Anthropologists estimate that the population of the atoll could once have
been as high @s 1000. Typhoons are uncommon ét Enewetak, but not
unknown. Over its 1000-year history, occasional storms washed over the
islands and stripped them of vegetation. Many people drowned. Without
food, more died of starvation. One of the few Westerners who reached the
island during the 18th century recorded Contact with a "tribe" numbering
less than eighty.
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Enewetakese legend claims that the people were always of that atoll.
At the northwest tip of the Marshall Islands, and more than 2750 miles
west of Honolulu, they remained {isolated -~- and insulated -- from the
rest of the world. They created their own small society, with its own gods
and songs. Their culture was deeply rooted in the place where it had grown.
The Enewetakans sing
I love the way my atoll is,
There where I was bom...
' I will never stay away from it,
For that is my true home and ancestral land,
My heritage forever.
Every Enewetakese family has a special place on the atoll, inherited from
its €ncestors. Their lives were infused with this sense of place, of
continuity. And they were inextricably bound up within its ecology.
They took their food from it; they lived in delicate balance with it. The
lagoon was more than liter@lly at the center of a complex ecosystem of
which the Enewetakans were but one link.
. States Senate in 1975
Chief Johannes told the United
That land, that atoll, ts part of us and we are part
of it in a way which is difficult to describe.
/
...Enewetak atoll is the only place whichis our:..
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In 1947, the Cold War was heating up.
yet able to defend itself.
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Europe was exhausted and not
Nationalist China was on the verge of collapse.
Our monopoly on "the bomb" was soon due to run out.
Under these
conditions, it is not surprising that the United States attempted to
maintain continued superiority in nuclear weapons. But nuclear weapons