Mutual Aid, Marshallese and “Mission”
I’ll be honest. When we first moved to Northwest Arkansas, a fact of the place that thrilled me was the large population of Marshallese islanders who had resettled to the area. I looked forward to getting to know these neighbors to learn their story.
However, there is a lot of cultural distance between the Marshallese community and someone like myself. Although I can’t and shouldn’t blame cultural distance for the pace of slow engagement I’ve had with the Marshallese community over the past decade (the slowness is as much my own malingering and distraction as anything), it’s also true that cross-cultural overtures are also ripe for potential abuse.
I remember back when I served as a missionary in Slovakia, a missionary who had served for decades in Namibia said, “Only missionaries who have been in a country for less than nine months or over thirty years really know the place.” Think about it a bit, and you’ll see the painful dark humor of that statement.
I guess what I’m trying to say here: although I had a real curiosity about the Marshallese, I felt it was inappropriate to simply seek out connections with the community simply to meet my own needs.
Over the past decade living in NWA, increasingly I’ve had the chance to partner with Marshallese organizations, and individual Marshallese leaders, on a variety of projects. Our interests frequently align around immigrant rights issues, among others.
But the Marshallese are immigrants with a difference. Because we have a Compact of Free Association with the Marshall Islands, they are free to travel to the United States without a passport or visa. This compact was established because of the tremendous harm our nation perpetrated on them when we tested nuclear bombs on their atolls. Between 1945 and 1958 67 nuclear tests were conducted on Bikini island. The results are tragically predictable: radiation and other harmful impacts to the islands and the peoples. (see, for example, Walter Pincus’s recent Blown to Hell: America’s Deadly Betrayal of the Marshall Islanders, https://amzn.to/3FMXrt7)
So although the Marshallese social justice needs intersect with other immigrant communities (they are almost always overlooked by entities providing state and federal resources, and thus forms and other documents are consistently in English, often Spanish, but almost never Marshallese, as just one example), they also have advocacy needs quite different from some immigrants.
To name just two: the compact allows free travel here, but no voting rights. So they pay taxes but have no vote. And although they pay taxes and social security, they do not receive social security benefits upon retirement (think about that…).
Ever since I’ve moved here, I could tell that Marshallese culture was quite different from my own culture, and really quite different from many other immigrant cultures. This makes sense. A small group of people living on a small set of islands would develop a certain kind of cohesiveness and way of being together all their own.
But in spite of seeing the difference, I’ve been very slow to really fathom what some of the differences might mean. And again, how I might be good neighbor, pastor, and advocate.
So along comes Albious Latior. Albious and worked together on a variety of projects prior to our present Ozark Atolls ministry. He was for a time on the staff at the Worker Justice center, and I volunteered with them. Then later, during the Trump administration, we were on the board of the NWA Sanctuary Network together.
Albious plays a specific role in our community: he’s a person of peace between the cultures. He speaks English and Marshallese, and he’s good at code-switching between the dominant Arkansas culture and his own Marshallese community.
From him I’ve learned so many things, ways of reframing how I’d perceived our Marshallese neighbors.
Let me give you a couple of examples. First, he taught me that time is different with them. Something starts based not on the clock, but when “the most important person” arrives.
Like just last night, when we hosted the Ozark Atolls launch party… although he told me the event would start at 7:30 p.m., I code-switched a little and told myself it would start at 8:15. And then it actually started a little after 9 p.m.
Now, here’s what I have begun to notice when I am at these events waiting: many of the Marshallese arrive near the actual start time, but show absolutely no anxiety about the fact the event may not start for an hour or more. They sit and wait calmly.
Meanwhile, I am constitutionally incapable of sitting and waiting calmly for that long. And you might ask yourself, “Who’s better off?”
Another example. I’ve been trained for a couple of decades in the post-colonial mindset. I’m skeptical of the motives of the missionary organizations that traveled to the Pacific to convert the people there to Christianity.
I still believe that Christianity was wedded to a harmful colonialism that has caused immeasurable harm across the planet.
However, the Marshallese themselves celebrate the arrival of the missionaries on their island with unrestrained zeal. It’s a national holiday, Gospel Day. The first Friday of December, similar to our Thanksgiving.
So who am I to steal their joy by outlining the ways in which Western mission lacked humility and failed to practice accompaniment. They are joyous about Christ and the gospel.
This is an important thing to know about the Marshallese: they are incredibly devoted people. Come Sunday their churches are packed… and not just Sundays. They go on missionary visits to each other across the country. Often they put church life even ahead of things like work and sleep. It’s a high priority.
So as a Lutheran pastor hoping to connect with the Marshallese, you might ask once again: then what is the touch point? They don’t need to join my church. They have vital, thriving churches.
Well, here’s what I’ve discovered. What the Marshallese need are allies and friends. Last year, during the height of the first wave of the Covid pandemic, Albious organized a group of singers to visit the elders in the Marshallese community. I went to many of the houses with them. One older gentleman kept staring at me as we visited. He’d lived here for years, and it was the first time a white man had come to his home.
That’s one part of the mutual relationship we can build. The other is advocacy, and ally-ship. We have not treated our Marshallese neighbors well. We caused immeasurable harm with our nuclear tests, and now with climate change their islands are literally being swallowed up by rising sea levels.
In the meantime, this year our compact with them is up for renewal, and they really need and deserve a better deal than the one they first got. They will be more likely to get a better deal if their neighbors who vote and have voice speak up on their behalf, reach out and support them.
Going back to the Ozark Atolls launch party, the other thing churches can do to be neighborly is simply to share space. Many of the Marshallese churches, as vital and active as they are, are currently tucked into rental facilities in various places across Springdale. They simply haven’t had the opportunity to build the church infrastructure that comes with the financial support of big donors who have built up large estates from which they can make donations.
But to really commit to mutual aid, true mutuality, is a delicate dance that doesn’t put one community in the position of patron and the other as client. Perhaps there will be transitional phases where that is the shape of the relationship, but the direction should be toward increasing mutuality.
Albious and I attempt to practice this. We use our fundraising platform to assist him. But on the other hand he helped more people complete rental assistance applications than anyone I know, and so contributed greatly to the ministry of GSLC.
He uses our kitchen. But he also repeatedly fills our Little Free Pantry.
We help create contexts where more Marshallese register to vote, get the vaccine, learn entrepreneurship, and the like.
But meanwhile we learn how to think differently about time, and if we show up, we eat Marshallese potlucks that put most Midwestern potlucks to shame.
We still have our growing edges. I believe the Marshallese churches in general are still only somewhat ready to have a conversation about LGBTQ inclusion. Meanwhile, our white church isn’t generally very comfortable worshiping in other languages or really creating space that feels like “home” for non-white communities.
So in this sense we are missionaries to each other. Mission not as “I have something to give you that will save you” but “we mutual share with one another in a way similar to the way the members of the Trinity share in each other’s life.”