Chuuk: Caricature of An Island

Francis X. Hezel, SJ

Reprinted from Micronesian Seminar Historical Articles 2003

Life in the Plastic Bubble

At my first arrival in Chuuk, in late September 1963, I was blind to the place and the people. The island held little interest for me except insofar as it was the setting for Xavier High School, the Jesuit secondary school to which I was assigned for the next three years. I was a young Jesuit scholastic en route to the priesthood, twenty-fours year old, fresh out of philosophy studies with a Master's degree in classical languages, but without any experience of the world beyond New York State. I had entered the Jesuits seven years earlier, partly because of their reputation as a teaching order, and I was eager to begin my teaching ministry, although I had no idea what to expect from the Micronesians who would be my students.

High school teaching, I soon discovered, was everything that I had hoped it would be-challenging and creative work that put me in touch with young men who for the next few years would be my closest friends. They were my life during the next three years. I taught them, prefected their study hall and dining room, led physical fitness for them every afternoon, played basketball and baseball with them, and accompanied them, whenever I could, on walks downtown on Sunday mornings to watch, perched on crude wooden benches, whatever movies were being offered that week in the rusting Navy surplus quonset hut that served as the local movie theater. Usually we were treated to Japanese samurai movies of ancient vintage with English subtitles, although now and then my friends were forced to suffer through an offering that Americans might consider a classic: "Northwest Passage," "Odd Man Out," or "A Place in the Sun," for example.

Our students at Xavier came from nearly every part of the Trust Territory with the exception of Kosrae, still an impregnable Protestant fortress in those days, but I found myself drawn to Palauans more than the others. With their competitive drive, their determination not to be outshone by others in their class, Palauans seemed to be motivated by values that I could well understand. In my classroom encounters with Palauan students, I occasionally encountered stiff resistance. A Palauan sophomore whom I had scolded in class reacted angrily, so I had him kneel in the front of the classroom. When he retaliated by ostentatiously spitting on the floor, I threw him out of class, admiring his spunk despite myself. An escalation of hostilities of this sort would have been all but unthinkable in students from other island groups, especially from Chuukese.

By contrast with Palauans, Chuukese seemed unfathomable. While they were the most obliging of people, I could only guess where they stood on the simplest of matters. A Chuukese student who came in to see me might sit mute in the chair until I asked him how he was doing. I would be obliged to pursue a line of questioning in order to extract from him the reason he had come to see me in the first place. If I showed the slightest inclination toward having him do something, he would nod his full agreement, even if I was sure that he preferred to take a very different course of action. I found it impossible to penetrate into the heads and hearts of these mysterious people. How was I to take the measure of these people when the harder I pushed, the more they seemed to yield?

"Dreaded Hogoleu"

Chuuk, still known as Truk in those days, is situated in the center of what was then the Trust Territory of the Pacific, a trusteeship administered by the United States until its eventual independence in 1986. Although the most populous of the six island groups that made up the Trust Territory, Chuuk had a land area of just under 50 square miles, small in comparison with the other groups. The heart of the group was a cluster of small volcanic islands enclosed by a single barrier reef of 130 miles circumference. The formation, sometimes termed an "almost atoll," was unusual in the Pacific-as if frozen halfway between the status of a high, volcanic island and a coral atoll. Together with a number of coral atolls scattered around it, and with which it is linked linguistically and culturally, Chuuk today comprises one of the four states of the Federated States of Micronesia (FSM). Its present population is about 54,000, slightly over half the total population of the nation.

For reasons too numerous and complex to go into here, Chuuk has come to be regarded, at least by those who have never lived there, as the sinkhole of Micronesia. Notwithstanding the preeminent role that a handful of its key leaders played in the long journey towards national independence, Chuuk is often looked upon as the home of the hapless, a backward place inhabited by bumblers and worse. In reality Chuuk is the poorest of the island groups in terms of per capita income and most other measures, but it has also gained a notoriety, deserved or not, for administrative incompetence and mismanagement of funds. Although its youth problems are no worse than anywhere else, its young men have acquired a reputation for belligerence and drunken mayhem that is unparalleled in the region. This same reputation now seems to extend to Guam, where Chuukese have been settling in large numbers since the late 1980s. When some young man wraps his car around a power pole on Guam, local residents assume that he must be Chuukese. If anything anywhere goes amiss, it is expected that Chuuk is where it will happen.

Chuuk's poor reputation is not of recent minting, it would seem. In the mid-nineteenth century Nautical Magazine and some of the more prominent sailing directories carried warnings that the island group was "dangerous to seamen" (Hezel 1973: 64-66). The Mortlockese, atoll dwellers 200 miles south east of Chuuk, were represented as rather urbane, inasmuch as they spoke a few words of Spanish and enjoyed Western delicacies like biscuits, preserves and Madeira, while Chuuk was generally reviled as a place best avoided. Part of the explanation might lie in the appearance of the people found there. Chuukese men, as caught in photographs during the early 20th century, had a fierce visage: stern and unsmiling, almost angry-looking, with earlobes slit and hung with coconut shell rings, hair piled at the top of the head, a wooden comb emerging at a menacing angle. (See, for instance, the photo in Hezel 1995: 69). They did not conform very well to the image of the playful native, that innocent child of nature, that captains and crews who had been months at sea might have hoped to meet when they dropped anchor at a Pacific island.

The first known encounter of Westerners with the people of Chuuk, which occurred at the visit of Alfonso de Arellano's San Lucas in 1565, concluded in a hostile display. Canoes from nearby islands bore down on the Spanish vessel as it was preparing to anchor, alarming the captain and compelling him to make for the pass in the reef. As the San Lucas sailed by, the warriors in the canoes hurled their spears at the ship without causing any harm. Arellano, however, was not as fortunate when he put in at Pulap, a coral atoll 200 miles west of Chuuk and now part of Chuuk State. There two of his men who went ashore to fetch wood and water were clubbed to death in full sight of the crew. (Hezel 1973: 52-53)

After Chuuk finally made it onto Western maps two and a half centuries later, its engagements with Europeans and Americans were no more violent than in most other parts of Micronesia. There were occasional outbursts of violence between Chuukese and foreigners, but there seems to have been little loss of life. The attacks on ships and the slaughter of their crews that occurred at times in Palau, Kosrae, Pohnpei, and especially in the Marshalls, were unknown in Chuuk. Nonetheless, Chuuk acquired a reputation for violence, out of all proportion to its frequency, that eclipsed whatever notoriety its neighboring islands had won. Don Luis de Torres, a Spanish official on Guam who had contact with canoe voyagers from the central Carolines, cautioned the commander of a French naval expedition that Chuuk's reputation among its fellow islanders was no better than among foreign seamen. "The natives of Truk have a bad reputation even among their own compatriots," he remarked (Dumont d"Urville: 1843: 174). From such warnings as these more than actual hostile encounters with foreign ships was fashioned the sobriquet "dreaded Hogoleu" (Hezel 1973: 66) that was attached to the island group in the nineteenth century.

Continued - Chuuk Caricature 2