Nuclear Diaspora: Bikini & Enewetak, 1946-1988

About the Collection

Copyright and Usage

Commercial use of any material in this collection is prohibited without prior permission from the Pacific Collection, University of Hawaii Hamilton Library. Copyright is retained by the creators of these materials, their descendants, or the repository if copyright has been signed over, as stipulated by United States copyright law. NOTE: Donor has obtained no consent from any person portrayed in any photograph for the public display of his or her image. It is the responsibility of the user to determine any copyright restrictions, obtain written permission, and pay any fees necessary for the reproduction or proposed use of the materials. See the University of Hawai'i Library's Usage Rights information page for further details.

Site Credits

Photographs: Dr. Leonard Mason and Dr. Robert Kiste
Original descriptive text: Dr. Robert Kiste
Graphic design, meta-data editing and site maintenance: Stu Dawrs, Pacific Specialist Librarian, Hamilton Library
Scanning and data entry: Kristina S. Arnaldo, Pacific Collection student assistant, Hamilton Library

Collection Provenance & Arrangement

The images in this collection are part of a larger set of research materials that was donated by Dr. Robert Kiste in 2005 to the University of Hawaii-Manoa Library's Pacific Collection. In the physical collection, these slides are stored in three separate binders. Binder Number One is labeled Kili and Bikini; Binder Number Two is labeled Trust Territory and Marshall Islands; Binder Number Three is labeled Ujelang & Enewetak.

For virtually every photo in the physical collection, Dr. Kiste created a type-written three- by five-inch index card with detailed notes. These cards have also been scanned and are included online with the image(s) they describe. In some cases, the same card describes multiple images, and so is included with each. On the rare occasion where an index card was not made and notes exist on the slide casing, the casing has also been scanned and included with the image online. The titles that appear above each photo are generally the first sentence (or portion thereof) on the related typewritten card.
Reference numbers that appear in the online collection were created by Dr. Kiste prior to his donating the slides to Hamilton Library. Reference numbers that end with the letter "K" indicate slides housed in the Kili and Bikini binder; those ending with either "TT" or "M" are housed in the Trust Territory and Marshall Islands binder; those ending with the letter "U" are housed in the Ujelang & Enewetak binder. In some instances, slides and/or their descriptive index cards were lost prior to their donation to the library, which accounts for occasional gaps in the numbering sequence.

In addition to the photos taken by Dr. Mason and Dr. Kiste, the physical collection includes the work of three other photographers. Four aerial images of Kili Island, shot in 1964 by Elden Buck, have been included in the online collection, with reference numbers 437-K through 440-K. Buck was a Protestant missionary who worked in the Marshall Islands. Owing to uncertainty regarding copyright, two other sets of slides were not digitized. They are: a) Twenty black and white slides, possibly shot by photographer Carl Mydans for National Geographic magazine circa 1946 (just prior to the Bikinians' initial relocation); and b) fourteen slides by a photographer of last name Cronkite (first name not known), which were also shot in 1946 at Bikini, just prior to the relocation. Both sets of photos are available for viewing as part of the physical collection, and are housed in the Kili and Bikini binder. In the physical collection, the photos taken by Cronkite are numbered from 1-K through 14-K, which accounts for the initial gap in this numbering series in the online collection (which begins with reference number 15-K).

Regarding Geographic Names

A variety of spelling conventions have been employed over the last fifty-plus years when referring to the islands of Micronesia. For the purposes of this site, name spellings were guided by the following principles:
1) For captioning and index cards created by Dr. Robert Kiste, original name spellings (i.e., as they were used during the Trust Territory era) have been preserved as they appear in the physical collection.
2) For all areas where new descriptive text has been created specifically for this site -- specifically the "place," "category," "collection," and "notes" fields -- currently accepted spelling conventions have been used.
3) While we recognize that alternate spellings exist, for the purposes of this site the following text was used as the naming authority:
Motteler, Lee S. Pacific Island names: a map and name guide to the new Pacific. Honolulu: Bishop Museum Press, 2006 (For complete bibliographic information click here.)
4) Whenever possible, where alternate spellings exist we have included them in the site's online glossary. The naming authority consulted for these alternate spellings is a map published by the UH-Manoa Center for Pacific Islands Studies, which can be accessed online by clicking here. (PDF viewer required.)

Regarding Image Manipulation

In several cases, the original slides in this collection have suffered color deterioration. Some were also originally under- or over-exposed. In these cases the images have been manipulated digitally to make them more "readable." For every image that has been digitally manipulated, the original, un-retouched image has been posted online as the "thumbnail" view; all larger views display the manipulated version. All slides that have been digitally altered also include explanatory text in the "notes" field.

Digitization Procedures

All images in this database were scanned from 35mm slides, originally as 400dpi RGB tifs, scaled to 400 percent. They were later resized to the dimensions used in the database and saved as jpeg files. In certain instances, the original 35mm slides have lost color information due to deterioration over time; in others, the originals were either over- or under-exposed. In these cases, the digital version has been manipulated using Photoshop to improve "readability" -- in most cases this involved using the "auto level" setting in Photoshop. In cases where images were manipulated, the un-retouched version is preserved online as the thumbnail view.