Lessons Learned

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Lessons Learned

This is a peer reviewed contribution. Received: 16 Nov 2004; Accepted: 27 Dec 2004 (c) Micronesian Journal of the Humanities and Social Sciences ISSN 1449-7336

Letao Publishing, PO Box 3080, Albury NSW, Australia 45

MICRONESIAN JOURNAL OF THE HUMANITIES AND SOCIAL SCIENCES

Vol. 3, n§ 1-2 December 2004

LESSONS LEARNED: The Micronesian Quest for Independence in the Context of American Imperial History

Glenn Petersen

City University of New York

In the course of their efforts to bring an end to US trusteeship over their islands, Micronesian leaders looked to American colonial history for the lessons it might provide them. This article draws upon both contemporaneous documentary sources and more recent interviews with the leaders who negotiated with the US, describing and analyzing the specific historical cases and patterns upon which the Micronesians drew, and focuses in particular upon the land and land rightsproblems experienced by native Hawaiians and American Indians. The Micronesians' insistence upon full autonomy and sovereignty was grounded in their understandings of these historical lessons.

To anyone studying them closely, the Micronesians' negotiations to end American trusteeship over their islands seemed at the time to proceed agonizingly slowly. The process began in 1965 with the founding of the Congress of Micronesia and the convening of its committee on future political status. The beginnings of a respectable degree of selfgovernment came with the establishment of the Federated States of Micronesia (FSM), Republic of the Marshalls, and Republic of Belau governments in 1978, and autonomy can be dated to the implementation of the compacts of Free Association with the US in 1986.1 The United Nations Security Council voted to terminate the trusteeship agreement in 1990 and the General Assembly welcomed the FSM and the Marshalls as members in 1991; the Micronesian governments have dated their status as independent nation-states to that time.2 When we consider still festering political status questions in, for example, Puerto Rico and Guam, or the 60 years Hawaii remained a territory, the extraordinary fact that most Micronesians achieved independence, rather than closer political integration into the US, is matched by the speed with which it was accomplished. There are several reasons for this, perhaps the single most important being United Nations oversight. Another element of enormous significance, however, was the Micronesians' own consciousness not only of what sorts of political relationships with the US they would find acceptable, but of what arrangements they found unacceptable. This awareness of what they would not countenance rested in part upon their own indigenous notions of what constitutes good government, but also in good measure upon their grasp of American history in general and the history of American expansion in particular. In this article I first analyze relevant elements of that history, then report and discuss Micronesian leaders' recollections about the lessons they learned from it.

The Micronesian leaders who negotiated with the US had all experienced the ravages visited upon their islands by World War Two, as the Japanese resisted the American drive through the Micronesian islands, which lay along the key routes both to the Japanese homeland and to the reconquest of the Philippines. The great majority of them, moreover, shared common elements of an American education. But as peoples who had been subjected to the vagaries of four different colonial regimes within the course of 50 years, their interpretations of American history differed significantly from those responsible for providing them that education. While most Americans have great difficulty perceiving their country as a colonizing power, or themselves as colonialists, this perspective is not so alien to those whom Americans have deprived of their lands or of sovereignty over their lands.

In particular, this essay seeks to preserve Micronesians' perspectives on the relevance of American history as they struggled to regain a real and substantial measure of autonomy over their homelands. After decades of research in Micronesia, I began working in Puerto Rico, in an effort to compare its political status processes with those of Micronesia. In 1996 I returned once more to the FSM and interviewed many of the surviving leaders who had negotiated the Compact of Free Association with the US, and worked my way systematically through the FSM archives, studying the records of the political status process. My research in Puerto Rico persuaded me that the Micronesians' achievement of independence had been relatively expeditious. I was also convinced that many Micronesians understood that in other American territories the longer the peoples have been under American rule, the more difficult it has become for them to choose to end it. Although I found that this awareness did indeed play a role in Micronesians' outlooks, I also discovered that a far more significant factor was their leaders' common experience as students in Hawaii, where they saw first-hand what had happened to Pacific islanders who lost their lands to Americans. That experience, coupled with knowledge of American territorial expansion and the decolonization efforts of other Pacific islands, convinced them that their best hope for survival as a people lay in establishing a firm but distant relationship with the US.

Ivan Musicant's Empire by Default, a centennial account of the Spanish-American War, describes "an American empire, acquired almost by default" (1998:655). Only his lack of historical reflection allows Musicant to claim that this episode demonstrates a sudden awakening of America's interest in world affairs and "an acceptance of America's newfound overseas responsibilities" (1998:34). Likewise, he is fundamentally wrong when he refers to the United States' "attempt to construct an empire, but one that differed from the colonial chattels of the European powers-an altruistic export of American politics, ideals, and morality" (1998:656). More to the point, in The Edge of Paradise, an account of "America in Micronesia," P.F. Kluge speaks of "America's accidental presence in Pacific" (1991:234). In point of fact, the US had been engaged in empire building from the earliest days of the republic and both its practices and its rhetoric largely matched, and often exceeded, that of the European imperial powers. To suggest otherwise is to deny the reasons for the struggles of those who have sought-some successfully, some not yet so happily-to put an end to American rule over their lands.

Continued Lessons Learned Pg 2