There is a simple but profound truth in power: who controls the situation defines the situation. If you don’t name the game, then you are just playing someone else’s rules. In Palau today, and across much of Oceania, we are caught in a quiet storm, a storm of stories, of holidays, of religious rituals, of languages, and economic models that are not our own. And yet, we participate in them fully. We celebrate foreign traditions without asking their origin. We obey foreign calendars without questioning who wrote them. We speak and think in foreign tongues and call it normal. And worst of all, we rarely stop to ask: Whose story is this, and why am I in it?
Let’s start with something simple, holidays. In Palau, we celebrate Christmas, Easter, Halloween, even Valentine’s Day, often with more passion than our own cultural events. But how many people truly understand the theological, colonial, or commercial histories behind these days? Christmas was not born in Odesangel, and the Easter Bunny has never hopped through the taro patches of Ngiwal. But we follow. We buy. We decorate. We even fight over who gets gifts. We reinforce these foreign traditions until they feel like our own. But repetition does not make something ours. It only makes it normal.
This is the genius of control: if you define the rhythm of the year, the words in the prayer, and the structure of the school, then you control the imagination of the next generation. You don’t have to raise your voice. You just have to raise your flag. You don’t have to ban local culture. You just have to flood the airwaves with yours.
Language is the most powerful evidence of this control. Even this article, these very words are in English. Not Palauan. Not the rhythmic tones of tekoi er a Belau. We write in English because we were taught to think in English. Our ideas, our arguments, even our anger are filtered through someone else’s grammar.
Language is not just communication. It is a worldview. If I cannot speak about the spiritual relationship between cheldecheduch and klechibelau in Palauan, then I cannot fully understand my own soul. If I can only pray in the language of the missionaries, then who am I really praying to? But the question then comes: should Palauan remain an oral language? Or should it evolve into a written one?
The answer is not simple. Oral tradition holds power, it preserves memory in breath, in rhythm, in the presence of elders. But we also live in a world where the written word is currency. If our children cannot read their own stories, they will only read others’. The real issue is not oral vs. written. It is control. Who decides what is taught, what is recorded, and what is forgotten?
Control is not always violent. It often comes as a gift. A scholarship. A church. A holiday. A good job that requires perfect English. Slowly, the foreign becomes familiar. And the familiar becomes forgotten. This is how a people can lose their soul without even realizing they’re bleeding.
We must become dangerous again. Dangerous in the sense of being critical. We must ask, every day: Is this mine? Or am I simply trained to do this because it pleases someone else’s system? We must relearn how to define the situation, our holidays, our history, our gods, our economy, our future.
If we do not, someone else always will.
Your Humble Servant
Al Kahalic