Marshallese Matriarchy

"Where The Girls Have All the Marbles"

I have seen matriarchy up close. I want to share my recollections. Bear with me while I give you enough background to convince you I have seen matriarchy in the Marshall Islands, where the women own all the land.

In July 1981, my young family and I went and lived in the Marshall Islands for about a year. Our third son, Daniel was born there. I was twenty-four. We taught at a Seventh-day Adventist quasi-rural mission school. In 1981 the Marshall Islands District was still part of a UN Trust Territory. Only few years before our stay and you had to have something like a US government invitation to come and reside and work there if you weren’t Marshallese. There were still residual restrictions when we went, but nowhere near as strict as previously. From 1915-ish until 1944 the Japanese partially occupied the Marshalls Islands. Sometimes under the pretense of a League of Nations mandate. Previously the Germans had purchased the Marshall Islands from Spain in 1880. The Germans didn’t really rule the Marshalls. They had a trading station on Jaluit Atoll. They traded for copra (dried coconut) with the Marshallese and shipped it to Germany from Jaluit. The first missionaries had come in 1857. The ship that carried the Congregational missionaries from Boston was called the Morning Star and their efforts at converting the Marshallese were very successful. When I lived in the Marshalls, they had been Christian for generations. Strict dress codes for the ladies, and lots of other little rules about right behavior. Back then, I never received a letter from any Marshallese that didn’t begin except by thanking and praising God the Father for something in general, and usually in specifics. Both the flag and Seal of the Marshall Islands are explicitly replete with Christian symbols.

The Germans took little interest in the Marshallese. The Japanese ruled over them with fierce brutality, but again, otherwise ignored them, except for the women they took. The Marshallese were captives. “They’d shoot you out of the tree for picking coconuts.” One old Marshallese man told me, “The Japanese would shoot us if we didn’t work. They’re the ones that taught the Marshallese how to work.” During the war, the Japanese turned several of the Marshall Island atolls into fortresses. My point is - the old Marshallese customs and their system of land rights were very much intact and alive when we were there in 1981-82, including matriarchy. The Germans and the Japanese changed very little in Marshallese culture.

All land title and inheritance was, and to a great extent, still is matriarchal in the Marshalls Islands. It has been that way time out of mind. You had two classes of landholders: Iroij, who owned the land, and Alep who had rights to the produce of the land. The Rejedadl had the right to work land as sharecroppers. The Iroij were the rulers, the Iroijlaplap was the chief of the Irioj on an atoll, and later for the nation, the chief of chiefs. The Marshall Islands archipelago has two chains, the Ralik and the Ratak. There are some minor differences in land rights between the two chains. I am familiar only with the details of the Ratak chain. If you want to read some reference material on Marshallese land rights - follow the link. But I don't think the scholarship is comprehensive. It’s complicated. Some of the other Central Pacific archipelagos and islands also have matriarchal customs, but I am not familiar with the differences or similarities. I know my scholarship is far from comprehensive.

Land matters. The Marshall Islands archipelago occupies around 600,000 square miles of ocean just north of the equator and west of the dateline. There are approximately thirty atolls and 1,100 islands. Eleven thousand square miles of lagoon waters and seventy square miles of land; not much land. The highest elevation is forty-foot above sea level on the main island of Maloalap Atoll. Twenty feet above sea level was the highest elevation on our Majuro atoll. The biggest Island on Majuro Atoll is a quarter mile across (400 meters) at its widest point. Life’s a coral sand beach in the Marshalls. It’s not an exaggeration to say all Marshallese customs touch on the land. Even today, in some sense, a Marshallese without land interests is separated from the life of his or her people. There are only about 70,000 Marshallese total. Upwards of a third of them live in the US now, legally, by treaty, which was negotiated when the US administration of the Trust Territory District ended in 1986.

In the long-ago time, the Marshallese would fight. The warriors would load up their outrigger canoes and paddle over to another atoll and have a fight. Usually, two, four, half a dozen guys would get killed and then the fight was over. The winners got the land and the women. Nobody divided the ownership of the land from the women. This was the way men could make themselves into new Iroij by fighting, and win the prize, the Iroij women, called the Laroij. All of course, with the Iroijlaplap’s approval.

Land and women went together, in war or in peace. The Morning Star missionaries were successful in persuading the Marshallese to give up the fighting, but the missionaries didn’t mess with the land rights. The land-right castes became purely hereditary. I was surprised at how respectful everyone was of the system. Everybody deferred to the Iroij. They respected them. But it was unforced. There was one term for the Americans called “rubelli.” It wasn’t exactly a polite term, I guess it wasn’t respectful. I still don’t know it’s etymology. You’d hear little kids yell it sometimes, and see older people hush them. I came to understand the Marshallese probably had more rules about right behavior than Americans could imagine. (excepting the table manners) I was just picking up on a few essentials. Our status, whatever it was, and for whatever reason, conferred on us a lot of respect. It surely had nothing much to do with our money, because we didn’t have any. A family of five, we got by on a $200 a month stipend. No electricity.

This universal respect for the Iroij, and for us, was paired with a complete disregard for notions of equality. I had two boys in my class who were part Japanese. Rod Kabua and Darrel Lamari. They were my top students. Rod was Iroij, his grandma was, I believe, married to the Iroijlaplap. Darrel’s Japanese blood quantum was through his father, and he was not Iroij. It came up in class, more than once, about their proficiency at schoolwork and their intelligence. I can remember the class declared, more or less unison, “yeah, they are smart because they are Japanese, all the Japanese are smart.” It was not resentful, no one was embarrassed at the hearing or the saying of it. Darrel and Rod were as Marshallese as anybody. They were in no sense living as Japanese. It was a blood thing and the Marshallese knew the Japanese were smart. The Marshallese take inequality for granted. 🍌≠🥥

I ran a four-acre garden after school. The students could work with me to help pay their tuition. I sold the produce at the other end of the atoll where most of the people lived. One day, somebody asked why Edna’s arms were so short. Her forearms were about half as long as they ought to be. Edna was there listening. It’s not as disfiguring as you might think, it had taken me weeks to notice. But it was obviously not normal. Kena Akki answered immediately with authority and distain at such a stupid question. “God made her that way.” I could add nothing.

So what difference did it make that the women owned all the land? Not much. If you couldn’t get along with your wife and she chased you off, you tended to be working your sister or your auntie’s land anyway. You still had land to take care of, you could still be a, “man of the land.” But it’s natural for a man to be jealous of his wife and he doesn’t like being chased off. He wants to be around his children, not somebody else’s. It’s hard to keep an eye on the wife if you are not around. Women were busy taking care of the children, cooking, doing all the things women have always done. The women were hard workers and made beautiful handicraft out of native materials. I can remember the women all working together, washing clothes and chatting. Sitting for hours in this impossible squatting position around their washtubs or cooking pots. The segregation of work into men’s work and women’s work was way stricter than anything you could imagine back home. Women were independent. They went to church without their husbands frequently. But I couldn’t see any real difference in the fundamental behaviors that have characterized the relations between the sexes in any historical context. In the Marshalls, the men ran everything and women owned everything. There were children everywhere. It's the same in every age, and every place, there's a daily grind, a routine. Everybody got along and nobody got along perfectly. Those who prepare for war seldom have to fight one. Parabellum. The war between the sexes. It was like Samuel Johnson said, “the law rightly gives women very little power, because nature has given her so much.” For the Marshallese, equality was not a thing to be grasped.

I really feel sorry for the Marshallese women these days. Forty years ago there wasn’t so much beer and cannabis. These days, Marshallese men tend to drink too much and smoke/use too much Marijuana - and they tend to do it all the time. Marshallese women? Not so much, because Marshallese custom is still strong. And by custom the women don’t drink or smoke. Nobody would say the Marshallese have too much money - so it must be the beer and weed are too plentiful, and too cheap. Masculinity is toxic when it's drunk.

The modern global economy produces an awful lot of wealth. We all want our share. Nobody imagines grinding poverty would make them happy, myself included. And an economy based on fighting over women and land would definitely be a step backwards. The biggest casualty of our technological and industrial prosperity is normal family relations. All this nonsense about gender identity and queer ideology is just a rich kid’s delusional, childish, tantrum. Life is too serious in its fundamental needs to imagine such leisurely nonsense when you are living the family life, 24/7, and hunger is never far from the door. I believe the Marshallese were divided from their poverty by the stability of their society. Like my dad said about growing up, “We didn’t know how poor we were.” I found it a happy place and it was full of children. I have the deepest respect for the Marshallese. I can’t imagine a more sacrificially generous and sharing people. I never got the impression the Marshallese thought of themselves as poor.

Homelessness isn't a matter of housing. Seriously, there are lots of homeless people camping out in American cities living in better digs than half of the Marshallese forty years ago. A house in the Marshall Islands was just a place to keep stuff dry. You were more comfortable outdoors. Sometimes you sat inside for shade or when it was raining. You cooked outdoors. You lived outdoors. Everybody was more or less related. There was a guy on Ajiltaki who was mentally ill, he heard voices. He didn't have a diagnosis, but he had a home and a place. Everybody knew him and helped look after him. If he took off his clothes, nobody would let him run around like that. Nobody in Ajiltaki was so busy they couldn't help with him, and nobody thought of chasing him off either. They didn't have a health plan. They shared what they could with him.

The average age of a Marshallese back then was less than fifteen years old. In Japan right now it's about fifty. I understand that bearing children and caring for them is sacrificial. It always has been and it doesn’t matter where, when, or how you live. For women it’s a biological sacrifice. Men are different. They need a reason to take care of their place and to keep momma happy. Necessity is a great reason. Too much choice, tends to make us choosy. There is something noble about a jealous man who is content to follow the rules and be a son, a father, and a husband and simply be, “a man of the land.”

A discouraged and very recently retired academic wrote he thought the ‘head girls’ were taking over all the institutions. There is something to that idea. I never went to a school with head girls, but I think I understand. Think Jacinda Arden or Gretchen Whitmer. The majority of college presidents are women. Women are rising fast in all the bureaucracies. Head girls seem to dominate in graduate studies and the professions. It doesn't matter to me if the women own everything, as long as they act like Marshallese women. Matriarchy isn't the problem. Head girls are the problem. Marshallese women follow Marshallese custom.

Are we headed for matriarchal tyranny? The head girl types certainly think they ought to try and run the whole show. The head girl doesn't need to own anything, she just needs you to do what she says. Many of these head girls only care about two things: their authority and making us mind. I have suffered under a few of them, although they probably thought I was the insufferable one. I have given thanks they weren't my relation. Head girls, I suspect, make terrible mothers. I never met one and thought, “she reminds me of my mother.” Just the opposite. My mom was smart enough to know the truth about ruling over others. It’s an art, not a science. She could be observant of all the manners, respectful of our need of them, and at the same, not take the petty rules too seriously. She was content with her family and her status. She wasn't too ambitious — and she couldn't stand head girls. I can't imagine my mother suffering hygienic masking graciously, let alone being locked down.

Maybe that's where I get it from. And remember this is ‘shout your gender identity’ month. There's a certain type of man who is a wannabe head girl. There is gender equity after all! But it's toxic. It isn't safe. I’d be speaking French if I told you what Mom thought about that form of toxic masculinity.