by TomBentley

What if rulers from a far-off land insisted that all subjects eat an allegedly beneficial imported cheese with a complex, challenging flavor? And what if a good percentage of the subjects were indifferent to eating it, or ate it only reluctantly, or refused to eat it entirely? And what if there were conflicting information about whether the cheese was even good for you at all? Peculiar metaphors aside, that’s how I saw my 2004–2005 year of teaching college English on the Micronesian island of Kosrae, a country with (for me) uncomfortable dependencies on the United States.

Micronesia’s history has been marked by foreign occupation. A part of the U.S. victory in the Pacific Theater of WWII consisted of evicting, sometimes forcefully, the Japanese from their strategic occupation of a huge swath of Micronesian territory. In 1947, a UN Trust Territory declaration gave the U.S. formal administrative rights over the islands of Chuck (then called Truk), Pohnpei, Yap and Kosrae. Upon the signing of a shared constitution in 1979, the four island groups became the Federated States of Micronesia (FSM), with the U.S. controlling its relations with other countries and retaining exclusive military access. Through various agreements (now formally called The Compact of Free Association) over the next 25 years, the FSM kept sovereignty, but the U.S. continued to administer many aspects of government, all the while pouring in vast sums of money.

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