Reprinted from SPC QUARTERLY BULi
IN. April, 1958
Above: Kili Island’s two hundred acres, viewed from the south-west at 1,000 feet altitude, are ringed by unbroken reef. The village is located near
the shore at left centre. Cleared area inland is planted with taro. Right: Juda, 54-year-old head of the ranking kin group on Kili, serves as elected
magistrate (mayor). His quiet leadership and innovative genius have speeded the islanders’ adaptation to a new life on Kili.
Kili Community In Transition
In 1948, a small community of two hundred and fifty people
from the northern Marshalls was settled on theisland of Kili,
in the southern Marshall Group. This study of the resulting
social and economic changes that have occurred was
contributed by...
N 1948 the reef-ringed island of Kili
lay abandoned, its thirty years’ development as a copra plantation in the
southern Marshalls ended by the mis-
fortune of war, its contract labour popu. lation returned to island homes,its groves
of carefully-spaced trees urgently requiring care. Now,ten years later, Kili’s
LEONARD MASON*
resources support a community of 250
Marshallese who combine copra export
and importation of rice, flour, sugar, and
tinned meats with the more direct use of
abundant coconut reserves, newly-planted
stocks of pandanus, banana, taro, and
breadfruit, and a limited sea-food supply.
The present population derives trom
Bikini expatriates who in 1946 were
evacuated from that northern Marshalls
atoll to make way for nuclear weapons
testing by United States agencies. When,
after two unfortunate years of residence
on inadequate Rongerik Atoll, these displaced
people
were
permanently
re-
settled on Kili Island, they brought with
them a way of living that was well
adapted to the drier, less productive
habitat of their Bikini origin.
Plant food on the northern atoll had
been limited to coconut, arrowroot, and
pandanus,
supplemented by negligible
husbandry of pigs and poultry and by
trapping of wild birds. The islanders had
avoided extreme want only by turning to
the more abundant resources of Bikini’s
reef
and
lagoon.
This
subsistence
economy, only slightly modified by visits
* Professor of Anthropology, University of
Hawaii.
from itinerant traders, was tied to a
system of land tenure in which matri-
lineage membership determined each per-
son’s rights in use and_ inheritance.
Each matrilineage was composed of persons closely related through the female
line. Male heads of these ranked kin
groups acted in concert to provide the
socio-political
leadership
needed
stable community organization.
for
Under
American administration after 1944 this
leadership was formalized as a council
with an elected magistrate as its head.
The isolated island of Kili (thirty
miles of open water separate it from
the nearest atoll, Jaluit) lacks the finny
treasure of Bikini’s lagoon. Kili’s 200
acres of land equal less than one-sixth
the area of Bikini’s twenty-five islets.
Such shortcomings have been surmounted
to some degree by the community’s experiments with the wider variety of food
plants that commonly thrive in the raindrenched and fertile soils of the southern
Marshalls.
States
In this respect the United
Trust Territory
Administration
has rendered aid through its Kili De-
velopment Project, initiated in 1953 with
project manager James Milne, a native
of Ebon Atoll, and continued in 1955 by
his successor Konto Sandbergen of Jaluit
Atoll, Both men had been prepared for
their assignment by special training at
the University of Hawaii.
Eight years of trial and error have led
ex-Bikinians and their Kili-born descendants to a generally successful adaptation
to the land. Remarkable changes have
occurred in economic and family organization as well as in technology. The
individual is emerging more prominently
in community affairs though he continues to be identified primarily with his
kin group.
matrilineal
Some features of the old
organization
seem
to
be
yielding to structural and functional
traits more reminiscent of the Euroamerican family system.
Land Division
Kili’s land and trees are now owned
and managed by some twenty of these
kin-groups-in-transition. Allocation of
real property was conceived and executed
in 1954 by the community’s own leader.