First the Spanish, then the Germans, then the Japanese. Finally, "Liberation" in 1944-5 by the Americans meant only relocation and continuing subjugation in fact if not in name. I was at Eniwetok and Bikini in the 1990's, after our Dep't of Energy had declared mission-accomplished in the remediation of nuclear test consequences. An island in the Eniwetok Atoll had been capped with a concrete dome: http://tse1.mm.bing.net/th?id=OIP.M18d6c5c4a19befb35899f2d562e39574o0&pid=15.1
while the inhabitants of the Atoll were allowed to return to their homes after nearly fifty years. Coconut trees planted on the main island (as part of the remediation) fail to thrive, to this day: http://www.panoramio.com/photo_explorer#user=59513&with_photo_id=2498440&order=date_desc.
Islanders carry diseases unknown to them before European contact, not least of which is Diabetes due to a now-permanent reliance on imported rice--the traditional taro and breadfruit crops simply can not be raised successfully any longer. Tumors and skin-ulcers are the norm rather than the exception.
And Bikini Atoll is worse. Those people were evacuated in 1946, allowed to return in 1970, and then told that the environment was still too radioactive for their continued residence--in 1980. To this day, they cannot return (4 or 5 people are resident caretakers on the atoll). But, as things turn out, the climate abetted by the energy consumption of the great powers will make even the restorative qualities of time-over-radioactivity moot: soon these places will be underwater.
The ocean will reclaim and cleanse the test sites of Bikini, Eniwetok, Kwajalein (all in the Marshall Islands), Johnston Atoll (still a U.S. possession), Moruroa and Fangutafoa (in French Polynesia), and the Montebello Islands (In Australia) on its own schedule. Humans, including the Marshallese, the Tahitians and the Aborigines, no longer have any say.
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