by Alonzo Kahalic

alkahalic6801@gmail.com

Dear Editor,

Anchoring Ourselves: A Palauan Reflection on Colonial Drift and Cultural Return

One day, a man from the village of Ngerchemai went out fishing. As he prepared to anchor his canoe, he saw a hawksbill turtle, the largest he had ever seen. In Palauan culture, the hawksbill shell is valuable, used to create traditional money. Eager to gain prestige, he dove in without a second thought. After a hard struggle, he surfaced triumphantly with the turtle. But when he turned to climb back aboard, his canoe had drifted. With the turtle in his arms, he tried to swim toward it, but the weight pulled him back. Eventually, exhausted, he let go. But by then, his canoe was far off, and he had to swim all the way back to shore—without the turtle, without the canoe.

This story, told and retold in Palau, is more than just a story, it is a warning and a mirror. Palau is that fisherman. In our pursuit of development, status, and material wealth, we jumped into the waters of modernity without anchoring ourselves to who we are. The hawksbill turtle is the illusion of success: new buildings, homes of cement, imported goods, fancy conferences, and systems designed in someone else’s language. We grabbed onto these with both arms, education systems that don’t reflect our stories, government structures modeled after colonial powers, consumer habits that generate more waste than wisdom.

And while we were wrestling with those promises, our canoe— our language, our identity, our sense of community, our sustainability—drifted.

This is the colonial mentality at work. It tells us to chase things over values, to measure success by GDP instead of well-being, to value the outside more than the inside. It has trained our eyes to admire what is imported and dismiss what is local, ours. And we, like the fisherman, have lost sight of what grounds us. We are now swimming hard. With rising costs, shrinking populations, limited food sovereignty, and social fragmentation, many are wondering: how did we drift so far? We complain about the price of water but say little about the rising cost of food or the dependency on imported fuel. Leaders sit in offices with $50,000 salaries, while 66% of our people make less than $15,000 a year. It’s not just inequality, it’s disconnection.

But here’s the wisdom embedded in our story: even after losing both turtle and canoe, the man still swam home. He did not drown. He returned. And so can we. Anchoring doesn’t mean turning back time, it means remembering who we are as we move forward. Our canoe is our culture, our history, our collective knowledge, and our capacity for self-sufficiency. We must return to that canoe, not to reject the modern world, but to steer through it with direction and dignity.

We already have the compass: in our land, our elders, our language, and our cultural practices. What we need now is the courage to re-anchor our policies, our education, and our economy in values that are regenerative, relational, and rooted in Palau with humility and respect. As the story reminds us, chasing glory without grounding leads to exhaustion. But returning to ourselves, to our community and our truth, is never too late.

In this moment of drift, may we and our leaders find the courage to let go of what weighs us down and swim back… to our people, our place, and our purpose.

Your Humble Servant

Al Kahalic