Then, after all of that, the people of the Marshall Islands underwent what Genz has described as one of the most violent histories of the twentieth century. The Pacific War brought air raids and hunger, and when the war was over the American military began twelve years of nuclear weapons testing on the atolls of Bikini and Enewetak at the northern end of the island chain. During those years, sixty-seven atomic and thermonuclear bombs were detonated; one of them, called “Castle Bravo,” created a blast a thousand times the magnitude of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki blasts. When Castle Bravo exploded on March 1, 1954, it completely obliterated three nearby islands, and the atoll of Rongelap some hundred miles away, which had not been evacuated, was hit with the radiation fallout. For a day and a night its islanders were blanketed in snowlike ash and began experiencing radiation sickness, including severe burns. After a few days, they were finally evacuated, then returned in 1957 despite the continued risks. Some three hundred people, many who had lived through the blast and were suffering from thyroid cancer, self-evacuated from Rongelap in 1985, permanently leaving their home behind.
Before the nightmare of nuclear testing, Rongelap had been the site of the Marshall Islands’ only navigation school. Apprentices from nearby atolls went there to receive formal training because its circular coral reef gave elders a real-life teaching model of how atolls affect the flow of swells and currents. Students would start by learning from stick charts, then by floating in canoes and feeling waves in the coral reef. Eventually they would take the tests necessary to earn the title of navigator according to long-standing Marshallese tradition, which carefully controlled the transmission and inheritance of such knowledge. During their final test, in which they apply their learning during a days-long voyage to a specific atoll, the student navigators experience what is called ruprup jokur, which means “breaking open the turtle shell,” a kind of intellectual process in which their minds fill with knowledge. All of this was lost after Castle Bravo. “The physical and social consequences of the massive radiation fallout from the 1954 Bravo test on Rongelap, Rongerik, and Ailinginae atolls essentially terminated the transmission of navigational knowledge to a young generation of navigation students,” wrote Joe Genz.
Korent Joel was one of those navigation students. As he told Genz,
When I saw the bomb’s light, I stood up in the house and looked down, and it was very bright. I didn’t know what it was but I thought it was a very big moon. Wow, all very bright, I could see some smoke, but I was thinking at the time it was a cloud. A very big cloud. It’s only 120 miles from Kwajalein to Bikini. So I can see the cloud and it’s really a big cloud. The women there, my mother stayed on Ebeye but all the children of my mother’s younger sister, they all got burned, even my grandma and grandpa they all got burned, all of them there.… All the elder navigation teachers were from Rongelap. Some of them died, some of the stayed.… Of all the elders, half died. They were old, very old. There were some that were sixty years old, some seventy years old. I saw those guys. They bathed in water that was contaminated. The Rongelap people have stopped going to the place to learn navigation because there are no more people there.… I would have learned many things if I had stayed on the island, such as making canoes.
Although Joel had never received the title of navigator after the loss of the school, he continued to learn skills directly from his grandfather and was among the handful of individuals who managed to practice traditional navigation in the decades that followed. When the last of the titled navigators died in 2003, he realized he needed to find a way to teach a new generation.
Huth and the party arrived in the capital of Majuro and were met by Alson Kelen, originally from Bikini Atoll and a student of Joel’s. Kelen is also the director of Waan Aelon in Majel, meaning Canoes of the Marshall Islands. Known as WAM, the vocational skills school has emerged as the Marshalls’ last, best hope for passing on navigation skills to the islands’ young people. Over the years, Kelen and Joel successfully negotiated with different Irooj in order to both respect traditions that strictly prohibited the dissemination of navigation knowledge outside of family lines and begin teaching traditional canoe-building and navigation to at-risk youth. Both made the preservation and dissemination of Marshallese navigation knowledge a mission, traveling throughout Oceania to collaborate with boatbuilding and navigation schools, soliciting money for WAM, and communicating with academics and scientists. (Early in the revival project they enlisted Ben Finney, the American anthropologist who helped launch Hawaii’s own resurgence in traditional navigation in the 1970s by cofounding the Polynesian Voyaging Society.) Kelen describes the canoe as the medium through which they teach young people at WAM their entire culture—carving, language, songs, stick charts, and navigation. “We started canoe races, going to all the different mayors of the atoll and asking them to bring the best of the best,” he said. “No one wants to lose and so canoe knowledge has been expanded.”
At sunset on June 22, Huth and the expedition set out from Majuro on two different boats—a traditional outrigger canoe called a walap and a chase boat. Their destination was Aur, an island sixty miles north, where they would deliver supplies and spend a few days before making the return journey. For the wave pilot, navigating at night is easier than during the day, when one’s eyes can play tricks on you. In order to sense the waves, you don’t look but rather feel them in your stomach as you lie on the boat. Kelen describes wave piloting as both a “feeling and the image that is in my mind. I picture where I am going,” he said. “We are feeling our way with currents and swells. And we always joke around that’s why Marshallese have big stomachs—we navigate with our stomach.” But as they set out for Aur, the conditions proved difficult. The waters were choppy, a mess of heaving and contradicting swells and winds. Huth and others became seasick. Even Kelen found it hard to eliminate information in order to identify the strongest swells and deduce his direction. Still he managed to accurately calculate when they were fifteen miles off the southeast corner of Aur, making it possible for them to successfully cut into the extremely small opening in the reef, a dangerous maneuver.
The return trip was easier, and the scientists were able to gather more data. The trade wind swells always seemed to be coming from the east, and Kelen detected a current sweeping them to the west. During the night Huth lay in the middle of the back of the canoe and focused on the motion of the boat, sensing a rolling that came in threes and then a pitch to the north. He made a note of it, thinking: I’m staking myself to this observation. Huth wondered whether he may have detected what is called dilep. Meaning “backbone,” it refers to a mysterious path of wave patterns that create a line between two islands. Marshallese navigators can follow dilep from one atoll to the next by detecting with their bodies the signature wave patterns emitted from the destination island. Dilep, as Genz points out, is the navigator’s highest art, but “from our scientific perspective, we cannot explain why this succession of distinctive waves forms on the direct sailing course between islands rather than on either side of it.”
Huth told me that during the three weeks he spent in the Marshalls, much of it was spent in his hotel room scouring maps and crunching the data generated by the trip to Aur. He realized that most travel takes place along the two chains of islands, Ratick and Rallick, which are oriented on a southeast to northwest axis. “I think the trade winds might hit these chains and give you a unique fingerprint, and dilep might be the path between atolls that you can follow perpendicular to the swells and waves created by the wind,” he said. It occurred to Huth that the size of the canoe tuned out the shorter frequency information from these waves, and by lying at the bottom of the boat, sailors can gather information from feeling the waves and follow their paths over long distances. Dilep might have even less to do with the actual swells and more to do with the distinct motion of the vessel riding them. It’s a hypothesis, one that he intends to test again.
Two years after the trip, I went to Harvard again to see Kelen,
Genz, and van Vledder convene to discuss a planned scientific paper publishing their intial findings. I met Kelen, tattoos covering his arms and neck, and talked about his students at WAM, some of whom were about to graduate with certificates in advanced carpentry and entrepreneurship. For him, this meeting was just another stop on a seemingly never-ending travel schedule across the South Pacific and beyond, connecting people and information in the hopes of preserving Marshallese wayfinding and contributing to the preservation of navigation across Oceania. Van Vledder brought with him a computer model that reconstructed the conditions from their voyage to Aur. It showed that winds and swells had indeed come from the east—but also that there was a swell from the north, thereby confirming Huth’s observation and perhaps bringing the group a step closer to explaining dilep and its significance for oceanography. As van Vledder put it, “Although we use computer models, our knowledge is incomplete. We try to reconstruct it and they are all simplifications. We can learn a lot from what the navigators know.”
The collaboration between the scientists and the navigators was meant to benefit future generations of Marshallese navigators as well. Six months earlier, Joel had passed away from complications of diabetes and an infection. As the lineages of traditional wayfinders faded, perhaps younger Marshallese could learn from a body of science explaining traditional navigation practices. But the collaboration presented a risk too. In the history of contact between the Marshallese and modernity, the islanders had already lost so much—language, traditions, physical health, and homes. What might they lose in this latest iteration of contact, no matter how benevolent its purpose? This concerned Huth. If they figured out the scientific explanation of wave piloting, such knowledge could be taught in the future, but in a very different way than how it had been traditionally learned through rigorous training, experience, and the cultivation of fine senses. “When I asked Alson how he knows there is a current, he just says he feels it,” said Huth. “So should we teach the Marshallese the science? We have to be really careful.” But Joel would likely have disagreed, Genz told me. It was Joel who first invited scientists to build a computer simulation of the waves, and who had nourished a vision in which Marshall Islanders married indigenous and scientific ideas for the betterment of their community. This wasn’t a concession but an act of agency, selecting and utilizing technology and information in pursuit of a goal: to ensure that future minds continue to undergo ruprup jokur and fill with knowledge of the sea.
ASTRONAUTS OF OCEANIA
Off the southern tip of Manhattan there is an island where the Lenape Indians once used to gather nuts from chestnut and oak trees. Today it is called Governor’s Island, and on a summer day I pushed my two-year-old son onto a ferry going there to join hundreds of Hawaiians as they witnessed the departure of Hōkūleʻa, a double-hulled Polynesian voyaging canoe that was at the tail end of a trip of some forty-seven thousand nautical miles, eighty-five ports, and twenty-six nations, all navigated without the use of Western instruments, maps, or charts. The purpose of the round-the-world journey was to spread awareness of malama honua, a Hawaiian concept of caring for the earth, at a time of climate upheaval for the world’s people, particularly those in the South Pacific. The Polynesian Voyaging Society, which built the canoe in the early 1970s, described the trip as creating a lei of stories, big and small, to bring people together.
At a conference earlier in the week I had heard the Hōkūleʻa’s mission described in much more radical terms, as a global movement for the resurgence of indigenous knowledge, language, and land-based practices that together represent an alternative future for humanity. Oceania has produced some of the world’s richest, most complex, and beautiful traditions of navigation, many of which were lost after first contact with Europeans. Like in the Marshall Islands, colonial governments had at times banned interisland travel and even forced the use of navigational instruments on their indigenous subjects. The British did it in Kiribati and Fiji. The French did it in Tahiti and the Marquesas, where they made it illegal to sail without a compass. In Hawaii, traditional canoes and navigation practices faded completely for several hundred years. However, some, like the Caroline Islands, managed to maintain their navigation traditions through the twentieth century. Today traditional navigation is a nexus for cultural empowerment. Nāʻālehu Anthony, a filmmaker and crew member of the Hōkūleʻa, argues that the teachings of Oceanian ancestors have become effectively guidelines for indigenous resurgence and determination. “If you want to cause change, disruption, resurgence, you can look at what they do on the canoe. They are practicing it every day. Some people say the navigator makes six thousand decisions a day. What direction, speed, how many miles? Open the sail, close the sail? Is a crew member sick? Those six thousand decisions they make cause change, and positive change in the right direction. If you want to cause disruption and change the arc of where everything is going, you can do so with decisions you make every day.” Anthony called Oceania’s original voyagers “the astronauts of our ancestors. They were the explorers of the earth. They mastered the science of living sustainably on islands. We’re resurrecting indigenous wisdom and sailing it in the way of the ancestors. We’ve reawakened a cultural pride, identity and connection to place.”
Vicente Diaz, a professor of American Indian Studies at the University of Minnesota and a traditional navigator from Guam, also described the building and sailing of traditional canoes like Hōkūleʻa across Oceania as part of a crucial effort to decolonize Oceania and as symbolic of indigenous struggles for self-determination. But such struggles, he warned, can and will be co-opted by the status quo. “The welcoming of the Hōkūleʻa in New York City should be a cause for concern,” he told the audience. “The radical potentials of traditional voyaging practices are worth celebration, but we can’t shy away from the political struggles that arise at every turn in indigenous revitalizations.” In other words, the Hōkūleʻa is a power grab by the disenfranchised, and one that threatens the continued legacy and policies of colonization across the South Pacific.
Diaz, speaking in 2016, pointed out that one of James Cameron’s upcoming sequels to Avatar—a movie that exploited the cliche of a White Messiah saving Natives—was inspired by Cameron’s deep dive into the Mariana Trench in the western Pacific Ocean. Cameron is just re-creating the same old “neoimperialist dream of conquering,” he said. Meanwhile, he pointed out, the Disney Corporation was just a year away from releasing Moana, a film set two thousand years ago in Oceania, about a sixteen-year-old girl who sets out on a quest that requires her to learn the ways of traditional sailing and navigating. “I dread it coming out,” said Diaz. “Behind it there is a marketing machine that is so large and so precise that it will become the dominant narrative.” The fact that Disney would be presenting Pacific spirituality and culture to a global audience, and would (and did) make millions of dollars from the enterprise, galled him. The film’s romantic and mysticized explanations of indigenous wayfinding erase what Diaz sees as the cultural specificity and historicity of Pacific seafaring’s “science and technology.”
Hōkūleʻa had in fact been built to counteract false narratives about the South Pacific, specifically how the original colonization of Oceania had taken place. The books Kon Tiki and The Ancient Voyages of the Pacific purported that South Pacific Islanders could not have voyaged intentionally across the ocean because they lacked the material technologies of the West. It really wasn’t until the 1960s that scholars began to document and study South Pacific wayfinding traditions and realized they were still practiced in places like the Marshall and Caroline Islands. One was Ben Finney and the other was David Lewis, the New Zealand doctor who would later go to Australia to try and understand the skilled navigation practiced by Aboriginal people in the Western Desert. Finney and Lewis believed that the original colonization of Oceania couldn’t have been accidental. They found support for their ideas in the work of anthropologist Thomas Gladwin, a former British administrator who was posted in the Car
oline Islands in Micronesia. In 1967 Gladwin returned to an atoll called Pulawat to take a course in noninstrumental wayfinding. He was particularly interested in “the process of thinking” among people who were completely outside of a European system of practical knowledge. Perhaps the ability to find, record, and analyze a coherent body of “native” knowledge, he thought, would provide new insights into human cognitive processes, and even the perceived differences in intelligence between lower and upper classes in Western society.
In Pulawat, Gladwin found a culture in which voyaging was at the heart of the very purpose and meaning of life. Their suspicion of mechanization and motorboats was high, and “almost every young man seems still to aspire to become a navigator,” he wrote. Children were taken on their first trips at the age of four or five, and sailors took tremendous joy in launching challenging, impromptu journeys on the numerous twenty-six-foot sailing canoes on the atoll. “The voyages are often organized on the spur of the moment, and an expedition to Pikelot even grows occasionally out of a long drinking party. ‘I’m going to Pikelot. Who’s going with me?’” Gladwin described. In one sixteen-month period, he recorded seventy-three interisland voyages. One of the most common was 130 miles to the atoll of Satawal, and in 1970, a 450-mile journey was “reopened” after seventy years of disuse when a captain received orally transmitted directions to Saipan and navigated it. “With such abounding enthusiasm for the sea it is evident that taking a trip to another island becomes in large measure an end in itself,” Gladwin wrote in his book East Is a Big Bird. Even as the Pulawatans had converted to Christianity and passenger boats began serving the islands, Gladwin observed that the islanders’ commitment and passion to navigation seemed to grow stronger rather than weaker. Pulawatans felt such élan for canoe trips that it wasn’t uncommon for them to launch one to Truk, 150 miles away, just to get a preferred type of tobacco.
Wayfinding Page 24