Land Issues in Chuuk

Francis X. Hezel, S.J. Micronesian Counselor #16 (October, 1994)

The Changing Value of Land

The traditional Chuukese attitude towards land was that it was "our strength, our life, our hope for the future." People parted with land as unwillingly as they would lose an arm or a leg; land was seen as inseparable from the family. The family was rooted in the land, and that's where its future lay. It was the source of livelihood in a day when people depended upon the land for food, housing, medicine and everything else. Land, incidentally, should also be understood to include the offshore flats (nonno) and reef or fishing areas.

The land ownership patterns and family groupings--the lineage especially--were shaped to fit one another. In a real sense, the family kin group was formed by its relationship to the land. People and families in some parts of Micronesia took their names from the land. Although this was not true in Chuuk, it is clear that the family and its land were very closely related. The history of the land was an integral part of the family history.

The social and economic changes in recent decade, which have modified this intimate traditional relationship between family and land, have altered the way Chuukese regard land. These changes are many; they include formal education, a Western political system, the court system, and rapid modernization. Probably the most fundamental and far-reaching change is the introduction of the money economy. By this is meant the growing reliance on money to support themselves. For some people, especially government employees living in town, money is the main source of support; and even those in the subsistence sector depend much more heavily on money and store-bought goods than ever before.

Money has altered the shape of the family, as we have seen in previous conferences. The spread of the money economy has been responsible for the fragmentation of the lineage grouping into household units--what can be called quasi-nuclear families. The result is that today the lineage seldom functions as the main economic unit, as it used to in the past. These changes seem to have accelerated during the 1960s as money became available in greater amounts to more people through the great increase in government jobs and other wage employment.

If the shape of the family has changed in Chuuk, we can not be surprised that the relationship of the family to land has also changed. There have been changes in the way land is acquired, passed on to others, and used today. Many of the problems related to land that were discussed in this conference are outgrowths of these changes.

Continued Traditional Land Ownership