In Iowa, a community of Marshall Islanders has found a place to settle, decades after the U.S. dropped nuclear bombs on their Pacific home
The half-dozen Marshall Islanders wandering this outdoor farmer’s market in a tight pack, more than 6,000 miles from their tropical, nuclear-scarred homeland, stick out with their colorful dresses, their banter in a foreign language, even their flip-flops on this cold, rainy morning.
Mary Jerilong Lenja, in wheelchair at left, recently arrived in America and is waiting for insurance in order to seek medical care for chronic low back pain. She is living in Dubuque, Iowa, with her daughter, Nikki, standing right, who cares for not only Mary but her aunt Key, on the floor, who also suffers from a debilitating condition. At right: A flag of the Marshall Islands hangs on the wall. | M.
When U.S. soldiers first arrived in 1944, they were greeted as liberators—a status they swiftly capitalized on, appealing to the islanders’ Christian faith when seeking permission to test nuclear weapons two years later. In one exchange, captured by military cameras, Commodore Ben Wyatt told an island leader named Juda that the Marshallese would be like the children of Israel who wandered in the desert and sacrificed to bring peace to the world.
Some Marshallese allege that the U.S. government, even after learning about the risks of radiation, willfully experimented on the islanders, pointing to a set of declassified documents that appear to reveal that residents were deliberately put in harm’s way. The United States has said contaminating the islanders with nuclear fallout was not intentional.
Meanwhile, the Marshallese who lived through the nuclear tests, which ended in 1958, have largely passed away, with the average life expectancy on the islands reaching only 63 for men and 67 for women. Their children and grandchildren, inheritors of the toxic legacy, have looked for new homes as the islands face old problems like radiation and emerging crises like climate change.
The two work briskly—Woods gingerly examining the wound and changing the dressing, Maun translating instructions and updates—and within seven minutes, the patient visit is complete. Other health issues are unique to the islanders, whose difficulties navigating the health system are accelerated by culture: Lots of simple English words, like “stress,” don’t have translations in Marshallese, Maun says. More pressing, Crescent estimates that nearly 80 percent of their islander patients have severe kidney disease, largely linked to the poor diet the Marshallese adopted after the U.S. irradiated their crops.
Residents of the Marshallese community living in Iowa take advantage of a food program to purchase items at a farmer’s market in Dubuque. | M. Scott Mahaskey/Politicoarrived in Dubuque to attend Christian seminary, nearly 30 years ago. But the biggest draw now, aside from the clinic, is the service industry, with staffing agencies working to place the islanders in part-time jobs that don’t include health benefits.
“Staff at the hospital had no idea of who the Marshallese were,” said Neil MacNaughton, a nursing professor at the University of Dubuque who spent part of 2016 educating other health workers about the islanders who lived in their midst. That lack of understanding went both ways, he added, even as the islanders were regularly arriving to local emergency wards in various states of medical crisis.
The problems go far deeper than diabetes and other chronic diseases, say the coalition’s members; they link the islanders’ illnesses to the nuclear testing in the islands in the 1940s and 1950s. The evidence on the connection between radiation decades ago and illness today is mixed—one federal study estimated that about 1.
Residents of the Marshallese community in Dubuque wait out the rain in hopes of hosting an annual community hog roast. | M. Scott Mahaskey/Politicothe plight of the Marshallese has won sympathy in other communities across the United States—like Springdale, Arkansas, where health workers have found a similar pocket of chronically ill islanders—and attracted a small but growing number of champions in Congress.
But they’ve struggled to win over colleagues and party leaders because of a simple legislative calculus: the islanders aren’t voters, and lack the key advocacy groups willing to go to war with Congress on their behalf. Under the COFA agreement, the Marshallese can live, work and study in the United States without needing visas—and while here, they pay taxes and even volunteer to serve in the military at higher per capita rates than many U.S. states.
Hirono and Cárdenas are aiming again for a budget bill currently slated for May. House Democrats also are eyeing a plan to raise the issue of the islanders’ lost Medicaid at an upcoming congressional hearing and further lay the groundwork for a legislative fix.
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