Rising Voices: Building Intergenerational Bridges to Empower Women and Reduce Gender-Based Violence (GBV) in the Marshallese Diaspora

This project is a collaboration with the Marshallese Educational Initiative (MEI), a nonprofit in Springdale, Arkansas, on a community-engaged project that entails research, outreach, and, eventually, a published study on occurrence, mitigation, and support designs concerning gender-based violence (GBV), violence against girls and women (VAG/W), and intimate partner violence (IPV) in the Marshallese diaspora centered in the diasporic hub of Northwest Arkansas, which has the largest population of Marshallese in the continental United States. The Republic of the Marshall Islands (RMI) Consulate highlights the political importance of the region, and community mobilization has been aided by intentional structural support offered through nonprofits, such as the MEI and their community partnerships, such as the Northwest Arkansas Women’s Shelter.  A Marshallese-focused interculturally-allied nonprofit (est. 2013), MEI is currently led and staffed almost exclusively by Marshallese and Marshallese American organizers, including the four women who run MEI’s Women’s Advocacy Program (WAP), and have created a Women’s wing, or physical space in the office, for Marshallese women’s issues and as an informal space for community affirmation.

The linked information shares how WAP “1) increases access to justice for Marshallese female survivors of domestic violence, sexual assault, and human trafficking, and 2) promotes women’s empowerment through wholistic health practices” by conducting “outreach to raise awareness of domestic violence, sexual assault, and human trafficking,” educating the Marshallese community about public resources, creating cultural awareness and partnering with advocacy agencies and officials, and providing interpreter services to help “Marshallese survivors seeking assistance.”  The project entails in-person organizing site visits during which we will host collaborative seminars focusing on critical consideration of 1) immediate design of the workshops and assessment of their impact and 2) unpacking prior studies/data and workshopping the long-term plan and methodology for the study/publication, which we are provisionally calling Rising Voices, after a series of WAP’s current workshops. Our template methodology and preliminary objectives for Rising Voices are based on “Someone to Save Me From Him: Findings from the Community Engagement Study on the Design of the Violence Against Women and Girls Support Service in the Republic of the Marshall Islands.” Crucially, we are holding exploratory workshops to further media outreach based on what I term “survivance media” and will document community-engaged explorations of its possibilities in multimedia form (and content creation). The concept of survivance comes from Native American studies and speaks to the continuation of Indigenous survival traditions in dynamic, creative contexts that resist domination and amplify vitality. Customarily, in Marshallese Indigenous matrilineal custom, women held the “ultimate” authorial voice as empowered through ties to ancestral land and lineage. This “ultimate” voice comes across in a myriad of songs, stories, instruments, and refuses toxic modernization and militarism as part of conversations about GBV. In addition to women being a focus group, reports have consistently ignored the LGBTQ2S+ population or, in customary terms, “double di” (two boned) persons, and we are dedicated to including the Marshallese LGBTQ2S+ community in this project.