Marshall Islands
A vast scatter of low coral atolls in the central Pacific, home to master ocean navigators, ruled by chiefs and matrilineal clans, marked forever by nuclear testing, and bound by custom, faith, and the sea. The complete guide.
The Marshall Islands is a tiny island nation spread across an enormous expanse of the central Pacific Ocean, made up of twenty-nine low coral atolls and a few small islands arranged in two long chains, home to only about forty thousand people. To understand it, begin with the land and the sea, for these are among the lowest islands on earth, mere ribbons of coral barely above the ocean, and life is bound utterly to the water; with the old order of chiefs and matrilineal clans that still shapes society and the holding of land; with the astonishing tradition of ocean navigation, the stick charts and the voyaging canoe; with the deep wound of the nuclear testing the islands suffered; with the body of custom the Marshallese call manit; with the Christian faith that fills island life; and with the close family and the rising sea that shadows the nation's future. From these flow the customs that follow. This guide walks through each in turn.
The atolls and the sea
The Marshall Islands is one of the most remarkable countries on earth in its very shape, a tiny scatter of land across a vast reach of sea. It is made up of twenty-nine coral atolls and a handful of small islands, more than a thousand tiny islets in all, arranged in two long parallel chains running northwest to southeast across the central Pacific: the Ralik, or Sunset, chain to the west, and the Ratak, or Sunrise, chain to the east. The total land is minute, barely a couple of hundred square kilometres, yet it is spread across nearly two million square kilometres of ocean, so that the nation is almost all sea, with only the thinnest ribbons of land.
The land itself is exceedingly low and fragile. These are coral atolls, rings of reef and sand enclosing shallow lagoons, rising on average only about two metres above the sea, with no hills, no rivers, and only a thin lens of fresh water beneath the sand. About forty thousand people live there, the great majority gathered on the crowded capital atoll of Majuro and on Ebeye, with smaller communities scattered across the outer atolls. Life is lived on a knife-edge of land between the lagoon and the open ocean, and the sea is not a backdrop but the very substance of existence.
From this geography flows everything in Marshallese life. The sea gives food, travel, and livelihood; the scarcity of land makes it precious beyond measure and binds it tightly to family and clan; and the lowness of the islands shapes both the ancient culture and the modern peril of the rising ocean. A few deep forces order Marshallese life: the old rule of chiefs and matrilineal clans; the great tradition of ocean navigation; the lasting wound of nuclear testing; the body of custom called manit; and the Christian faith. The sections that follow trace these and then walk through the customs of daily life.
Chiefs and clans
Marshallese society has always been ordered by rank and by clan, and this old structure still shapes life deeply even in the modern age. Traditionally the people are divided into ranked classes: the iroij, the high chiefs, who hold ultimate authority over the land and its people; the alap, the heads of the lineages and clans, who manage the day-to-day affairs of the land and the kin group; and the dri jerbal, the workers and commoners who labour on the land. Rank orders much of social life, and even today a great deal of a person's standing comes from kinship and chiefly relation as much as from personal achievement.
Beneath the chiefs runs the deep structure of the clans, the jowi, and Marshallese society is matrilineal, with clan membership, land rights, and inheritance passing through the mother's line. This gives women a profound, if often behind-the-scenes, power, for though men are the public chiefs and speakers, it is through women that the clans and the land descend, and women hold great influence in the decisions of family and clan. Land, so scarce and so precious on the atolls, is held within these matrilineal kin groups and overseen by the chiefs, and the bonds of clan and lineage are the bedrock of identity and belonging.
The chiefs still wield real authority, especially over land, and the old order coexists with the modern democratic state, which even keeps a council of high chiefs alongside its elected parliament and a special court for matters of custom and traditional rights. Respect for rank runs through everyday conduct: one does not raise oneself above one's seniors, one defers to those of higher standing, and the high-ranked speak on behalf of others. To understand the Marshall Islands is to understand this enduring order of chiefs, clans, and matrilineal kinship, in which a person's place is woven from rank, lineage, and the precious land that descends through the mother's line.
The navigators
Of all the achievements of Marshallese culture, none is more extraordinary than the mastery of the open ocean, for the Marshallese were among the greatest navigators the world has ever known, able to voyage between tiny atolls across vast stretches of empty sea without any instrument at all. Their ancestors settled this scatter of distant islands by sailing canoe, and over the centuries they developed a science of wave-piloting of astonishing subtlety, reading the swells of the ocean, the way they bend and cross and rebound from distant land, to find their way. A skilled navigator could lie in the hull of the canoe and feel, through the motion of the boat against the swells, the presence of an island still far below the horizon.
This knowledge found its most famous expression in the stick charts, the navigation maps unique to the Marshall Islands, made not of paper but of the midribs of palm leaves lashed together, with small shells to mark the islands. The curved and straight sticks traced the patterns of the ocean swells and currents and the way they were disturbed by the atolls, and the charts came in kinds: some, the mattang, to teach the beginner the principles of the waves; others, like the rebbelib and the meddo, to show the islands of a chain or a region. These were not carried on the voyage but studied and memorised on shore, tools for training the navigator's mind and body to read the living sea itself.
Bound up with the navigation is the great art of the sailing canoe, the wa, the swift outrigger built by Marshallese craftsmen and famous across the Pacific for its speed and ingenious design, and the fine weaving of the women, the mats, baskets, and fans of pandanus and coconut fibre prized throughout the region. Much of the old voyaging knowledge faded as the modern world arrived, but it is held in deep honour as the heart of Marshallese identity, and there is a real and growing revival of canoe-building, sailing, and the navigator's art, taught now even to the young. The stick chart has become a national emblem, and to understand the Marshall Islands is to understand a people who turned the empty ocean into a known and navigable world.
The nuclear wound
No account of the Marshall Islands can pass over the deepest wound in its modern history, for these tiny atolls were the site of one of the most devastating episodes of the nuclear age. After the Second World War, when the islands came under the administration of the United States, the Americans chose the remote atolls of Bikini and Enewetak as a testing ground for nuclear weapons, and between the mid-nineteen-forties and the late nineteen-fifties they detonated dozens of nuclear and thermonuclear devices there, including the most powerful weapon the United States ever exploded, a single blast many times the force of the bomb that destroyed Hiroshima.
The cost to the Marshallese was terrible and lasting. Whole communities were moved from their home atolls, told they could one day return, and many never could, for their islands remain contaminated to this day; the people of Bikini and Enewetak live still in exile, on other atolls or in the United States. Radioactive fallout, most infamously from the great blast of nineteen fifty-four, spread across inhabited islands, sickening people who had not been moved, and the legacy of cancer, of poisoned land, of displacement, and of broken trust has shadowed the nation ever since, a profound injustice the Marshallese have never forgotten.
This history has shaped the modern nation and its place in the world. The struggle over the harm done, over compensation, health care, and the cleaning of the land, runs through Marshallese politics and the country's relationship with the United States to this day, and the testing era is preserved in national memory and museum as a defining wound. Out of that suffering the Marshall Islands has become a powerful moral voice in the world, first against nuclear weapons and now against the rising seas that threaten the islands anew, a small nation that has twice faced an existential danger from forces beyond its shores. To understand the Marshall Islands is to understand the depth of this nuclear wound and the dignity with which its people carry it.
Manit and Marshallese manners
The Marshallese have a word for the whole body of their custom and traditional way of life: manit, the inherited culture, manners, and values that bind the community and order proper conduct. At the heart of manit lie the deep Marshallese values of respect, generosity, and the placing of the family and community before the self, along with the careful observance of rank and the courtesies owed to chiefs, elders, and those of higher standing. To live well is to live by manit, with humility, with respect for one's seniors, and with generosity toward kin and community.
Marshallese manners flow from these values. People are warm, hospitable, and generous, but also reserved and mindful of rank and propriety; one is modest and does not push oneself forward, one defers to elders and chiefs, and one is careful to give and to share, for generosity is a deep virtue and the sharing of food and resources a bond of community. Cooperation and mutual support, the spirit of standing together as kin, run through island life, and the obligations of family and clan are taken with great seriousness. Oratory is prized, and elaborate speeches mark the great public occasions, the first-birthday feasts and the community gatherings.
For a visitor, the keys are respect, modesty, and an openness to share. Honour the elders and those of standing; be modest and unassuming rather than loud or forward; accept hospitality graciously and reciprocate with generosity; dress and behave modestly, especially given the strong Christian sensibility of the islands; and be patient and gentle in the relaxed island way. A respectful, humble, generous manner is warmly met, for the Marshallese are a hospitable people, and to be welcomed into a Marshallese community, offered food and a place, is to feel the warmth of manit, the custom of generosity and respect that holds island life together.
Food of the atoll
The food of the Marshall Islands is the food of the coral atoll, drawn from the sea and from the few crops the thin island soil will bear. The sea is the great larder, giving fish and seafood in abundance as the everyday heart of the diet, caught from canoe and reef with the skills of a seafaring people. From the land come the staples that the atoll can grow: the breadfruit, the coconut in all its forms, the pandanus, taro, and the arrowroot dug by the women, along with bananas and the other fruits of the tropics, simply prepared and shared in the communal way.
The work of food has long followed the division of the sexes that runs through atoll life: the men to the sea and the sky, fishing, building canoes, gathering drinking coconuts and catching birds, and the women to the land and the village, digging arrowroot, gathering pandanus, weaving, and preparing the food. In modern times, and especially on the crowded capital atolls, imported foods, rice, flour, tinned goods, and the fare of the wider world, have become a large part of the everyday diet, a change that, as across the Pacific, has brought rising health problems, while the traditional foods of fish, breadfruit, and coconut remain central to island life and to celebration.
Food is bound up with family, community, and ceremony, and the sharing of it is a deep expression of manit and of social ties. At the great communal feasts, the church occasions, the first-birthday celebrations, the jubilees that mark the completion of a church or a community work, food is prepared and shared in abundance, and to contribute generously is to affirm one's place in the community. A guest is welcomed warmly and offered food as a matter of course, for hospitality and generosity are central virtues. To share a meal in the Marshall Islands, the fresh fish and the breadfruit and the coconut, is to be received into the warmth and the deep communal life of the atolls.
Faith and festival
The Marshall Islands is a deeply Christian country, and the faith fills the whole of island life. Christianity came with American Protestant missionaries from the middle of the nineteenth century, followed by Catholics and, in more recent times, a wide range of other churches, and it took the deepest root, so that today nearly the whole population is Christian, the majority Protestant. The church stands at the centre of community life, attendance is high, congregations are devoted, and the Christian faith is woven into the values, the calendar, and the daily conduct of the Marshallese, blended in the island way with the older custom of manit.
The faith shapes the rhythm of the year, and nowhere more gloriously than at Christmas, called Kurijmoj, which is by far the greatest celebration of the Marshallese year. Far more than a single day, it is a season of weeks of preparation, of communities dividing into groups that compose and rehearse songs and dances to perform in friendly, joyous competition in the church, building to a great climax of singing, dancing, feasting, and gift-giving. It is the high point of communal and religious life, a magnificent fusion of Christian devotion and Marshallese custom, song, and community, found nowhere else in quite this form.
Other festivals mark the national and historical calendar. There is the great commemoration that recalls the end of the war and the time of liberation, kept with parades, traditional dance, canoe races, and feasting; there is the day set aside to honour Marshallese culture itself, with displays of the old dances, songs, weaving, canoe-building, and navigation; and there are the jubilees and the communal celebrations of island and church life. Through the festivals run the rich Marshallese traditions of song, dance, and oratory, and the deep bonds of faith and community. A visitor who shares in a Marshallese celebration, above all the great season of Kurijmoj, sees the island culture and the island faith at their most joyful and most alive.
Family and community
Family and clan lie at the very foundation of Marshallese life, the deepest source of identity, belonging, and support. The extended family and the matrilineal clan, reaching far beyond the single household, bind each person into a wide web of kin, with rights and duties, land and belonging, all flowing through these ties, and through the mother's line above all. A Marshallese is, before anything else, a member of a family and a clan, and the obligations of kinship, the sharing, the support, the showing up for one another at every occasion of life, are taken with deep seriousness as the heart of manit.
Community runs strong on the atolls, where life is lived close together on the narrow land and bound by the dense ties of kin, chief, and church. Life centres on the family, the clan, the village, and the congregation, and the values of cooperation, generosity, respect for elders and rank, and mutual support hold it all together. The great occasions of life, the births and the lavish first-birthday feasts, the weddings, the funerals, the church jubilees, the season of Kurijmoj, draw the community together in song, feasting, and ceremony, renewing the bonds of family and clan that are the strength of island society.
Modern life has brought great change and real strain. Many Marshallese have moved to the crowded capital atolls or away to the United States, where large communities now live, seeking work, education, and health care, and the country struggles with the legacy of nuclear testing, with crowding and poverty on the urban atolls, with health problems from the changed diet, and with deep dependence on outside aid. Yet through the changes the core holds: the family and the clan, the respect for elders and chiefs, the Christian faith, the love of song and the sea, and the body of custom called manit. To understand the Marshall Islands is to see, beneath the modern strains, a people bound together by kinship, custom, faith, and the ocean that has shaped them for a thousand years.
The nation today
The Marshall Islands today is a small, independent island republic of about forty thousand people, a vast scatter of low coral atolls in the central Pacific, with its capital and largest settlement on the atoll of Majuro. It is a democratic republic with an elected parliament, the Nitijela, which chooses the president, and it keeps alongside it a council of high chiefs and a court of traditional rights, so that the old order of iroij and clan still has its place beside the modern state. It is bound to the United States by a Compact of Free Association, under which America provides large financial aid and takes charge of defence, keeping a military base on Kwajalein atoll, while Marshallese may live and work freely in the United States.
The nation lives by a mix of subsistence fishing and farming on the outer atolls and a modern cash economy on the urban ones, sustained heavily by American aid, by the labour and remittances of the many Marshallese abroad, and by a few distinctive ventures, including one of the largest ship registries in the world, which flies the Marshallese flag over a great fleet of foreign vessels. It is a poor and dependent country facing hard challenges: the unfinished legacy of nuclear testing, crowding and limited resources, health and social strains, and above all the grave and growing threat of the rising sea to its low atolls, which has made it a leading voice in the world for action on the changing climate.
Through its challenges, the Marshall Islands holds firmly to the identity that defines it. The chiefs and matrilineal clans still order society; the great navigation tradition, the stick chart and the canoe, is honoured and revived; the memory of the nuclear wound is carried with dignity; the Christian faith fills island life, crowned each year by the season of Kurijmoj; and the custom called manit, with its deep bonds of family, generosity, and the sea, endures. To know the Marshall Islands is to meet a small, resilient ocean nation, master navigators of the wide Pacific, who have survived a terrible history and now stand, on their thin ribbons of coral, as a voice for all the low islands of a warming world.