Our Kapijukinen: Climate Adaptation Policy and Poetry in the Marshall Islands

Abstract

This creative thesis analyses the climate coloniality of Marshall Islands' national adaptation policies, arguing that the climate crisis is the latest continuing saga of colonialism impacting the Marshall Islands and Marshallese cultural relationships to land. This thesis presents new poetry inspired by the scholar's experiences as an activist and working in the national and international climate space, weaving in the climate crisis with the nuclear legacy, and exploring Marshallese deep time relationships to land and modern identity. It explores climate coloniality based on Farhana Sultana's article, "The Unbearable Heaviness of Climate Coloniality" (2022), and connects this to other scholarships from the Pacific, Micronesia, and the Marshall Islands. It then analyses the Marshall Islands government's policies, the Adaptation Communication (2021), the Community Consultations (2024), and the National Adaptation Plan (2024), arguing that adaptation is a form of survivance - resistance and survival - for Marshallese people as a way to protect our islands, culture and heritage. However, the policies fall short on identifying how the previous legacies of colonialism have contributed to vulnerabilities to climate change, and how climate change is yet another continuation of those colonial impacts. Woven throughout the exegesis are poems from the creative component, which is a manuscript of new poetry that engages in adaptation, climate change, and the colonial legacy.