Micronesian colonists settled in the Marshall Islands some 2,000 to 4,000 years ago, said April Brown, a history professor at Northwest Arkansas Community College and president of the Marshallese Education Initiative. The group recently offered a class on Marshallese culture and language for area teachers.
"They made it on their own -- with their own technology -- before the West came in," Brown said. Missionaries from Boston arrived in the islands in 1857.
The Germans held a protectorate in the late 1800s, and the Japanese took control in World War I.
"The Japanese improved the infrastructure of the Islands but were brutal to the Marshall Islanders during World War II," Brown said. "But the Marshallese people have forgiven them."
"In the 1940s, the U.S. took control of the Pacific," Nia Aitaoto, co-director of the Center for Pacific Islander Health in Fayetteville, continued the story. After World War II, the United States tested its nuclear weapons capability in the Bikini Atolls of the Marshall Islands, resettling some natives in environments different from those they had known for generations. "The French did the same thing in Polynesia. It was not just one area of the Pacific," Aitaoto said.
"The vegetation and fish were killed for generations (after the bomb tests)," said Aitaoto. "It took a long time to heal the land to grow."
"People before would eat what was healthy," said Anita Iban, a Marshallese community liaison for the Springdale Public Schools. "Then they ate all that canned stuff, frozen meat and frozen chicken, when they were used to fresh fish out of the water."
A U.S. Navy survey in the early days of occupation found no diabetes and no hypertension among the people living on the islands, Aitaoto said. But to counter food shortages, the military introduced canned goods, white flour and sugar in the form of candy to the Islanders' diets.
Today, the Compact of Free Association with the United States gives the States sole responsibility for international defense of the Marshall Islands, and it allows islanders to live and work in the United States and establishes economic and technical aid programs.
NW Business on 03/26/2017