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Traveling With The Marshallese To DC For The Asian & Pacific Islander American Health Forum
APIAHF #Voices2022
An American-style conference at a hotel is by definition not conducted in “the island way.” Having spent all day with Pacific Islanders at the Asian and Pacific Islanders American Health Forum, I was therefore unsurprised that they had arranged for a gathering of islanders in the evening after the last event—a reception after the reception.
The Hawaiian host had secured one of those end-of-hallway suites that can open for events, so about 7:15 p.m. the group sat down in a very large circle and began proceedings, which meant long-form introductions.
The introductions ended about 10:45 p.m.
You might think, if you’d been in panel meetings and author lectures all day that this might feel… long. But you’d be wrong. I learned more and was transformed more by all the introductions than anything else that day.
I’m going to try to write this as authentically as possible, but I also invite all readers to keep in mind I was the one white guy in a room of Pacific Islanders, so a lot of my work both in being present and in writing this blog is to learn and unlearn simultaneously.
There appears to be a shared culture among Pacific Islanders of humility, stronger among some island communities than others. This came across as each island stood to present themselves. Additionally, there is a consistent respect for elders, so most of the time each island presented beginning with the oldest attendee at the conference.
In the room were groups from Tonga, Hawaii, Samoa, Palau, Chuuk, the Marshall Islands, Guam, and Kosrae. The majority of these islanders are part of the diaspora—they now live in places like California, Oklahoma, Arkansas, Washington D.C.—and lead organizations advocating for Pacific Islander concerns and serving their people (I’ll return to this in a bit).
The Tongans were especially from Orange County and have led multiple volunteer orgs that have served Pacific Islanders for about 20 years. They concluded their introductions with a traditional Tongan folk song. The Hawaiian’s hold a unique place among the islanders because they are also a U.S. state and have universities. They were our hosts for the evening, and I was surprised when the song they selected was the Doxology, but sung in Hawaiian.
We continued around the room, with the high energy of the Samoans, an introduction to island nations mostly new to me like Palau and Chuuk, then awkwardly I was introduced together with our Marshallese, and finally the folks from Guam, with their own unique and complicated history of connection to the Phillipines and the U.S., and the two attendees from Kosrae who taught us about their island and also a kind of call and response camp song (it is also the case that their island is the one on which the island in Moana is based).
Then we wrapped up the evening gathering in a circle for a prayer led by the eldest, which was temporarily co-opted when a group of younger attendees broke into an impromptu sing through the entirety of Lean On Me.
Why do I tell you all this? Well, for me it’s kind of an exercise in examining how island culture is both like and not like my own culture. Being somewhat overly simplistic, I could say my culture is a lot less humble, and a lot more willing to take the stage, to feel like the room is theirs. But on the other hand, I’m familiar with long group introductions and impromptu songs. I used to be a camp director, after all.
But to tell you why it matters to the Pacific Islanders that they take time to do things together in their own way, in the island way, I have to shift to the justice topics inherent to this conference, which begins with…
Data Disaggregation
One concern of Pacific Islanders is to ensure that advocacy groups are aware that the needs of their communities are not always identical to the wider needs of Asian communities. Pacific Islanders are and are not Asian. But in a lot of data analysis based on census data, they are lumped in with Asians. This results in various inequities.
So part of the origin story for the Pacific Islanders organizing as their own caucus at this health forum has to do with taking the 2010 US Census Data and creating a report that disaggregated the data for Pacific Islanders. This helped everyone see better the unique needs of the Pacific Islanders.
This is what you call data justice. Governments can’t really allocate resources correctly when they don’t have data. This is actually why sometimes governments attempt to not measure certain things (think of Trump’s attempts in the last census to reduce measures around the LGBTQIA+ community, or the constant conservative attempt to keep racial data aggregated).
So in the same way that the Pacific Islanders have struggled to disaggregate data, they’re also careful to disaggregate themselves at this forum.
Once you’ve disaggregated, then you can also define who is missing from the planning tables. Once you are counting, you can see, “Oh, we don’t have any Pacific Islanders on the board of this organization. We should change that.”
Mana
Many mentioned in the room last night they could feel the mana. There is indeed a spiritual life force permeating spaces where people feel at home, safe, loved, that they belong. Although I don’t call it mana and typically refer to this as “good energy” or Spirit, I totally identified with this sense in the group. I think I’m constitutionally made up to especially appreciate being with groups of people who are feeling mana even though the mana they experience isn’t related to my own presence or spiritual energy.
I guess you could say I like being a visitor, that I may even feel at home as a visitor. I don’t know what that says about me but there it is.
But the reality is that none of the populations of the Pacific Islands are huge. There are maybe 45,000 people on the Marshall Islands, 48,000 on Chuuk, 10,000 on the tiny single island Kosrae. Even Guam which we may think of as larger has a population of 168,000.
What this means in practice is that many of the folks present at our gathering, even if they are diaspora islanders, are still potentially related as family to others in the room, may share the same tribe, and in any event even if not directly related still identify with one another because the total population is around that of a mid-sized American city.
So Pacific Islanders feel close even if their islands are small and far from each other, and they also feel close because there is this shared spirit of peace toward each other and the world. And it’s really true if more of the world were like the islands, the human population as a whole would be much lower impact.
Truth and Reconciliation
The Marshall Islands are the only location in the Pacific (and the world) where the U.S. conducted extensive nuclear testing. Over 60 atom bombs were tests on various atolls across the Marshall Islands, which resulted in tragic levels of exposure to radiation to the Marshallese people.
Even today there are many places in the Marshall Islands where radiation levels are higher than Chernobyl.
No wonder then that the health forum for Asian and Pacific Islanders is an important connecting point for the Marshallese, because so many health outcomes in the community are inequitable. We literally contaminated their whole nation and to this day the Marshallese are living with the effects of long-term exposure to radiation.
The hope is for an official apology. The US has apologized for dropping nuclear bombs on Japan but has never apologized to the Marshallese. Additionally, they hope that part of that apology includes the full release of classified documents from the era of nuclear testing, because, as Benetick Kabua Maddison says, “There is no closure without full disclosure.”
You can hear his full recent speech to the UN here.
The first speaker at our conference, Senator Mazie K. Hirono, mentioned a famous dictum in her book talk: “If you are not at the table, you are on the menu.” This was certainly true of the Marshallese; because they did not have a seat at the US national defense strategy table, they ended up “on the menu” as the location for our nuclear testing.
The situation has been made more complex in 2022 by the reality that as a result of the compact the Marshall Islands and the U.S. signed decades ago, now tens of thousands of Marshallese live in diaspora in the United States. The compact allows Marshallese to freely travel to the United States, live and work her. But there is not a clear pathway to citizenship and Marshallese who live here under the compact have a reduced set of rights (for example, they cannot vote).
One part of the ongoing conversation for the compact renewal, which will happen in 2023, has to do with the extent to which the diaspora communities get to have input into the formation of the new compact. As it stands right now the compact is being negotiated primarily through Marshallese still on the island, and administrative representation from the U.S. government. Mostly excluded from the talks are diaspora Marshallese here living under the compact.
This is problematic because the Marshallese population in the U.S. is now larger than the population of Marshallese on the islands. They really need to be a part of the conversation. Listening to our Marshallese community in Arkansas, it seems clear that there needs to be a place at that table for Arkansas Marshallese in particular, because they are the largest Marshallese population outside of the islands and will soon surpass the islands.
But more importantly the Marshallese need to have a voice as a whole people so they can state their needs and desires in all their diversity. Because they have been so harmed historically through a lack of voice and presence at the table, it’s incumbent on all of us who are neighbors to advocate for them to gain a greater voice.
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A books footnote: I really appreciated the two book talks hosted at our conference, so I link to the books here and recommend them.
Immigration Reform: The Corpse That Will Never Die, by Charles Kamasaki
Heart of Fire: An Immigrant Daughter’s Story, by Senator Mazie K. Hirono the first the first Asian-American senator and only immigrant in the senate.
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