From displacement to development: arts education as a means to build cultural resilience and community-led arts production in the Marshall Islands

This is a participatory arts education project involving a series of workshops conducted with schoolchildren; members of their extended families; and trainee schoolteachers in the Marshall Islands and Hawaii. The workshops will include activities in creative writing, the visual arts, and photography, and will result in creative outputs (by Marshallese children, trainee teachers, and artists involved in the project) and academic outputs (produced by the project team) exploring the Marshallese experience of displacement as a result of:

i) US nuclear testing during the Cold War
ii) The appropriation and continued use of Kwajalein island for US ballistic missile testing
iii) Resulting conditions of poverty necessitating migration to Hawaii and other parts of the US in search of a better quality of life.

The Marshall Islands experienced five centuries of colonisation under Spain, Germany, Japan and finally the US, and during the twentieth century, global wars and US military expansion led to the forcible (and often permanent) displacement of much of the population. During the Second World War, Marshallese were forcibly evacuated from Kwajalein island to make way for Japanese, then US military installations, and during the Cold War, many more Marshallese were forced to leave northern atolls (such as Bikini and Enewetak) to make way for US nuclear testing. The Bikinians were told their displacement would be temporary, but contamination from nuclear radiation has rendered their homeland uninhabitable for an estimated 30,000 years, as well as afflicting Marshallese exposed to fallout with a range of serious health problems (including cancers and birth defects) which are still manifesting in descendants born generations later. Nuclear refugees were forced to settle on southern islands such as Majuro and Ebeye, and were joined by remaining islanders from Kwajalein forced to relocate when the US established a ballistic missile testing base on Kwajalein during the Cold War.

The Marshall Islands became self-governing in 1979, and signed a Compact of Free Association with the US (in 1986) which granted islanders the right to work and settle in the US, and included a one-off settlement for nuclear compensation claims. However, the settlement fund is far too limited to address the immense environmental and health damage caused by the tests, and many impoverished Marshallese have migrated to neighbouring US states (such as Hawaii) in search of a better standard of living, only to discover that many entitlements (such as the right to vote or to apply to national healthcare schemes) are only extended to US-born Marshallese. This has exacerbated existing conditions of poverty, and in addition, migrants have become stigmatised in US media and public discourse as a drain on public resources (including health and welfare systems).

This project aims to better understand the Marshallese experience of displacement, and to explore how strategies of resilience that remain within the community might be deployed to build educational and socioeconomic capacity in the future. Arts movements elsewhere in the Pacific have demonstrated the potential for creative work to bear witness to, and aid recovery from, the traumas of displacement and dispossession under colonialism. There is a robust network of professional indigenous artists and arts educators extending throughout much of Oceania, and the project aims to explore potential for the Marshall Islands to join this creative community, building on incipient moves in this direction (such as the recent revival of Marshallese jake-ed (clothing mat) weaving through a series of workshops held at the Marshall Islands branch of the University of the South Pacific). In addition to a number of creative outputs, the project will deliver sustainable arts education training to Marshallese schoolteachers, and produce policy documents for circulation to the Marshallese government and other stakeholders.

In keeping with the ODA agendas inflecting this funding call, the majority of the impact and benefits of this project will be channelled directly into the Marshall Islands. Beneficiaries include:

1) Marshallese project participants

The project will involve a series of creative writing and visual arts workshops run at the Majuro Cooperative School in Majuro (capital of RMI), and Central Middle School in Honolulu, Hawaii. In addition to producing creative writing and visual art focused around their own individual understandings of Marshallese displacement, the children will have the opportunity to bring in, interview and photograph a member of their extended family in order to explore the intergenerational aspects of displacement, as well as discovering what kinds of values and culturally-situated knowledge remain in spite of that displacement, and could be used to develop future strategies of resilience and cultural well-being.

The results of these activities will be shared directly with RMI participants, via the dissemination of:
i) A published booklet featuring a selection of creative writing, art and photography produced by each child participant
ii) A memory stick (for each child) featuring a range of audio-visual material produced during the workshops, including film clips of students reading their own piece of creative writing. Also included will be PDF versions of a new poem (by Jetnil-Kijiner), and a graphic novel (by Enos) that will draw on insights into Marshallese displacement and cultural resilience revealed during the workshops
iii) A report (produced by demographer/public health physician Polly Atatoa-Carr), converting the results of qualitative analysis of workshop data into an accessible format for both child and adult participants. If desired a meeting/workshop will be arranged to present/discuss findings with participants

These activities and outputs benefit Marshallese project participants in that they will have a record of their involvement, personal copies of creative outputs from the project, and a stake in the knowledge that is produced about their understandings of displacement.

2) The Marshallese Education sector

The trainee teachers' workshops on creative writing and the visual arts to be held at USP (RMI campus) will produce a range of benefits, not just in terms of building capacity within the teacher training programme and creating the potential for further creative initiatives within the USP, but also in terms of teaching strategies and resources (including teaching resource packs, offering guidance on teaching the commissioned new poetry and graphic novel described above) that will be circulated more widely to RMI's 150 schools.

3) The Marshallese government/other official stakeholders

Government/official stakeholders will be included on the project right from the planning stage, and will share in project outputs, including the report on Marshallese wellbeing and cultural resilience to be written by Dr Atatoa-Carr. Direct beneficiaries include the Ministry of Education and the Ministry of Health, representatives from which will be invited to the symposium held in Majuro at the end of the project.

4) NGOs/members of the Marshallese creative economy

RMI has a number of NGOs focused around youth education, training and healthcare, and we will work with them to maximise the benefits of project findings for RMI youth (see pathways to impact attachment). The Fiji Museum, Bishop Museum (Honolulu) and Alele museum (Majuro) wish to exhibit the project's slideshow.

5) A wider public/international audience

The project website will make various results and outputs from the project available to the wider Marshallese public, and to an international audience, thereby enabling users to adapt our methodologies and insights to other contexts (such as displacement of other island communities due to climate change and international exploitation of natural resources).