US still prevails in conqueror role

importantly in the United Nations Trusteeship Agreement which, since 1947, has provided the basic terms of America’s control of Micronesia.

The role of liberator was reflected in the economic and social goals of the agreement, in its provisions for the education and well-being of the people of Micronesia and, most im portantly, in its specification that Micronesia be brought to the point where our people would themselves determine an appropriate new political status: “self-government or independence”.

The role of conqueror, however, was reflected in the designation of Micronesia as a strategic trusteeship, in the proviso that enabled the United States to alienate and to fortify our islands and to veto any change in our political status which challenged the control it won during the war.

America’s roles as a conqueror and liberator have often clashed and, when this has happened—at Kwajalein, at Eniwetok and Bikini, in the year-to-year freedom of the trusteeship agreement, and even in our recent status negotiations with American representatives—the role of conqueror has always prevailed.

Whether America will ever be able to sort out and reconcile such a diversity of interests, such cross purposes, remains to be seen, al though I am sure they have my best wishes, and the best wishes of Micro nesia, in this undertaking.

Meanwhile, however, we Micro nesians who have lived under the trusteeship and who now are wit nesses to its finale have our own diversity of interests, our own cross purposes, to sort out and to recon cile.

Like most Micronesian legislators who now find themselves across a negotiating table from United States representatives, I am a product of the American period in Micronesia.

In my generation and in myself I can find evidence of the various aspects of the United States trusteeship—and of the tension and turmoil that result from the conflict between the best and the worst that America has accomplished in our islands and in ourselves.

I suspect that the best aspect of the American period was the ad ministering authority’s willingness to educate Micronesians. To be sure, the educational system they brought to our islands was often ill-suited to Micronesia. Many early textbooks and programmes and teachers came no closer to the reality of Pacific life

than California. But there was never any question about America’s basic willingness to fully educate Micro nesians.

Unlike the Japanese, who generally offered nothing more than a grade school education and some highly circumscribed vocational training, the United States determined to educate at least some Micronesians as far as it was possible for them to go.

They sent us to regional high schools, to colleges abroad, and kept us there.

And there—not on the playing fields of Eton but in the Trust Territory dormitories in Guam and Hawaii— Micronesia’s battle for a new political status was begun.

It was there that we learned the familiar lessons of unity, democracy, sovereignty and self-government, the lessons which generations of Ameri can students have absorbed and taken for granted, the lessons which—upon our return to our home islands, to the crowded district centres, to the equally crowded government offices —we found could not be satisfied in Micronesia. Our expectations could not be fulfilled: not in a strategic trusteeship, not in a United States territory, not by an administrator who uneasily alternated between his role as conqueror and his role as liberator.

Now I come, as all of us who re turned home came, to the worst aspects of the American trusteeship.

We quickly found that the options we had believed were open to us were actually foreclosed. They were fore closed not only by the terms of the trusteeship. They were also fore closed by the economy that was then developing in Micronesia, an economy which already was racing away from the self-sufficient, subsistence economy of our fathers to a system in which imported goods, some of them necessary, many of them trivial, were making inroads on Micronesian life.

We were witnessing the birth of an economy which would soon be—and today now is—thoroughly dependent on imported goods, contracted skills, and annual outside aid. It was not a pleasant process to contemplate and the most troublesome thing about it was we were its products, we were its educated imports. In Micronesia, the life of our fathers was being lost and the ideals of their sons could not be realised.

There may be a way out of the predicament I have just described. I believe that we are beginning to dis cover it.

I am not sure that, at first, I