HISTORY OF THE PEOPLE 



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Fig. 1 Iroij (Chief) Joannes Peter and his wife Bela. Ujilang 

 Atoll, Nov. 17, 1976. [Photo by Janet Lamberson.] 



I 



Fig. 2 Luther, an Enewetak elder and a repository of tradi- 

 tional cultural wisdom. Ujilang Atoll, Nov. 17, 1976. [Photo 

 by Jcinet Lamberson.] 



(father's sister's daughter or mother's brother's daughter), 

 and a very high percentage of marital unions were of the 

 preferred type. 



Ideally, postmarital residence was patrilocal. A male 

 took his bride to live on his father's land. Sometimes 

 newlyweds lived with the man's parents, but the couple 

 usually built a separate dwelling nearby. Quite commonly, 

 a man and his married sons occupied adjacent dwellings 

 but shared a common cooking house which was a separate 

 structure. Thus, a patrilocal extended family was the most 

 common family group located on a given wato. 



Another facet of Enewetak Atoll culture that differed 

 from that of the rest of the Marshalls was the system of 

 land tenure and inheritance. In contrast to the rest of the 

 Marshalls where matrilineages (subunits within the matri- 

 clans) constitute landholding corporations, the land tenure 

 system at Enev,(etak Atoll was bilateral. In most cases, a 



married couple divided the land they had each inherited 

 among their children, and a child usually received some 

 land from both his or her father and mother. As the paren- 

 tal generation died and as members of the next generation 

 married and produced children, the process was repeated 

 with parents allocating land among their offspring (Fig. 4). 



The people had an almost mystical attachment to their 

 land, and their ties to it were deep. They could trace the 

 history of their holdings back about a half-dozen genera- 

 tions. As indicated previously, an individual's identity was, 

 at least in part, defined by one's urate and one's island of 

 residence. 



A final important social institution was an import. The 

 people of Enewetak Atoll were the very last in the 

 Marshalls to experience missionization because of their iso- 

 lation and distance from the wetter, more richly endowed 

 southern atolls where colonial powers always had their 



