beaches, warm
144 9. Closings: Points of Departure

breezes, dazzling coral reefs swarming with polychrome fish, and friendly people.
As such images are marketed to potential visitors, those visitors often fail to com-
prehend why any islander would want to move away from paradise on earth. But
island peoples have their own reasons and their own myths.
This became clear as I chatted with Lindsey one afternoon inside a neighbor-
hood store near his modern home on Wééné. I mused about why chon Namoluk
seemed so attracted to places beyond the reef, and he didn’t hesitate a moment
in providing a response: “We think of Guam, Hawai’i, and the mainland as
cleaner and more beautiful than Chuuk. We think of them as paradise, just as re-
won, “foreigners,” think of our islands as paradise.” Dreams of cleanliness,
beauty, opportunity, excitement, adventure—dreams of paradise—continue to
pull Namoluk people beyond the reef toward an unknown future. As chon
Namoluk make themselves and their own history through these twenty-first
century journeys, they indulge in an ancient Micronesian curiosity to explore
what lies over the horizon. And who knows? Maybe they’ll actually find paradise
there.

CODA
Who are you? Where are you from? In spite of the recent academic maelstrom
over globalization, transnationalism, deterritorialization, postcommunities, and
the like, for the overwhelming majority of the world’s inhabitants the fundamen-
tal link between answers to these two questions remains basic to their sense of
self and how they live their lives. People still identify themselves and think of
themselves as attached to places, emotionally and imaginatively, if not always
physically. But people also adopt new locales as their own—what I’ve called “col-
onizing” in Chapters 1 and 3—as their personal biography is woven into new
places (see Chapter 8). Of course, adopting new locales as their own is something
chon Namoluk and other Carolinian atoll dwellers have always done, as the dis-
cussion about “Points of Origin” earlier in this chapter makes clear. Atoll com-
munities have what might be called an “absorptive quality,” taking in new mem-
bers via several possible means.
As Namoluk people have moved to new homes in new lands, they’ve retained
a certainty about who they are and where they’re from, but they’ve also carried
with them a flexibility and openness. This has aided them in developing broader,
more inclusive identities as warranted, identities such as “Mortlockese,”
“Chuukese,” “Micronesian,” “Pacific Islander,” or even for a very few “American.”
These nested identities in varied circumstances are not mutually exclusive or in-
compatible with each other, and they have implications for all of us who live in
an increasingly fluid and interconnected world. They underscore the point that
while our identities may shift over our lifetime, or according to where we live,
few, if any, of us are “rootless.”
 Coda 145

My own case may serve as an example: my father immigrated to America from

the United Kingdom, so I have a “Scottish” component to my personal identity to
mix with the English, Scottish, and French “blood” from my mother’s side. At a
distant remove, these countries—especially Scotland—form a part of my idea of
who I am. Born and reared (mostly) in the United States, I’m an “American” by
birth and citizenship. Born in San Francisco, I’m a “Californian,” and that’s the
place where I own property and intend to retire. Within the United States, my
parents’ families settled in Indiana and Illinois, and these were places we visited
regularly as I grew up, to see grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins, and other ac-
quaintances. I went to college in Iowa and returned to Iowa after graduate school,
where I’ve taught for thirty-one years, so the Hawkeye State is a part of me too.
Thus I have multiple “Midwestern” roots. At age eight I moved with my family to
Hawai’i, where my family put down mangrove-like roots: “even though right now
none of us actually resides in the islands, Hawai’i is my family’s emotional home.
Our roots in Hawai’i’s lateritic soil nourished my childhood love affair with is-
lands until that affair sprouted in college and eventually grew into a career that
carried me much farther into the Pacific” (Marshall, in press). So my identity is
linked to multiple places: Scotland, the United States, the Midwest, California,
and Hawai’i. Each of these places means something special to me; I’ve visited all
of them and have lived in all of them but Scotland. So how does this relate to
Namoluk people “beyond the reef?”
The ways Namoluk people historically have absorbed new members into
their community, and the ways that today they take on new identities in new
places, all illustrate what Harri Englund calls “emplacement”: “Rather than
heralding a return to place-bound ethnography, emplacement provides a per-
spective in which current analytical insights into a global space are enhanced by
the postglobalist realization that globalism itself hinges on specific circum-
stances. A key analytical consequence is the realization that the widespread
ethnographic doubt about local-global distinctions may indicate the futility of
disconnecting culture from place. Emplacement defines the human condition in
which globalism has its permutations” (2002, 276). Edward Bruner (1999, 475)
comments that Batak village members identify themselves as such, even in cases
where they were born elsewhere and have never actually been to the village.
Helen Morton (2002) emphasizes that diasporic Tongans still identify as having
ties to Tonga as a cultural island home. I suggest that these Batak and Tongan
connections are similar to my own felt connection to Scotland as a place: distant
but definite. Like Pukueu, we humans will continue to move about, to relocate,
to seek the satisfaction of “opening up those dark seas.” As we do so, our canoes
will be launched from known points of departure—from a home—and these
home places, wherever they may be, will continue to hold us “in the grip of a
shared identity.” People are no longer bound to places, but they are still bound
up in them.
146 9. Closings: Points of Departure

Notes
1. “No man is an island, entire of itself ” (Donne 1624, Devotions XVII).
2. Guest lectures by Watson were sponsored by the Center for Asian and Pacific Studies
at the University of Iowa during November 2002. On November 12th he spoke on
“Tracking a post-modern diaspora: The Man lineage in Hong Kong, London, and be-
yond.”
3. Only if such children took up long-term residence on Namoluk or met some of the
other criteria for Namoluk citizenship to be discussed would they become chon Namoluk.
4. Goodenough (1951) called people counted among a lineage’s members who were
neither born nor adopted into it as children “client members,” and this language has been
adopted by other anthropologists who’ve worked in Chuuk State. For more information
about clientship, see Marshall (1977).
5. This is an identity that also is used on Pohnpei and throughout Pohnpei State as a
consequence of the now-sizeable Mortlockese community that first was established there
during the German colonial period following a severe typhoon that struck the Lower
Mortlocks in 1907. The Germans relocated several hundred people to Pohnpei who other-
wise would likely have perished for want of food and water, and these people eventually
acquired land rights in Sokehs.
6. When I was fourteen years old, my family and I moved from Hawai’i to Michigan.
Soon thereafter we drove through Indiana, headed for my mother’s hometown in south-
ern Indiana for a family reunion. En route we stopped at a gas station in a small town, and
the attendant kept looking at the Hawai’i plates on our car, and then at us. Finally, he
screwed up his courage and asked my father, “Where’s that there aloha Hawaya?” That was
two years before statehood and many years before Hawai’i-Five-O.
7. There are, of course, “in-between” cases. In one, the children of a Namoluk man who
lives on Pohnpei have visited the atoll nearly every summer, and they understand
Mortlockese quite well. They identify with Kosrae, their mother’s island, but they are defi-
nitely aware of their ties to Namoluk and are familiar with the place and its people. In an-
other, the daughter of an American man and a Namoluk woman grew up in Yap, raised by
her mother and her Yapese stepfather. She, too, speaks a modicum of Mortlockese and is
acquainted with her Namoluk kin, but when I asked her how she self-identifies, without
hesitation she said, “Yapese.”
8. Although it is not about contemporary travelers, Goodenough (1988) has published
a poem by this title, written in both Chuukese and English.
 Glossary

afakúr descendants of the men of a matrilineage or matriclan.

afakúran eu ainang co-descendants of one matrilineage or matriclan.

ainang clan.

akkapwas a shout used to announce the presence of a canoe, ship, or air-

plane, similar to “Sail ho!” Also a shout indicating anger, often ut-
tered by intoxicated men.

alillis ffengen cooperate (literally, “help together”).

aluel young man approximately between the ages of fifteen and thirty-
five.

amoleset a beach strand tree that may grow to 10 meters in height;

Tournefortia argentea L.

angarap skipjack tuna, called aku in Hawaiian.

apeipei drift log.

asipwar nephew.

benunu the soft, gelatinous flesh found inside the kernel of green or drink-
ing coconuts.

bwang an indigenous martial arts tradition of the Caroline Islands.

chielap an elderly person.

chin one of two traditional alliances in the Mortlock Islands, including

Kuttu, Lukunoch, Satawan, and Ta.

147
148 Glossary

chon person or citizen of.

fáál canoe house.

fanu dry land; also used in reference to an island.

holokū a Hawaiian dress, like a long, fitted mu’umu’u.

ichich a jack fish.

kansopa a copra-drying oven.

katekista a catechist in the Catholic Church (a lay leader).

kul a beach strand tree with many uses; Barringtonia asiatica (L.)
Kurz.

likapich spearfishing.

likeriker long-nosed butterfly fish.

mae stone fish weir built into the reef flat.

makal atoll chief.

marau one of two traditional alliances in the Mortlock Islands, including

Ettal, Moch, Namoluk, and Oneop.

mataw open sea; deep ocean beyond the reef.

mei breadfruit tree; breadfruit.

meyi iwi greasy, oily.

mon a species of reef fish.

Morschlok Mortlocks, the Mortlock Islands.

mosoro cookhouse.

muuti to adopt.

mwáán an adult man, typically over age thirty-five.

mwaramwar a lei; a garland of flowers and other sweet-smelling things.

mwéngé food; to eat; also used in reference to land and related resources
that can be used to produce food.

ngel a big game fish called wahoo in English and ono in Hawaiian.

nom lagoon.
 Glossary 149

nóó popo a large, rounded ocean swell or wave; literally, “pregnant wave.”

nu a coconut palm; a coconut.

palu navigator.

póllai yellowtail.

pwá a swarming, circling dense flock of seabirds feeding on minnows;

used by fishermen to locate schools of tuna and other game fish.

pwiipwi created sibling; friend.

pwól taro swamp; taro plot.

rewon non-Micronesian foreigner.

samol an ainang traditional clan chief.

serau barracuda.

set named, owned sections of the reef flat.

takou yellowfin tuna, called ahi in Hawaiian.

tetel en aramas descent line; literally, “a line of people.”

til minnows; small fry.

tipeuo ffengen agree, be of one mind; literally, “agree together.”

tola all [the rest].

ttong love; pity.

tumwunuu ffengen take care of or look after one another; literally, “nurture together.”

waafatil paddling canoe.

waapas to drift away.

waasééla drift voyager.

waaserik sailing canoe; open-ocean voyaging canoe.

yiis alcoholic home brew produced from baker’s yeast, sugar, and
water.
 Suggestions for
Further Reading

A number of recent books examine contemporary Oceanic societies, particularly

as they are engaged and intertwined with such places as Australia, New Zealand,
and the United States. In this regard, see Vicente M. Diaz and J. Kēhaulani
Kauanui (2001); Cluny MacPherson, Paul Spoonley, and Melani Anae (2001);
and Paul Spickard, Joanne L. Rondilla, and Debbie Wright (2002), all of which
are cited in the reference list. In addition, the following three volumes are highly
informative: David Hanlon and Geoffrey M. White, eds. (2000), Voyaging
Through the Contemporary Pacific (Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield);
Victoria S. Lockwood, Thomas G. Harding, and Ben J. Wallace, eds. (1993),
Contemporary Pacific Societies: Studies in Development and Change (Englewood
Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall); and Victoria S. Lockwood, ed. (2004), Globalization
and Culture Change in the Pacific Islands (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall).
There are several good overviews of the contemporary situation in Micronesia
from the perspectives of both anthropology and history. Volumes by David
Hanlon (1998) and Francis X. Hezel (2001) are cited in the reference list. To these
must be added an anthropological stock-taking of post–World War II research in
Micronesia: Robert C. Kiste and Mac Marshall, eds. (1999), American
Anthropology in Micronesia: An Assessment (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i
Press).
Finally, there are two good case studies of Pacific Islander migrants to the
United States. The first is a study of Sāmoans in California—Craig R. Janes
(1990), Migration, Social Change, and Health: A Samoan Community in Urban
California (Stanford: Stanford University Press)—and the second is a study of
Tongans in the United States—Cathy A. Small (1997), Voyages: From Tongan
Villages to American Suburbs (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press).

151
 References

Allen, Linda. 2002. Maintaining Marshallese fundamentals with Christian fundamental-

ism. In Constructing Moral Communities: Pacific Islander Strategies for Settling in New
Places, ed. Judith S. Modell. Special Issue of Pacific Studies 25(1&2):95–116.
Anae, Melani. 2001. The new “Vikings of the sunrise”: New Zealand-borns in the informa-
tion age. In Tangata O Te Moana Nui: The Evolving Identities of Pacific Peoples in
Aotearoa/New Zealand, eds. Cluny Macpherson, Paul Spoonley, and Melani Anae. pp.
101–121. Palmerston North, New Zealand: Dunmore Press.
Anderson, Benedict. 1983. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of
Nationalism. London: Verso.
Appadurai, Arjun. 1988. Introduction: Place and voice in anthropological theory. Cultural
Anthropology 3(1):16–20.
Ashby, Gene, and Giff Johnson. 2001. Internet explosion in FSM, Marshalls. Pacific
Magazine 26(1):27.
Basso, Keith H. 1996. Wisdom Sits in Places: Landscape and Language Among the Western
Apache. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press.
Bedford, Richard, and Robert Didham. 2001. Who are the “Pacific peoples”? Ethnic identi-
fication and the New Zealand census. In Tangata O Te Moana Nui: The Evolving
Identities of Pacific Peoples in Aotearoa/New Zealand, eds. Cluny Macpherson, Paul
Spoonley, and Melani Anae. pp. 21–43. Palmerston North, New Zealand: Dunmore
Press.
Brady, Ivan A., ed. 1976. Transactions in Kinship: Adoption and Fosterage in Oceania. ASAO
Monograph No. 4. Honolulu: University Press of Hawai’i.
Brooke, James. 2003. Guam, hurt by slump, hopes for economic help from military. The
New York Times 10 March:A14.
Bruner, Edward M. 1999. Return to Sumatra: 1957, 1997. American Ethnologist
26(2):461–477.
Carroll, Vern, ed. 1970. Adoption in Eastern Oceania. ASAO Monograph No. 1. Honolulu:
University of Hawai’i Press.

153
154 References

Cheyne, Andrew. 1852. A Description of Islands in the Western Pacific Ocean. . . . London: J.
D. Potter.
Clifford, James. 2001. Indigenous articulations. In Native Pacific Cultural Studies on the
Edge, eds. Vicente M. Diaz and J. Kēhaulani Kauanui. Special Issue of The
Contemporary Pacific: A Journal of Island Affairs 13(2):468–490.
Cook, Len, Robert Didham, and Mansoor Khawaja. 2001. The shape of the future: On the
demography of Pacific people. In Tangata O Te Moana Nui: The Evolving Identities of
Pacific Peoples in Aotearoa/New Zealand, eds. Cluny Macpherson, Paul Spoonley, and
Melani Anae. pp. 44–65. Palmerston North, New Zealand: Dunmore Press.
Davis, George. 1959. Truk Agricultural Information Booklet. Moen, Truk, Eastern Caroline
Islands: Department of Agriculture.
Day, A. Grove. 1966. Explorers of the Pacific. New York: Duell, Sloan and Pearce.
Diaz, Vicente M., and J. Kēhaulani Kauanui, eds. 2001. Native Pacific Cultural Studies on
the Edge. Special Issue of The Contemporary Pacific: A Journal of Island Affairs 13(2).
Doane, E. T. 1874. The Caroline Islands. The Geographical Magazine pp. 203–205.
[Manuscript examined at the Gregg Sinclair Library, University of Hawai’i–Mānoa.]
Dobbin, Jay, and Francis X. Hezel, eds. 1996. Micronesian migration since World War II. In
The Micronesian Counselor Series 2, Number 2. Pohnpei: The Micronesian Seminar.
Englund, Harri. 2002. Ethnography after globalism: Migration and emplacement in
Malawi. American Ethnologist 29(2):261–286.
Fink, Deborah. 1998. Cutting into the Meatpacking Line: Workers and Change in the Rural
Midwest. Chapel Hill, N.C.: University of North Carolina Press.
Finney, Ben R. 1979. Hōkūle’a: The Way to Tahiti. New York: Dodd, Mead.
FSM [Federated States of Micronesia]. 1996. 1994 FSM Census of Population and Housing.
National Detailed Tables. Palikir, Pohnpei: Office of Planning and Statistics, FSM
National Government.
Geertz, Clifford. 2000. The uses of diversity. In Available Light: Anthropological Reflections
on Philosophical Topics, by Clifford Geertz. pp. 68–88. Princeton: Princeton University
Press.
Gegeo, David Welchman. 2001. Cultural rupture and indigeneity: The challenge of (re)vi-
sioning “place” in the Pacific. In Native Pacific Cultural Studies on the Edge, eds. Vicente
M. Diaz and J. Kēhaulani Kauanui. Special Issue of The Contemporary Pacific: A Journal
of Island Affairs 13(2):491–507.
Girschner, Max. 1912. Die Karolineninsul Namoluk und ihre Bewohner. Baessler-Archiv
2:123–215.
Gladwin, Thomas. 1970. East Is a Big Bird: Navigation and Logic on Puluwat Atoll.
Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.
Goodenough, Ward H. 1951. Property, Kin, and Community on Truk. Yale University
Publications in Anthropology Number 46. New Haven: Yale University Press.
———. 1988. Waasééna “Drift Voyager.” Anthropology and Humanism Quarterly
13(1):26–27.
 References 155

———. 2002. Under Heaven’s Brow: Pre-Christian Religious Tradition in Chuuk. Memoirs
of the American Philosophical Society Volume 246. Philadelphia: American
Philosophical Society.
Goodenough, Ward H., and Hiroshi Sugita. 1980. Trukese-English Dictionary. Memoirs of
the American Philosophical Society Volume 141. Philadelphia: American Philosophical
Society.
Gorenflo, Larry J. 1995. Regional demographic change in Chuuk State, Federated States of
Micronesia. Pacific Studies 18(3):47–118.
Greenhouse, Steven. 2002. Where hands still labor. The New York Times 1 September:3.
Gudde, Erwin G. 1969. California Place Names. The Origin and Etymology of Current
Geographical Names. 3rd ed. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Gulick, Reverend Luther H. 1862. Micronesia—of the Pacific Ocean. The Nautical
Magazine and Naval Chronicle 31:169–182, 237–245, 298–308, 358–363, 408–417.
Gupta, Akhil, and James Ferguson. 1997a. Beyond “culture”: Space, identity, and the poli-
tics of difference. In Culture, Power, Place: Explorations in Critical Anthropology, eds.
Akhil Gupta and James Ferguson. pp. 33–51. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press.
———. 1997b. Discipline and practice: “The field” as site, method, and location in an-
thropology. In Anthropological Locations: Boundaries and Grounds of a Field Science,
eds. Akhil Gupta and James Ferguson. pp. 1–46. Berkeley: University of California
Press.
Hanlon, David. 1998. Remaking Micronesia: Discourses over Development in a Pacific
Territory 1944–1982. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press.
Hess, Jim, Karen L. Nero, and Michael L. Burton. 2001. Creating options: Forming a
Marshallese community in Orange County, California. The Contemporary Pacific: A
Journal of Island Affairs 13(1):89–121.
Hezel, Francis X. 1973. The beginnings of foreign contact with Truk. Journal of Pacific
History 8:51–73.
———. 1979. The education explosion in Truk. Pacific Studies 2(2):167–185.
———. 1983. The First Taint of Civilization: A History of the Caroline and Marshall Islands
in Pre-Colonial Days, 1521–1885. Pacific Islands Monograph Series 1. Honolulu:
University of Hawai’i Press.
———. 1991. The Catholic Church in Micronesia: Historical Essays on the Catholic Church
in the Caroline-Marshall Islands. Chicago: Loyola University Press.
———. 1995. Strangers in Their Own Land: A Century of Colonial Rule in the Caroline and
Marshall Islands. Pacific Islands Monograph Series 13. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i
Press.
———. 2001. The New Shape of Old Island Cultures: A Half Century of Social Change in
Micronesia. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press.
———. 2003. Rough seas ahead: The FSM economy during Compact II. Micronesian
Counselor Issue 44. Pohnpei: Micronesian Seminar.
Hezel, Francis X., and Michael J. Levin. 1996. New trends in Micronesian migration: FSM
migration to Guam and the Marianas, 1990–1993. Pacific Studies 19(1):91–114.
156 References

Hezel, Francis X., and Thomas B. McGrath. 1989. The great flight northward: FSM migra-
tion to Guam and the Northern Mariana Islands. Pacific Studies 13(1):47–64.
Howard, Alan. 1999. Pacific-based virtual communities: Rotuma on the World Wide Web.
The Contemporary Pacific: A Journal of Island Affairs 11(1):160–175.
Howard, Alan, and Jan Rensel. 2001. Where has Rotuman culture gone? And what is it do-
ing there? Pacific Studies 24(1&2):63–88.
Janes, Craig. 1990. Migration, Social Change, and Health: A Samoan Community in Urban
California. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Jervis, Lori L. 2001. The pollution of incontinence and the dirty work of caregiving in a
U.S. nursing home. Medical Anthropology Quarterly 15(1):84–99.
Jorgensen, Joseph G. 1990. Oil Age Eskimos. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Kohl, Manfred Waldemar. 1971. Lagoon in the Pacific: The Story of Truk. Schooley’s
Mountain, N.J.: Liebenzell Mission U.S.A.
Krämer, A. 1935. Inseln um Truk. (Zentralkarolinen Ost, Lukunor, Namoluk, Losap,
Nama, Lemarafat, Namonuito, Pollap-Tamatam). In Ergebnisse der Südsee-Expedition,
1908–1910, ed. G. Thilenius. Series 2, Volume 6. Hamburg: Friederichsen, DeGruyter &
Co.
Kubary, Jan S. 1880. Die Bewohner der Mortlock-Inseln. Geographischen Gesellschaft in
Hamburg. Mitteilungen 1878–1879:224–299.
Lal, Brij V. in press. Introduction: Place and person. In Pacific Places, Pacific History: Essays
in Honour of Robert C. Kiste, ed. Brij V. Lal. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press.
Larson, Robert Bruce. 1989. Sojourning and personhood: College students return to Truk,
Federated States of Micronesia. Ph.D. dissertation, University of Hawai’i.
Lessa, William A. 1964. The social effects of Typhoon Ophelia (1960) on Ulithi.
Micronesica 1:1–48.
Lessa, William A., and Carlos G. Velez-I. 1978. Bwang, a martial art of the Caroline Islands.
Micronesica 14(2):139–176.
Linnekin, Jocelyn, and Lin Poyer, eds. 1990a. Cultural Identity and Ethnicity in the Pacific.
Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press.
———. 1990b. Introduction. In Cultural Identity and Ethnicity in the Pacific. pp. 1–16.
Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press.
Lütke, Par Frédéric. 1835. Voyage Autour Du Monde, Exécuté par Ordre De Sa Majesté
L’Empereur Nicholas Ier, Sue la Corvette Le Séniavine dans les années 1826, 1827, 1828 et
1829. Vol. 2. Paris: Didot Freres.
Macpherson, Cluny. 2001. One trunk sends out many branches: Pacific cultures and cul-
tural identities. In Tangata O Te Moana Nui: The Evolving Identities of Pacific Peoples in
Aotearoa/New Zealand, eds. Cluny Macpherson, Paul Spoonley, and Melani Anae. pp.
66–80. Palmerston North, New Zealand: Dunmore Press.
Macpherson, Cluny, Paul Spoonley, and Melani Anae, eds. 2001a. Tangata O Te Moana
Nui: The Evolving Identities of Pacific Peoples in Aotearoa/New Zealand. Palmerston
North, New Zealand: Dunmore Press.
 References 157

———. 2001b. Pacific peoples in Aotearoa: An introduction. In Tangata O Te Moana Nui:

The Evolving Identities of Pacific Peoples in Aotearoa/New Zealand, eds. Cluny
Macpherson, Paul Spoonley, and Melani Anae. pp. 11–15. Palmerston North, New
Zealand: Dunmore Press.
Manchester, Curtis A., Jr. 1951. The Caroline Islands. In Geography of the Pacific, ed. Otis
W. Freeman. pp. 236-269. New York: Wiley.
Marcus, George E. 1998. Ethnography in/of the world system: The emergence of multi-
sited ethnography. In Ethnography Through Thick and Thin, by George E. Marcus. pp.
79–104. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Marshall, Mac [Keith]. 1972. The structure of solidarity and alliance on Namoluk Atoll.
Ph.D. dissertation, University of Washington.
———. 1975a. Changing patterns of marriage and migration on Namoluk Atoll. In Pacific
Atoll Populations, ed. Vern Carroll. ASAO Monograph Number 3. pp. 160–211.
Honolulu: University Press of Hawai’i.
———. 1975b. The politics of prohibition on Namoluk Atoll. Journal of Studies on Alcohol
36(5):597–610.
———. 1976. Solidarity or sterility? Adoption and fosterage on Namoluk Atoll. In
Transactions in Kinship: Adoption and Fosterage in Oceania, ed. Ivan Brady. ASAO
Monograph Number 4. pp. 28–50. Honolulu: University Press of Hawai’i.
———. 1977. The nature of nurture. American Ethnologist 4(4):643–662.
———. 1979a. Weekend Warriors: Alcohol in a Micronesian Culture. Explorations in World
Ethnology Series. Palo Alto, Calif.: Mayfield Publishing.
———. 1979b. Natural and unnatural disaster in the Mortlock Islands of Micronesia.
Human Organization 38(3):265–272.
———. 1981. Sibling sets as building blocks in Greater Trukese Society. In Siblingship in
Oceania: Studies in the Meaning of Kin Relations, ed. Mac Marshall. ASAO Monograph
Number 8. pp. 201–224. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.
———. 1990a. Two tales from the Trukese taproom. In The Humbled Anthropologist: Tales
from the Pacific, ed. Philip DeVita. pp. 12–17. Belmont, Calif.: Wadsworth Publishing.
———. 1990b. Combining insights from epidemiological and ethnographic data to inves-
tigate substance use in Truk, Federated States of Micronesia. British Journal of
Addiction 85:1457–1468.
———. 1990c. “Problem deflation” and the ethnographic record: Interpretation and in-
trospection in anthropological studies of alcohol. Journal of Substance Abuse
2(3):353–367.
———. 1996. Chon Guamoluk: Namoluk people on Guam, 1995. Paper presented at the
25th Annual Meeting of the Association for Social Anthropology in Oceania, 7–11
February, Kailua-Kona, Hawai’i. [An abbreviated version of this paper appeared in
Dobbin and Hezel (1996:33–36).]
———. 1999. “Partial connections”: Kinship and social organization in Micronesia. In
American Anthropology in Micronesia: An Assessment, eds. Robert C. Kiste and Mac
Marshall. pp. 107–143. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press.
158 References

———. in press. Imagining islands. In Pacific Places, Pacific History: Essays in Honour of
Robert C. Kiste, ed. Brij V. Lal. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press.
Marshall, Mac, and Leslie B. Marshall. 1990. Silent Voices Speak: Women and Prohibition in
Truk. Belmont, Calif.: Wadsworth Publishing.
Marshall, Mac, and Mark Borthwick. 1974. Consensus, dissensus, and Guttman scales: The
Namoluk case. Journal of Anthropological Research 30(4):252–270.
Marshall, Mac, Larry Gabriel, and Joakim Manniwel Peter. 1998. Chuuk. In Australia and
the Pacific Islands, eds. Adrienne L. Kaeppler and J. W. Love. The Garland Encyclopedia
of World Music Volume 9. pp. 733–737. New York: Garland Publishing.
Mayo, Larry W. 1992. The militarization of Guamanian society. In Social Change in the
Pacific Islands, ed. Albert B. Robillard. pp. 220–240. London: Kegan Paul International.
Missionary Herald. (A periodical published by the American Board of Commissioners for
Foreign Missions, Cambridge, Mass.: The Riverside Press.).
———. 1876. Letters from the missions. Micronesia Mission. 72(10):308–311.
———. 1879. Letters from the missions. Micronesia Mission. 75(6):216–221.
———. 1880a. Letters from the missions. Micronesia Mission. 76(5):175–178.
———. 1880b. Letters from the missions. Micronesia Mission. 76(7):264–265.
———. 1881a. Letters from the missions. Micronesia Mission. 77(1):16–19.
———. 1881b. Letters from the missions. Micronesia Mission. 77(7):269–272.
———. 1882. Letters from the missions. Micronesia Mission. 78(6):220–222.
———. 1886a. Letters from the missions. Micronesia Mission. 82(8):308–311.
———. 1886b. A visit to Micronesia (by Charles H. Wetmore, M.D.). 82(9):333–339.
———. 1888. Letters from the missions. Micronesia Mission. 84(7):300–304.
———. 1891. Letters from the missions. Micronesia Mission. 87(9):369–372.
———. 1901. Letters from the missions. Micronesia Mission. 97(9):413–416.
———. 1903. Letters from the missions. Micronesia Mission. 99(4):157–159.
Moore, Henrietta L. 1999. Anthropological theory at the turn of the century. In
Anthropological Theory Today, ed. Henrietta L. Moore. pp. 1–23. Cambridge: Polity
Press.
Morrell, Captain Benjamin. 1832. A Narrative of Four Voyages to the South Sea, North and
South Pacific Oceans, Chinese Sea, Ethiopic and Southern Atlantic Ocean, Indian and
Antarctic Ocean from the Year 1822 to 1831. New York: J & J Harper.
Morton, Helen. 2002. Creating their own culture: Diasporic Tongans. In Pacific Diaspora:
Island Peoples in the United States and Across the Pacific, eds. Paul Spickard, Joanne L.
Rondilla, and Debbie Hippolite Wright. pp. 135–149. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i
Press.
Namoluk Constitution. 1991. Muun Namoluk, Chuuk State, Federated States of Micronesia.
Aewan Chulapan Alluk noun Muun Namoluk. Namoluk Constitutional Convention, 9
December 1991.
Nason, James D. 1970. Clan and copra: Modernization on Etal Island, Eastern Caroline
Islands. Ph.D. dissertation, University of Washington.
 References 159

Ortner, Sherry B. 1984. Theory in anthropology since the sixties. Comparative Study of
Society and History 26(1):126–166.
Pelto, Pertti J. 1973. The Snowmobile Revolution: Technology and Social Change in the
Arctic. Menlo Park, Calif.: Cummings Publishing.
Peter, Joakim. 2000. Chuukese travellers and the idea of horizon. Asia Pacific Viewpoint
41(3):253–267.
Quackenbush, Edward M. 1968. From Sonsorol to Truk: A dialect chain. Ph.D. disserta-
tion, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.
Reuney, Theophil Saret. 1994. The pulling of Olap’s canoe. Boundary 2: An International
Journal of Literature and Culture 21(1):254–258.
Richards, Dorothy E. 1957. United States Naval Administration of the Trust Territory of the
Pacific Islands Volume 2. Washington, D.C.: Office of the Chief of Naval Operations.
Riesenberg, Saul H. 1965. Table of voyages affecting Micronesian islands. Oceania
36:155–170.
Roche, Walter F., Jr. 2003. Marshall Islands agrees to set regulations for “body brokers.”
Orlando Sentinel 3 April. http://www.orlandosentinel.com/news/nationworld/orl-
asecbrokers03040303apr03,0,3046972.story?coll+orl%2Dhome%2Dheadlines.
Roche, Walter F., Jr., and Willoughby Mariano. 2002a. Indentured in America: A ray of
hope in Springdale. A series in the Baltimore Sun and Orlando Sentinel 15–17
September. http://pidp.eastwestcenter.org/pireport/2002/September/09–19–02.htm.
———. 2002b. Indentured in America: Trapped in servitude far from their homes. A se-
ries in the Baltimore Sun and Orlando Sentinel 15–17 September.
http://www.sunspot.net/bal-te.indent15sep15story.
Rodman, Margaret C. 1992. Empowering place: Multilocality and multivocality. American
Anthropologist 94(3):640–656.
Rogers, Robert F. 1995. Destiny’s Landfall: A History of Guam. Honolulu: University of
Hawai’i Press.
Ruben, Kino S. 1973. [No title.] In Micronesia: Island Wilderness, by Kenneth Brower; pho-
tographs and an introduction by Robert Wenkam. New York: Seabury Press for Friends
of the Earth, San Francisco.
Russell, Alison. 1993. Born in the U.S.A. Guam Business News 11(5):20–22, 24, 26, 28, 30.
Sahlins, Marshall D. 1999. What is anthropological enlightenment? Some lessons of the
twentieth century. Annual Review of Anthropology 28:i–xxiii.
Schlosser, Eric. 2002. Fast Food Nation. The Dark Side of the All-American Meal. New York:
Perennial/HarperCollins.
Schneider, David M. 1968. American Kinship: A Cultural Account. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.:
Prentice-Hall.
Sharp, Andrew. 1960. The Discovery of the Pacific Islands. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Slusser, R. C., and R. E. Hughes. 1970. Letters and photocopies of printed information re-
lating to Typhoon Phyllis, 1958, on file at the Joint Typhoon Warning Center, U.S. Fleet
Weather Central, Guam.
160 References

Spickard, Paul, Joanne L. Rondilla, and Debbie Hippolite Wright, eds. 2002. Pacific
Diaspora: Island Peoples in the United States and Across the Pacific. Honolulu: University
of Hawai’i Press.
Ulin, Robert C. 2001. Understanding Cultures: Perspectives in Anthropology and Social
Theory. 2nd ed. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers.
Ward, R. Gerard, ed. 1967. American Activities in the Central Pacific, 1790–1870 Volume 5.
Ridgewood, N.J.: Gregg Press.
Warner Pacific College. 2001. Warner Pacific College 2001–2002 Catalog. Portland, Oreg.:
Warner Pacific College.
Watson, James L., ed. 1997. Golden Arches East: McDonald’s in East Asia. Stanford:
Stanford University Press.
———. 2000. China’s Big Mac attack. Foreign Affairs 79(3):120–134.
———. 2002. Globalization and culture. Encyclopedia Britannica. revised 15th ed. pp.
133–137.
Wendel, John. 1998. That all may be one: Negotiating personhood and modernity at a
boarding school in Micronesia. Ph.D. dissertation, University of Rochester.
Wolf, Margery. 1992. A Thrice Told Tale: Feminism, Postmodernism, and Ethnographic
Responsibility. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
WHO [World Health Organization]. 2001. Mid-level and Nurse Practitioners in the Pacific:
Models and Issues. Manila: World Health Organization, Western Pacific Region.
Wilson, Rob. 2000. Reimagining the American Pacific: From South Pacific to Bamboo Ridge
and Beyond. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press.
 Index

Adoption, 14, 36, 39, 41 (n19), 52, 121, 109, 111, 118–119, 122, 124, 127, 136,
135–136, 146 (n4), 148 141–142, 144–146 (n7)
Africa, 134 African American, 128
Agriculture/Agriculture Euro-American, 109–110, 118, 127
Department/agricultural agent, Mexican American, 138
26–27, 34, 47, 69 Native American, 138
Airfield/airport/airstrip, 3, 25, 43, 50, 68, American Board of Commissioners for
77–78, 90, 116, 125–126 Foreign Missions (ABCFM), 22–24,
Aircraft/airplane/jet, 25, 34, 43, 47, 55, 58, 40 (n16)
73, 77–79, 98, 122, 126, 140, 147 Amwes Islet, 9 (map), 25–26, 65, 68, 76
Akin, David, xv (n2), 122
Ala Moana Beach Park, 143 Anae, Melani, 138–139, 151
Alabama, 109, 138 Andaman Islands, 8
Alaska, 134 Anderson, Benedict, 11
Alcohol/alcoholic beverages, 32, 57–58, 60 Angaur Island, 3–4 (map), 23–24, 45
(n14), 149 Antarctic, 20
beer, 55, 57–58, 84 Apartment, 82, 86, 94–95, 101–102, 119,
drinking/drunkenness/inebriated/intoxi 121, 125–126, 128
cated, 32, 57–58, 60 (n13, n15), 85, Appadurai, Arjun, 10
111, 118, 147 Arcata, California, 126–127, 131 (n9)
vodka, 20 Armed forces/military, 2–3, 25, 40 (n11),
yeast, 33, 57, 149 45, 54, 59 (n8), 81, 95, 117–118, 131
Allen, Linda, 96 (n1)
America. See United States of America U.S. Army, 49–50, 95
American/Americans, 5, 8, 21, 25, 27, 32, U.S. Marine Corps, 59 (n8), 109, 127
34, 39–40 (n11), 44, 50–51, 54, 56, 58, U.S. Navy, 26, 47, 51, 54–55, 95, 117
76, 81, 85–86, 91, 93, 99–103 (n1), Ashburn, Georgia, 93

161
162 Index

Ashby, Gene, 87 California, xv, 50, 56, 76 (n5), 88 (n3), 99,

Asian, 117–118, 140 101, 111, 117, 125–126, 130–131
Association for Social Anthropology in (n8), 138–139, 143, 151
Oceania (ASAO), 59 (n8) California Maritime Academy (CMA), 54
Asterion, 2 Canned meat, 27–28, 56, 66
Atlantic Ocean, 83, 143 Canoe house, 25, 30, 32–33, 46, 63, 71, 148
Aunt, 39, 52, 71, 76, 136, 145 Canoe, 20, 22, 26, 30, 33, 142, 145, 147
Aurora, Oregon, 98 paddling, 28, 61, 149
Australia, 21, 48, 51, 80, 113, 137, sailing, 3, 6, 8, 19, 24–25, 27–28, 30, 45,
143, 151 61–65, 70, 149
Capuchins, 24
Bali, 116 Car/automobile, 34, 59, 73, 97, 100, 102,
Bananas, 28, 55, 65 111, 116, 126, 131 (n9)
Bangkok, 101 Carl, 22
Bank of Guam, 49, 107 Caroline Islands/Carolines, 4 (map), 9–10,
Barnwell, Jane, xv 16 (n1), 22–23, 27, 45, 73, 147
Carolinian, 8, 18, 43, 59 (n8), 88 (n3), 135,
Basso, Keith, 10, 13, 124, 133, 142
144
Bay
Carroll, Vern, 39
Humboldt Bay, 126, 131 (n10)
Carucci, Laurence M., 60 (n9)
Tumon Bay, 94, 118, 143
Cash economy/wage economy. See also
Beach/beaches, 15, 68, 70–71, 100, 143,
Wage employment, 24, 26–27, 31, 34,
147–148
48, 52
Berea High School, 128
Catechist, 24, 73, 148
Betel, 118
Catholic Church. See Churches
Big Island, 54
Cedar Falls, Iowa, 12, 85–86, 91, 102
Bilateral, 35
Cedar Rapids, Iowa, 77–79
Bingo, 33, 71
Cell phone, 100
Bishop Museum, 14 Cement house, 14, 30, 67, 69
Blackbirder/blackbirding, 22 Census. See also De facto population; De
Blue Mountains, 83 jure population, 52–53, 59 (n7), 74,
Body brokers, 92–93 114, 123, 138
Borthwick, Mark, 32 Certified nursing assistant (CNA), 90,
Brady, Ivan A., 39 92–93, 98, 108, 128
Brain drain, 69 Chaminade University, 108
Breadfruit, 20–21, 26, 28, 32, 38, 41 (n20), Chamorro/Chamorros, 117–119, 121, 131
56, 65, 68, 71, 116, 148 (n1, n4)
Britannia, 39 (n2) Charles City, Iowa, 103 (n3)
Brooke, James, 117–118 Charleston, South Carolina, 83
Brother, 36–37, 40 (n19), 41 (n19), 81, 101, Chat room, 54, 87–88, 105
109, 111 (n2), 121, 123, 125–128, Chen, 73
130–131 (n5), 132 (n12, n16) Cheyne, Andrew, 21–22
Bruner, Edward M., 134, 145 Chicken, 30, 71, 103 (n3), 116
 Index 163

Chief, 32, 36, 148–149 Chuuk Lagoon (as a place), 2–3, 5 (map),
Child/children, 2, 8, 15, 30–32, 34, 37, 39, 16 (n2), 18, 23, 26, 38, 44, 64, 73, 75,
44, 46, 48, 51–54, 68–71, 73–74, 76, 82, 86, 88 (n6), 98, 102, 108, 110, 114,
82, 84, 91, 93, 97–98, 101, 107–108, 116, 119, 121, 123–124, 128, 135, 140
110–111, 116, 119–124, 127–129, 131 Chuuk State, 4 (map)–5 (map), 9, 12, 16
(n4)–132 (n15), 134, 136–137, 139, (n1), 19, 24, 28, 34–35, 40 (n13), 43,
141–142, 146 (n3, n4, n7) 45, 47–50, 52–53 (table), 55, 58, 60
China/Chinese, 50, 85, 118, 134 (n13), 68–69, 74–76 (n3), 80, 82–83,
Christian/Christianity, 23, 26, 28, 71–72, 86, 96–99, 102, 107–108, 110–111,
96 114, 116, 118–119, 125, 131 (n10),
Christmas, 132 (n12) 134, 136–140, 142, 146 (n4)
Churches government of, 32, 48–49, 51, 79, 85
Apostolic Faith Church, 126 Chuuk State Hospital, 48–49, 51–52,
Baptist Church, 85 108–109, 115, 123
Berea Evangelical Church, 96 Chuukese language, xvi-xvii, 16 (n3), 18,
44, 54, 102, 105–106, 141, 146 (n8)
Catholic Church/Catholic Mission, 24,
Chuukese people/ethnicity, 7, 14, 32, 40
26, 29–30, 40 (n7, n8), 72–73, 96,
(n13), 55, 59 (n8), 60 (n13), 73, 87,
124, 148
96, 105, 108–109, 116, 119, 125, 134,
Church of God, 96
137, 139–140, 142, 144
Congregational Church, 2, 22, 40 (n16)
Cigarettes, 20, 31, 34, 57
Island Community Church (ICC),
Clans, 14, 30, 32, 35–37 (table), 41 (n19),
96–98, 102, 127–128, 132 (n13)
135–136, 147, 149
Liebenzell Mission, 24, 96
Fáánimey, 36–37 (table)
Missionary Memorial Church Beyond
Imwo, 36–37 (table), 40 (n17)
the Reef, 98
Inemaraw, 36–37 (table), 40 (n17)
Namoluk Protestant Church, 23–24,
Katamak, 36–37 (table), 40 (n17), 125,
29–31, 39 (n3), 40 (n8, n17), 72, 132 127, 132 (n15)
(n15) Sópwunipi, 36–37 (table)
Protestant Church/Protestant Mission, Sór, 14, 36–37 (table)
2, 22, 24, 34, 47, 51, 96, 125 Souwon, 36–37 (table), 132 (n14)
Seventh-Day Adventist, 40 (n8) Tum, 40 (n17)
United Church of Christ, 34, 40 (n16) Wáánikar, 14, 36–37 (table), 125, 128,
Chuuk/Truk (as a place), 2–3, 6–7, 9–11, 130
14–16, 18–20, 24–26, 28–29, 31–32, Cleveland State University, 85
34, 38–39 (n1, n5), 40 (n8, n10, n13, Clientship/client members, 135–136, 146
n15), 43, 45, 48–49, 51, 54–55, 57–59 (n4)
(n4), 64–65, 67, 70, 72, 77–79, 81–82, Clifford, James, 14, 16
84–85, 88 (n4), 93, 96, 98–101, Cluster, 93, 96, 102, 109, 114, 123–127, 129
105–111, 116, 118, 120–122, 126, 128, Coconut wireless, 86, 140
131 (n5), 134, 136–137, 140–144 Coconut, 2, 19–21, 26, 28, 31–32, 38–39
Chuuk/Truk High School, 6, 34, 76 (n3), (n6), 40 (n14), 41 (n20), 46, 65, 68,
107 71, 87, 147, 149
164 Index

Coconutchat, 54, 87–88, 128 Cousin. See also Cross-cousin, 39, 76, 86,
Collage, 89–90, 92–93, 95–96, 118 101, 109, 145
College degrees, 5, 47, 49, 52, 80, 90, 95 Crescent City, California, 130
Associate, 47, 49, 51, 69, 79–80, 83–84, Cross-cousin, 37, 72, 109, 132 (n12)
86, 95, 101, 107, 124, 126–127 Cynthiana, Kentucky, 93
Bachelor’s, 47, 49, 51–52, 55, 72, 79–80,
82–84, 86, 88 (n1), 95, 101, 107–108, Dallas, Texas, 76
124, 126 Daughter, 2, 14, 84, 101, 109–110, 113,
Master’s, 49, 51–52, 80, 82, 86, 95, 107 121–123, 125–126, 128–131 (n5,
College of Micronesia-Chuuk Campus n12), 132 (n15), 146 (n7)
(COM), 49, 65, 80, 99, 131 (n7), 133 Davis, George, 26–27
College of Micronesia-Pohnpei Campus Day, A. Grove, 19
(COM), 51, 80, 84, 124, 128 Dededo. See Guam
College of the Redwoods (COR), 126–128, De Facto population, 76 (n6)
131 (n10, n12), 132 (n12) De Jure population, 15, 36–37 (table), 53
Colonial eras/periods/governments, 28 (table), 74, 80, 118, 120
German, 3, 23–24, 45, 146 (n5) Department of the Interior, 47
Japanese, 3, 6, 24–26, 32, 45, 56, 72 Dernbach, Kate, xv
Spanish, 23 Des Moines, Iowa, 76, 78
U.S./American, 3, 17, 26, 47–48 Descent line/descent group, 25, 36, 149
Colonized/colonizing, 23, 53–54, 106, 144 Diabetes (NIDDM), 56–57, 60 (n12), 121
Columbus, Ohio, 110 Diaspora, 99, 134, 146 (n2)
Communicate/communication, 12–13, 15, Diaz, Vicente, 134, 151
31, 67, 87, 98–100, 103 (n5), 124, 139 Diocese of the Caroline and Marshall
Community college, 76 (n5), 77, 80–81, Islands, 73
83–84, 93, 95, 101, 109–110, 123, 126 Dispensary, 14, 26, 31
Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana District center. See Urban center
Islands (CNMI), 4 (map), 7, 48, 75 Divorce, 16, 54, 93, 121, 128, 131 (n2), 142
(table), 80, 86, 137 Doane, E.T., 22
Compact of Free Association/The Dobbin, Jay, 121
Compact, 7–8, 52–53, 92, 117–118, Donne, John, 134, 146 (n1)
122, 143 Drift/drifting/drift voyager, 100, 139–140,
Compact impact, 121 142, 147, 149
Computer, 49, 79, 87, 99, 102–103 (n5),
109 Earth oven, 30, 121
Congregational. See Churches East-West Center, 47
Continental Air Micronesia/”Air Mike”, 43, Easter, 72, 100, 111, 122, 125, 128
95, 98 Eastern Oregon State College (EOSC),
Cookhouse, 30–31, 148 83–84
Cook Islands, 48 Ebeye, 107
Copra, 23, 25–26, 31–34, 148 Economy. See Cash economy; subsistence
Coronado, California, 12 economy
Corsicana, Texas, 8, 84–85, 88 (n2), 116 Education. See School
 Index 165

Eekmwar, 106, 111 (n1), 140 Tony Roma’s, 118

Elderly/elders. See Senior citizen Village Inn, 86, 91
Elementary school, 24, 46, 48, 50, Father, 15–16, 36–38, 40 (n19), 54, 58, 83,
82, 120 107, 110, 125–126, 130–131 (n4), 132
Berea School, 96 (n12, n13, n15, n16), 135–136,
Namoluk Elementary School, 14, 26, 29, 141–142, 145–146 (n6)
31, 48, 69, 80, 86 Father’s Day, 132 (n15)
Elites, 69, 73, 116 Federated States of Micronesia (FSM), 3–4
E-mail, 15, 54, 60 (n9), 87, 99–100, 102, (map), 7, 9, 16 (n1), 19, 40 (n13), 48,
105, 113, 131 (n6) 52–53, 59 (n4), 60 (n9), 67, 73, 75
Emplacement, 134, 138, 145 (table), 84, 86–87, 90–93, 95,
Endogamy/endogamous/in-marriage, 37, 107–108, 114, 117–118, 121–122,
135 134, 137–138
English language, xvi-xvii, 51, 54, 59, 76, Congress of, 49, 73
87, 92, 97, 102, 106, 110–111, 117, Embassy of, 93, 95, 101
122, 139, 146 (n8), 148 Ferguson, James, 10–11
Englund, Harri, 134, 145 Field-trip, 2, 6, 28, 31–32, 34, 62, 73, 121
Epidemic, 25–26 Fiji/Fijian, 22, 48, 59 (n8), 80, 96, 137, 143
Epidemiological transition, 56 Filipino/Philippines, 34, 118–119, 131 (n4)
Eskimo, 134 Fink, Deborah, 103 (n2)
Ettal, 5 (map), 8, 12, 16 (n2)–20, 24–26, 45, Finney, Ben, 65
65, 125, 133–134, 148 Firth, Raymond, 8
Eureka, California, 11–12, 95, 102, Fish/fishing, 17, 20, 28–29, 41 (n20),
109–111, 113–114, 125–131 (n9, n10, 55–56, 62, 70, 73, 91, 116, 122, 127,
n12), 132 (n12, n15), 140 144, 148–149
Europe/European, 18, 20, 64 spearfishing, 29, 34, 71, 148
Exogamy/exogamous/out-marriage, 35, 38, trolling, 28, 32, 62–63, 70–71
141 Flagstaff, Arizona, 95
Extended family, 14, 27 Florida, 60 (n15), 101, 111, 128, 138
Flour, 26–28, 34, 66
Fais, 3, 4 (map), 45 Food. See also Fast food, 24–25, 27–28, 30,
Falgout, Suzanne, 60 (n9) 32, 38, 56, 63, 65, 71, 78, 91, 94,
Fast food, 56, 76, 90–92, 98, 117 110–111, 118, 127, 135, 143, 146
Burger King, 91, 128, 131 (n7) (n5), 148
Denny’s, 91 Foreign exchange student, 5, 79
Hardee’s, 86, 91 Fosterage, 39, 52
Kentucky Fried Chicken (KFC), 56, 91, Fourth of July, 84
118
Little Caesar’s Pizza, 118 Gabriel, Larry, xv, 40 (n15)
McDonald’s, 13, 56, 90–91, 103 (n1), Garment factories, 7
110, 117 Geertz, Clifford, 89–90
Pizza Hut, 91 Gegeo, David Welchman, 140–141
Sizzler Steakhouse, 91 Genealogies, 15, 38
166 Index

Geneva, Switzerland, 101 Hawai’i, xv, 5, 7–8, 12, 22, 44, 47–53
George Washington High School (Guam), (table)–54, 56, 65, 69, 74–76, 78–79,
110 82, 84, 86–87, 94–95, 98, 100,
Georgia, 101, 128 106–111, 114, 117–119, 122,
Germany/German. See also Colonial eras, 126–127, 130–131 (n4, n6)–132
German, 3, 23, 35, 45, 50, 81, 100, 131 (n12), 134, 137–140, 143–146 (n6)
(n4) Hawai’i Pacific College, 82
Girschner, Max, 18, 24, 39 (n1, n5), 40 Hawai’i School of Business, 51
(n17) Hawaiian, 82, 131 (n1, n10), 147–148
Gladwin, Thomas, 6 Health aide/health assistant, 14, 26, 47, 59
Globalism/globalization, 10, 13, (n4), 69, 109
144–145 Health care/medical care, 7, 34, 38, 60
Golden Gate Bridge, 130 (n12), 102, 108, 115, 121, 123–124
Gonzaga University, 80 Health problem/ill health, 39 (n3), 56–57,
Goodenough, Ward H., xvi, 18, 39 (n5), 84, 93, 102, 124
146 (n4, n8) Hess, James, 143
Gorenflo, Larry, 114, 116
Hezel, Francis X., 6–7, 22–24, 34, 39 (n2,
Grandchildren/granddaughter, 48, 58, 74,
n4)–40 (n7), 77, 88 (n2), 117–118,
98, 110–111, 120–125, 131 (n5)
121, 151
Grandparent, 52, 98, 108, 125, 136, 145
High school/secondary school, 2, 5–7, 26,
Grants Pass, Oregon, 130
34, 38, 47, 49, 51–52, 54, 67–69,
Great Smoky Mountains, 83
72–73, 77, 79–80, 82, 84, 87, 92–93,
Greenhouse, Steven, 89–90
102, 107–110, 116, 120, 126, 128, 131
Grecian formula, 73
(n5)
Greyhound bus, 85–86, 100
Hispanic, 138
Guam, 4 (map)–5, 7–8, 11–12, 43–45,
HIV/AIDS, 60 (n10)
47–48, 50–53 (table)–58, 60 (n15),
65, 67, 69, 73–76, 78, 80, 82, 84–87, Hōkūle’a, 65
91–92, 94–96, 98–100, 102, 106, Holokū, 77, 79
108–111, 114–125, 127–129, 131, Home/home place, 6, 8, 10–12, 15, 25, 34,
134, 137–140, 143–144 44, 52, 55–56, 58–59, 67, 78, 80,
Guamoluk, 117–123 82–84, 87, 90, 93, 97–98, 108,
Guam Memorial Hospital, 52, 121 110–111, 114, 120, 122, 124, 127, 132
villages on Dededo, 117, 121 (n13)–134, 136, 138–141, 143, 145
Yigo, 121 Honolulu, 8, 12, 15, 43–44, 58, 82, 91,
Guano. See Phosphate 94–95, 98–102, 107–111, 113, 116,
Gulick, Luther, 22 122–128, 130–131 (n7), 132 (n13),
Gupta, Akhil, 10–11 140, 143
Honolulu Community College, 5, 107, 132
Hanlon, David, 151 (n12)
Harding, Thomas G., 151 Hospital, 34, 52, 85–86, 108, 115
Harwood, Captain, 21 Hotel maid. See Housekeeping
Hashmy, 21 Hotel, 7, 48, 89, 92, 94, 117–118, 121, 143
 Index 167

Household, 30, 39, 44, 69, 108, 120, Kailua, Hawai’i, 12, 14, 78
123–125, 129 Kalamazoo, Michigan, 109
Housekeeping, 48, 90, 92, 128 Kansas City, 82, 116, 141
Howard, Alan, 134, 137, 140 Kauanui, Kēhaulani, 134, 151
Humboldt State University, 126–127, 131 Kapingamarangi, 4 (map), 25, 47
(n10) Kapi’olani Community College, 108, 110,
Husband, 5, 15, 32, 83–84, 93, 101, 131 (n7)
108–109, 111 (n2), 120–121, 124, Keating, Elizabeth, xv
128–129, 134 Keesing, Roger, 16 (n4)
Kennedy administration, 6, 34
Identity/identities, xvii, 10–11, 13–14, 35, Kentucky, 137, 140
55, 69, 86–87, 97, 103, 114, 125, 130, Key West, Florida, 48
133–135, 137–146 (n7) Kinship, 10, 14, 30, 35–36, 38–40 (n19), 54,
Illinois, 53, 79, 145 65, 98, 135, 140
Immigration and Naturalization Service, Kiribati, 4 (map), 48
92 Kiste, Robert C., 151
Indiana, 145–146 (n6) K-Mart, 118
Internet, 12, 16, 54–55, 87–88, 93, 99, 102, Kohl, Manfred, 24
105, 109 Korea/Korean/South Korea, 29, 48, 50, 73,
Iowa, 77–78, 81, 99–100, 103 (n2), 128, 145 88 (n3), 100, 117–118
Iowa Beef Packers (IBP), 86, 91, 103 (n2, Koror, 4 (map), 25, 51, 107
n3) Kosrae/Kosraen/Kosrae State, 4 (map), 16
Iowa City, Iowa, 12, 83, 85 (n1), 43–44, 109, 119, 146 (n7)
Iraq, 109 Krämer, A., 24
Iras, 78 Kubary, Jan, 18
Island Hopper, 43–44, 58, 84, 98, 106, 110 Kula Sanitarium, 123
Israel, 48 Kuttu, 5 (map), 8, 16 (n2), 18, 26, 65, 109,
Italy, 50 128, 147
Kwajalein, 4 (map), 43
Jaluit Gesellschaft, 23 Kwara’ae, Malaita (Solomon Islands),
Janes, Craig R., 96, 151 141–142
Japan/Japanese. See also Colonial eras,
Japanese, 3, 5–7, 20–21, 24–26, 29, Lal, Brij V., 135
32, 34, 40 (n10, n11), 45–48, 50, 56, Land, 10–11, 14–15, 24, 36–39, 41 (n20),
64, 109, 116–118 44, 61, 68–69, 111, 114, 116–117, 131
Jervis, Lori, 92 (n1), 134–135, 146 (n5), 148
Jesuits, 34, 86 Larson, Bruce, 7
Job Corps, 52, 124 Las Vegas, Nevada, 132 (n13)
Johnson, Giff, 87 League of Nations, 46
Jorgensen, Joe, 134 Leor, 1, 33
Jubilee, 72, 132 (n15) Lessa, William A., 27, 88 (n3)
Junior high school, 7, 40 (n16), 47, Levin, Michael, 118
106–107, 116, 120 Levirate, 38
168 Index

Lincoln, Nebraska, 12, 95 Mariana Islands, 4 (map), 40 (n13), 131

Lineage, 8–9, 15, 35–36, 38–40 (n18)–41 (n1)
(n19), 106, 108, 111, 128, 134, 146 Marriage/marry, 9, 35–38, 50–52, 54–55,
(n2, n4) 69, 72–73, 75, 79–82, 86, 88, 93, 99,
matrilineage/matrilineal, 14–15, 35–38, 101, 107–110, 114, 116, 119, 124–126,
40 (n9), 135–136, 142, 147 128–129, 131 (n2, n4), 134–136, 140,
Linnekin, Jocelyn, 134, 140, 142 142
Lockwood, Victoria S., 151 Marshall Islands/Republic of the Marshall
Long Beach, California, 76 Islands (RMI)/Marshallese, 4 (map),
Long-timers, 8, 100, 102, 126, 139 40 (n13), 44, 48, 59 (n4), 60 (n9), 73,
Los Angeles, California (LA), 78, 98, 100, 75 (table), 84, 86–87, 91–93, 96, 107,
125, 130 118–119, 128, 131 (n10), 137,
Losap, 2, 5 (map), 9, 16 (n2)–19, 24, 39 142–143
(n1), 65, 108, 127, 132 (n13) Marshall, Leslie B., xv, 1–2, 14, 16, 27, 51,
Louisville, Kentucky, 100, 128 60, 73, 77–79, 83, 86
Lukeisel. See Mortlock Islands Martial arts, 51, 85, 88 (n3), 95, 147
Lukelap, 29, 137 bwang, 88 (n3), 147
Luken Islet, 9 (map) judo, 85
Lukunoch, 5 (map), 9, 16 (n2)–18, 20–24, tae kwan do, 85, 88 (n3)
26, 131 (n12), 147 Maryland, 128
Lumber/lumber mill/lumber yard, 25, 27, Masculinity, 63, 94
66–67, 95, 126–127, 131 (n10) Mass, 24, 73
Lütke, Fedor, 19–21 Matrilineage/matrilineal. See Lineage
Maui, 123, 132 (n13)
Macpherson, Cluny, 138–139, 151 Maui Community College, 107–108, 123
Macy, Captain Richard, 19 Mayo, Larry, 117–118
Maid. See Housekeeping McDonald’s. See Fast food
Mailo, Petrus, 26 McGrath, Thomas, 7
Majuro, 43, 67 Medical treatment. See Healthcare
Malawi, 134 Meatpacking, 91, 103 (n2)
Mall, 94, 117–118, 130 Medex, 49, 59 (n4)
Man/men, 3, 5, 15, 24, 26–27, 30, 32, 36, 40 Merika, 44, 53–54, 56, 78–79
(n8), 41 (n19), 44–48, 52–53, 55, Michigan, 77, 79, 83, 108, 146 (n6)
57–59 (n1, n2, n3, n5, n6), 60 (n10, Micronesia (as a region), 3, 4 (map), 7, 11,
n13, n14, n15)–64, 67, 69–71, 73, 14, 20, 23–24, 28, 34, 38, 40 (n16),
78–79, 88 (n3, n4), 89, 91–93, 95, 97, 44–51, 53 (table), 56, 58, 80, 84, 92,
100, 103 (n3), 106–109, 111 (n1), 100, 114, 117, 135, 137, 140, 143, 151
116, 118, 124, 127, 129, 131 (n8), 136, Micronesian (as an identity), 3, 6–8,
142, 146 (n7), 148 22–23, 44, 46–47, 49–51, 56–57,
Manchester, Curtis A., Jr., 19 63–64, 82, 84, 87–88 (n2), 91–93,
Marcus, George, 12 118, 125, 134, 137, 139, 144, 149
Mariano, Willoughby, 92–93, 103 (n4) Micronesian archipelago, 8, 84, 93
 Index 169

Micronesian Occupational College language, xvi-xvii, 18, 54, 97, 101, 110,
(MOC), 49, 107 141–142, 146 (n7)
Micronesian Public Safety Academy, 107, people/ethnicity, 17–18, 35, 38, 55, 73,
109 82–83, 86–87, 96, 98, 101, 107, 109,
Migrant/migrate/migration, 5–7, 10–11, 125–126, 128–129, 134, 137, 140, 142,
16, 35, 38, 44–45, 50, 52, 54–55, 144
59–60 (n12), 62, 67, 69, 73–74, 86, 96, society/culture, 13, 15, 102
100, 102–103, 105–108, 110, 114, 117, Mortlock, Captain James, 17, 39 (n2)
120–123, 134, 143, 151 Morton, Helen, 145
emigration, 6, 34, 52, 67–68, 70, 106, Mother, 2, 32, 37, 40 (n19), 71, 101, 108,
116 110, 121, 123–124, 130–131 (n4)–132
immigration/immigrant, 7, 43, 89–92, (n12, n16), 135–136, 141–142,
98, 124–125, 135, 138, 145 145–146 (n6, n7)
Military. See Armed forces Motorboat, 1, 19, 28, 34, 61–64, 70, 73
Minister, 23–24, 40 (n17), 51, 72, 96, 126, Mountain, 2, 16 (n3), 58, 83
132 (n13), 136 Multilocality, 10–11
Minnesota, 79 Multisited, 12, 107
Missionaries, 2, 22–23, 40 (n16) Music, 15, 32, 40 (n15), 44, 71, 97, 116
Mission/missionization, 23–24, 26, 28, 39 Mwáán, 40 (n13)
(n3), 47, 62, 96
Missouri, 108, 140 Nama, 2, 5 (map), 8, 16–19, 39 (n1)
Mizpah High School, 2, 14, 34, 40 (n16), Namoluk community, xvii, 6, 8, 11–16,
76 (n3) 25–26, 28–31, 35–37, 61, 65, 68–69,
Moch, 5 (map), 8, 16 (n2), 18, 24, 26, 73, 72–73, 80, 98, 102–103 (n5), 105,
111 (n1), 129, 148 107, 110, 113, 135, 140–143, 145
Modern/modernity, 63, 69, 114, 117, 144 Namoluk Constitution/Constitutional
Moen. See Wééné convention, 18, 61, 72
Money, 62–63, 67, 69, 82, 116, 132 (n12) Namoluk municipal government, 18, 26,
Moore, Henrietta, 14 32–33
Morning Star, 22 Nantakku, 2
Morrell, Captain Benjamin, 20–21 Nantucket, Massachusetts, 19
Mortlock Islands/the Mortlocks, 3–4 Nanyō Bōeki Kaisha (NBK), 25, 40 (n10)
(map)–5 (map), 7, 9–11, 16 (n2)–18, Nason, James D., xv, 25
21, 23–24, 28, 31, 37–39 (n2)–40 Nauru, 3, 4 (map), 23, 45, 48
(n16), 66, 98, 102, 106, 114, 119, Navarro College, 84–85
134–135, 137, 140, 147–148 Navigation/navigator, 3, 6, 18, 20, 43, 45,
Lower Mortlocks/Nomoi, 17–19, 21–25, 63, 90, 149
35, 39 (n1), 65, 86, 106, 146 (n5) Nedelic, Pierre, 23
Upper Mortlocks/Lukeisel, 17, 19, 39 Nero, Karen, 60 (n9)
(n1), 65, 73, 96 Network, 5–6, 11, 15, 45, 55, 98, 102–103
Mortlockese (n5), 109, 139
communities, 9–10, 15, 18, 24, 35, 109, New England, 2, 22
146 (n5) New York, 93, 95, 101, 127
170 Index

New Zealand, 48, 59 (n8), 113, 137–139, Palau/Palauan/Republic of Palau, 4 (map),

143, 151 9, 25, 40 (n13), 45, 47–49, 51, 59
Newúwé, 143 (n8), 60 (n9), 67, 75 (table), 84–86,
NIDDM. See Diabetes 88 (n4), 107, 118–119, 126, 131
Nomoi. See Mortlock Islands (n10), 139
Nomoilam, 18–19, 87, 100, 140 Palau Community College, 51
Norfolk, Virginia, 51, 110 Pandanus, 26, 28, 32, 62
North America, 130 Papua New Guinea, 50, 80, 82
North Carolina, 84, 93, 110–111, 138 Paradise, 143–144
Northeast Missouri State University, 85 Parent, 12, 14–15, 39, 52, 67. 69–70, 76, 78,
Nukuoro, 4 (map), 19, 47 99, 110, 124, 130, 136–137, 145
Nurse/nursing (as a profession), 47, 49, 59 Pastor. See Minister
(n4), 86, 92, 95, 108, 110 Patrilateral, 36–37
Nursing home, 92–93, 128 Peace Corps/Peace Corps Volunteer
(PCVs), 14, 34, 48, 50
O’ahu, 14, 125 Pelto, Pertti J., 76 (n1)
Peniyésene, 9, 78
Oceania/Oceanic, 135, 140, 142, 151
Pensacola, Florida, 12
Oakland, California, 126, 130
Peter, Joakim, xv, 40 (n15), 133, 137
Okinawan, 40 (n10)
Phosphate, 3, 23, 45
Old folks/old man/old people/old woman.
Pickup truck, 2–3, 116, 127
See Senior citizen
Pieman, 143
Oleson, Alice, 60 (n9)
Pingelap, 4 (map), 39 (n3), 48, 119
Oneop, 3, 5 (map), 8–9, 16, 18, 24, 26, 40
Piis Emmwar, 5 (map), 16 (n2), 24, 136
(n9), 45, 47, 72, 122, 148
Place, 5, 7–8, 10–13, 15, 32, 38, 53, 64, 76,
Ono, Sarah, xv
78, 86, 88–89, 102–103, 106, 114, 120,
Oregon, xv, 5, 49, 55, 58, 73, 79, 84, 86, 101,
123–124, 133–135, 138, 140–142,
108, 111, 137, 139 144–146 (n7)
Organic Act, 117 Planet Hollywood, 118
Ortner, Sherry, 143 Pohnpei/Pohnpeian/Pohnpei State, FSM, 4
Outer island, 2, 6, 23, 26, 32, 35, 57–58, 68, (map), 9, 12, 16 (n1), 19, 22–24, 35,
73, 114, 134 39 (n3), 40 (n13, n16), 43–45, 47–48,
Ozark, 91 52, 55, 58–59 (n8), 67, 73, 78, 84,
86–87, 93, 106–109, 111, 118–119,
Pacific Basin Medical Officers Training 123–125, 128, 131 (n10), 146 (n5, n7)
Program (PBMOTP), 51, 109 Pohnpei Agricultural and Technical School
Pacific Choice Seafood, 127–128 (PATS), 124
Pacific Islands/Pacific Islander/the Pacific, Polowat, 4 (map)–5 (map)–6, 9, 19, 65, 135
1, 3, 13, 16 (n1), 19–20, 22, 28, 38–39, Polynesian, 137
48–49, 57, 80, 96, 98, 113, 133–135, Port town. See Urban center
137–140, 143–145, 151 Portland, Oregon, 8, 12, 55, 58, 91, 95–98,
Pacific Islands Central School (PICS), 47 100, 102, 106, 109, 125–128, 130, 132
Pacific Northwest, 55 (n12, n13, n15), 140
 Index 171

Poyer, Linette, 134, 140, 142 Schlosser, Eric, 91

Priest, 24, 73 Schneider, David M., 36
Principal (of a school), 48, 69, 96 School, 5, 34, 39 (n3), 46, 48, 54–55, 69, 71,
Protestant. See Churches 74, 76, 79–80, 82–83, 88 (n3), 96, 101,
Pull factors, 6, 34, 116, 144 107–111, 121–124, 127–128, 138
Pukos, 29, 137 church-based, 34, 69, 116
Pukueu, 1, 65, 145 public, 34, 76, 108, 119, 121, 139
Schoolteacher. See Teacher
Quackenbush, Edward, 9 Scotia, California, 126
Queens Hospital, 123 Scotland, 145
Seawall, 68
Radcliffe-Brown, A.R., 8 Seattle, Washington, 1, 116
Radio, 31–32, 34, 47–48, 61, 67, 99 Security guard, 90, 93–94, 109
Rain/rainfall, 30, 65, 71, 76 (n4) Senior citizen, 15–16, 31, 37, 40 (n18), 45,
Raven, Captain, 39 (n2) 58–59, 63, 67, 71, 74, 91–92, 96, 98,
Red Cross, 66 111, 123, 130, 149
Rensel, Jan, xv, 134, 137 Sennit, 28, 40 (n14), 46, 71
Reuney, Theophil Saret, 1, 15, 43 Senyavin, 19
Rice, 24, 26–28, 32, 34, 56, 66, 70, 97, 116 Severance, Craig, 59 (n8)
Richards, Dorothy E., 40 (n11) Sharp, Andrew, 19
Riesenberg, Saul H., 19 Ship, 1–2, 6, 12, 20–26, 31–35, 40 (n10),
Roche, Walter F., Jr., 92–93, 103 (n4) 45, 47, 55, 62, 73, 98, 106, 114–115,
Rodman, Margaret, 10–11 140, 147
Rogers, Robert F., 117 Sibling/sibling set/siblingship, 14, 32,
Rondilla, Joanne L., 151 36–37, 39–40 (n19), 52, 67, 70, 87, 99,
Roosevelt High School (Honolulu), 132 109, 149
(n13) sibling-set marriage, 37, 111 (n2)
Rotuman, 137, 140 Sister, 32, 36–37, 41 (n19), 78, 81, 100,
Ruben, Kino S. 17, 28 108–111 (n2), 123, 125, 127–130, 132
Russia/Russian, 19–20 (n13), 134
Slusser, R.C., 26
Sahlins, Marshall, 143 Small, Cathy A., 151
Saipan, 4 (map), 7, 45, 47, 49, 52, 67, 82, 84 Social class, 68–69, 115
Salem, Oregon, 8, 12, 55, 95, 97–99, Sokehs, 146 (n5)
126–127, 130 Solimeo, Samantha, xv
Sāmoa/Sāmoan, 48, 59 (n8), 80, 96, Solomon Islander, 141
123–124, 131 (n10), 139, 143, 151 Son, 14, 32, 36, 58, 83, 101, 110, 113, 121,
San Diego, California, 107 123, 125, 130, 132 (n15)
San Francisco, California, 126, 130, 145 Sópúúk, 116
Santa Rosa, California, 59 (n8) Sópwonewel, 29, 137
Satawan, 5 (map), 7, 9, 16 (n2)–18, 21–23, Sororate, 38
26, 39, 45, 74, 107, 116, 147 Southeast Missouri State University, 85
Satawan Junior High School, 7, 107 Southwest Islands (of Palau), 9, 59 (n8)
172 Index

Southwest (of USA), 138 Tobacco. See Cigarettes

Spain/Spanish. See also Colonial eras, Toinom Islet, 9 (map), 32, 76 (n5)
Spanish, 3, 45, 85, 117, 138 Tokelauan, 139
Spickard, Paul, 134, 151 Tokyo, 44
Sponsored, 55, 102 Tonga/Tongan, 48, 139, 143, 145, 151
Spoonley, Paul, 138, 151 Tonowas, 3, 5 (map), 24, 45, 47
Springdale, Arkansas, 91 Toon, 5 (map), 86, 141
S.S. Monterey, 76 (n5) Tourist/tourism, 7, 34, 43, 92, 94, 117–118,
Star of the Sea, 73 131 (n1), 143
Stonington, Connecticut, 20 Trade/trader, 20–21, 23, 26, 28, 32, 55, 63
Store, 2, 27–28, 31, 56, 64, 94, 107–108, 144 Translocal community, 143
Straub Clinic, 123 Transnational/transnationalism, 10–11, 13,
Subclan, 30, 35–36, 41 (n19), 125, 128–130 64, 99, 107, 134, 138, 144
Subsistence economy, 31 Transportation, 6, 13, 55, 62, 98, 106
Sugita, Hiroshi, xvi, 18 Tripler Army Medical Center, 123
Sumatra, Indonesia, 134 Truk District. See Chuuk State
Suomi College, 108
Truk Islander, 2
Switzerland, 50, 101
Trust Territory. See U.S. Trust Territory of
the Pacific Islands
Ta, 5 (map), 16 (n2), 18, 147
Trust Territory School of Nursing, 49
Tahiti, 65, 143
Tuition, 34, 69, 116, 126
Taiwan, 29, 56, 117
Tuna, 28, 32–33, 62–63, 70, 147, 149
Taro
Turkey tails, 55–57, 60 (n9)
as food, 26, 28, 32, 40 (n12), 56, 70
Turkey tail disease, 57
plot/patch, 36, 41 (n20), 68, 71, 116, 149
Tuvalu, 48
swamp, 25–26, 40 (n12), 41 (n20), 65,
Typhoon, 26–28, 35, 70, 117, 146 (n5)
68, 149
Teacher, 28, 39 (n3), 47–49, 51, 69, 71–72, typhoon house, 29, 121
76 (n3), 81–82, 84, 86, 88 (n3), 95, Typhoon Pamela, 65–68
107, 109, 111 Typhoon Phyllis, 26–30, 65–66, 69
Telephone/phone, 12, 15–16, 73, 79, 82, Tyson Foods, 91
85–86, 93, 99–103 (n5), 105, 109,
116, 122, 126–127, 131 (n6), 140 Ulithi, 4 (map), 27, 119
Television/TV, 73, 76, 85, 116, 118, 139 Ulin, Robert, 13
Tennessee, 140 Umap Islet, 9 (map)
Texas, 51, 88 (n3), 95, 107, 126 Uncle, 39, 52, 76, 136, 145
Thailand, 50 Unilineal, 35, 38
Thanksgiving, 12, 85, 125 United Kingdom, 145
Thatch house, 30 United Nations (UN), 5, 34
The 101st account, 16, 143 United Parcel Service (UPS), 95, 127
Tikopia, 8 United States of America/ USA/ the
Tinned fish, 28, 56 States/America. See also American;
Toba Batak, 134, 145 Colonial eras, U.S.
 Index 173

as a country/place, 2–3, 7–8, 12, 15, 18, 127, 130–131 (n11), 132 (n13), 139,
21, 26, 34–35, 44, 49, 51–54, 57, 60 142, 144–146 (n7)
(n13), 64, 74–75, 78–88 (n3), 90–96, Vladivostok, 20
99–103 (n4), 109–111, 115, 117–121, Vocational training, 47, 49, 52, 69, 96
124, 130, 138–139, 141–143, 145, 151 Voyage/voyaging, 2–3, 6, 18–19, 45, 63, 65,
government of, 5–6, 34, 49, 79 98, 149
U.S. mainland, 7–8, 12, 44, 47–53
(table)–54, 56, 58, 67, 69, 74–76, 79, Wage employment/wage job/wage work.
84, 86–87, 98, 100, 106–109, 111, 115, See also Cash economy, 3, 6–7, 38, 45,
119, 122–126, 137–139, 143–144 48, 51–52, 67–69, 74, 80, 108, 115,
U.S. Trust Territory of the Pacific Islands 117, 121
(USTTPI), 3, 6–7, 26, 34, 40 (n13), Wallace, Ben J., 151
47–48, 66, 74, 79, 86, 137 Wal-Mart, 109, 132 (n13)
University of California, Berkeley, 80 Warner Pacific College (WPC), 96
University of Guam (UOG), 47, 51, 79, 82, War
107, 110, 134
Gulf War, 54–55
University of Hawai’i, Hilo, 125
Iraq War, 109
University of Hawai’i, Mānoa, 48, 54, 59
Spanish-American War, 117
(n4), 80, 82, 107, 109, 127, 133
World War I, 3, 46
University of Iowa, xv, 77, 80–81, 85–86,
World War II, 3, 5–6, 17, 25–26, 38, 40
134, 146 (n2)
(n11), 45–48, 113, 116–117, 137, 151
University of Northern Iowa (UNI), 85
Ward, R. Gerard, 21
University of the South Pacific, 109, 124
Washington, 83, 85–86, 121
U.S. International University (USIU), 107
Watson, James L., 13, 90, 103 (n1), 134,
Urban center, 2, 6–7, 28, 34–35, 38, 40
146 (n2)
(n13), 56–57, 68, 73–74, 80, 99, 106,
Wééné, xv, 2–3, 5 (map)–7, 9, 12, 24, 26,
108, 110, 114–115, 120, 122
USSR. See Russia 32, 34, 38, 40 (n13, n17), 45, 47–48,
50, 52–53 (table), 55–58, 67, 69,
Vacation, 67, 73, 116, 122 71–76, 78–80, 82–84, 86, 95–96,
Valedictorian, 80, 86 98–103 (n5), 106–111, 114–118, 120,
Vehicle. See Car; Pickup truck 122–124, 126–128, 130–131 (n5), 132
Velez-I, Carlos G., 88 (n3) (n12, n13), 136, 139, 141, 143–144
Videocassette/VCR, 99–100, 102, 116, 132 Wendel, John, 88 (n5)
(n15) West Virginia, 116
Village, 25, 29, 32, 40 (n13), 137 Western Apache, 13
Virginia, 54, 110–111 Western Islands/Islanders (of Chuuk
Virtual community, 140 State), 5 (map), 6, 65, 116
Virtual kinship, 98–99, 130 Western Michigan University, 109
Visit/visiting/visitor, 12, 15, 18, 33, 52, 63, Western Oregon University, 101
67, 73–74, 84–86, 98, 100, 102–103 Whaler, 19–21, 23, 28
(n5), 105–106, 108, 115, 122, 125, White, Geoffrey M., 151
174 Index

Wife, 40, 54, 58, 88 (n6), 101, 107, 122, Wooden house, 29, 31, 67, 69
125, 127–128, 130–131 (n4), 132 World Health Organization (WHO), xv, 59
(n15) (n4), 101
Wiichap, 116 World Wide Web, 87, 99
Willamette Valley, 58 Wright, Debbie H., 151
Wilson, Rob, 134, 140 WSZC (radio station in Chuuk), 32, 71
Wisconsin, 79, 109
Woleai, 4 (map), 45 Xavier High School, 34, 76 (n3), 81, 86, 88
Wolf, Margery, xvi, 13 (n5), 107, 126, 134
Woman/women, 1, 3, 5, 15, 24, 26–27, 30,
32, 36, 40 (n9), 44, 46–48, 50–52, Yap/Yapese/Yap State, FSM, 4 (map), 6, 9,
55–59 (n1, n2, n3, n5, n6), 67, 69, 71, 16, 35, 40 (n13), 47, 58, 65, 67, 146
77–79, 82, 86, 88 (n3), 89, 92–93, 95, (n7)
97, 100–101, 107, 116, 118, 120–121, Yigo. See Guam
123–130, 136, 146 (n7) Young William, 17, 39 (n2)