4083
Draft copy of paper presented at 10th Pacific Science Congress,
Honolulu, Hawaii, August 25, 1961.
except with author's permission.
Not to be reproduced or quoted
The content will be included
eventually in a book on the Kili situation, date of publication as
yet uncertain.
CHANGING FAMILY ORGANIZATION AMONG EX~-BIKINI MARSHALLESE
a
Leonard Mason
Professor of Anthropology
University of Hawaii, Honolulu
In the summer of 1957, when I went to Kili Island, in the
Marshalls group of Micronesia, I had intended to undertake a study
of how certain attitudes become established among children and youths
with respect to the advantages and disadvantages of life on the atoll
of Bikini.
In 1946, just over a decade earlier, the grandparents,
parents, and older siblings of this younger generation had been
evacuated as a community from Bikini Atoll in order that the United
States government might use the lagoon and islands as a site for
testing nuclear weapons.
The community had previously been quite
isSlated from the rest of the Marshalls, and some 200 residents
formed a remarkably inbred and culturally conservative group regarded,
by other Marshallese as an inferior and somewhat naive people.
In the early months of 1948, two years after their resettlement on Rongerik, another atoll in the relatively dry northern
Marshalls, I spent a week or more on Rongerik Atoll at the request
of the Government to determine the condition of their adjustment to
the new environment.
The atoll's resources had proved inadequate
for permanent settlement on a
subsistence basis, and the community
hed undergone a frightening experience during which the local leaders
had attempted a number of innovations to meet the crisis. The entire
population was removed as soon as possible and by the end of 1948,
after a waiting period on Kwajalein Island, they were settled on
the single island of Kili in the southern Marshalls. Here they
continue to live at the present time.
Adjustment to the natural
conditions on Kili has not been easy, but this is for quite dirferent reasons than prevailed on Rongerik. This aspect of their
resettlement has been described elsewhere.
In 1949, about one year after the group's arrival on Kili,
I was able to spend another brief period with them, enough to gather
certain demographic and other information for comparison with that
gained carlier on Rongerik.
In the course of this field work I
remarked significant differences among individuals and family groups
as to their attitudes toward Kili and their remembrance of Bikini.
Some hated the new island, for good reasons, and harked back
comstantly to Bikini as the place to which they wished to return-this was impossible because of the consequences of atomic weapons
tests.
Others accepted the fact of their resettlement and faced
the future on Kili with an optimistic and constructive view. At
that time I wondered what would be the attitudes of individuals born
on Kili after 1948 who would never have the chance to know at firsthand what the Bikini of their elders had been, or might be, like.