How Artists Are Preserving Marshallese History in Arkansas

This piece appears in the columns section of frieze 247, ‘Lay of the Land’

Before taking to the seas by kōrkōr (canoe), Marshallese navigators consulted metto: charts made of bent and twined wooden sticks that mark out distances between islands in the atolls, which were depicted using cowrie shells. Beyond spatial representation, some charts traced abstract patterns of ocean phenomena: currents, refractions, the ebbs and flows of tides.

While making metto is one element of an expansive body of sea knowledge passed down through generations, Marshallese navigators didn’t actually bring them on canoe journeys. ‘They would just go by their intuition,’ Arkansas Coalition of Marshallese founder and CEO Melisa Laelan tells me when we speak. ‘They didn’t need anything else. Just the feel of the swirling movement of the ocean, following the stars and looking at the sky.’

Such navigational practices are the conceptual ground for ‘Navigating Lolelaplap’, an exhibition at Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Bentonville, Arkansas, on Marshallese culture and experiences in the northwest of the state. The region is home to more than 15,000 Marshallese people, many of whom were dis- placed from the atolls as a result of US nuclear testing between 1946 and 1958. (One bomb tested in 1954, Castle Bravo, was 1,000 times stronger than the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945.)

The consequences of the testing were dire and continue to affect the atolls’ people, lands and waters to this day. Following the 1986 Compact of Free Association, a treaty guaranteeing free movement between the Marshall Islands and the US (but preventing further legal action against the US for nuclear damages), thousands of Marshallese relocated to American cities. Job opportunities and family ties led many to Northwest Arkansas, now a hub for the US Marshallese community. Laelan – whose organization began to provide social services and cultural offerings for this community in 2011 – is one of the main collaborators on the exhibition. Born and raised in Majuro, capital of the Marshall Islands, she moved to Springdale, Arkansas, in 2005 and has since become a revered advocate for Marshallese people adjusting to life in the state. She likens her role to that of a navigator. ‘It’s important to recognize the process of navigation, whether it’s through the water or the land or the system,’ she says.

Marshallese people in Northwest Arkansas – like the makers of metto – are becoming attuned to the ebb and flow of the tides in their new home. Laelan wants the exhibition’s Marshallese and non-Marshallese visitors alike to experience this attunement in the gallery, where they’ll be welcomed to touch featured weavings. ‘As soon as you step into the exhibition, you feel the heat, you feel the islands,’ she tells me. Laelan hopes that this multisensory experience will encourage visitors both to sit with the weight of nuclear history and to celebrate the vitality of Marshallese culture today. Fittingly, the exhibition features a metto made by community member Deacon Jones in the 2010s.

The framework of navigation hinges on two interconnected struc- tures carrying manit, the Marshallese word for culture: the kōrkōr and the church. Every part of the kōrkōr cor- responds to Marshallese teachings, and the balance required to steer the whole vessel mirrors the balance required to hold onto manit in times of change. The church, like the kōrkōr, offers a spatial home for manit. The majority of Marshallese people have practiced the Christian faith since missionaries arrived on the atolls in the 1850s. In Northern Arkansas, Marshallese families gather at churches to tell stories, celebrate birthdays and learn the language. Laelan describes a blending of religion and culture that is not only syncretic, but fully integrated. In her words, ‘church is like a spinal cord to everything cultural’ and cannot be separated from other carriers of manit, like the kōrkōr.

Church will be represented in ‘Navigating Lolelaplap’ by a Marshallese-language Bible, and the kōrkōr by a canoe made during a 2021–22 collaboration with Crystal Bridges. These two embodiments of manit will infuse the exhibition and form a structure for experiences of wayfinding – a vessel in which navigators can sense the swell of the ocean, watch the stars in the sky and feel their way through vast waters.

This article first appeared in frieze issue 247 with the headline ‘Navigating by Feel’

‘Navigating Lolelaplap’ is on view at Crystal Bridges, Bentonville, from 19 October – 31 March 2025

^{Main image: A canoe built at Crystal Bridges and featured in ‘Wa Kuk Wa Jimor/Canoe of One Community’, 2022. Courtesy: Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville}