satisfactory
islanders.
relationship
with
other
For example, the Kili Church, which
is actively supported by the entire resi-
dent community, participates in the Asso-
ciation of Marshall Islands Churches, an
indigenous society that carries on the
work initiated a century ago by Protestant
missionaries from Boston and Honolulu.
Meetings of the Marshall Islands Congress on Majuro are attended each year
by the Kili magistrate and an associate,
where they join with other delegations in
debate on policy recommendations to the
Trust Territory Administration.
Advanced schools on Majuro and
Jaluit receive annually certain youth of
Kili who are spiritually and financially
aided by Kili’s Church and Council.
Natives of Jaluit report that the Kilians
who have been working on the colony
site on that atoll are fitting well into the
local population. especially in church
activities.
As noted earlier, many residents of the
island regard their kinsmen on other
islands as part of the Kili community.
Such absentee members constitute another link with Marshallese society;
they guarantee some security to Kilians
visiting away from home, and introduce
new ideas and practices to the parent
community through established kin ties.
Kilians of today, both councillors and
laymen, have broken through the shell in
which they were living, and are groping
tentatively and hesitantly for a wider
outlook and for richer experiences. If
they can learn to think of themselves as
Marshallese, not as ex-Bikinians, they
should find it easier to dispel some of
their present anxieties and to seek more
objectively the solutions to those problems which remain from a decade of
having to adapt a traditional wayoflife
to a strange physical and social environment.
Nove: Field research during the summer of
1957 on Kili Island, on which this progress
report is based, was undertaken by the writer
while on leave from the University of Hawaii
as a Senior Post-doctoral Fellow of the
National Science Foundation and with the aid
of a grant
Program.
from
the
Tri-Institutional
Pacific