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

点击翻译按钮获取中文摘要

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 Warii) The appropriation and continued use of Kwajalein island for US ballistic missile testingiii) 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.