006, When I Arrived Jet Lagged and Unprepared for a Field Director Position with a Teaching Non-Profit Called Worldteach
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EATING EMPIRE, GOING LOCAL: FOOD, HEALTH, AND SOVEREIGNTY ON POHNPEI, 1899-1986 BY JOSH LEVY DISSERTATION Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in History in the Graduate College of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2018 Urbana, Illinois Doctoral Committee: Professor Frederick Hoxie, Chair Professor Vicente Diaz Professor David Hanlon Professor Kristin Hoganson Associate Professor Martin Manalansan ABSTRACT Eating Empire, Going Local centers the island of Pohnpei, Micronesia in a global story of colonial encounter and dietary change. It follows Pohnpeians and Pohnpei’s outer Islanders in their encounters with Spain, Germany, Japan, and the United States, negotiating, adapting to, and resisting empire through food and food production. In the process, Pohnpei extended food’s traditional role as locus of political influence and used it to navigate deceptively transformative interventions in ecology, consumption, the market, and the body. Food became Pohnpei’s middle ground, one that ultimately fostered a sharp rise in rates of non-communicable diseases like diabetes, heart disease, and hypertension. The chapters draw on global commodity histories that converge on the island, of coconuts, rice, imported foods, and breadfruit. These foods illuminate the local and global forces that have delivered public health impacts and new political entanglements to the island. Eating Empire uses food and the analytic lenses it enables – from ecology and race to domesticity and sovereignty – as a tool to reimagine Pohnpei’s historical inter-imperial and contemporary political relationships from the bottom up. ii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS The first time I saw Pohnpei was in the summer of 2006, when I arrived jet lagged and unprepared for a field director position with a teaching non-profit called WorldTeach. In the past 12 years the island has given me a great deal, not least the opportunity to meet my wife Tamaki when we both numbered among its small community of transient foreign volunteers. I have therefore accumulated a great many debts, both in my life as a teacher in Pohnpei’s public and private schools and in research that took us from Champaign-Urbana to Honolulu, Pohnpei, Chuuk, Guam, and Tokyo. Those debts are too numerous to name in full, but I am especially grateful to the many people who smoothed the way for this project and welcomed Tamaki and myself into their homes and communities. On Pohnpei, Johnny and Analihter Rudolph and their family embraced us from the start. Fr. Francis Hezel shepherded me through my first attempts to make sense of the region’s vast primary and secondary literature. The students of PICS High School, Our Lady of Mercy Catholic High School, and the College of Micronesia-FSM taught me far more than I taught them, and I am particularly indebted to John Haglelgam for his mentorship and to Sr. Isabel Semen, Russell Figueras, and Delihna Ehmes for their support. Pohnpei’s archives would have remained nearly closed to me without the generous help of Rufino Mauricio, Gus Kohler, Mordain David, Jason Lebehn, Bruce Robert, Takuya Nagaoka, and Bill Raynor. The Mwoalen Wahu Ileilehn Pohnpei took the time to meet with me, and to offer their guidance. I offer a special thanks to all those who joined me for oral history interviews, whose names are listed in the bibliography. While not every conversation appears in my footnotes, each was invaluable. We have found abundant support from many others on Pohnpei, who fed us, taught us, challenged us, joked with us, and bailed us out. In no particular order, thanks to Rainer Jimmy, iii Adelino Lorens, Jacqueline Hazen, Damian Sohl, Fr. Dave Andrus, Bishop Julio Angkel, Penny Jimmy, Samson Pretrick, David Wolphagen, Bill and Tamme Jaynes, Joe Villazon, Suzanne Hale, Francisco Marcus, Emerson Odango, Brandon and Monalisa Tara, Fusayo Kobayashi, Kaori Mizumoto, Michaela Corr, Noah Rolff, Yohei Takano, Mieko Oda, Kumiko Nirasawa, Tim Smit, Greg Watson, Yuka Onishi, Takahisa Watanabe, Scott and June Nicloy, Brittany Bachant, Kristin Dennis, Emily Hagen, Meredith Pentzien, and the Suzuki and Akinaga families. On Oahu, we owe a great debt to the Pohnpei Fellowship Ministry, and especially to Robinson Frederick, Jordan Gallen and Lilly Cantero-Gallen, Jansen Santos, and Alice Ehmes. Stu Dawrs, Eleanor Kleiber, Dore Minatodani, and the rest of the staff at the Pacific Collection were unfailingly accommodating of my ceaseless requests, and I am grateful to the archivists and staff at the Mission Houses Museum, Bishop Museum, and Kamehameha School as well. In Chuuk, Guam, and Tokyo, thanks to everyone at the Micronesian Seminar, Micronesian Area Research Center, Japan Institute for Pacific Studies, and National Diet Library. Thanks also to David Hanlon, Ken Rehg, Jojo Peter, Wakako Higuchi, Kanika Mak-Lavy, Brad Rentz, Ti Ngo, Piyawit Moonkham, and Hi’ilei Hobart and for their counsel and support. I am especially grateful to my wise and always-patient advisor Fred Hoxie and for the steadfast mentorship of my committee, Kristin Hoganson, Martin Manalansan, Vince Diaz, and David Hanlon. Thanks also to my writing partners, without whom I would never have finished this draft: Koji Ito, Mark Frank, Stefan Kosovych, David Lehman, Beth Eby, Raquel Escobar, Camarin Meno, Lydia Crafts, Mark Sanchez, Mike Abele, Steven Bruce, and Liz Matsushita. Numerous institutions funded the island-hopping archival and oral history research that lies at the heart of this project. A special thanks to UIUC for its generous support through the Nelle M. Signor Graduate Scholarship and Graduate College Dissertation Travel Grant, and for the iv Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations Samuel Flagg Bemis Dissertation Research Grant, the Newberry Library NCAIS Graduate Fellowship, the Amherst College Forris Jewett Moore Fellowship, and the East-West Center Affiliate Scholar program. Judy Bennett and the staff of the University of Otago’s Centre for Colonial Cultures kindly facilitated my participation in an invaluable workshop on Pacific coconut cultures. Thanks also to Antoinette Burton, Nancy Castro, and the Illinois Program for Research in the Humanities for their support during my final year of writing. Finally, my deepest appreciation to my wife Tamaki, whose Japanese language skills and background in nutrition I relied on so heavily that she ought to be considered a co-author. For many reasons, this project would not have been possible without her. This dissertation is dedicated to Tamaki, and to Manuel Amor, Bill Raynor, Sakae Taira, and Margery Terpstra, whose memories and wisdom enliven this project but who passed away before it could be completed. v TABLE OF CONTENTS MAP .................................................................................................................................. vii PREFACE ............................................................................................................................1 INTRODUCTION ...............................................................................................................4 CHAPTER 1: IDEAL COCONUT COUNTRY: COMMODIFIED COCONUTS AND THE SCIENTIFIC PLANTATION ...................................................25 CHAPTER 2: THE RICE GRAIN AS RACIAL BORDERLAND: RACE, STATUS, AND BELONGING ON JAPANESE POHNPEI ...............................53 CHAPTER 3: VITARELLI’S SPAGHETTI: IMPORTED FOODS, INDIGENOUS MODERNITIES, AND IMPERIAL ANXIETIES ON COLD WAR POHNPEI ..................................................................................................104 CHAPTER 4: BREADFRUIT AND RICE: SOVEREIGNTY, SUBSISTENCE, AND THE RICE REVOLUTION .......................................................164 CONCLUSION: GOING LOCAL ..................................................................................215 REFERENCES ................................................................................................................220 GLOSSARY ....................................................................................................................239 vi MAP Map 1: Pohnpei, adapted from Riesenberg, Native Polity of Ponape, 1968. vii PREFACE Casual chatter on Pohnpei often turns to the island’s escalating rates of non- communicable disease, its numerous heavyset residents, the abrupt spike in both after the 1970s, and to years past when things were different. Older Pohnpeians and outer Islanders have often reminisced with me over the lean figures they saw in their youth, and of a time when they themselves felt healthier, or lighter. Those familiar with my work in the archives ask whether I have seen photographs of earlier times, when their ancestors were fitter, and stronger. “How have you seen how our bodies used to be,” some ask, “and how thin we were?” Something has changed on Pohnpei. An indigenous food system that once promoted healthy bodies has been replaced with one that fosters a deadly growth in conditions like heart disease and hypertension, and by 2002 had left 73.1% of Pohnpei’s adult population overweight or obese and 32.1% with diabetes.1 The epidemic of non-communicable disease on Pohnpei is a matter of urgent community concern, as are NCD epidemics in indigenous communities across Oceania and North America. Those public health crises have also become a priority for national and international health organizations, and the Pacific Island Health Officers Association has even declared a “regional state of health emergency” across Micronesia