An Introduction

In June 2006, I attended a Majuro Chamber of Commerce luncheon in the capital of the Republic of the Marshall Islands (RMI). The purpose of the meeting was for officials from the RMI Ministry of Education (MOE) to answer questions from the general public, and from the Chamber of Commerce specifically. After an hour and a half of standard introductions followed by a barrage of pre-circulated questions about the poor performance of schools in the RMI prepared by the Chamber president, the meeting was opened to the public. Nearing the end of the meeting, I asked a question. The transcript of my question, as well as the response from the Minister of Education at the time, follows:

Question from the floor. David Kupferman, CMI [College of the Marshall Islands]. Education has always occurred in the Marshall Islands. What we are talking about today is the schools. What do you want from the schools?

A. Wilfred Kendall, Minister of Education, read the MOE Mission Statement in answer to this question. (Majuro Chamber of Commerce 2006)

What one should immediately notice, besides the awkward construction prefacing my question, is the brevity and emptiness of the Minister’s response. I should add that there was no further discussion on this point; clearly the Minister’s oral recitation of the MOE’s mission statement was taken to answer my bothersome question: what is the purpose of schooling in this context? And why is schooling as a practice assumed, rather than questioned?

In the spirit of full disclosure, and to complete the image for the reader, I provide here the full text of the MOE mission statement:

We aim to educate and prepare all students to be independent, literate and successful, reach their greatest potential, be critical thinkers and problem- solvers, and be culturally and globally competent and responsive. We are committed to developing effective partnerships with parents and the community, placing qualified teachers in all schools, creating safe and conducive learning environments, and equipping our schools with vital learning resources. (Ministry of Education 2007a, p. 6, original underlining)

One is hard-pressed to place the cultural, social, or geographic context to which this mission statement refers. Is this Majuro or Michigan? What does it mean to “educate and prepare all students”? Prepare them for what? How does Marshallese society define a child’s “greatest potential”? What does it mean to be “critical thinkers and problem-solvers”? Are critical thinking and problem-solving the same in Marshallese culture as they are, say, in the predominantly white, upper-middle class suburb of Chicago where I was raised? And what does it mean for anyone to be “globally competent”? Competent at what?

By way of comparison, let us consider the following section of the preface to the Education in Palau handbook written for American teachers new to the islands in 1963:

The educational aim of the Palau District Education Department is to build a truly integrated Palauan educational system, which will prepare Palauan children to live more successfully in their own communities as moral, educated, and responsible citizens, at the same time, trying to prepare them for their responsibilities to, and in the world community. (Ramarui 1963, p. 1)

Here we can see the parallels in schooling as preparation for citizenship, both at the community as well as the global levels, in addition to the basic purpose of “educating” students. Again, we are left to wonder what it is, exactly, children are expected to be educated in and for, how “education” relates to either the Marshallese or Palauan context, what it means to “live more successfully,” and why such education can only occur through the mechanism of school provided for by the state.

Such examples of the ways in which “education” is spoken about, and by extension meant and defined, in fact are ubiquitous and can be found in a variety of geographical and institutional contexts. In the summer of 2009, in one instance, the Kosrae State Department of Education held an “Educational Awareness” conference geared to public school teachers and the community at large; the tag line, to be found everywhere from the banners announcing the conference to the t-shirts later worn by participants, declared the purpose of the conference: “Everything for the Child.” The implications embedded in such an event include the assumptions that the Kosraean community is simply not “aware” of education or its “benefits”; that Kosraean teachers and parents do not, presently, do “everything for the child” (an arrogant and surprisingly not uncommon supposition often pronounced by proponents—usually foreign consultants—of “education” in this formulation); and that the path to dedicating “everything for the child” lies through an adherence to the principles and values inherent in formal state-sponsored “education” and “educational awareness.”

What each of these examples demonstrates, in a word, is a normalization of school and schooling in the islands of Micronesia that looks unsurprisingly like the American models upon which they are based. Here the normalization of the discourse and practices of school is the process by which one is required to employ a particular vocabulary in order to engage in the conversation; that is, there is one “normal” way to speak of school, a way that is non-contingent, uncontestable, and precludes and forecloses on alternative considerations of how and when one speaks of school or schooling. Moreover, such an approach suggests that school, and by extension the problematic term “education,” is somehow an ontological experience that is universal, essentializable, and coincidentally American. In other words, the proper way, and indeed the only way, to “educate” Micronesians is by employing American (i.e., “universal”) schooling habits and practices. Furthermore, since the Palauan example above was written more than four decades before our Marshallese and Kosraean illustrations, it seems reasonable to conclude that this process of normalizing school in the region is not new, yet at the same time it is nonetheless relatively recent.

What is most troubling about this normalization process is that it forecloses on any alternative discourses regarding education; that is, nowhere in the examples above is there a consideration of Marshallese, Palauan, or Kosraean processes of education from an autochthonous perspective or arising in context. The only way to engage in conversation about education and schooling is to assume school, and consequently to assume that school is, again, the right way to educate Islanders. However, as I will argue, schooling as it is currently configured in Micronesia is a fairly recent phenomenon (beginning with the advent of the American colonial period after World War II and culminating in the exportation to the islands Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society programs of the mid-1960s) and is therefore not a concept that is indigenous to the islands nor necessarily compatible with island contexts. But the largely uncritical normalization of school and schooling is indeed unmistakable. The questions I am ultimately trying to answer with this project, then, are how schooling has been normalized in Micronesia; what the effects of that normalization process are; and what, if any, alternative discourses on education exist or can be considered? In Foucaultian terms, what were the conditions of possibility that led the Minister of Education to dismiss my question with a largely irrelevant answer, and why was his answer acceptable and reasonable to the luncheon audience?

An Ocean of Discourse: Schooling in Micronesia and Beyond

This study, in its attempt to consider the process of normalizing school and its effects in Micronesia using a Foucaultian power-knowledge analytic, is the first of its kind. Nowhere in the literature on Micronesian schooling (and, I would also argue, on the issue of Pacific schools) is there a philosophical counter-reading of the purpose of school and its effects. That is, there is yet to emerge an analysis of school and schooling in the islands that employs a methodology (or methodologies) in order to consider alternatives to school, either as a practice, an institution, or a system; in other words, we are still waiting, in the terms of Peters and Burbules (2004), for a “philosophical corrective to the confidence with which mainstream theorists allow these concepts or terms [such as truth, objectivity, and progress] to remain unexamined and unreconstructed in face of the demise of epistemological foundationalism” (p. 4). Instead, schooling is assumed; that is, school in Micronesia is given as an ontological, self-evident phenomenon, one that is acontextualized, dehistoricized, and depoliticized. The questions being asked in the extant literature focus on how to “improve” or “indigenize” school, which I maintain are the wrong questions; the discussion would be better served by asking a more fundamental question: why have school in the first place?

As a result of the rather narrow focus of studies on school in Micronesia, the discourse is largely concerned with a restricted understanding of schooling employing a limited vocabulary (usually involving public policy buzzwords such as “curriculum,” “reform,” “parent involvement,” “no child left behind,” etc.). Certainly the largest repository on school “research” in Micronesia is provided by Pacific Resources for Education and Learning (PREL), a quasi-governmental non-profit consultancy based in Honolulu. Popularly considered the “experts” in Micronesian schooling, assisted in no small part by their diffusion of offices throughout the region as well as a Board of Directors that includes nearly every minister and director of education of each of Micronesia’s island states, PREL dominates the discourse on schooling through a variety of projects using qualitative and quantitative methodologies, thereby making educational research in the area “scientific.” While a comprehensive listing of PREL reports (or perhaps better yet its “archive”) is beyond the scope of this book (and perhaps unnecessary for the purposes of the project), two examples, both from Kosrae, should suffice. In the first example, Kawakami (1995) employs a conventional qualitative research methodology to determine how best to improve school performance of “at-risk” youth in Kosrae. (It is interesting to note that this is one of a number of almost identical studies; one need simply replace one island name with another.) While the application of the term “at-risk” is problematic in itself in this context, what is more troubling is the set of conclusions and recommendations based on the analysis of surveys distributed to teachers and parents in the island. Here the study reports that “Schools, communities, and parents should work together to give consistent messages about the value of education” (p. 19); the “value” of education here is undefined, and therefore assumed to contain a universalism that may have nothing to do with the social context of Kosrae. (Later in the study Kawakami goes on to remind the people of Kosrae that “‘It takes a whole village to raise a child’” (p. 20), a rather condescending point to make to an island made up of village communities who probably have a better grasp of a village’s responsibilities than such an “expert” does.)

In the second study, Low et al. (2002) employ a research model, “The Teaching Learning Cycle,” to direct teachers in a village school in Kosrae to improve “literacy” among students. Here, again, the lexicon of educational expertise is problematic, as “literacy” serves to delineate a narrow and specific meaning: that is, written communication skills in English, achieved through a linear, cause-and-effect teaching strategy. In this way, PREL’s approach uses a model of the scientific method in which western notions of schooling and the application of Enlightenment research methodologies are both assumed and necessary. This rather conventional way to speak about schooling is embedded in “the very Enlightenment norms that education research typically prides itself on: ‘truth,’ ‘objectivity,’ and ‘progress’” (Peters and Burbules 2004, p. 4). Thus “literacy” among Kosraean students is reduced to an empirical problem that can be “solved” or “fixed” by applying some western problem-solving through experimentation, what Baez and Boyles (2009) critique as the “culture of science” in educational research.

A major limit to this scientific approach, however, is that such methods fail to recognize that empiricism “contains a conception of the ‘thing’ as a datum cut off from the temporal processes responsible for producing it in its intimate connection with the human practices it represents” (Carver and Chambers 2012, p. 21). Thus PREL’s study not only controls the ways in which schooling can be talked about, but it also forecloses on any alternative discourses on the subject. What is missing entirely from both these (and virtually all other) PREL reports on Kosrae is the role of the church, which dominates the island’s society. While Michalchik (2000) offers a useful analysis of knowledgeability in church, at home, and in school (in fact her study is the only one I have encountered suggesting that western ­schooling may be contextually inappropriate in the case of Kosrae, although her conclusions are much more tentative than what I am proposing), it is disconcerting that the literature produced by PREL could overlook such an indispensible facet of Kosraean society. By doing so, such studies not only foreclose on alternate ways of thinking about education in an island context, but negate discourses on the island itself.

Widely quoted among PREL reports, and an archive unto himself through Micronesian Seminar since 1972, Francis Hezel is also widely seen as an educational “expert” in the region. As Hanlon (2006) has noted, “Hezel’s influence on Micronesian studies is formidable. He is consulted and his work cited by almost every expatriate government official, educator, researcher, and development specialist” (p. 203). This project is no exception, except that my purposes for citing Hezel’s work are intended to offer a critique of his analyses, rather than simply to quote him at face value. Running throughout Hezel’s work is a commitment to the modernization and development of Micronesia, which he argues can best be accomplished through the schools. This approach betrays a teleological faith in western development models; in Hezel’s (1975) words, “Education has always had a ‘civilizing’ function throughout history” (p. 126), suggesting that educations have a common purpose and that schools in Micronesia are no exception, while implying simultaneously that Micronesian societies prior to the advent of western modes of schooling were neither educated nor civilized. While, like in the case of PREL’s archive, it is not necessary (or perhaps even possible) to conduct a discursive analysis of every article written by Hezel on the topic, it is useful to consider at least one more example that demonstrates the prevailing argument about schooling in Micronesia as a self-evident, and self-evidently beneficial, part of island society. Here Hezel (1989) remarks “Education, although originally a foreign artifact and one that was used quite deliberately to colonize the [I]slanders and induce them to change their ways and accept the ‘blessings of civilization,’ has now become a cherished part of Micronesian life” (p. 29). This analysis is complemented by (and perhaps based on) an earlier work by Carl Heine (1974), a Marshall Islander who wrote that “as a Micronesian, I am colonized” (p. xi), and then goes on to say “The Americans may someday leave Micronesia, but they will long be remembered, for despite all their shortcomings in governing Micronesia, they made possible a new phenomenon in Micronesia, the ‘liberation of the mind’” (p. 93). Thus the normalization of school is inherently a good thing, one that is apparently, and uncritically, clamored for by the Islanders themselves.

Making a different argument, yet arriving at a similar conclusion, is a common theme in the works of Nevin (1977), Flinn (1992), Peacock (1993), and Heine (2002), in which the transformative character of formal schooling in Micronesia is openly acknowledged and critiqued as having a negative effect on “traditional” society—yet the conclusion is not to reconsider the contextual or epistemic processes embedded in such modes of schooling in the first place, but rather to “improve” or “reform” school. In this way, the notion of school as an institution is again normalized through an uncritical acceptance of schooling as a natural and universal part of any society. Thus Nevin (1977) writes “it is the cruelest irony that it is education itself which exacerbates their [Micronesians’] blind hopes, as year by year it trains their children away from the old culture and toward an ambiguous academic form that is supposed to be consistent” (p. 148), only to conclude that the answer lies in “giv[ing] them some training, some guidance, and a co-op structure…and they could accomplish things. Why not build a school that would put such instruction on a systematic basis?” (p. 182). We see here that it is not school that is the problem; it is the way instruction is delivered.

Likewise a similar intellectual sleight of hand is evident in Peacock’s (1993) analysis of Palauan school instruction in the 1950s, in which “students had weekly fishing trips, under the supervision of elder Palauan fishermen” (p. 11). In the next paragraph, however, Peacock contends, “The various languages and cultures of Micronesia called for locally created curriculum. The greatest problem in elementary education was the lack of well-educated teachers” (p. 12). Implicit here is that Palauan fishermen are not “well-educated teachers” as defined in a narrow, western sense; the answer to this dilemma therefore lies not in re-conceptualizing the need for school, but rather in how to credentialize (that is, prepare “well-educated”) teachers so that, in this case, traditional fishing techniques can be taught in a school setting. This line of reasoning is a bit like an old joke from the Catskills in which two elderly folks are in line at a lunch buffet and the first person declares “The food here is terrible,” to which the second person responds “And such small portions.” Applied to our study of schooling, one can offer a similar joke in which western schooling is admittedly a powerful force for change, including the possible loss of “traditional culture”—and if only Micronesians could be better at it.

A pair of rather dated critiques of the American model of schooling, while making the case that school as it is configured in Micronesia is flawed at best, still has its own problematic analyses to contend with. In the case of Gladwin (1970), an attempt is made to consider the logic of navigators from Puluwat Atoll in Chuuk State within a comparative framework of poverty and “at risk” education in the US. Tied closely to this approach is Gladwin’s use of development discourse that links the poverty of minority groups in the US with the Chuukese, thereby defining the Islanders as “poor” within the terms of western material wealth; this “poverty” is then extended to explain cognitive differences between Chuukese sailors and “successful” western students, specifically as it relates to the lack of heuristics (in Gladwin’s words, “innovative problem-solving”) in the development of the navigators’ intellect. Perhaps the most frank critique of American influence in the region comes from Gale (1979), although his focus is framed within the lens of public policy analysis and his conclusions regarding school in Micronesia are limited to a lamentation on the increasing numbers of American teachers arriving annually in the islands. Taking issue with reports such as those by Gale, Gladwin, and Nevin (although not by name), Ramarui (1979) offers a roundabout critique of the critiques of schooling in Micronesia, concluding that the American model of school in Micronesia must be defended. Here he echoes Heine’s (1974) earlier assessment of American school as “liberating the mind” while simultaneously advocating for school as an indispensible element of “development” in the region, without considering either the power relations operationalized by such “liberation” or “development” nor the effects of applying such a model of schooling to island contexts.

Broadening our scope, schooling in the wider Pacific has more recently been the focus of “indigenizing” school curricula and assessment practices, but without questioning the appropriateness of western models of schooling in the first place. Again, the vocabulary employed in such a discourse is inherently limited and narrow, forcing one to enter into the conversation by considering such things as “curriculum” and “assessment” and how they can become more “culturally appropriate,” which in turn forecloses on alternatives that allow for more fundamental questions, such as why have this type of schooling at all. Among the studies produced by scholars on this topic writing almost exclusively from Fiji and Aotearoa/New Zealand (Bishop and Glynn 1999; Pene et al. 2002; Thaman 2003a, b; Nabobo-Baba 2006), a short essay by Heine (2002), writing of the Marshall Islands, begins: “The debate about quality and relevancy of Pacific education is rooted in the belief that what we have in practice is not our own making. At the same time, we must take responsibility for its successes and failures” (p. 84). In other words, while the foreign nature of institutionalized school is recognized, though not questioned, it needs to become, in Heine’s case, more “Marshallese”—and the way to accomplish that is by taking aspects of “traditional” Marshallese culture and adding them to the school curriculum (this trend has come to be known in Majuro as “Majolizing” the curriculum, a phenomenon recently championed by the Marshall Islands Ministry of Education). Elsewhere, Thaman (2003a) argues for including “aspects of indigenous education into course curricula” (p. 11). This approach amounts to a type of cultural “window-dressing,” requiring that island cultures be forced to fit a prescribed western model of school rather than meaningfully re-conceptualizing education so as to develop alternatives that allow for the context to shape the educational needs and forms of a particular community. In short, the imperative of school becomes continually normalized through a newfound sense of cultural “ownership” of the institution.

While this trend is lamented by Teaiwa (2006) when she states “Incorporating the Pacific into preexisting frames of knowing is not a new practice” (p. 74), what is being called for here is a shift in the functioning of the institution of school; nowhere is the argument made that alternatives to the institution may in fact exist. Thus the focus of the luncheon in Majuro is on providing free lunch to students, as that is what will allow them to improve test scores—and so long as we are asking the wrong questions, as Pynchon (1973) says, the answers are superfluous. This project therefore intends to ask the right questions, perhaps for the first time.

Decolonizing the Postcolonial Position

Complicating the present work is a number of notions, both political and philosophical, which need to be addressed at the outset. First among them is the issue of who gets to speak in a work on Micronesia, the islands and their Islanders, and how even this basic concern is tangled up in the complexity of the twin concepts of postcoloniality and decolonization. To begin, then, we should start with the latter obstacle and what we mean when we use such loaded language, and then consider the limits of conventional approaches through what is called positionality in Pacific Studies.

Hulme (1995) writes “‘postcolonial’ is (or should be) a descriptive, not an evaluative term” (p. 120). In Pacific Studies, it seems, the notion that we are researching and writing in a time of postcoloniality suggests that our methodologies should reflect that particular temporal condition (that we are operating in a space and time after colonization) and that our processes of research and reporting ought to be “decolonized” as well. Smith (1999), in titling her seminal work Decolonizing Methodologies, contributes to this focus of Pacific Studies as employing a post-colonial (that is, after colonization) perspective, and in doing so has offered a blueprint of sorts for scholars working within Pacific Studies and conducting qualitative research. Here the thrust of Smith’s argument is that research has been done to Pacific Islanders, and now, in a time of the post-colonial, more legitimate research is that which is conducted by and for Pacific Islanders; the assumption embedded in this line of thinking is one of native authenticity as a sign of merit or worth, as well as one of temporal certitude. Yet the period of the “post-colonial” is not easily defined as simply “a condition that is automatically and for all time assumed once a formal colonial status has been left behind” (Hulme, p. 121); rather, the postcolonial (without the hyphen) describes a process that is dynamic in its disentanglement from the colonial, one that is by no means complete in the Pacific, nor even assured. As Loomba (2005) observes, “if uprooted from specific locations, ‘postcoloniality’ cannot be meaningfully investigated, and, instead, the term begins to obscure the very relations of domination that it seeks to uncover” (p. 22). To “decolonize” methodologies in Pacific Studies, then, assumes even greater importance if one is to consider that the development of the postcolonial is in no way complete, acontextual, or even inevitable.

I need to take a moment here to briefly note Mignolo’s (2011) distinction between decolonizing and postcoloniality. Whereas the “postcolonial” emerges out of the language and vocabulary of postmodernism, the act of “decolonizing” or “decolonial thinking” comes before the postmodern, and is evident in a variety of moments in time, not the least of which can be found during the colonial period. As Mignolo states, decoloniality and postcoloniality act “as complementary trajectories with similar goals of social transformation” (p. xxvi); in this way he is marking out important territory for decolonial thinking, one that affords “options” rather than “alternatives.” While I agree with much of Mignolo’s argument here, I do not think his dismissing of alternatives is particularly helpful in that his critique is limited to “alternative modernities” or “alternative development.” What I am calling for in my push for alternative conditions of being is not reimagining modernity, development, or schooling, but rather alternatives predicated on the notion that a universal epistemic field of knowledge and reality does not actually exist—there are operationalizations of what is termed “real” or “truth,” but I do not take those as my starting point. Here I am trying to push beyond pre-existing frames of knowledge, as I think Mignolo is, such that, if one tries to “reform” or “indigenize” school, as we have already seen above, “You lose the match before starting the game” (Mignolo 2011, p. xxix). It should also be noted that the notion of a universal decoloniality or postcoloniality is in of itself mistaken; since, as no two colonial experiences are identical, neither are decoloniality or postcoloniality. Indeed, Mignolo is writing from Latin America, a context that shares few, if any, similarities with the context of the Pacific, and specifically Micronesia—and to search for similitudes among their many forms would seem to accept a universalizing notion of epistemic modernity that flies in the face of what I read as Mignolo’s call for “decolonial thinking.” For our purposes, then, let us acknowledge Mignolo’s decolonial/postcolonial distinction without presuming either that the terms represent a universal, acontextualized experience or that it is a matter of either/or; we should, and shall, consider both contextually and simultaneously.

To return then to Smith (1999), the picture one gets of research in Pacific Studies is somewhat less nuanced; her focus on “indigenous researchers” is simultaneously intended to bestow an essentialized value on the native researcher while (perhaps unintentionally) limiting the prospects for legitimate “decolonizing” research and thinking on the part of non-native researchers. (I will return to this latter idea in the next section below.) For our purposes, it is useful at this point to consider an example from Micronesia that employs Smith’s approach, namely Heine’s (2004) dissertation on student success stories of Marshallese immigrants in the US. Using a qualitative methodology, and employing Smith’s framework of the native researcher going out into the field of one’s own community, Heine explores why some Marshallese students do better in school than others. Since Heine is herself Marshallese, and the interviews and surveys were conducted in the Marshallese language, we can bestow an air of authority on the mediation of Heine’s results. What are considered only cursorily, however, are the larger issues of why Marshallese would move to the US in the first place, and how the US-Marshallese relationship is reflective of colonial patterns of political, economic, and intellectual governance; in this way, Heine assumes the structures of power circulating through western modes of formal schooling as self-evident and non-contingent. The problematic in this instance is placed squarely at the feet of the Marshallese she is researching, rather than in the system of schooling that reinforces the narrative of colonization. Thus, there is little, if any, consideration of the postcolonial as it is understood as a process rather than as a temporal marker. So does Heine’s use of “decolonized methodologies” necessarily make this a postcolonial or decolonizing work? In other words, is all that is required summed up by the indigeneity of the researcher without taking into account the broader objectives of the research itself or the epistemic systems in which they operate?

One possible response to these questions is to consider the purpose of decolonizing academic work: to give voice to the previously voiceless. Certainly in the work of Smith (1999), Heine (2004), and others, the level of mediation of Islander voices is softened somewhat by the ability of Islander researchers to communicate in the vernacular, as well as to adhere to particular customs and protocols better than someone unfamiliar with that community. Other examples within the emerging writings on Micronesia by Micronesians include Hattori’s (2004) historical analysis of the effects of US Naval health policies and practices on the Chamorro population on Guam, as well as Diaz’s (2000) call to “re-collect” histories of Guam from the Islanders themselves. Yet what sets these types of works apart from one that employs a so-called “decolonized” methodology such as Heine’s is the intention of the research to contribute to the process of decolonizing; that is, while Heine is concerned with assessing “what works” for Marshallese in US schools, thereby trying to figure out how to get Marshall Islanders to succeed according to the agendas and contexts of the colonizing entity (the US), Hattori and Diaz are more interested in privileging Chamorro voices by dispelling popular myths of US Naval benevolence or the idea that Chamorros have no history before the advent of colonization and Christianity, respectively. Put another way, the former study results in the rationalization of particular structures of colonial power, while the latter examples attempt to explode the colonial narrative by shining a light on what has been displaced by colonization.

What is more, beyond simply “giving voice” to those who historically have not been privileged to speak, a decolonizing approach to Pacific Studies, and one that seems to be emerging recently in writings on Micronesia, is one that treats culture not as a static state of being, one that is “traditional” or needs to be “preserved,” but rather as a mutable, contested space. Perhaps the most compelling recent example of this approach to addressing issues of culture and custom comes from the poetry of Kihleng (2008), who employs Pohnpeian vernacular as a way to express key local concepts. Interestingly, her poem “My Urohs,” also the title of her collection, is the only piece in which she does not give detailed translations of Pohnpeian terms and phrases; it is also arguably the most effective poem because it is not bogged down in translation. Here she writes of the hand-sewn flower-print dress ubiquitous in Pohnpei and other parts of Micronesia as a living, vibrant element of local custom, important for its present utility rather than as a signifier of some past relic that needs to be resurrected. This notion of giving voice through cultural expression is all the more potent in that Kihleng is not afraid to let her use of Pohnpeian stand on its own, suggesting that there are some things that are not transposable into either the English language or western frames of knowing and expressing. Indeed, here we see one way in which the process of a decolonizing approach speaks to the complexities of the “postcolonial” present.

At this point I draw on Hanlon’s (1992) explanation of Tambiah’s (1990) “edge of commensurability” where, “At this edge, cross-cultural comparisons, translation, and interpretation become increasingly problematic” (Hanlon 1992, p. 109). It is at this “edge” that Kihleng’s poem does not need to include full translations in order to signify the presence of culture as operating in quotidian Pohnpeian experiences. Culture and custom in these instances do not need to be “reinvented” or “remembered”—they are already embedded in the contexts of their communities.

Indeed, the idea of decolonizing methodologies in Pacific Studies should mean more than asserting a native authenticity on the part of the researcher by virtue of her/his birth or ethnicity; rather, decolonizing research should consider the ways in which native authenticity emerges from the practice of giving voice to and utilizing custom as an ever-present characteristic of the process of postcoloniality. That is, rather than “resurrect” custom or “go back” to the way things were before colonization (implying, incorrectly, that things were somehow simpler before westerners showed up), research should deploy custom as a valid set of knowledges, one that may or may not be compatible with existing western lenses of analysis and evaluation.

For the purposes of the present work, I am most interested in the ways in which these local knowledges can be utilized in the service of self-determination; in other words, how can cultural practices and knowledges that are already in operation open up alternative conditions of possibility for what we mean by “education” in Micronesia and who gets to speak as an “expert” or “teacher”? While my work does not likely qualify as contributing to “decolonizing methodologies” according to Smith (1999), since, among other things, I am not conducting a qualitative study and I am not in a position to provide native authenticity as a non-native researcher, I argue that reconceptualizing the ways in which we consider the reasons for giving voice to extant customary practices in fact contributes to the development of a decolonizing approach that recognizes the descriptive (rather than evaluative) temporality of the postcolonial as an on-going process rather than as a fixed and perfected condition. It is my intention to open a space in which we can privilege an alterity of customary practices through a disassembling of school in Micronesia, whether or not the existing structures of formal schooling—or even normalized epistemic structures—recognize it as such: not for the purposes of finding ways to fit culture to the technology of western schooling and hope Micronesians get better at it, but rather to suggest ways in which custom and culture can be deployed in order to open up what constitutes conditions of possibility for “education.” (This idea is explored in Chap. 7.) Decolonized research in this sense does not treat culture and custom as simply a hurdle that is navigated better by a native researcher; instead, such research treats culture and custom as organic, complex, and authentic elements of an ongoing exploration of the descriptive postcolonial and processes of decolonization.

Repositioning the Binary

Intimately linked to decolonization of methodologies in Pacific Studies is the role of positionality as one engages in research in the region. As is the case with much of qualitative research, one’s position in relation to the work being done is central to the trustworthiness of the conclusions drawn; and while issues of positionality loom over more disciplines than just Pacific Studies, for our purposes we should limit our discussion to the context at hand. Wesley-Smith (1995) traces the emergence of this debate over authority of voice and positionality to what he calls the “empowerment rationale,” which manifested itself in Pacific Islands Studies during the period of political decolonization in the region in the 1960s and 1970s. In this way, one’s positionality as an indigenous researcher lends an air of empowerment to one’s research if, in an age of political decolonization, one also participates in a form of intellectual decolonization. Here research is no longer simply something carried out by representatives of the colonizing entities, but rather an action of academic emancipation for the communities being studied as well as the researchers who are part of that community.

In its simplest and most reductionist form, however, positionality hinges on an inverted binary: one is either an insider and comes from the community being researched, and therefore has a right to speak; or one is an outsider, and therefore does not “understand” the community being researched. In an age of decolonization, the argument follows, it is better to be an insider (or as close to an insider as is possible) than an outsider, for in the time of colonization, the binary precluded insiders and privileged outsiders. One unintended outcome of this reductionist approach to the empowerment rationale and matters of positionality has been what Teaiwa (2010) asserts is “the lack of honest indigenous analysis….that indigeneity becomes a catch-phrase or war cry for ownership of knowledge and resources that can block critical investigation—even by indigenous people” (p. 117). In other words, research in this sense is worthy only if an indigenous scholar conducted the research, regardless of the quality of the work. Used in this way, the binary of positionality becomes a sort of “disempowerment” rationale, both intellectually as well as politically, for those who do not qualify as “insiders,” since “binary oppositions always support a hierarchy or economy of value that operates by subordinating one term to another” (Peters and Burbules 2004, p. 19).

It is also important to note, however, that this approach emerged during a particular historical period, during the political decolonization of the 1960s and 1970s, when the empowerment rationale manifested itself as both a political and intellectual response to what was seen at the time as the urgency to erase all vestiges of colonization. This binary approach to positionality and the consequent misappropriation of the empowerment rationale has driven much of the debate over what kinds of research are or are not legitimate within the realm of Pacific Studies. (Indeed, to get a taste of just how viscerally personal and emotional this debate can get, one need look no further than the Trask-Keesing debate in the early 1990s: see Keesing 1989, 1991; Trask 1991). Nonetheless, as the development of Pacific Studies has exposed the complexities of decolonization and postcoloniality over the past five decades, the limitations of an essentialized positionality have lingered, and continue to inform the issue of who can speak in Pacific Studies. Thus, Thaman (2003a) sums up her critique of western approaches to qualitative research when she writes “your way/objective/analytic/always doubting/…my way/subjective/gut-feeling like/always sure” (pp. 3–4). Picking up on the notion of subjectivity and “gut-feelings,” Hereniko (2000) goes so far in his analysis of native versus non-native researchers working in Rotuma as to assert that “there are certain matters, largely to do with intuition, emotion, and sensibility, that the outsider may never fully grasp, for these are things in the realm of the unseen, acquired through early socialization in the formative years, and perhaps inherent in the Rotuman gene pool” (p. 90). Here Hereniko is willing to suggest that what makes one an Islander is attained not only by one’s social context, but also as a matter of eugenics; this problematic attempt to essentialize “native-ness,” and by extension non-native-ness, offers little for the non-native researcher (and, I might add, the native researcher), as one’s right to speak in this case is determined not by what one has to say, but rather by virtue of one’s DNA. And to return momentarily to Smith (1999), we see that she ends her introduction by asserting “The book is written primarily to help ourselves” (p. 17). We might then ask, if one pardons the awkward grammatical structure of the question, who is “ourselves” (or, rather, “we”)? Here Mignolo (2011) comes to Smith’s defense, arguing

it would also be possible to object that the use of the first-person-plural pronoun‘we’ denounces an essentialist conception of being Maori or that ‘we’ indeed is not a tenable stanza at the time when postmodernist theories really ended with the idea of a coherent and homogenous subject, be it individual or collective. It could, indeed, be said. But….It would not be convenient for Maori, Aymara, or Ghanian philosophers or for Indians from Calcutta, who are modern/colonial subjects and would rather have ‘our modernity’ than listen to vanguard postmodern critics or Western experts on developing underdeveloped countries. (p. 138)

And so we return to the issue of identity, ironically in a way that seems to negate Mignolo’s earlier call for an epistemic delinking from modernity and “alternatives” when he refers to Smith’s “our modernity.” Rather than delinking and decolonizing thinking in this case, Mignolo reverts to an inversion of difference predicated not on his “options” but rather his pre-existing “alternatives.”

Or, as Hall (1996) puts it, “If post-colonial time is the time after colonialism, and colonialism is defined in terms of the binary division between the colonisers and the colonised, why is post-colonial time also a time of difference?” (p. 242, original emphases). As issues of positionality arise out of the debate over what constitutes “decolonizing” research, they also lead to a series of uncomfortable questions: whose voice is allowed to speak? Can a non-indigenous researcher produce work that is worthwhile? Where is the line drawn regarding who is or isn’t an “insider” or “outsider”? And who determines one’s place in this binary? Indeed, while I agree with Mignolo that the people who make up a community ought to write their own agendas and exercise social and political sovereignty, what of those who do not fit neatly into either the indigenous/non-indigenous categories? There are no satisfactory answers to these questions from a pure rationale of positionality, but they do expose the rapid way in which the certitude, emerging as it does from western scientific “truths,” that undergirds such qualitative typologies falls apart. Perhaps it is a matter of complicating such “us/them” categorizations and dis/qualifications.

These questions of positionality therefore suggest a limited and narrow strategy with which to unpack the larger concerns of methodological and intellectual decolonization. Positionality in this case tends to result in a rather simple formula in which one either is or is not allowed to speak by virtue of her/his place within the insider/outsider binary (in this case whether one is or is not an “Islander.”) Instead, one’s position is often much more nuanced and complex, and is not an attribute that is easily reducible to either/or conceptions. It is my contention, then, that “positionality” is too limited in its scope, as it is understood and employed in both Pacific Studies and writings on Micronesia. The rather limited binary of insider/outsider, as well as the cumbersome and generally unhelpful typologies evident in qualitative research (such as indigenous-insider, indigenous-outsider, external-insider, and external-outsider) which try to add differing degrees to emic and etic perspectives but result in the selfsame binary, focus too much attention on what the researcher is rather than on where and when it is from which s/he is speaking. Indeed, the implication of the binary of positionality is that one position is “better” than another (it is “better” to be an indigenous-insider than an external-outsider, for instance), and that the quality of one’s research is reflective of one’s positionality; in this way, like the misuses of “postcolonial,” “positionality” is manifest as an evaluative, rather than a descriptive, term.

The Temporality of De-positionality: Locus of Enunciation

Foucault (1984) once wrote “I wish I could have slipped surreptitiously into this discourse which I must present today, and into the ones I shall have to give here, perhaps for many years to come. I should have preferred to be enveloped by speech, and carried away well beyond all possible beginnings, rather than have to begin it myself” (p. 108). Indeed, in many ways I wish that I, too, were able to simply join in this conversation as it was already progressing, rather than to have to be the one to initiate it. However, it is important to note that this project is very much a product of a particular perspective and of a particular moment in time, one that is informed primarily by my locus of enunciation.

Here I should offer a brief but vital distinction between what I mean by a locus of enunciation and the foregoing critique of positionality above. One of the great limitations (and challenges) of determining one’s positionality is that the term assumes a fixed essence: one is an insider or outsider; a participant or an observer; or some permutation of static categories (such as an insider-participant or a participant-observer or an outsider-participant-observer—you get the idea). Positionality, constructed in this way, allows little room for movement: one either is an Islander or is not an Islander, and the legitimacy of one’s argument is colored by one’s standing. In short, positionality in this way acts as a pre-existing condition.

One’s locus of enunciation, by contrast, is defined by both where and when one speaks; that is, locus of enunciation concerns itself less with what someone is and more with the time and place from which they are speaking. Mignolo (1995) explains that

Scholarly discourses (as well as other types of discourse) acquire their meaning on the grounds of their relation to the subject matter as well as their relation to an audience, a context of description (the context chosen to make the past event or object meaningful), and the locus of enunciation from which one ‘speaks’ and, by speaking, contributes to changing or maintaining systems of values and beliefs. (p. 5, original emphasis)

Locus of enunciation thus focuses on the twin components of narrative and temporality, and the reason for entering the discourse in this way is to acknowledge both that “understanding the past cannot be detached from speaking the present” (Mignolo 1995, p. 6) and that there is no such thing as a neutral discourse. For our present purposes we will focus on temporality first, and address the narrative aspects below.

With this type of orientation in mind, when one writes is nearly as important as what one has to say (and certainly as important as what one represents). Instead of asking a question about my positionality (what am I?), the attendant locus of enunciation question might be: when am I? While I have mentioned the complexity—and pitfalls—of a chronological rendering of the term postcolonial above, it is useful to remind ourselves that such a term, according to Hulme (1995), should be descriptive rather than evaluative, and critical rather than temporal. Yet here I am attempting to make a particular argument about power-knowledge in a moment during which the sovereignty model of power dominates the field of Pacific Studies, and specifically scholarship concerning school/ing in Micronesia; and indeed this sovereignty model of power operates in such a way as to assume that colonization in the greater Pacific (and Micronesia) is somehow over and in the past (more on power in Chap. 2). In this way my use of the term “postcolonial” is intended to articulate, at the time in which I am making this argument, its critical and descriptive functions, and not as a temporal marker—for while the sovereignty model works on the assumption that the “post” in postcolonial designates that the time of colonization has passed, in truth the effects of colonization still readily circulate through, among other things, the technology of school in the islands. I am therefore writing as part of Hulme’s (1995) “process of disengagement from the whole colonial syndrome” (p. 120, original emphasis), rather than in a time when the observation is made that colonization has ceased to exist (when it has not).

My locus of enunciation, then, fully embraces what Fuentes (1982) calls “the multiplicity of time” (p. 72), in that I acknowledge the various ways in which my own perspectival lens is shaped by, and reflective of, the peculiar moment in which I as a writer mingle with you the reader, as well as with the array of perspectives my argument is informed by, clashes with, or complements. Thus, at the time of this writing I approach the notion of the postcolonial largely in concert with particular poststructural strategies and I take issue with other strategies that rely on particular conceptions of positionality as exclusive (and in extreme cases exclusionary). It is in this way that we can appreciate what Fuentes (1982) meant when he said “Societies are healthy when they accept that history and language are an unfinished business—our unfinished business—and bring questions and skepticism to bear on that unsatisfaction” (p. 73, original emphasis). In other words, whether I am a colonizer or a post-colonial, from the standpoint of positionality, is largely irrelevant; what matters for my locus of enunciation is a recognition of the complexity of the overlapping layers of colonial practice in a postcolonial moment. And while I myself have not experienced colonization as an Islander, the time in which I am writing, that temporal aspect of my locus of enunciation, allows me to see how it works—the “unfinished business” of colonization—in the time of the postcolonial.

Narrator as Narrative

But enough about that; let’s talk about me. For, when one speaks of a locus of enunciation, one must also take into account the place from where one speaks. Viewed in another way, exploring one’s locus of enunciation is an exercise in the construction and narrativization of the self. Indeed, The distinction between positionality and locus of enunciation lies in the opportunities afforded by either one to move and speak according to one’s descriptive locale, spatially, temporally, and perspectivally. Thus, while both positionality and locus of enunciation can ask the question “who am I to write this?”, the answer in the case of the former would necessarily entail the application of fixed essences and categories, while the latter allows for the production of the self through a plurality of narratives. Deleuze (in Foucault 1977) addresses this latter approach by asking and answering “Who speaks and acts? It is always a multiplicity, even within the person who speaks and acts” (p. 206). My locus of enunciation in this sense acts as a sort of de-positionality, and this project is thereby the convergence of the multiplicity of narratives that inform my own subjectivity and identity.

Let us then begin with the obvious: I am a white, Jewish, middle-class male from an upper-middle class neighborhood north of Chicago. If this were the extent of the narrative, the reader might be left with the impression that I am unconnected from any meaningful interaction with the topic of this dissertation; in other words, why would a white guy (a pair of labels which undergird the stereotypical rendering of the imperialist in the Pacific) be interested in school in Micronesia? Or perhaps the reader would move in a slightly different direction, and focus on the connection between my citizenship and the colonial relationship between America and Micronesia; or again, less patiently, one might ask what right I have to speak on this topic. Thankfully, that is not the end of the narrative, and so these static identifiers have little bearing on either my locus of enunciation or my intellectual project; thus, turning to Riley (2000), “which self-description is to count as broadly societal, or which is to be assessed as a private quirk or an idiosyncratic characteristic, depends largely on the intensity of its potential ‘politicisation’ in play at any one moment” (p. 7). I am, in a narrow sense, a colonizer if one is to think in terms of the “potential ‘politicisation’” of my whiteness and maleness operating in a time of the so-called post-colonial (with an intentional, and temporal, hyphen). But again, this dismissal of my self-construction arises in a particular way, specifically if one is fixated on fixed categories of positionality, and “my identity (if I am forced to locate such an object at all) may turn out to be not as much a matter of what it is, but of where it is” (Riley 2000, p. 10)—and like our contention above that the temporality of one’s locus of enunciation is concerned more with when one is than what one is, we can similarly assert that the place from which one speaks carries more import than what one is.

All of this is not to deny that I am the beneficiary of discrete operationalizations of power circulating through either American or Micronesian contexts; certainly my entry into Micronesia as a so-called “teacher” has been facilitated by the history, and continuous production of, a decidedly colonial construction of identity in the islands. Indeed, it seems odd to me to invert my own encounter with the region: I arrived in Saipan as a 22-year old college graduate, and within a week of arriving landed a job teaching high school algebra and geometry. (Fittingly, my undergraduate degree is in history and politics and government.) My only other post-college work experience had been a stint immediately prior in South Korea teaching English (again, a subject I am woefully unequipped to teach). Taking into consideration the fact that no 22-year old Chamorro from Saipan with less than a year of work experience, let alone teaching English (or Chamorro) in South Korea, could ever show up in Winnetka, Illinois, and land a job teaching any subject at New Trier High School (my alma mater so often and appropriately disparaged for its embodiment of white advantage), I would be remiss not to acknowledge that I come from a place of privilege (whether intentionally and of my design or not).

Yet that place of privilege is compounded by an intimate association with Micronesia that would develop upon my second foray into the islands, this time in my early 30s in the Marshall Islands at the college level and by way of parenthood (my daughters’ family on their mother’s side comes from Kosrae, and they can therefore also lay claim to an island heritage). This immediate engagement with Micronesia, or at least parts of it, has profoundly impacted my locus of enunciation. Whereas while in Saipan I was relatively free to come and go as I pleased (I could, if I had wanted, leave and never return), in this place and at this point (specifically Majuro while I am writing this) I can choose to leave my residence in the islands, but I cannot leave my connection vis-à-vis my daughters and wife. From a viewpoint of positionality, I would probably be classified as some sort of outsider-participant; but from a standpoint of the narrative of my locus of enunciation, I am now inextricably linked, personally as well as professionally, with these islands. This is not to suggest that I am somehow “going native,” nor do I claim to be “an Islander” as other foreigners living in the region repeatedly, and indelicately, refer to themselves. I will never be “Kosraean,” as that is not part of my narrative; but my daughters and wife are, and they are most definitely part of the ongoing construction of my narrative self.

My locus of enunciation and the place from which I currently speak are both persistently informed by my professional and intellectual narratives as well. Above I refer to myself as a “teacher” in Saipan using quotation marks; the punctuation in this case is not meant to be entirely facetious, although it is meant to convey a certain amount of doubt on the certainty of the implications of such a word. While in Saipan I was a “teacher” in the American sense: that is, I taught an American curriculum to students who, although Islanders (mostly Chamorro and Carolinian, although there were students from other Micronesian islands as well, and Japan and Korea), were for the most part all American citizens preparing to attend college in the United States. Beyond the tropes of paradisiacal island beaches, warm weather, and coconut trees, there was little I did professionally to interact at all with any kind of “Islander” orientation. Again, though, I was barely into my 20s and I was the beneficiary of the structures of power that afforded me a certain amount of undeserved privilege; concepts such as colonization and self-determination did not inform my world-view.

The notion of “teaching,” however, played a pivotal role in my next steps, as I initially left the education profession, and Saipan, and returned to the mainland US to try my hand at something a little more concrete (quite literally—I spent the next 2 years attempting to learn the carpentry trade by building concrete forms for commercial buildings in downtown Chicago). After my stint in “the real world,” however, I returned to the classroom both as a student and as a teacher, this time in New Mexico. My master’s degree is in the education of at-risk youth, and I spent 4 years teaching 8th graders history in a fairly conventional manner. At some point I decided to try my hand at returning to the islands, this time as a “qualified” teacher (that is, with a degree and license in hand), and wound up at the College of the Marshall Islands as an instructor in the education department.

And so it was there and then, first as an education instructor, then as the chair of the education department (a title conferred upon me 72 h after my arrival in Majuro due largely to a departmental process of self-elimination), then as an academic administrator and dean (again, positions for which I was largely unqualified in terms of the academy) during the college’s accreditation “crisis,” that I began to see things in a different light. Mignolo (1995) asserts, “the need to speak the present originates at the same time from a research program that needs to debunk, refurbish, or celebrate previous disciplinary findings, and from the subject’s nondisciplinary (gender, class, race, nation) confrontation with social urgencies” (p. 6). Thus, as the college struggled to retain its accreditation status under the auspices of the Western Association of Schools and Colleges (WASC), the regional body that oversees junior and community colleges in California, Hawai‘i, and the “American-affiliated Pacific” (a nice euphemism for largely colonial relationships between the US and American Samoa, the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands, the Federated States of Micronesia, Guam, the Marshall Islands, and Palau), I was thrust into a position to help “save” the college. (While I have elsewhere considered the effects of accreditation, suffice it to say that the college needs to remain accredited by WASC in order to retain access to US Pell grant funding which makes up a large portion of the institution’s operating budget; see Kupferman 2008.) It was through this process of struggling to retain accreditation that I saw laid out before me a system of colonization pervading all levels of the institution, and leaking out into the rest of the community. My question to the minister which began this chapter is but one of myriad examples that opened my eyes to the ways in which western “education,” which was presented in the islands as somehow universal, non-contingent, and normalized, and in which I had a professional degree and years of experience (to say nothing of the fact that I was raised in the context of such a system), actively worked, and continues to work, to displace and marginalize local conceptions of education, self-determination, and social sustainability.

My locus of enunciation, then, is largely constructed from a self-narrative of dispersal, rather than unification. There is any number of elements, personal, professional, intellectual, which inform from where and when I speak. There are no solidarities or certitudes of origin or perspective that inform so much of conventional positionality. As Spivak (1990) says, “I can’t fully construct a position that is different from the one I am in” (p. 68); indeed, I am not an insider, outsider, or insider-outsider, because I am not in any of those positions. As complex (and perhaps disappointing to some) as this assertion is, the fact of the matter is that I am neither a colonizer nor the colonized (nor anything in between, if such a space is possible). Rather, I am speaking in a time of postcolonial discourse to professional circumstances that are influenced daily by my most personal of interactions. This locus of enunciation, this space-time from which I speak, is effected by my own narrative as well as that of the islands in which I live and work; in turn, my intellectual project is both a product of and productive of those narratives. In short, what I say in this book is dependent upon where and when I am writing from. To attempt to insinuate some other agenda or some other narrative, or to attempt to enclose my argument in terms of the binaries of positionality, ignores the magnitude of the spatial and temporal aspects of my locus of enunciation, and consequently ignores both the narrator and the narrative.

Inconvenient Implications: “The Intellectual” and the University

One’s locus of enunciation, it should be apparent by now, is not intended to provide an outline of personal and intellectual consistency or solidity, nor is the act of describing it meant to confer upon it any sort of infallibility; indeed, quite the opposite is true, as the more one considers her/his locus of enunciation, the clearer it becomes just how complex and constantly shifting it is. As such, the locus of the intellectual is, on the surface at least, always at odds with the very institutional structures of power that allow one to lay claim to the descriptor of “intellectual”; in other words, how does one reconcile engaging in a critique of the very institution that not only produces that individual but sustains and develops her/him? Here I am speaking of my relationship with American-style higher education, within which I am implicated: as an employee (at the time of this writing) of the College of the Marshall Islands (CMI).

The relationship of the university to the intellectual is certainly one that has vexed poststructuralists, working in the same milieu, at least enough to consider the implications of being so implicated. Foucault (1977), speaking about the role of the intellectual within the university, and that of the university on the intellectual, in the aftermath of the student riots in France in 1968, admits “It has always been a problem for someone like me, someone who has been teaching for a long time, to decide if I should act outside or inside the university” (p. 223). He then proceeds to follow up his point with a series of questions, none of which he answers. Elsewhere, Spivak (1990) speaks of “safety in locating myself completely within my workplace” (p. 3), and later goes on to suggest, “I don’t think there is an extra-institutional space” (p. 5). For my part, I am initially unsatisfied with either approach, hoping as I do for some statement of clarity with which I can shine a light upon my own locus in this context: it seems insufficient merely to name the problem, as Foucault does, and at least as problematic to embrace institutional space as somehow all-encompassing, as Spivak suggests.

Upon greater deliberation, however, I simultaneously acknowledge the importance of both stances while desiring to go further. My purpose here is informed perhaps most importantly by a second implication acting upon my locus of enunciation, professionally as well as ethically, in that I currently hold a curious, if not suspect, title at CMI: coordinator of Marshallese Studies. I say curious (and suspect) because, firstly, I do not hold any sort of degree or qualification in the field of Marshallese Studies (we will put aside for a moment that no such area credential exists anywhere); and secondly, because, in the absence of such a qualification, I am not (even) Marshallese. As a matter of fact, I was offered the position as a compromise to my return to CMI after a 2-year hiatus to complete my PhD coursework at the University of Hawai‘i—I left CMI in August of 2007 after having spent 2 years as the academic dean (a position I held for reasons which we dare not digress into here), and, having no interest in returning to mid-level management or to the obvious complicity of institutional power structures embodied in administration, I opted for a faculty position. Yet, with no regular faculty positions vacant, and at the urging of the accrediting commission, the president of CMI at the time (also an American) created my current post by fiat; his justification for appointing me as the Marshallese Studies coordinator was summed up in his mistaken assumption that I was earning a PhD in Pacific Islands Studies (in fact, I completed a certificate in Pacific Islands Studies)—and once again, we will put aside the problematic yet non-essential digression of why it was that the college had partially invested in my pursuit of a doctorate without clarifying what field it is I was studying (for the record, it was educational foundations).

Be that as it may, it is this second implication of serving as coordinator that most troubles me, since it is the professional posting which I now inhabit and that which most directly affects my locus of enunciation. How exactly do I serve as coordinator of a non-existent field within an institutional structure that quite obviously models itself on a colonial exemplar of tertiary schooling in an age of the postcolonial? It perhaps goes without saying that there is no self-evident answer to this question. Regardless, such interrogation is necessary to not only name my locus of enunciation, but also to privilege it as the starting (and ever-present) point of my orientation personally, professionally, and intellectually.

It is here that I am able to return to the contentions of Foucault and Spivak above. The act of naming the problem for the intellectual—that is, working inside or outside the institution—is primary for Foucault (1977), as “The university stands for the institutional apparatus through which society ensures its uneventful reproduction, at the least cost to itself” (p. 224). In this way, the tertiary school offers the technology with which particular knowledges are normalized and legitimized, at the expense of those knowledges which are in turn displaced, ignored, or erased by this “uneventful reproduction”; and it is therefore incumbent upon the intellectual to recognize that “it isn’t enough to suppress or overturn the university. Other forms of repression must also be attacked” (Foucault 1977, p. 224). Likewise, Spivak (1990) remarks, “the whole de-glamourised inside [italics added] of the institution defines our stepping beyond this [the institution]” (p. 5). It is from within the institutional structures of power that one finds the most resistance, and it is there that, remembering Spivak’s earlier comments, she finds herself most comfortable.

Thus, I am able to name what troubles me (my current professional title) and also to acknowledge my role within that troubling (as an employee of an American-accredited tertiary institution in a non-western context)—and in doing so confess to and privilege my own locus of enunciation in that role, at this time, and at the time of this writing. It is armed with such an awareness—although by no means with a concurrent clarity of purpose or ability to rationalize away my own complicity—that I write, in Foucault’s term, to attack the university (or in my case the college) and the structures of power that operate through it and offer the most resistance. Accordingly, professionally I have taken my dubious title to mean that I should act to uncover what has been displaced, ignored, and erased by the privileging of western knowledges at CMI, and in turn work to begin the process of privileging and normalizing those sublimated Marshallese knowledges; and in turn I simultaneously name my locus of enunciation, as much for myself as for the reader, in order to better render the complexities of the narrative I am constructing of both myself and my project in the rest of this book.