Socio-political and moral issues concerning land rights of two Pacific island indigenous cultures

Abstract

This paper focuses on bioethical issues related to the land rights of two Pacific Island indigenous cultures from the Guam and Bikini islands. It is based on the author's field experiences, documented public facts about these situations, and the experiences of the Guamanian (Chamorro) and Bikini people. The data for this paper was gleaned from extensive interviews with cultural informants living on Guam, as well as with the descendants of the original people who were forced to migrate from Bikini Atoll.

Keywords:

• bioethics
• Micronesia
• indigenous cultures

Bioethics is a term that encompasses many aspects of the health and welfare of individuals and groups. The concept captures also rights associated with the dignity of individuals and groups, including the right to own land and to have control and discretion over one's land. This philosophy impacts every aspect of cultural life by posing difficult ethical dilemmas often ignored or interpreted in ways that change the course of people's lives and, in this case, prevented the indigenous people from occupying their own land. Individual and group values involve dignity and survival, including the ability to make decisions and control processes that are sometimes infringed upon by larger groups that exercise power over indigenous people and cultures.

The list of references at the end of this paper contains the main sources that were integrated with data from the informant interviews, conducted over many years with numerous trips to Micronesia. The published sources about Guam cited here come primarily from the work of Phillips (1996) and Hezel (2001) and from library documents held by the Micronesian Area Research Center (MARC). Published sources about the actual migration of the Bikini Atoll original inhabitants came from the extensive work of Kiste (1974) and Niedenthal (2001) and commentary about the deplorable situation and lack of food from the research of Leonard Mason (1954). When information from the published sources did not corroborate information from the informant interviews or the author's own personal observations, the author checked the data by carrying out additional interviews with informants from different generations. In no way should this paper be considered a definitive statement on land management or the events that transpired during the forced migration from Bikini Atoll. There is still much more research needed on both of these topics.

Fieldwork: getting settled

My first experience with a land issue on Guam was during my second trip; on this trip, my husband and two young children traveled with me. He and I were also working with a separate grant from the National Science Foundation, not related to this project. We decided to live in the southern village of Inarajan where there was evidence that the Chamorro language was still in use. I rented a house divided into two apartments. It was perfect. We moved into the upper apartment and used the lower apartment as our office. We shipped our entire library so as to avoid driving 20 miles to the University of Guam to use their library, which was not nearly as good as ours. It took about six weeks for the books and other things, including my washing machine, to arrive. I connected the washing machine outside. Guam is so warm that connecting it outside, by the back door, seemed like a good idea, at least so I thought. To get to the washing machine, I had to go outside and walk down some steep stairs. One day after it arrived, I was carrying my huge basket of dirty laundry when I encountered a goat tied to the washing machine. Who in the village had the right to tie anything to my washing machine?, I thought. After all, I was paying the landlord $500 a month. Having just come to terms with the goat, I noticed that someone had fenced off an area in the backyard and in that area were pigs, many pigs of all sizes! When the Guamanian landlord came to pick up the rent, I vented all of my anger. I was no longer the polite researcher, I was the angry tenant, who wanted the goat and pigs removed. This was when I discovered that my washing machine was on land that he did not own and also that the area with the pigs was not his either; someone else in the village owned the backyard. Apparently, I had not rented the land that the house was built on. The owners of the land were not interested in renting it to me: they needed the land for their family, and the fact that we were paying a lot of money for the building so that we could do our research was of no importance to them.

Concepts of land ownership

These early experiences with land, along with my own lack of cultural knowledge and a very naive attitude whereby I assumed that Western views of land ownership and/or land leasing applied universally, served as the beginning of my research on a much broader issue concerning land and the survival of cultural traditions associated with land in Micronesia.

Micronesia is composed of many individual island cultures. Although each island is considered unique from a cultural perspective, the people of these non-industrial cultures share a common link. They are all concerned about finding ways for their cultural traditions to survive from internal and external pressures frequently imposed by non-Micronesian cultures that believe they belong there.

These non-Micronesian cultures and their invasions often disrupt nature and society. The present study also seeks to establish who should be responsible for saving the cultural traditions of these island cultures. What roles should professionals in the fields of cultural anthropology and sociology play in helping to preserve the cultural traditions of indigenous cultures?

Traditionally, the Micronesian concepts of “land ownership” and “land leasing” have differed considerably from the Western view of the same concepts. When we in the West think of land ownership, we think of the legal aspect of ownership, whereas in Micronesia, most of the islands follow rules based on kinship and lineage. This paper will not be focusing on either of these aspects but on other land issues. In most of Micronesia, especially on Guam, land is considered a “communal resource,” that is, a collective unit to be used for the benefit of a group and not for individual gains. When someone with no access to land wanted to lease a parcel, he would go to someone in the village who he knew had land and ask to lease a parcel to raise food for his family. In most cases, permission was happily given but no monies were exchanged and no legal papers were drawn up (Guampedia.com, 2013; Phillips, 1996).

Certain families on Guam were looked upon more as managers of parcels of land which had been in their families often for hundreds of years, but they were not considered, from a Western perspective, “owners” of the land. Everyone on the island of Guam knew who these families were and as new generations appeared, this type of “management” was passed on to new family members. During World War II, and continuing until about 1941, most of the islands in Micronesia were under Japanese control. The Japanese took over the land management and divided the land equally among all of the families, with no regard to which families had previously managed the land. Thus, every family had an equal share of the farmland and each family was expected to produce food for the Japanese military. After, when the Japanese no longer controlled Guam, the original managers of the island's farmland wanted their land parcels back and based their rationale on moral bases; that is, returning the land to the original managers was the “right thing to do.” However, many of those who had never managed the land before refused to give control back to the original families, so only some of the land was returned to the original managers. To this day, many of these issues that have ended up in court have never been settled. One of the objections was that there was often no documentation to show who the original managers were. Original documents in the legal Western sense did not exist: there was never a need for any, as everyone simply knew who the land managers were (Hezel, 2001; MARC, 2014).

It wasn't until 1944 that the US government regained control of Guam, through heavy bombing raids on the island. What followed next was the practice by the US government (mostly military) of condemning land so that US military bases could be built on it instead. The US government enacted this process when the Guamanians refused to sell their land to them for a pittance. Although the Guamanians challenged this, they were unable to fight the might of the US government, who controlled the island. This is still in practice today; when the US government wants land to extend military bases, they take the land and remove any local inhabitants. Those from Guam, always loyal to the USA, were known both as Guamanians and Chamorros. They were, and continue to be today, the direct descendants of the Chamorro culture, the original inhabitants who did not migrate to Guam and have been there for over 4000 years, working and living on the land; supporting their families and building a good life for their future, and for the future generations of Chamorros. These people were all forced, by the USA, to move off their land, often receiving nothing in return, even though the US government had promised to pay. These people did not want to give up their land as it meant giving up their only means of feeding and housing their families. They had absolutely nothing except for the land. All cultural traditions were tied to the land and the waters surrounding it. The US government refused to allow them to stay on the land, to build or occupy houses as they had prior to World War II. The land was no longer under Chamorro family management; and even though the temporary Naval government was notified that some of the flattened land, resulting from severe bombing by the US military, was vacant, and despite the fact that under Guam laws people's rights were being violated. The US Congress had not paid anything to the Chamorros, but the people were still physically removed from the land they had always occupied, long before Western civilization arrived. To this day, there are still many cases involving these condemned lands in the courts, still to be settled (Guampedia.com, 2013; Hezel, 2001). Presently, military bases and other installations occupy close to three-quarters of the land once managed by the Chamorro families. It is often hard for Westerners to figure out why Liberation Day is still celebrated by the Chamorros and their families and considered a most important holiday tradition by the Chamorro people on Guam (Phillips, 1996). To a Westerner, like myself, a supporter and advocate of indigenous people, it sends a message, a reminder that those “celebrating” their liberation have been wronged and a reminder to the US government that what they have taken from these people needs to be returned.

Bikini

In 1945, US President Harry S. Truman ordered the US military to test atomic bombs and their impact on US warships (Kiste, 1974). The US military chose Bikini Atoll (the Marshall Island group) even though it was an inhabited atoll; approximately 167 human beings lived on this atoll. The whole point of testing was, “for the good of mankind to end all wars.” This is what the inhabitants of Bikini were told, who found that they too had no choice and would have to move from their island, and were to be compensated for the use of their island by the USA. They were promised that they could eventually return. Thus began not one move, but a whole series of moves. The first with some, though not enough, food provision to a smaller atoll than Bikini. The food lasted only a few weeks. During this time, the Bikinis discovered that the coconut trees and other edible vegetation on the island were not as productive as those on Bikini: they were of a lower quality, could not produce enough food for those who were staying there, and the fishing was not acceptable. After a short period of time, the Bikinis began to suffer from starvation. Many were sick and some died from eating poisonous fish from the new lagoon. This situation became public knowledge, thanks to the intervention of a well-known cultural anthropologist, Leonard Mason. Notified of the concerns of a colleague at the University of Hawaii, Mason went to the island to check and reported the situation to the US government. Shortly afterwards, the Bikinis were moved. The Bikinis then started building houses, imagining that this situation would be permanent (Mason, 1954). However, shortly after the building had begun, the Bikinis were told that the USA was moving them again: the US government needed this atoll, Enewatak, as a second nuclear testing site. In 1948, the Bikinis were moved again to Kwajalein Atoll and housed in tents next to a concrete US military airfield. Shortly after their arrival, they were told they would be moved again, this time to Kili Island – the third move in less than two years. Now there were 184 Bikinis, all wanting to return to their original homeland, but the levels of radiation made this impossible. Yet they were shown pictures of Bikini and it “looked OK” to the Bikini people. The USA had difficulty explaining how a place could “look OK,” with beautiful vegetation, but due to the effects of testing along with radiation fallout, it would kill all those who tried to stay there (Hezel, 2001; Niedenthal, 2001).

In the 1980s, I taught in Oklahoma at a small liberal arts university where, besides teaching, I was the International Student Advisor to about 200 Micronesian students. The largest group came from the different islands and atolls of the Marshall Island group. At that time, the Marshall Islands, including all of the atolls in this group, were still part of the US Trust Territory of the Pacific. It was in this capacity that I met many of the descendants of the 137 Bikinis who had been forcibly removed from Bikini Atoll by the executive decisions of the US government. My students were born on Majuro Island and had parents who were allowed to work on Kwajalein, but no longer were any Micronesians allowed to stay past 7.00 p.m. on Kwajalein. Those working there were taken by boat to Ebeye, essentially a tent and a Quonset hut, an overcrowded hovel full of diseases and violence.

My students knew the history of their relatives, mostly their great grandparents, grandparents, and other relatives of that generation, most were now either dead or scattered among many other atolls and islands in the Marshall Island group. These students provided excellent stories and experiences that helped to document what was written on the forced migration from Bikini. These experiences were strong and became part of their orally related history associated with the Marshall Islands of Micronesia.

Today, one reads about “tours” of Bikini but no one actually walks on Bikini; these commercial tours are conducted with participants on boats with tour guides who continue to justify past actions as “for the good of all mankind.” Radiation levels are now lower than they were but when some of the original group of Bikinis returned for a short period as part of a pilot study (Niedenthal, 2001) and ate the food they attempted to grow, they became very ill because the soil still contained very high levels of radiation and other chemicals. There is little hope that Bikini Atoll can ever be inhabited again as it was in 1945, before the USA forced the inhabitants into a life of starvation, depression, and poverty with changes made that never took into consideration the Bikinis’ cultural traditions (Kiste, 1974; Niedenthal, 2001).

Who decides?

The question is, who is responsible for decisions about changes that will impact on the lives of indigenous people living in Micronesia and other global areas? Historical events briefly recounted in this paper will challenge the ethical standards of cultural anthropologists, sociologists, and political activists. The view that those most affected by the proposed changes should have been responsible for (or at least involved in) the decisions that impacted on their lives, was never even considered by the US government. I have omitted many details from the historical events described in this paper. Few changes have occurred during the past 70 years to alleviate the emotional and economic condition of the Micronesians directly affected by the decision-making of the US government. However, when sifting through the thousands of pages of documents available in government offices on Guam, one can find newly established agencies where Guamanians can file their grievances. There are certainly more Micronesian lawyers, even though, for the most part, they have been unsuccessful in representing these land cases in court. One source noted how pleas for justice, using nonviolent methods, “fell on deaf ears.” Some of the small quantity of land still managed by the original families has been divided into even smaller parcels and sold privately when the economic boom from tourism started in the 1970s and 1980s. What about the aftermath of the forced migration from Bikini? Hardly anyone talks about the plight of these people nowadays and many of their descendants continue to work on Kwajalein, living in unimaginable conditions of disease and poverty on Ebeye Island, still longing to repossess the land taken from their ancestors.

As cultural anthropologists and members of a global society, we need to respond to such examples of grave injustice, especially when witnessing them in the course of our research. We have an obligation to help those who have devoted their time to help us gather data about their culture and experiences. We should seek to raise public awareness and call for international condemnation of such action, urging immediate redress for the unfair mistreatment of these populations.

Many of us are now part of the International Commission on Indigenous Knowledge and Sustainable Development, for whom this paper was originally presented. As a member of this Commission, I consider it our personal responsibility not only to report and share our research at meetings, but to combine our voices to strongly object when we hear of stronger and more powerful cultures taking over and treating smaller, less powerful cultures as though they were invisible and do not exist. This is one way we can give back and encourage the conservation of weaker cultures by respecting their decisions regarding their current and future existence.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.