The American Touch in Micronesia

Nevin, David (1977). "The American Touch in Micronesia".

Abstract: Captain Cook (1728-79) wrote about them first. But little dependable up-to-date infor- mation on the island peoples of the Pacific and their problems has been available. These books fill the gap. Nevin, a former Life writer, focuses on the islands and atolls of Micro- nesia, occupied in turn by Spain, Germany, and Japan, and since 1947 administered as a UN Trust Territory by the United States. In- formed by extensive interviews with both Micronesians and American officials, he at- tributes the corruption and unrest troubling these strategically important dots on the map to fumbling U .S. neocolonialism. Trumbull, who long covered the South Pacific for the New York Times, credits the United States with successful educational programs in Micronesia but wonders if the artificially uni- fied "rusted Trust" has a political future. Trumbull's readable report ranges far beyond Micronesia. He covers nations as diverse as Papua New Guinea, which became independ- ent in 1973, and the tiny island Republic of Nauru, "acre for acre and body for body" the world's richest nation, but already well on its way to having 80 percent of its land area strip-mined for phosphate.

Nevin's dismay at what the Americans have wrought in Micronesia, "the last American colony," is great, and the volleys he directs against those who have exported the trappings of Western prosperity to a tradition-bound, shell-age culture hit hard at maladroit, misplaced idealism. Nevin, who originally went to the islands to survey education, found a people severed from tradition by American schooling and unable to integrate into a new world of economic opportunity because, quite simply, no jobs exist beyond the swollen government bureaucracy. Increasingly, Nevin recounts, trouble in paradise is evident in the same kind of social disintegration that afflicts Indians, Eskimos, and other people marooned between two cultures--drunkenness, violence, malnutrition have all arrived with the money economy. But in Micronesia the unreality" is all-pervasive because ""there is so little to develop"" in terms of economic infrastructure. Strategically important to US military control of the Pacific, Micronesia has always been administered to serve American interests; until the 1950s it simply stagnated. With the New Frontier's social idealism there came a vast -and vastly destructive- infusion of money. "All the change in Micronesia came from money," virtually none from evolution among the island peoples themselves. There are problems with Nevin's book- hopeful alternative policies are few, and, as he readily acknowledges, there is no going back to pristine subsistence-living. And Nevin himself seems to be of two minds on the question of whether economic development is possible even with more enlightened administration. But the focus on tho hopeless frustration produced by schools--every year graduating people with no working society to absorb them- is both shrewd and sensitive. It should inspire a depressing feeling of Déjà vu and heightened concern for a part of the world that does not normally impinge on anyone's consciousness.

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