The Unquiet Earth of Rongerik

Seen from above, the Pacific resolves into a single blue sheet stitched with cloud, a system of vast distances. Pale rings of coral appear below, each atoll small enough to cover with a thumb. A patrol plane climbs over water that shows no seam between one island group and the next, its crew watching fuel and weather with equal attention. A thousand miles of open water separate administrative offices from the atolls, and this distance was part of the problem: decisions made in air-conditioned rooms took weeks to reach the people they affected, and the people had no way to answer back except through the officials who came to count them.

Rongerik is a necklace of islets around a lagoon of some three square miles, a speck between Bikini and Eniwetok on any chart of the region. The atoll had been claimed by the German Empire in 1885, passed under the Japanese South Seas Mandate after the First World War, and become part of the vast US Naval Base Marshalls after the Second. It was uninhabited when the Bikinians arrived on March 7, 1946, transported 125 miles eastward on U.S. Navy landing ships. That was part of its appeal to the planners of 1946: no one to displace, no claims to adjudicate. The atoll had coconut palms and a lagoon and the look, from the air, of a place that might sustain a few hundred people if the fish were plentiful and the rain was kind.

The rain was not kind. The fish were not plentiful. And the coconut palms, which the Bikinians had been told would provide food and drink, were fewer than they had been led to expect and slower to bear than anyone had promised. By the early 1950s the breadfruit groves that the Navy Seabees had helped to plant were producing little, and the fish weirs that the men had built along the reef flats were often empty.

The Bikinians had come from an atoll with a lagoon of two hundred square miles and a reef system that had fed them for generations. Nine of the eleven family heads, the alaps, had chosen Rongerik in February 1946, when King Juda had agreed to the American request and announced that everything was in God’s hands. They had chosen it on the basis of a Navy reconnaissance report and a map. The map had not shown the hunger.

The first clear signal of how badly the choice had gone came in April 1949, when a Trust Territory officer named John F. Rubeli visited the atoll and found the Bikinians starving. Rubeli’s report described a population living on a fraction of the food they needed, with children whose bellies were distended and adults who had lost weight they could not afford to lose. The report went up the chain of command through the Trust Territory administration and into the Navy’s files. It did not produce an immediate rescue. It produced a series of surveys, each of which confirmed the last, and a growing recognition in the administrative offices of the Pacific that the Bikinian problem was not going to solve itself.

The problem had a shape that the bureaucracy could not easily accommodate. The Bikinians were not a military unit that could be redeployed or a ship that could be towed. They were a community of people who had been moved once, on the promise that the move was temporary, and who were now discovering that the place they had been moved to could not sustain them. The Navy had other priorities. The Cold War was intensifying. The atomic tests at Eniwetok in 1948 and 1951 had drawn attention away from the Marshalls’ older problems. The Bikinians on Rongerik were a small population on a small atoll, and their distress was documented in memos that circulated among officials who had many other memos to read.

But the memos accumulated. Anthropologists who visited Rongerik in the early 1950s wrote reports that described the breakdown of traditional subsistence practices. The men who had once fished the reef flats of Bikini with nets and traps now found the Rongerik lagoon too shallow and too poor to support the same methods. The women who had tended taro patches on Bikini found no taro on Rongerik. The coconut palms, which were supposed to provide both food and copra for trade, produced less than the population needed. The Bikinians were not merely hungry; they were hungry in a place that did not allow them to do the things that had made them who they were.

The reports reached Washington. They reached the Trust Territory administration in Honolulu. They reached the Navy, which had conducted the tests at Bikini and had made the original promise of return. And they reached a small number of officials who understood that the situation on Rongerik was becoming a public relations liability as well as a humanitarian crisis. The Bikinians had been photographed by the Navy in 1946, standing on the beach at Bikini as they prepared to leave. They had been described in press accounts as a people who had sacrificed their home for the cause of peace. That narrative had served the Navy well during the tests. It was now becoming a problem, because the people in the photographs were starving on an atoll that the Navy had chosen for them.

The decision-making that followed was slow and hesitant. The Trust Territory administration considered several options. One was to return the Bikinians to Bikini, but the atoll was still contaminated from the 1946 tests and the Navy was using it as a support base for the Eniwetok tests. Another was to move them to a different atoll in the Marshalls, one with a larger lagoon and better fishing. The Bikinians themselves had opinions about where they wanted to go. They had heard about other atolls from other Marshallese. They knew which ones had good reefs and which ones did not. They had been moved once without being consulted about the details, and they did not want to be moved again on the same terms.

The option that eventually emerged was Kili, a single island rather than an atoll, about two hundred miles south of Bikini. Kili had no lagoon. It had a reef that dropped off quickly into deep water, which meant that the fishing methods the Bikinians had used on Bikini and Rongerik would not work. It had coconut palms and some breadfruit, but it was smaller than Bikini and had never supported a permanent population. The Bikinians were told that Kili was the best available option. They were told that the move would be temporary, that they would eventually return to Bikini when the atoll was safe. They had heard that promise before.

The move to Kili took place in 1952. The Bikinians were transported by Navy vessels, along with their belongings and the materials of their church, which had been disassembled and rebuilt on Rongerik and would now be disassembled and rebuilt again. The move was not a return. It was a second displacement, and it carried with it the implicit admission that the first displacement had failed. The Navy and the Trust Territory administration did not frame it that way. They framed it as a necessary adjustment, a response to conditions on Rongerik that had proved less favorable than expected. The Bikinians, who had lived through both the expectation and the reality, understood the difference.

Kili was not Rongerik. It had more land, and the land was more fertile. But it was not Bikini, and the difference was not merely a matter of size.

On Bikini the Bikinians had lived around a lagoon that was the center of their world. The lagoon provided fish, shellfish, and a means of travel between the islets. The reef provided a boundary that was also a resource.

On Kili there was no lagoon. The island faced the open ocean on one side and a narrow reef on the other.

The men who had been fishermen became farmers, or tried to become farmers, on land that had never been farmed intensively. The women who had gathered shellfish on the reef flats of Bikini found no equivalent on Kili. The social structures that had organized life on Bikini, the relationships between families and the division of labor between men and women, were strained by the new conditions.

The Bikinians on Kili were not starving in the way they had starved on Rongerik. But they were not thriving. They were living on an island that had been chosen for them by officials who were responding to a crisis rather than planning a future. The crisis on Rongerik had forced the administration to act, but the action was a second displacement rather than a solution. The Bikinians had been moved from Bikini to Rongerik on the promise of return. They had been moved from Rongerik to Kili on the same promise. The promise had not been kept, and the conditions that made it necessary to move them again were the conditions that the original promise had been meant to prevent.

The archival record of these years is not a record of dramatic decisions. It is a record of memos and surveys and reports, each of which confirmed what the last had said. The Bikinians were not thriving on Rongerik. The Bikinians were not thriving on Kili. The Bikinians wanted to return to Bikini. The Navy was not ready to let them return. The Trust Territory administration was caught between the Navy’s schedule and the Bikinians’ needs. The memos circulated. The surveys were conducted. The years passed.

In 1954 the United States conducted a thermonuclear test at Bikini that was far larger than the 1946 tests. The Castle Bravo shot, on the first of March, produced a yield of fifteen megatons, more than twice what the scientists had predicted, and spread radioactive fallout across the Marshall Islands. The people of Rongelap and Utrik were evacuated. The Bikinians on Kili were not in the path of the fallout, but they were reminded, if they needed reminding, that Bikini was not safe. The atoll they had left in 1946 was now the site of tests that made the original Crossroads shots look small. The promise of return, which had been vague in 1946, was now vaguer still.

The Bikinians on Kili waited. They had been waiting since 1946. They had been moved twice, and each move had been described as temporary. They had been told that their home would be safe to return to, and the tests had continued. They had been told that Rongerik would sustain them, and it had not. They had been told that Kili would be better, and it was better, but it was not home. The waiting was not a passive state. It was a condition that shaped every aspect of their lives, from the food they ate to the stories they told their children about the place they had come from.

The story of the Bikinians is often told as a story of exile, and that is accurate as far as it goes. But it is also a story about the limits of what a bureaucracy can do when it tries to manage a human problem with the tools of administration. The Navy had moved the Bikinians to Rongerik because the atoll was uninhabited and the move was expedient. The Trust Territory administration had moved them to Kili because Rongerik had failed and the move was necessary. Neither move had been designed to sustain the Bikinians as a community. Both had been designed to solve a problem for the institutions that made them.

The problem for the institutions was not the Bikinians’ welfare. It was the Bikinians’ presence. A population living on an atoll that could not support it was a population that generated reports and inquiries and, eventually, criticism. The criticism was not primarily about the Bikinians. It was about the Navy and the Trust Territory administration and the promises they had made. The Bikinians were the evidence of those promises, and their distress was the measure of how far the promises had fallen short. Moving them to Kili did not resolve the underlying issue. It moved the evidence to a different location.

The underlying issue was the one that had been present from the beginning: the Bikinians had been removed from their home for a purpose that was not theirs, on terms that were not theirs, and with a promise that had not been kept. The removal had been framed as a sacrifice for peace, and the Bikinians had agreed to it in the belief that everything was in God’s hands. The sacrifice had been real. The peace had not been secured in the way the framers of the narrative had imagined. The Bikinians had given up their home, and the world had not become safer. It had become more dangerous, and the danger had come back to Bikini in the form of ever-larger bombs.

The disposability calculus that had governed the original decision had not been abandoned. It had been applied again, to Rongerik and then to Kili, each time with the same logic: the Bikinians could be moved, and the move could be managed, and the management could be documented in a way that satisfied the institutions involved. What the calculus could not account for was the cumulative cost. The Bikinians had lost their home, their lagoon, their reef, their taro patches, their breadfruit groves, their fishing grounds, and the social structures that had organized their lives around those things. They had lost them one by one, in a sequence of decisions that each seemed reasonable at the time and that together produced a result no one had intended.

By the mid-1950s the Bikinians were on Kili, and the tests at Bikini were continuing. The atoll they had left was a testing ground, and the promise of return was a promise that no one could say when it would be kept. The Bikinians had been moved twice in six years. They had been told that each move was temporary. They had been told that their home would be safe. They had been told that the new place would be better. The telling had not made it so.

The unquiet earth of Rongerik had forced a reckoning, but the reckoning was incomplete. It had produced a second displacement, not a restoration. It had acknowledged the failure of the first move without addressing the reasons for it. It had responded to the Bikinians’ distress without resolving the conditions that caused it. The Bikinians were still waiting, and the waiting was still the central fact of their lives. The atoll they had left in 1946 was still contaminated. The promise of return was still unkept. The earth under their feet was still not their own.

The distances remained. Washington to Honolulu, Honolulu to Kwajalein, Kwajalein to Kili. The chain of command and communication that had brought the Bikinians to Rongerik and then to Kili was still in place, and the people at the end of it were still dependent on the decisions of officials who lived thousands of miles away. The Bikinians had been moved twice, and the moves had been managed, and the management had been documented. What had not been managed was the thing that mattered most: the return. The Bikinians were not home. They had not been home since 1946, and the years were adding up, and the promise was growing older, and the atoll was still not safe.