Micronesian Chiefs under American Rule: Military Occupation, Democracy, and Trajectories of Traditional Leadership

The U.S. military has historically and recently been involved in regions characterized by substate political formations, of the type known to anthropologists as tribes and chiefdoms. This article uses the U.S. occupation of the Japanese Mandate islands in the Pacific War as an example of differing outcomes when American political ideas and practices intersect chiefdoms under conditions of war.

Chiefdoms and tribes were widespread in the past in Europe, the Americas, Africa, Asia, and the Middle East; the societies of the Pacific Islands are among the best-known examples. These substate forms were subsumed into colonial, and then national, regimes. Chiefly political systems remain important elements of nation-states in much of the world, requiring national and international actors to understand and engage with these “traditional” leaders. Yet chiefdoms are seldom recognized as sophisticated and complex political forms, rooted in local cultural concepts and social, economic, and political structures, shaped by history and by global forces. Instead, popular European and American understandings of chiefs come from colonial-era descriptions and syntheses by nineteenth-century evolutionary anthropologists who saw chiefdoms as a stage in governance that would disappear as all societies moved toward a Western-style representative democracy. Such views—of chiefs as ahistorically “traditional,” unsophisticated, and bound to wane with modernization—have shaped policy and pragmatic relations with these leaders. This article attempts to delineate more accurately the multifaceted contours of chiefly societies, both in the past and as they continue to function in the contemporary world.

American military encounters with chiefly societies have been studied by historians in the contexts of the Native American/Indian Wars and the Philippines. More recently, military strategists and political scientists analyze chiefly sociopolitics in the Middle East and Central Asia, and anthropological expertise has contributed to understanding these processes.¹ Less widely known is the half-century of American experience with chiefdoms in Micronesia during and after World War II, as U.S. officials (first military, then civilian) implemented security goals and promoted political change. By highlighting this experience, we intend to give greater historical and anthropological context to U.S. policy in dealing with substate societies under conditions of conflict and occupation.

The Pacific region has long served in anthropology as a classic “laboratory” of social variability. In Micronesia, most of which came under American governance as a result of invasion and conquest during World War II, we can examine a range of indigenous responses to attempts to impose or develop democracy in chiefly societies. This region holds a strategic position between East Asia and North America. As fortified outerworks of the Japanese empire, it was a key battleground of the Pacific War, and these small islands continue to hold geopolitical importance for Asian-American relations. While victory and postwar UN Trusteeship ensured strong links with Americans, relations among the Micronesian nations and with the United States and various East Asian nations are continually negotiated. For the United States, the process of establishing and maintaining ties with indigenous leaders and people in this strategic region developed through policies seeking to achieve often contradictory goals—acknowledging and preserving traditional culture while pressing for democratization and Americanization to ensure long-lasting ties to the American political orbit.²

More broadly, the diversity and complexity of this region demonstrates the variable impact of war and occupation on substate political regimes. Despite the storehouse of historical and anthropological knowledge about chiefdoms, political and military actions frequently have not been grounded in any systematic understanding of their characteristics. Indeed, America’s experience in Micronesia during and after the Pacific War seems to have faded from the nation’s historical memory, yet it holds lessons about military conquest, the United States as a colonial administrator, and democratization. During the war years and through the 1950s and 1960s, American military and political personnel endeavored to implant democracy in these chiefly societies. Today, the role of traditional chiefs in these islands ranges from strong participation in democratic institutions, to parallel structures of traditional and imported decision-making, to...