Michele Collins, RH (AHG), MPH
For many people, the Marshall Islands are the site of US nuclear bomb testing in the 1950s and 1960s and of famous World War II battles. For me, it is also my birth place, although, I am not Marshallese in ethnicity. In 2011, my husband and I were studying in Chengdu, China. We choose to take a side trip to the Marshall Islands from China, my first trip back to the Marshall Islands since I was two years old, figuring it would be shorter and easier trip. It is not actually shorter, measuring about the same distance between the US and the Marshall Islands and China and the Marshall Islands.
Nor is it necessarily easier to get there. The real trick in getting there at all, is in finding a flight. On our 36-hour flight back to China – with multiple, long layovers, including one in the Philippines for a night – the quickest and simplest route our travel agent could find for us included a total of 6 layovers. Only one airline, Continental flies to Majuro, the capital city, mainly because there is a military base on Kwajalein, another island grouping, and they transport families and military personnel. In Micronesia, the plane that we flew home is known as an “island hopper”, meaning it made stops on three different Micronesian islands, one of which is Kwajalein, as it makes its way to Guam. This country is not a likely tourist destination for most, unless you own an ocean-faring boat or like to scuba dive.
The Republic of the Marshall Islands, located in the Northern Pacific, about midway between Australia and Hawaii, is comprised of 29 coral atolls and five islands covering roughly 70 square miles of land spread out over 750,000 square miles of ocean. When I was born there in 1970, the islands were a trust territory of the United States, given to us from Japan, after World War II. Although, the country officially began to govern itself in 1979, and was granted its sovereignty by the United States in 1986, the trust territory status was officially ended by the United Nations in 1990.
These islands literally sit at sea level, which contributed to the native population becoming master canoe makers and ocean navigators. The Marshallese created complex stick charts, representing the ocean swell patterns and the way the individual islands disrupted these patterns, to navigate their canoes around the island chains. The native language, Marshallese, even has individual words for the four main types of ocean swells they recognized.
There is unique and rich culture, language, healing traditions, and uses of the flora and fauna in the Marshall Islands. Learning more about the healing traditions and local flora and fauna was one of my main interests when we visited Majuro in February of 2011. We spent the majority of our time in Arno, one of the outer islands, only accessible by boat. Our host, who rented out a a duplex to us on the island, the only structure of its type on Arno, which is home to about 400 people. We were the only tourists on the island at the time. When he found out my husband and I were both herbalists, he shared helpful information with us and introduced us to a local herbalist who was learning more about Marshallese traditional healing and herb uses.
My most treasured souvenir from our travels is a book our host recommended to me that I was able to find and purchase while there, Traditional Medicine of the Marshall Islands: The Women, the Plants, the Treatments. Luckily, the University of the South Pacific, located in Majuro, sells this book, which comes with three full color posters, one each documenting of Marshallese plants, shrubs and trees. This book describes the uses of medicinal plants in the Marshall Islands and some background on Marshallese traditional medicine. The herbal combinations and treatments documented in this book were passed down through many generations, in dreams and through the spirits of their ancestors. Most healers kept this knowledge secret, only willing to pass it on to worthy participants.
The work for the book, published in 2006, began in 1998 when visitors from Fiji came to the Marshall Islands to share their knowledge of solar oven making. As the women from Fiji and the Marshall Islands worked together, they shared their knowledge about medicinal plants and their uses. All were concerned that their knowledge might not survive far into the future. These conversations inspired a collaborative effort by Maria Kabua Fowler, Marylou-Foley, Dr. Irene Taafaki of the University of the South Pacific, supported by the Manager of the Women in Development Office at the Ministry of Affairs (Ione deBrum), Carmen Bigler, and Women United Together in the Marshall Islands. Women United Together in the Marshall Islands formed to help in the collection of information about the usage of medicinal plants.
The collaborators held two participatory workshops to which they invited traditional healers from all over the Marshall Islands. The first in November of 2001, was attended by two traditional healers from Hawaii, Auntie Alapa’i Aka’apa Ahuko’oohumukini and Roland Bula Ahi Logan. Their encouragement helped convince local Marshallese healers to share their knowledge, saving it from the fate of other native groups who were attempting to record these traditions, perhaps too late. The information collected in the first session was carefully documented and recorded and verified by others who attended the second session. They were also able to incorporate accounts documented by early German ethnographers. In addition to a rich materia medica with full color pictures, these book also contains articles about such topics as how the Marshallese traditional medicine is structured, the role of women in healing, and how illnesses were treated in historic times.
This book I am describing is, unfortunately, hard to obtain, unless you happen to be in Marjuro and can swing by the University of the South Pacific office there. You can find it used on Amazon by clicking here. There is also an excellent website, titled Plants and Environments of the Marshall Islands that has a detailed listing of many Marshallese plants, with pictures and descriptions of their usage.
I am ever fascinated by plants and their traditional usages. And I am always inspired by the utility and functionality of the medicinal uses of plants in traditional systems. I studied traditional Chinese medicine because I wanted a holistic diagnostic system to use herbs medicinally (and successfully) in a clinical setting. We are fortunate to have a rich, several thousand year old history of writings, discourse, and evolution that Chinese herbal medicine represents. It can give us a point of reference to better understand the fragmented pieces left from other traditional systems. A good example of this is the book Wind in the Blood: Mayan Healing and Chinese Medicine by Hernan Garcia, Antonio Sierra, and Gilberto Balam, that documents the Mayan healing traditions of the Yucatan peninsula, comparing the cosomology and structure to Chinese medicine.
Our host in Arno was excited to learn my husband and I were herbalists because he had, himself, experienced much benefit from the herbal treatments he had received from a local herbalist. He and the local herbalist both generously and willingly answered our questions and shared what they knew about Marshallese herbal medicine with us. And, in gratitude, I want to pass on some of these resources here so that others can be exposed to them as well. Thank you for taking time to read.
