THE MARSHALLESE IN SPRINGDALE, ARKANSAS
No longer can I stay; it's true.
No longer can I live in peace and harmony.
No longer can I rest on my sleeping mat and pillow
Because of my island and the life I once knew there.
The thought is overwhelming
Rendering me helpless and in great despair.
My spirit leaves, drifting around and far away
Where it becomes caught in a current of immense power -
And only then do I find tranquility.
-Bikinian Anthem, Lore Kessibuki (1914-1994)
In 2016, I began documenting the story of the Marshallese diaspora and its people in Springdale, Arkansas, which has become the largest community of Marshallese in the United States.
Specifically, I focused on the traumatic history of the Bikinians, a community of about 5,000+ Pacific Islanders, whose homeland in the Bikini Atoll remains radioactive and uninhabited due to years of deadly US nuclear testing. The Bikinians have lived in exile on the islands of Kili and Ejit in the Marshall Islands for 70 years. Currently, there are only a few remaining Bikinians out of the original 167 who were asked to leave their homeland in 1946 by the US military.
The relatively recent emigration to the United States entails yet another significant move away from their ancestral homeland. Their migration was motivated by the ability to live, work, and study in the United States according to the Compact of Free Association. However, as a new immigrant and historically exploited community, the Marshallese American livelihood remains entwined with blue collar work in the poultry industry of Northwest Arkansas.
Pre and post covid-19 pandemic, the struggles and daily lives of both the Bikinian and general Marshallese population offer a complicated look into what it means to be a part of American society. Beyond the typical photojournalistic mode of doomsaying, the honest and enduring question for me is “What does it look like to succeed in America when you’re Bikinian or Marshallese?”
This decision to both pursue and publish this particular work on the Marshallese arrives at a time when their community urgently needs national attention in the deadly aftermath of the pandemic. It also coincides with a personal choice in seeing the merits of looking at an adjacent and related ethnic experience to foster empathy and understand who we are as Americans in this new administration and era.
To that end, I saw the use of printing on banana fibre paper to be a visual way connecting my own heritage with the Marshallese experience in that it is a crop endemic to both the Marshall Islands and the Philippines.
To learn more about how you can engage with this particular Marshallese community, please reach out to the Arkansas Coalition of Marshallese.
PRESS
-The Washington Post