Carving the Archipelago into a Canoe

The first thing Richard did after sitting down was check his watch. He took off his black baseball cap, put it back on, and adjusted its faded brim. A white anchor was stitched on its center, beneath it in small typeface the word “Marina.” When I asked whether the design meant anything to him, he shook his head. Nothing special.

“Sorry, I only have forty minutes,” he said. Our interview had been fitted between his work shifts, and he had arrived in a hurry, a dusting of the morning’s job still on his jacket. He was thirty-seven and stocky, with a thick beard climbing almost to his sideburns. He wore a dark green hoodie and gray shorts despite the early-spring cold, hovering around ten degrees Celsius. Yet the hurry left his voice once he began talking about outrigger canoes.

I began by asking whether he considered the United States or the Marshall Islands his home. He lifted his head and looked toward the gray sky beyond the window.

“The Marshall Islands,” he answered immediately. “One day I’ll go back.”

The country he meant holds 181 square kilometers of habitable land, scattered across more than two million square kilometers of ocean. Sixteen years had passed since he left. By the end of our conversation, Richard would give “one day” a tentative date: in ten years, perhaps, when his youngest finished school. Everything between that future return and the life he had built in America explained why going home remained both certain and continually postponed.¹

“It’s where I’m from, where I was born and grew up. I won’t ever forget where I’m from,” Richard said, slowly, as though he was weighing each word on his tongue. He had left at twenty-one, but he still spoke of home in the present tense.

I asked him to write down the name of his home atoll. He wrote “Ailinglaplap,” then translated it for me as “the greatest atoll.” He had grown up with his parents and siblings on one of its outer islands. He remembered coconut palms bending in the trade winds, lagoon water so clear you could see the giant clams on the seabed, and meals drawn from the land and the lagoon—breadfruit, coconuts, fresh-caught fish.

After completing primary school, Richard moved to Majuro, the capital of the Marshall Islands, to continue his education. There, he discovered how far behind he had fallen. “I was like kindergarten level compared to them,” he said.

The shortage of teachers and materials on his island meant that many teenagers left school to earn a living. Richard understood the extent of that educational divide only when he entered a classroom in Majuro. Years later, he learned that the country now has laws mandating basic education for children. Enforcement remains uneven on the outer islands, where shortages of teachers and materials continue to limit what schools can provide.²

Upon graduating from high school, U.S. military recruiters visited his campus. Several of his friends enlisted, and Richard came to regard their subsequent lives as more financially secure than his own. He had considered joining them but let the opportunity pass.

“I was gonna go, but I didn’t,” he said. “I was dumb when I was young. I regret it.”

Then his mother passed away. “Then I moved from the outer island to Majuro to make a better life for my younger siblings.” Majuro had what the outer islands did not—a port, shops, secondary schools, a college, a hospital. He could not leave his siblings on an atoll without a middle school. Although life in the capital was not easy, he managed to find work and could afford to keep his siblings in school. During those years, he also met the woman who would later become his wife.

His departure from Majuro was far less deliberate. In 2010, his older brother called him from Texas. He lived about an hour from AT&T Stadium, home of the Dallas Cowboys; Richard loved football—“rugby,” he called it—and had always dreamed of watching a game in person.

The invitation was half a joke: “Hey, you wanna move? I live one hour from the stadium.”

“I said, ‘Alright, I’ll come. I’ve never been to a stadium.’”

Under the Compact of Free Association, Marshallese citizens can live and work in the United States without obtaining an immigrant visa. What began as an invitation to see a football game could therefore become a move across the Pacific. Richard left Majuro for Texas.³

Even now, the outcome made him laugh. He had crossed half the globe for a single game—and in six months in Texas, he never once set foot inside the stadium. “I didn’t like it,” he said. There was no sea in Texas, no salt in the air. Only highways, and fish fillets in plastic packages in the supermarket coolers.

So, he left again, this time to Phoenix, Arizona—a desert oasis. There, he found a larger Marshallese community and steadier work. He married, had children, and began establishing a life in the United States. Nevertheless, he continued to imagine returning to the Marshall Islands. In 2017, he bought a ticket to Majuro, intending to move home permanently.

Fate took a turn at that juncture. That summer, stopping over in Seattle to see friends, he walked down to the waterfront one evening and looked out at Puget Sound. Pacific waters—the same ocean he had known all his life. Colder here, under a grayer sky, but the salt smell and the slap of waves against the pier were the same.

“I saw the water and weather in Washington in summer, and I decided to stay here for a while,” he said.

“For a while” stretched into nearly ten years. He canceled his ticket, found work in Seattle, and brought his wife and children up from Arizona.

He now lives with his wife and four children, while his seventy-four-year-old father and stepmother live nearby. Other relatives—including uncles and cousins—remain in the Marshall Islands.

“The life we have right now here is better than in the islands,” Richard said. “Even though we pay rent, we still get good doctors, good school for my kids. The hospital is good, work is good.”

Staying, he made clear, was for his family. As for himself, he spread his hands. “I was gonna go back to my home in 2017, but I moved here, and after a year I thought, ‘Still Pacific Ocean? I still can stay here.’”

Unlike in Texas and Arizona, Richard has seldom participated in the local Marshallese community in Seattle. “I don’t really interact with Marshallese communities here,” he said. “It’s just me, my family, my work, and the water.”

Each time he said “water,” it came out softer than the words around it.

I asked which Marshallese practices he still carried into his daily life.

“Everything is water—being in the water and respect. That’s the biggest one.”

Being in the water, for Richard, does not mean swimming or surfing. It means what it has meant to Marshallese for generations—traveling, fishing, learning from one another on the sea. And at the center of all of it is a vessel.

“In the water back home, we got a canoe, an outrigger canoe. Everything on the canoe is our culture, everything on it—everything is our country.”

The outrigger canoe is the oldest form of transport in the Marshall Islands and the most tangible symbol of its maritime culture. For generations, outrigger canoes connected the scattered islands of the Marshallese archipelago. They carried people between atolls to fish, trade, visit relatives, and exchange knowledge. Marshallese navigators learned to locate islands beyond the horizon by reading stars, currents, and the ways ocean swells changed as they encountered distant land. Stick charts modeled these relationships between waves and islands, helping navigators study patterns they would later recognize at sea.⁴

The canoe brought several kinds of knowledge together. Traditionally, its hull was carved from breadfruit wood, its sail woven from pandanus leaves, and its lashings twisted from coconut fiber. Building one required knowledge of the plants growing on the islands as well as the balance, flexibility, and strength necessary for surviving open water. Sailing one required a different knowledge: how to read winds, waves, reefs, and stars. Richard’s repetition—“everything on it”—suggested that the canoe mattered not as an isolated artifact but as a vessel for the relationships that had sustained life across the islands.⁵

Richard does not claim to be a master of that art. But when he said, “I’m planning to build one,” he said it with such certainty that the canoe seemed already to be resting in his backyard. He was not going to leave the canoe to museums and photographs.

Richard already spends as much time near the water as his life permits. “I am always on the water, even in the winter,” he said. “I go out every time when I have the chance.”

Seattle winters are cold and sodden, and the Sound is colder still—dark water, more often than not under rain. Despite bearing little resemblance to the warm lagoons of Ailinglaplap, it is the same Pacific. His eyes lit up when he said “every time.”

When I asked who had taught him what he knew about the ocean and canoes, he simply replied, “My community.”

His answer described knowledge acquired collectively: young and old working side by side on the water, one generation showing the next how to shape a hull and navigate by swell and star. These practices belonged to the community rather than to any single person. In the Marshall Islands, organizations such as Waan Aelõñ in Majel continue that transmission by teaching canoe construction, sailing, and navigation to younger generations. Their work helps preserve skills that changing technologies and patterns of migration have made more difficult to pass down through ordinary communal life.⁶

In the United States, that transmission is harder to sustain. Richard’s children are not growing up amid the communal life of Ailinglaplap, where they could learn from elders and spend time on the water. Building the canoe would allow Richard to show them some of what his community taught him.

When I asked how Marshallese culture could be passed to younger generations in the United States, Richard located the first responsibility inside the home.

“It’s gotta start with the parent, not the community,” he said. “You gotta start with the parent, then community, and then go out.”

His sequence reflected the rhythms of life in diaspora: parents at work, children in American schools, and limited hours for church or community gatherings. Home provided the most consistent setting, and Richard drew its clearest boundary around language. “I speak Marshallese at home with my kids,” he said. “I tell them the only place they don’t speak Marshallese is at school. My home, it’s gotta be Marshallese only.”

Food provides another connection. “Food is still the same—breadfruit and rice,” Richard said. “It’s not hard to find here.” Frozen breadfruit, taro, coconut rice—they can be found or substituted in Pacific Islander grocery stores in Seattle. His family continues to prepare dishes such as rice banke, made with pumpkin, coconut milk, and rice, and chukuchuk, rice balls mixed with coconut and sugar.

Richard worried that young Marshallese in the United States “might forget where they came from.” He placed his hope in their continued closeness to the community: “Everybody stays down with the community and learns more about it.”

For the Marshallese diaspora, community is sustained largely through two institutions: scattered associations and churches. Churches are among the few places islanders in the United States regularly gather; one of Richard’s cousins attends every week. Since moving to Seattle, Richard himself has rarely attended. In Texas and Arizona, he had lived inside the community’s rhythm. Here, he has stepped back; his wife and children attend church and gatherings, while he has settled into the life he named at the start: “just me, my family, my work, and the water.”

Richard’s fear that young Marshallese might forget where they came from extended to history. During his childhood in the Marshall Islands, nuclear testing occupied no place in his school lessons.

When I asked what he had learned about the tests in school, his reply was immediate. “No, not written, not taught in schools.”

He encountered that history later in life. “I read about it in books, watched it on the news, articles and Facebook,” he said. Growing up on the outer islands, Richard had known little about what his country had experienced. Then he found a book that placed familiar island names beside unfamiliar technical terms. News reports gave those terms images; articles and Facebook posts added photographs, testimony, and explanation.

Piece by piece, Richard assembled a history that had reached him decades late. As its pattern emerged, he began placing the nuclear tests alongside the illnesses his family had endured. Books, broadcasts, and social media became his archive, each source exposing another part of a past that his schooling had left unexplained.

I came to think of this belated recognition as a second fallout. The first scattered radioactive debris across the islands; the second arrived decades later, as people like Richard discovered the history in fragments, after its consequences had already entered their families.

Richard’s experience is not isolated across schools in the Marshall Islands. “These are issues that aren’t taught in the classroom,” says Marshallese activist Benetick Kabua Maddison, speaking of the nuclear legacy and climate change alike. The generation that lived through the tests rarely volunteers its memories, and activist Ariana Tibon traces the reticence to its source: “My belief is that it’s because of all the trauma.” In a 2021 interview, Tibon recalled asking students at Marshall Islands High School to guess how many nuclear weapons the United States had detonated in their country. “No one even came close to 67. The highest number I got was seven,” she said. “Most of them thought it was just one.”⁷

American classrooms are quieter still. The Marshallese Education Initiative stated that “Despite the importance the Marshall Islands played in the United States’ rise to Superpower status...this shared nuclear legacy is not found in U.S. history textbooks and rarely acknowledged.” Researchers at the University of Washington have even developed dedicated toolkits and advocacy scripts to push for integrating Marshallese history into Washington State’s K-12 curriculum—a testament to its persistent absence from mainstream American education.⁸

The silence has recently begun to break. In 2017, the Marshall Islands government established the National Nuclear Commission and began systematically promoting nuclear justice education along with hiring university students to teach nuclear heritage in public schools and communities. By 2021, the College of the Marshall Islands had a Nuclear Club, and Tibon began touring schools with lectures. But these remain supplements, not curriculum. The Marshall Islands Ministry of Education’s new education sector plan for 2020-2023 also makes no explicit mention of integrating nuclear history into the curriculum.⁹

Sixty-eight years have passed since the United States conducted its final nuclear test in the Marshall Islands in 1958—enough time for three or four generations to grow up after the testing era. Across those generations, many Marshallese have encountered the nuclear legacy through delayed knowledge, fragmented reconstruction, and individual discovery. They learned in hindsight that their homeland had served as a testing ground and then reconsidered family illnesses, displacement, and environmental loss through that history.

The history Richard assembled in adulthood gave him a way to understand the illnesses he had already witnessed. His father, now seventy-four, was diagnosed in his later years with radiation-induced lung cancer.

“My dad, he’s got a lot of issues there,” Richard said. “He got lung cancer from the radiation.”

Richard placed his father’s illness within a wider pattern among Marshallese families. “All cancers come from the radiation, not the food,” he said. He traced diabetes, another widespread illness in the islands, to the imported foods that replaced much of the traditional diet. In his account, the two diseases carried different histories: cancer came from nuclear testing, while diabetes followed the arrival of canned and processed food.

His father had lived on another outer island rather than Bikini. For Richard, that distance offered little protection. The Marshall Islands formed one small country across which wind and water moved freely.

“It’s a small island only,” he said, lowering his voice.

I asked whether he believed radiation had affected communities throughout the Marshall Islands.

“Yeah, everywhere in the Marshall Islands,” he answered. “Yes.”

Richard continued to explain that the most practical thing for him to do was to bring his father to the United States for treatment. Limited access to specialized care is one reason many Marshallese, especially people with serious or radiation-related illnesses, seek treatment abroad or migrate to the United States.¹⁰

“That’s why I have a doctor here,” he said. “He’s in and out of hospital here, and he still sees a doctor. He’s still alive.”

As he spoke, his hands tightened around his knees. His father’s frequent hospital visits placed demands on the family, though each visit also gave him access to treatment that Richard struggled to imagine receiving in the islands. His aunt’s experience had taught him the difference such access could make.

“Back home, years ago, the doctors weren’t good,” he said. “My auntie went to the hospital, they did surgery, and the next day she was gone.” He paused, his Adam’s apple bobbing once.

“I wish we had good doctors back home,” he continued. “That’s why people migrate from back home here—to see a good doctor.”

The RMI has two main hospitals, one in Majuro and the other on Ebeye. Residents of the outer islands usually rely on small health centers staffed by health assistants and supplied with basic medications. Serious injuries and illnesses may require transfer to one of the hospitals or treatment abroad.¹¹

“If you get broken, they’ll give you medicine, that’s it. No level of procedure or surgery,” Richard said. “Getting medicine often means painkillers and antibiotics, and little else.”

For families on remote islands, reaching advanced care requires money, transportation, and time. Migration brings them closer to specialists and hospitals, while placing them thousands of kilometres from the land and communities they call home.

When I asked whether the nuclear legacy had affected him psychologically, Richard paused. “Maybe me,” he said with a laugh. “Maybe that’s why I’m mental.”

Richard expressed far less uncertainty when I asked whether U.S. compensation had been sufficient. He shook his head.

“It’s not enough,” he said. “All those people never went back to their island. It’s still right now, nobody called back yet. It’s been around... Yeah, it’s still not enough. They just give them land over here and then... land is an important part of Marshallese culture.”

Marshallese land rights descend through the maternal line, linking each generation to a particular atoll. Richard described how women’s inheritance and men’s administrative roles operate together: “Land is passed down from the mom. But if you’re the oldest man, you’re gonna get the land. Then it goes back to women again. So, it’s kind of back and forth.”¹²

Resettlement elsewhere breaks this chain. For Richard, that rupture measured the failure of compensation: the displaced communities had been given land, but they had never gone back.

By every practical measure, the life Richard has built argues for staying — the work, the schools, the doctors; he had said as much himself. But of the Marshallese I interviewed, he perhaps exhibited the strongest longing to return to the islands.

Two weeks before our interview, Richard had visited Hawaii. Entering the warm Pacific water revived the desire that Seattle’s colder shores had kept alive.

“I felt the heat in the water, the salt water, and I thought, ‘I’m gonna pull back,’” he said.

This time, Richard gave his return a timeline. “If I’m still alive, I’ll go back in maybe ten years, when my youngest one graduates college and high school.”

Ten years would carry his children through school and release him from the responsibilities that currently keep him in the United States. His timeline followed the same pattern as his earlier decisions: he had moved to Majuro to support his siblings and remained in America for his children and father. His own return would come after the people who depended on him had secured their futures.

He had already begun contemplating what kind of work he might find back home—though he concedes that the employment market is grim since there is intense competition for government positions and there are limited private-sector opportunities. “I’ll try to find a job because right now it’s very hard to look for a job back home.”

When asked whether Marshallese culture remains strong today, he answered with two consecutive affirmatives—his tone firm. Yet he also observed that the American way of life is reshaping the values of the younger generation. “Mainland, like in the U.S.—everything is time, money. Back home it’s more grounded, everybody gathers at home. Here it’s like a couple of people, buying money and...” He trailed off.

Technology had widened the distance between his childhood and his children’s. “Technology,” he said. “There’s a lot of difference from when I was younger.” Smartphones and social media give young Marshallese constant access to English-language entertainment and American popular culture. Marshallese material occupies a much smaller space online. Across the islands, uneven internet coverage and expensive data can make sustained local content production difficult. Much of the content that does appear is produced by foreign NGOs and advocacy groups focused on nuclear testing and climate change. As a result, the Marshall Islands often appear online through the lens of crisis, leaving young people fewer spaces to share their own music, fashion, humor, and daily lives.¹³

Even as outside cultures continue to seep in, Richard remains optimistic that life in the United States has actually “strengthened” his Marshallese identity. “I tell the world where I’m from every time. I like it, I proceed where I’m from.” Being a minority has made him deliberate about what he carries. When I asked what being Marshallese meant to him, he reached not for language or custom but for origin itself: “I come from there, I tell the world where I’m from every time.”

Then his phone went off. Forty minutes, almost to the minute. Richard hurriedly stood up before saying goodbye. He had no time to join us for dinner, he explained, since another job site was waiting. “One day I’ll go back,” he said at the beginning and said again at the end.

I watched through the glass window as his figure dissolved into the gray-blue dusk of a Seattle street until he disappeared around a corner.