We Keep Our Culture

Early spring in Seattle still carried a chill. Lorna wore a red hoodie over a long, hand-sewn Marshallese skirt. Red flowers, yellow-green leaves, and bands resembling the currents mapped in traditional stick charts crossed the black fabric. Red has chiefly associations in the Marshall Islands, and its deep crimson dye was traditionally extracted through laborious preparation of hibiscus and mangrove. Pandanus trees break the wind and help hold the soil of the atolls in place; their leaves also supply material for weaving and evoke shelter, family, and continuity. The deep-red flowers at the center of Lorna’s skirt were ļō, or sea hibiscus. Complete hibiscus-blossom patterns were traditionally associated with women of chiefly families.¹

The pattern was fitting. In manner, Lorna was easy going and approachable, indistinguishable from anyone else in Seattle’s Marshallese community. She was surrounded by family: her parents, three children, and several sisters had arrived with her, filling the room with conversation and movement. Yet she was the daughter of an iroij, or chief, and that upbringing shaped how she understood her obligations to family and culture.

Twenty years earlier, Lorna had come to the United States for college. She did not finish her degree or return to settle in the Marshall Islands. Instead, family illness, her children’s futures, and the availability of medical care gradually anchored her in Seattle. Migration had not displaced Marshallese culture from her life; it had made its preservation more deliberate. She did not know whether she would go back, but residence was no longer the sole measure of her connection to home.

“I came here for college,” Lorna said softly.

In 2006, at eighteen, she traveled to the United States hoping to pursue higher education. Like other eligible Marshallese citizens, she could enter, work, study, and live in the country under the Compact of Free Association (COFA). She imagined the opportunities she could gain; perhaps she would follow her father—study abroad and return to the Marshall Islands to do something for her homeland.

That plan remained unfinished. Lorna stayed, married a Marshallese man, and raised two sons and a daughter, all born in the United States. “He’s a worker. He does welding,” she said of her husband. Over time, the practical center of the family’s life shifted to the United States.

Health care contributed to that shift. Lorna’s father-in-law had lived with diabetes and required dialysis. “My husband’s dad, he just recently passed away. Yeah, he had health conditions. So, we kept helping him. He was on dialysis.” Caring for him tied the family to doctors and treatment in the United States.

Her parents, siblings, and other relatives remained in the Marshall Islands, and she had visited them the previous summer. When I asked whether she might eventually return to live there, she left the possibility open. “I’m not sure, like we’ll just see.”

When asked about arrangements for her children, Lorna said, “If I move, they don’t move.” The sentence did not reveal whether they opposed returning, had lives they would not leave, or were simply old enough to make their own decisions. It did establish that Lorna could no longer imagine migration as a single family journey. Even if she returned, the next generation might remain.

After twenty years, neither country could be considered temporary. The Marshall Islands remained the place of her parents, siblings, and upbringing. Seattle was where her husband worked, her children had grown up, and her family had obtained medical care. The question of return could not be answered by attachment alone.

When our conversation turned to nuclear testing and its effects on Marshallese health, Lorna’s tone grew heavy. “You know how it exploded, it’s probably all over Marshall Islands. And like the food that we grow and the fish that we fish, they’re probably all contaminated.”

I noted that the tests had ended more than seventy years earlier and that later assessments had found some areas safe in terms of radiation levels. Lorna remained unconvinced. “So the thing is it still has contamination. Yeah, but I’m not sure, that’s what I think. And because our food is like natural, they grow them and they fish.”

Her skepticism rests on a history that present reassurances cannot erase. For instance, in 1968, the United States announced that Bikini Atoll, where twenty-three nuclear weapons were tested by the U.S., would be resettled. Families gradually returned, only to be evacuated again in 1978 after whole-body measurements found cesium-137 above permissible levels. Official declarations of safety had failed within living memory. Her doubt can therefore be understood as a response to environmental trauma: an inherited distrust reinforced by the chronic and rare illnesses that have run through Marshallese families for decades. ²

Between 1946 and 1958, the United States conducted sixty-seven nuclear tests at Bikini and Enewetak Atolls. Fallout from the 1954 Castle Bravo test exposed inhabited atolls, and radioactive materials including strontium-90, cesium-137, and plutonium-239 seeped into the soil, dissolved into the seawater, and are still decaying slowly today: their half-lives range from thirty years to twenty-four thousand years. Their persistent presence helps explain why nuclear contamination cannot be imagined as an event that simply ended with the final detonation, even though present conditions and exposure risks vary greatly among atolls.³

When I asked Lorna whether nuclear testing had brought widespread psychological wounds as well, Lorna was silent for a moment. “I don’t know, I’m not sure about that. I only think about the health concerns.”

She later explained that she had never seriously thought about the psychological state of her community. Her attention remained fixed on bodily questions: whether food was safe, whether disease could be treated, and whether a sick relative could reach a doctor. In a country where the WHO recorded only one psychiatrist, such immediate physical needs often left little room for psychological care.

For decades the country has been caught in a circle: radiation sickens islanders; scarce medicine drives them out; the more who leave, the less capacity remains to build a health system; and those who stay have one more reason to go. The archipelago is still absorbing the aftershock of the explosions—a slower one, measured in the steady departure of its people.

Though Lorna originally moved to the United States for education, medical care helped keep her family there. Many Marshallese people, she said, migrate “to be able to get help, to be able to see a doctor.” The medical system in the Marshall Islands “needs better,” while conditions on the outer islands beyond Majuro are “the same”—or still more limited.

Diabetes was the illness she mentioned most readily. “A lot of Marshallese have diabetes.” Estimates have placed the prevalence of Type 2 diabetes in the Marshall Islands above 30 percent, far beyond the global average. Her father-in-law’s years on dialysis had made the consequences immediate. When I asked whether she associated diabetes with nuclear testing, however, she hesitated—a rare thing in her answers. “Um... I think both.”⁴

A direct causal connection between radiation exposure and the country’s high rate of Type 2 diabetes has not been established. However, Lorna’s intuition that “both” play a role is not without reason. Long-term radiation is known to damage the thyroid and endocrine system, planting the seeds of chronic disease. Further, nuclear testing and displacement disrupted the nation’s relationship to land and food: fear of contaminated food, alongside the expense and limited availability of local produce, contributed to reliance on imported rice, canned meat, refined starch, sugary drinks, and other processed foods.⁵

The scale of chronic disease places demands on a Marshallese medical system with limited specialists, equipment, and dialysis capacity. Patients who need long-term or advanced treatment may have to leave the country, but travel itself requires money, family assistance, and somewhere to stay.

Teresa, Lorna’s friend and another of my interviewees, illustrated the same pressure. She had left the Marshall Islands at twenty-five and had lived in the United States for nine years. A kidney-transplant recipient, she had since had children and built a stable life in America. She described hospitals in the Marshall Islands as “too much trouble,” “not effective,” and staffed by people who “don’t care about patients.” A transplant patient who avoids hospitals is its own kind of medical record. For both women, limited care and distrust of local hospitals made remaining in the United States feel less like a preference than a necessity.

This is what medical migration can look like from inside a family: one person’s arrival creates a route others can follow when they need care. Lorna came for college. She became the somewhere to stay.

Lorna’s father is an iroij of a prominent Marshallese clan and has also held government office. Within the Marshall Islands’ matrilineal land system, the iroij is the traditional land steward and the community’s spiritual leader, the link between ancestral order and modern governance. Constitution Day celebrations, handicraft exhibitions, and dance rehearsals need the chief’s blessing, and the people’s collective concerns—food radiation, chronic disease care—travel through the chief to American institutions or the national government. Lorna therefore grew up near traditions that were embedded in the organization of everyday relationships.⁶

The order travels abroad with him. Whenever Lorna’s father visited Seattle, Marshallese community members came to greet him and later gathered before his departure. The community turns out in traditional skirts and dresses, as well as “wearing boots, shoes, or slippers.” She explained, “When they come, then people will come and say hi and hello like that, before they leave us. Then we come together and... it’s like a party, a farewell party.”

The day we met, Lorna arrived with her parents and three children, a cluster of sisters trailing behind, and the room filled with warmth and noise. Her parents were gentle yet commanding, frequent visitors to America—though even this visit, like so many Marshallese crossings, had medical check-ups at its center.

When I admired the embroidery on the sisters’ skirts, all of them told me to visit Lorna’s home, where the walls hang with jaki-ed—the celebrated weaving of Marshallese women. The word covers a family of objects: the daily resting mat, the ceremonial dress called nieded, the handcrafted pieces given as gifts. The craft once nearly vanished; artisans had to relearn it from photographs of nineteenth-century mats preserved in overseas museums. It is the concrete expression of kōrā im an kōl—the creative gift women are born with—and among the finest weaving traditions in the Pacific: a skeleton of pandanus fiber, a lace-like openwork, shells inlaid in the forms of sea stars, ocean flowers, and waves, the technique passed down orally among women only.⁷

The women became more animated as they discussed skirts, weaving, and jewelry. Lorna opened her phone and showed me photographs of herself and her friends, every throat and wrist carrying island work: beads and carved flowers cut from atoll shells—Kili’s small conchs, the polished shell of giant clams—set off with coconut-husk fragments and coral-powder dyes. The designs carry atoll imagery—waves, flowers, sea stars, water droplets, and other forms associated with the ocean. Today, these hand-woven shell works have become vessels of Marshallese cultural identity, carrying the collective memory of the nation.

Lorna orders traditional skirts, shell necklaces, and earrings from small workshops on the islands. “You can check out the Facebook page,” Lorna said. “This Facebook is from a Marshall Islands small business.” She scrolled through the merchant’s work—coral, pandanus vine, shell—pointing piece by piece. “These are earrings and the necklace and the bracelet. They also have bags. They make them, they weave them. Those are the stuff that we give to people here that are not Marshallese. We give as gifts.” She then explained, “They mail by FedEx or UPS.” The wait lasts several weeks, but Lorna is happy to wait.

The transaction was ordinary, yet it sustained several relationships at once. It supported artisans in the islands, placed Marshallese work in homes in the United States, and allowed objects to circulate as gifts beyond the community. Holding a woven piece, she said, she could see the coconut groves on the atoll, the fish in the shallow seas, the evenings when family sat together. A handwoven piece became a pocket of home that could cross the Pacific.

When I asked what the Marshall Islands meant to her, Lorna began with mutual care.

“It’s like a tiny island. But like what the culture is, it is like everyone helping each other, like they gather every time, and like the love they spread. And I’m proud to be a Marshallese. Proud.”

She said “proud” twice. Asked whether other Marshallese people felt the same way, she answered without hesitation.

“Yeah. They always mention their culture and how they stick together and how they work with each other. Help each other out. Yeah, like even when there is a funeral, everybody will come together and help each other out.”

In Lorna’s description, culture was expressed through collective labor. People cooked, contributed money, organized gatherings, and appeared when a family needed them. That mutual aid continued in Seattle. “Even here. Even like the first birthday for babies and birthdays, like we invite Marshallese to come join us. It’s a big thing.”

A child’s first birthday, or kemem, is one of the most important Marshallese celebrations. Eighteenth birthdays and birthdays after fifty may also be celebrated on a large scale. Funerals draw relatives and community members together to divide the work of feeding guests, supporting the bereaved, and completing the ceremony. Visiting elders are welcomed and sent home with gatherings like the farewell Lorna described for her father. Migration had not reproduced every aspect of life on an atoll, but it had carried a structure of obligation into this modernized American city.⁸

Lorna described continuity within her own household just as firmly. “No change. We keep the tradition.” When I asked what that included, she answered, “Music and dances and food.” Her family spoke Marshallese and prepared Marshallese dishes at home. Her children also welcomed food brought from the islands. “They like fish. Like when we bring food from back home.”

Community events extended those practices beyond the household. Every year at the end of May, Marshallese families in the Seattle area gathered for their Constitution Day celebration in a park, sharing food, music, and dance. It was a day when “every Marshallese gathers together, like all the community.” Schools created other occasions for children to present their culture. “Sometimes like most of the schools now where our children attend, they have a multicultural night. So, they bring in Marshallese handicrafts. And they do dances, they do singing and Marshallese dances.” In her view, the school’s multicultural night is an important moment for passing identity to the next generation. Teresa likewise sent her daughter to a Pacific Islander club, at a school with enough islander students to teach Pacific history, dance, and food culture outright. Such programs could not reproduce the everyday density of island life, but they gave children public settings in which Marshallese identity became visible and shareable.

Lorna initially denied that American culture had significantly altered Marshallese tradition. “No. Not really... because we keep our culture.” However, she followed with an acknowledgment of intergenerational differences. “You know, these days kids, they grew up here and they try to follow like American kids more. But us parents, we tell them what they have to do. And the kids know what to do and not what to do when they are with the community.” The two answers were not necessarily contradictory. To Lorna, keeping culture never meant the children behaving the same in every room—it meant knowing which room they were in. That knowledge is deliberately taught, parents as guardians as much as practitioners, and in her telling it holds: American school days, Marshallese community days, and no crisis of assimilation between them.

When I pressed on the threats facing Marshallese culture, Lorna was silent for a while, then said she had never seriously thought about the question. She lives at the center of a world that answers it daily: relatives speaking the language, families gathering, the woven pieces arriving from the island workshops, her children dancing at multicultural night.

When Lorna spoke about the future, one phrase kept returning: “I’m not sure.” It appeared in her answer about permanent return and again when I asked about climate change. “Everyone says so, but I’m not sure. People back home are indeed worried: the weather is getting warmer, the sea will come in, the land is getting smaller.”

Asked again about the psychological effects of nuclear testing, she similarly replied, “I don’t know, I’m not sure about it.”

Lorna’s uncertainty was not indecision but an accurate account of a life spread across two countries. Medical care and her children’s futures kept her in the United States, while family and culture continued to connect her to the Marshall Islands. She had neither severed her relationship with home nor turned return into a plan; she had learned to live without resolving the distance between them.

Several pressures converged in that uncertainty. With an average elevation of roughly two meters, the Marshall Islands faces flooding, erosion, saltwater intrusion, and damage to crops and freshwater supplies as seas rise. Nuclear testing has left a different kind of doubt about the long-term safety of land and food. Medical limitations encourage families to seek treatment abroad, while children educated in the United States develop attachments and opportunities of their own.⁹

The Runit Dome on Enewetak has become one public symbol of that doubt. American cleanup crews placed radioactive debris beneath its concrete cap, whose visible cracking and contact with seawater have intensified concern about the waste left behind. Lorna did not mention the dome, however, and it would be misleading to substitute it for the worries she actually described. Hers were more immediate: the safety of food, the illnesses within families, the loss of land, and the feasibility of return.¹⁰

Such concerns do not dictate the same outcome for every family, but they narrow the choices available to many Marshallese migrants, who rebuild their lives in the United States without necessarily deciding that it is where they ultimately belong. Lorna neither predicts a bright future nor dramatizes a tragic one. She concentrates on what she can sustain now: raising her children, caring for elders, and gathering with the community. “I’m not sure” remains her answer about tomorrow, but the life she maintains in Seattle is already giving that answer a shape.

In the Marshall Islands, many of the practices Lorna described had been woven into the texture of daily life. In Seattle, they required deliberate occasions: Constitution Day, multicultural nights, kemem celebrations, funerals, welcome gatherings, and farewell parties. The culture had not become less authentic, but the work of sustaining it had become more visible. Her own words captured that shift. “They always mention their culture and how they stick together,” she had said of Marshallese people. On the atoll, no one needed to name what surrounded them. What had once been habit had become a choice.

This movement from habit to intention is one way culture survives in an era of globalization, when migration disperses communities and carries traditions far beyond the places in which they developed. Once culture is no longer reinforced by a shared geographic setting and daily routine, it must take root in new soil through gatherings, food, language, and relationships. That continuation often requires more deliberate effort than it did in the homeland—and people willing to assume responsibility for bringing others together. In Seattle, Lorna had become one of the people who made it possible.

Her upbringing in a chief’s household gave her a particular relationship to these practices, but she rarely described cultural continuity as an individual achievement. Her language was collective: people “stick together,” “help each other out,” and “keep our culture.” Responsibility moved through families and gatherings, much as the objects she ordered traveled through networks connecting Seattle to the islands.

Lorna could not guarantee what her children or future grandchildren would retain. Asked to look far ahead, she could only say, “I’m not sure.” Yet her actions supplied a partial answer. The skirt she wore that morning had crossed the Pacific because someone wove it, someone mailed it, and Lorna chose to put it on. That chain of choices—not an inheritance preserved without change—was what keeping the tradition now required. The engine is the one she named: everyone helping each other, the love they spread.