Bikini Elder Interviews with Jack Niedenthal

Emso Leviticus, a young woman at the time of the exodus from Bikini, recalls the transition from being under the Japanese rule to the American takeover, to their journey to Rongerik:

Emso Leviticus [Personal Communication: Leviticus, E. Interview with Jack Niedenthal. 1990 (in Marshallese)] Emso is in the picture below:

EMSO LEVITICUS "How our lives began to change. I remember the stories of when we women used to wear clothes made out of woven pandanus leaves with our tops sometimes going bare until one day the Japanese brought us dresses to wear. I eventually had about five dresses or so like most of the other girls and that seemed to be plenty for us to wear. All the girls loved the change of style, especially because the clothes felt comfortable to us, and so we were wearing dresses when the Americans finally arrived on our islands.

"We were elated when we discovered that the Americans weren't going to hurt us, in fact, the Navy men were very kind and gave us big bins filled with all kinds of food that we had never seen or eaten before like C-rations, chocolates, corned beef and other wonderful things. They took some of us to the ship to get medical attention. One woman named Tamar was very sick, and when she returned, she was all better again. The Americans stayed awhile and I befriended one of the men. He often visited with me and built a cement water catchment for my house.

"I can still recall the day when the more important looking Americans came to ask us to move from our islands. All of these new men were wearing beautiful uniforms. After church one day, they asked us to come together on Rosie's and Dretin's land called Loto, near Lokiar's land, to have a community meeting.

"We were all there--men, women and children--and we tried to listen carefully to what they were asking our leaders. All of the women became surprised when we found out that they were requesting that we move to Rongerik Atoll or Ujae Atoll. I remember that our leaders answered: 'If we have to leave, we would rather go to Rongerik because we don't want to be under the leadership of another king or iroij on Ujae.' No one dissented in front of the Americans when they asked us if we would be willing to go to another island so they could test their bombs. We had had a meeting beforehand. It had been decided that we would all stand behind Juda when he gave our answer to the man with the stars on his hat and clothes.

"We were a very close-knit group of people back then. We were like one big family. We loved each other accordingly. After we made the final decision, no one made any problems about it. We agreed to go along with whatever was decided by our leaders.

"Eventually, they sent a group of our men ahead to begin getting Rongerik ready, and in the meantime, we had a church service at the cemetery of our elders. We put flowers on their graves and cleaned up the area. I remember being very sad at that time because of the strange feeling of having to leave behind the bones of my ancestors while strangers would be walking around on our island.

"We left our island after loading everything we owned including our canoes, various kinds of food, bibles, dishes, tools and even some pieces of our church and Council house. We loaded it all onto one of those big ships that open in the front [Navy landing craft], and then, after finding our places on the ship, we waved good-by to our islands and sailed to Rongerik.

"Being a curious young girl, never having seen anything like this before, I had fun on the ship. We finally arrived at Rongerik Atoll, and after we unloaded all of our belongings onto the beach, the Council immediately began to decide on which families would live in the various houses that had been prepared for us. We started dividing up the food that the Navy men had given us and we tried to fall back into the daily routines of our lives.

"Routine was difficult now though because there were many newsmen on Rongerik taking pictures of us. I guess it was all exciting in a way, but it was also a little scary. Those people who were looking at us were strange. The island itself looked so different from Bikini. It was smaller. And, from the beginning, we had reason to lack confidence in our abilities to provide for our future on that tiny place. We could only remain hopeful and keep thinking that one day soon we would be returned to Bikini."

The torment and grief experienced during the two years that the Bikini people spent suffering on Rongerik Atoll has best been expressed by Lore Kessibuki, considered the poet laureate by the Bikinians. Rarely did the bitterness of his people's trials and tribulations show through his smile and the sweetness of his personality. However, whenever he was called upon by the media to do an occasional brief review of the Bikinians exodus, he always described the stay on Rongerik with an enormous amount of remorse and hatred. The situation on those islands was obviously a dreadful situation for the people. But it was felt deeper by Lore, for he was one of the leaders of a forgotten and starving community. He died in 1994.

Lore Kessibuki [Personal Communication: Kessibuki, L. Interviews with Jack Niedenthal. 1987, 1988, 1990, 1991 (all in Marshallese)]::

LORE KESSIBUKI "While on Rongerik there were, of course, many problems for us to deal with as leaders. But the crisis in particular that stands out in my mind, even today after the many years have gone by, is the illness that many of us came down with as starvation became prolonged and excruciatingly painful.

"The first symptom was that we all suddenly had a very hard time sleeping. When we would finally manage to doze for a short time late at night, and afterwards, wake in the morning, we would find ourselves feeling weak and dizzy and shockingly unable to stand. We could see that the sun had already risen above the trees. This gave us the urge to start working for our families. I used to lay on my mat in the mornings just wondering what was wrong with me until finally I would manage to find the strength to get up and move around enough to get a drink of water. It was then that we would be confronted with the strangest of feelings. By simply touching the water our limbs would be shot with pain as if thousands of needles were running up and down our hands and legs. These sensations, coupled with the awkwardness of adjusting to our newfound environment, left us feeling very perplexed.
I remember that sometimes I would have no feeling in my hands, and in addition to this personal dilemma, I had to watch helplessly as we all became so very thin and sick. We had no meat on our legs and arms, and our muscles were worn thin from the lack of activity.

"In Rongerik you just shouldn't eat the fish. The fish have a history of being poisoned by the food that they ate from the reef--even though they were the exact same kind of fish that we used to eat on Bikini. One reason we knew that the island was uninhabitable, even before we arrived there, was because our elders had taught us that Rongerik was inhabited by a demon named Litobora.

"Even through all of these hardships it was unfathomable now that we still held high hopes that the Americans would help us...Bikini is like a relative to us: like a father or a mother or a sister or a brother, perhaps most like a child conceived from our own flesh and blood. And then, to us, that child was gone, buried and dead.

"In the old days we lived and worked together in harmony and treated each other with a great amount of respect. That is how we respect the Americans now. But back then we would get upset with each other for believing in the Americans and in the promises that they made when they asked us to move: That they would take care of us no matter where we were even if we were on a sandbar or adrift on a raft at sea. We would shout at each other that the promises weren't true because surely this wasn't 'the best of their ability'--as they had promised--being shown towards us. After all, it was certainly clear that they had forgotten about us. Even as the problems began to mount, it was still extremely hard to let go of the belief that the Americans would someday come through."

In March of 1948, after two long years on Rongerik, the Bikinians were transported to Kwajalein Atoll and housed there in tents on a strip of grass beside the airport. The Bikinians fell into yet another debate among themselves about alternative locations soon after they settled in on Kwajalein. Kilon Bauno who, while alive, was the iroij of the Bikinians and earlier in his life, during the time of exodus, a councilman. Kilon died in 1992. Here is his firsthand account of life on Kwajalein and the decisions that had to made by the islanders, which include their transition to Kili Island:

Kilon Bauno [Personal Communication: Bauno, K. Interviews with Jack Niedenthal. 1988, 1990 (all in Marshallese)]:

KILON BAUNO: "We lived a strange life on Kwajalein. From day to day we were frightened by all the airplanes that continuously landed very close to our homes. We were also frustrated by the small amount of space in which we were permitted to move around. We had to depend on the U.S. military for everything. We were always asking them to help us in one way or another. We were afraid of this alien environment and almost from the day we got there we began thinking about other places to live.

"We talked about moving to many places like: Wotho, Lae and Ujae Atolls. But we encountered the same types of problems with all of these islands. One major factor was that these islands already had people living on them and therefore we thought that we would have social conflicts with the inhabitants because they recognized the iroij of those atolls. We Bikinians did not. We were afraid that they wouldn't let us live by our own rules and so we began asking the Americans to find somewhere else for us. Then, Dr. Mason asked us about Kili Island. We debated among ourselves about where we should go. Finally it came to a vote. We chose Kili by a large majority over Wotho and Ujae as the sight of our third temporary home.

"They sent some Navy men along with some of us Bikinians to help set up our community there. I remember that time well because we were so tired of all this moving around, building new communities and then having to adjust to new places--always adjusting, adjusting, adjusting. Now, once again, we had to start thinking of how to move all of our people to this next island. It was terrible. We were so weary and exhausted, not only by the labor we were going through to get these places ready, but also by these thoughts in our minds: What was happening to Bikini? How long would we be in this new place? Sometimes we wouldn't eat for an entire day because of the combination of hard work and all the worry that we were experiencing. We were always asking ourselves, 'What are we doing here? What are we going to eat when we get our people to this new place? How will our lives be there?' Questions like this were a great burden for our leaders at that time."

The difficulty in inhabiting Kili is due in part to the small amount of food which can be grown there, but more so because it has no lagoon. Kili differs substantially from Bikini because it is only a single island of one-third of a square mile in land area with no lagoon compared to the Bikinians' homeland of 23 islands that forms a calm lagoon and that has a land area of 3.4 square miles. Most of the year Kili is surrounded by 10 to 20 foot waves which deny the islanders of the opportunity to fish and sail their canoes. After a short time on Kili--an island that islanders believe was once an ancient burial ground for kings and therefore overwrought with spiritual influence--they began to refer to it as a "prison" island. Because the island does not produce enough local food for the Bikinians to eat, the importation of USDA canned goods and also food bought with their supplemental income has become an absolute necessity for the peoples survival. Lore Kessibuki, who died in 1994, tells of further problems associated with Kili:

Lore Kessibuki [Personal Communication: Kessibuki, L. Interviews with Jack Niedenthal. 1987, 1988, 1990, 1991 (all in Marshallese)]

LORE KESSIBUKI: "Let me now explain a little about the history of Kili Island. The first foreigners to come to this part of the world were the Germans, and then afterwards, the Japanese came. During these times Kili was used as a prison island for people who misbehaved on Jabwor on Jaluit Atoll, which was one of the centers for the Marshall Islands. You could say that in those days Kili was considered, literally, a prison.

"Then came the Americans after World War II, and after moving us from Bikini so that they could test their bombs, they eventually moved the Bikinian people to Kili. We feel that Kili is like a prison because we can't sail to another island, or even take a long refreshing walk when life closes in on us. Many times even the ships refuse to stop and unload supplies for the island. There are many other things that simply cannot be done on Kili, because it is such a small island.

"The food we brought with us did not last very long. We again began to starve. This time, when we began to worry, we all blamed everything on the Americans. What could we do? The Americans moved us here, then they forgot about their responsibilities to us, and again we found ourselves starving. We were full of worry and near death. Their promises were once again not ringing true. And yet, through all of this, most of us remained hopeful that the Americans would come to our aid. Most of us clung desperately to the belief that the Americans would again be our saviors.

"In those early days on Kili we spent a lot of time contemplating and dreaming about our homeland. But negative feelings would always surge up in our beings telling us that we would never see our islands again. These thoughts made us realize that we may never again be able to pass on the valuable traditional skills necessary to sustain our lives on the outer islands. And, therefore, there was the possibility that our origins and our stories of Bikini might also be forgotten. These thoughts made living on Kili very depressing.

"The Americans gave us a boat to sail to Jaluit Atoll. That made us feel hopeful that we could eliminate some of the hunger problems that we were experiencing. Within a short time, however, the boat ran aground and sank because of high winds. We kept believing in our proverb that 'everything was in God's hands' and that one day God would help us return to our homelands. This was the only way we were able to alleviate our horrible feelings of fear and frustration when our minds were drifting and filled with questions: 'The Americans, when will they come? America, America, America--where are you?'"

Pero Joel, a Bikinian elder involved in the aborted return to Bikini in the 1970's, describes below his experience of living on his traditional though radioactive homeland for the first time in 25 years. Like most Marshallese people, the word Pero uses for radiation is the English word "poison." Pero died in September of 2002.

Pero Joel [Personal Communication: Joel, P. Interview with Jack Niedenthal. 1989 (in Marshallese)]

PERO JOEL "Once I had heard that the U.S. government was proclaiming that Bikini was safe and free from poison, I began to have overwhelming thoughts of joy. I immediately began requesting that they send a ship to pick up my family and I from Rongelap, where we were living at the time, so that we, too, could go to Bikini and get involved in the restoration. The ship finally did arrive and took us to Bikini where we began living in a house on the southern end of the island, in a town we called Lokwerkan, which the U.S. government had built for us.

"I worked on Eneu and Bikini planting crops, pulling weeds and in general, refurbishing the islands. I felt so happy, peaceful and proud--and why not? It was our land, our islands and we were content to be working and living there. We felt that we belonged on Bikini because it is the place that God had given us.

"During the cleanup, life on Bikini was not like these days where we worry about everything and find ourselves always bickering with each other. The only problems we encountered were due mainly to the fact that we had no reverend with us. But we really didn't have any worries until those scientists started talking about the island being poisoned again. You see, right before they began warning us about the coconuts, pandanus and the crabs being unsafe, the ships had started coming much more infrequently, and so we had to rely heavily on our local food.

"On Eneu we had gardens and on Bikini we drank coconuts and ate pandanus all the time. I was one of the people helping to make those gardens. We were told in the beginning of our stay on Bikini that it was safe to eat anything that we wanted, so we did. We had many kinds of foods, bananas and things like that. The scientists would come and explain a little about the radiation, but we were always under the impression that everything was safe and that we could go about our everyday business and not worry. I used to ask them a lot of questions like, 'How deep into the soil did the poison go?' When they would answer me they would say that it was about one-foot deep into the ground, but that it wasn't anything for us to worry about.

"Then the Americans started changing the rules on us. Before they had said that we shouldn't worry about the poison. Then they started saying that they weren't sure and that we shouldn't be drinking as many coconuts or eating coconut crabs, nor anything else that lived off the land, because maybe there was more poison in the soil than they had originally thought. I didn't understand this. It was if we were being told two totally conflicting rules that we had to follow at the exact same time: You know, 'Well, it is safe for you people to live on Bikini, but there still is enough poison on the island that you shouldn't eat more than one coconut per day.' These statements confused us. Earlier they told us to eat what we want, and then they told us to go easy on the local food. I couldn't explain this even to myself, how was I supposed to make sense of it when I told these things to my family when they began to ask me questions?

"Finally, the Americans and their scientists came back a few years later saying that we had to leave Bikini. They said we had ingested too much poison and that it wasn't safe to live on Bikini anymore. We didn't care at this point because we had already started to get that hopeless feeling again; though because we all wanted to stay on Bikini we did explore all possibilities in an attempt to find a way out of this problem. We kept thinking, 'The Americans first told us that it was safe to live here. Then they changed their minds and made some rules for us to follow. Now they are telling us to leave. Should we go?'

"We kept having meetings among ourselves that would last from sunup until sundown. We were so heartbroken that we didn't know what to do. But our islands were now again being declared poison. The Americans were telling us that we had to leave. We had to follow what they were saying because we really felt that we had no choice. If they say it is not safe to live there, we have to go, even though we hated departing from the islands where we had come to know peace and quiet for the first time in many years. We even asked them if we could stay on Eneu island and we formulated a plan among ourselves where we were going to try to live by the airport, but they said we would have to wait until they knew more about the poison before we could remain anywhere on Bikini Atoll. And so we followed their wishes because we knew we shouldn't go against what the Americans say. We were sad, but we didn't want to make a problem for the Americans. If they say move, we move.

"The ship was in the lagoon the night before our departure. While leaning on the railing of the ship I drifted back in my mind to when I was still on Rongelap and first heard they were going to allow us to return to Bikini. I could have swam the whole way from Rongelap to Bikini [125 miles] I was so happy. Now we were going away from our homeland again."

Another member of the aborted return to Bikini was Jukwa Jakeo, an outspoken elder who died in October of 1988. I can only say that while Jukwa in this interview states that he is an "uneducated man," I always found him to be very savvy, smart and articulate.

Before he died he would call me almost every day on the phone to talk about all kinds of issues--and he wouldn't let me hang up until he believed he understood what I was telling him. His interruptions of my workday just used to drive me nuts. It wasn't until he passed away that I actually started missing his calls, which was my loss and I still feel stupid for not taking advantage of our conversations like I should have. I think it is a sign of intelligence to admit you don't know something, and Jukwa had a way of making you feel that the universe might just be a lot bigger and more unfathomable than you ever imagined it to be.

To get ready for a future cleanup of their atoll, in April of 1987, a delegation of Bikinians went back to Bikini to reestablish the traditional land boundaries that run in a vertical fashion across the island from the lagoon to the ocean side. There were some media people with us at the time. Early one morning Jukwa had answered some questions from a reporter in a way that had piqued my curiosity, so much so that later I took my video camera and pulled Jukwa over to the shade of a big tree so I could talk to him, and record him, alone. He had this to say about being back on Bikini for the first time since the second exodus:

Jukwa Jakeo [Personal Communication: Jakeo, J. Interview with Jack Niedenthal. 1987 (in Marshallese)]:

JUKWA JAKEO "The thoughts that I have now, as I stand again on Bikini, are very similar to the thoughts I had back when we were moved here in the 1970's: Happiness. I have another feeling, however. It enters my mind as I stand here, and it confuses me very much. That is: Why did they move us off our islands back then, telling us that they were poison, but we are able to return and visit here today?

"I know we have come here to try to figure out the old boundary lines that divided our pieces of land. But when I stop to think about this task it is extremely difficult for me because I keep remembering all those conflicting statements and ideas that have been expressed about Bikini over the years since we were sent away by the Americans. Why are we setting boundaries on land that has already been declared unsafe?

"The technical difficulties that we experienced in our attempts to reestablish the boundaries stem from the fact that all the natural surroundings and markers that we used to delineate the land partitions are now gone. They were destroyed by the U.S. government and all of their atomic bomb testing. Today, when we draw the lines, we are using estimations only. We are guessing. This inability to be accurate makes it impossible for us to mark the boundaries as they were before the testing period. Age has robbed me of my ability to think. These other old men here are simply making guesses. We are old men and our bodies are now tired and sore from all this work. We have argued with each other and now our thoughts are all mixed up. We are so exhausted. The difficulties make me feel the happiness of our return less. It has been a long time from 1946 until now, more than 40 years that some of us have been gone from our homeland.

"I want now to speak about land and the reason we Marshallese treasure it so highly. The land we sit on now as we talk is like gold. The ground that you walk on, from time to time and from day to day, no matter where you are in the Marshall Islands, is also like gold. If you were Marshallese and you didn't have any land you would be considered a bum, a drifter or a beggar. But if you were an owner of vast amounts of land you would be considered a very rich and wealthy man. Land is the Marshallese form of gold. To all Marshallese; land is gold. If you were an owner of land you would be held up as a very important figure in our society. Without land you would be viewed as a person of no consequence. But land here on Bikini is now poison land. When I think of that as a consequence for my family members, it frustrates me. I apologize to them because I don't quite understand the depth of the situation here on Bikini. I am an uneducated man. I am Marshallese and I can't quite understand or tell what is safe and what is unsafe here. I can only have faith in the U.S. government. They have the responsibility for telling us what is good for us and what is dangerous. But for myself, my foresight and my knowledge concerning these radiation issues ends right here in front of my face. As I said this morning to those newsmen: 'I can't tell if these Americans who are working on this island are doing a poor job, or performing miracles of science. I am uneducated in these matters. I am unintelligent because I didn't go to school to study radiation science. So, I can only hope that the U.S. government will tell us the truth about Bikini, whether it is safe for us to live here now or in the future.'"

While maintaining the integrity and the corpus of their trust funds, it has been the goal of the Council to take care of their people--wherever they may be--and at the same time to continue to move forward towards the radiological cleanup, and ultimately, the resettlement of Bikini Atoll. Mayor Tomaki Juda and the now deceased Kilon Bauno reflect further on the future of the people of Bikini and their islands:

Mayor Tomaki Juda [Personal Communication: Juda, T. Interviews with Jack Niedenthal. 1987, 1988 (all in Marshallese)] :

"The American customs that we have adopted have changed some of the better Marshallese traditions of days gone past. Today we see, increasingly, that this way of life is steadily creeping--uncontrolled--into our society: Our cooperative traditions are eroding. Now, everything we do in our day to day lives involves competition. If you are not educated, you will be one of the poorest of people; if you have a car, and somebody wants to use it, they have to pay rent before they can drive off in it. This is the American way of life, and now we, the Bikinian people, fully understand how it works.

We have incorporated many American customs and practices into our own. After the negotiations were finalized between the U.S. government and the Marshall Islands, both countries considered this new relationship to be one of free association. This tie to the U.S. has further brought to our attention the American styles and ways of life because the money that they give us, and that we use daily, is the American dollar. We buy American goods, in fact, most of the products sold in our stores come from America. Rice, tea, coffee, flour sugar, Spam, cola, corned beef, automobiles, VCR's and television. Our children grow-up watching American movies. This causes our children, increasingly, to adopt the American value system and their customs as depicted on film. This phenomena greatly disturbs some of our elders who remember what our lives were like on Bikini. On the other hand, the new technology makes us more comfortable on this tiny island."

Kilon Bauno [Personal Communication: Bauno, K. Interviews with Jack Niedenthal. 1988, 1990 (all in Marshallese)]:

"I want my future to be one that has no troubled times. I want a calm, peaceful existence for us all. I don't want my people to suffer anymore in my own lifetime or thereafter: I just want things to go along nicely, and for our lives to be normal and without worry. Those events that we experienced many years ago were just horrible. I would hate to see my people drift into that painful state of affairs again.

We want the Americans to continue to take care of us, and we want them to be part of our future. When I think of the years and years that it will take to clean Bikini until the poison is totally eradicated and therefore safe for our children, I get extremely depressed. I will die long before this occurs. I know that I won't be able to be buried in what I believe should be my final resting place by our custom, on the land of my ancestors, on Bikini Island.

I hope that my children, grandchildren and great grandchildren will find only peace in their lives. I hope that the islands that they will have to live and survive on will be suitable for them. I want them to refurbish our lands and experience good, wholesome lives together...One can't really ask God for anything more than that."

The Cultural Journey
Further interviews with the people of Bikini with regard to their proud heritage, customs & history.

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