Marshall Islands: Marshall Islands Legends and Stories, ed Daniel A Kelin

I'm catching up - I have been reading but not posting, so this and the following two reviews are for books I read in 2019 but didn't post until 2020.

Daniel A Kelin lives in Hawaii (the United States) but travelled around the Marshall Islands, a scattered collection of tiny islands and archipelagos, collecting these stories. Unlike the traditional tales I've read from other Pacific nations, gods do not seem to feature in these stories, but there are plenty of supernatural beings , especially demons, and the trickster figure Letao. The sense of humour of the native story tellers is reflected in the frequent ending of the Letao stories - "he went to America, that's why the people there are so smart."

I did wonder whether there exist tales of gods which were not revealed to the editor, as it appears there may have been some cultural restrictions on telling the traditional stories to an outsider. However, most of the story tellers appeared to appreciate the necessity to have the stories recorded in order to preserve them, as the young people of the islands adopt a more Western way of life, and the old oral culture passes away.

I enjoyed these stories, more so than the ones I read from Nauru, as there appeared to be a greater variety. Since they were collected more recently, there are more reflections of modern culture in the stories, although they appear to be still largely traditional.

It seems timely that I came across a news story about the islands just a few days ago. They have been passed around various western nations before gaining their sovereignty - in World War 1 they were a Japanese territory and in 1944 they were taken over by the United States, which used them as a site for testing nuclear weapons.(Most notably, on Bikini Atoll.) It seems that the giant dome built to contain radioactive waste is leaking, contaminating the Enewetak lagoon and thus the food supply of the islanders. Nowhere else in the world has the US dumped so much of its nuclear waste on another country.

Hopefully the problem can be dealt with, and the life of the islanders can continue, including the passing on of their unique culture as expressed in these stories.

Marshall Islands Legends and Stories was published by Bess Press (Honolulu, Hawaii) in 2003.