Our final object of analysis includes a canoe bailer from Bikini Atoll in the Marshall Islands of Micronesia (slightly southeast of Hawai‘i) in 1946. In presenting this object, which was used by Micronesian natives to remove water from their canoes in a process known as bailing, we move on from the (relatively recent, by deep historical standards) ancestral Oceanic culture of the Lapita; past the settlements of various Pacific islands, including most notably Aotearoa and Hawai‘i; and directly into the post-World War II era and its associated contemporary issues of concern.

The bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki on the Pacific island of Japan are an obvious image of destruction, and a narrative so visibly etched into any American high school education. Left secondary to that narrative, however, is that numerous world powers - in particular, the United States - afterwards used the waters and lands of the Pacific as a space to test generations of atomic weapons with even greater explosive yields; researchers and military officials alike used the Pacific Ocean as a laboratory to investigate the after-effects of nuclear weapons, mushroom clouds, and other high-potency items.

Even more unspoken in that narrative includes the dislocation of islanders who once called those now atomic-atolls home, peoples who would have once used this wooden object in order to scoop water out of their canoes; one scholar of the Pacific writes that in the wake of World War II, the United States developed a so-called Trust Territory of the Pacific Islands in order to assume a legal right to forcefully remove and dispossess islanders for nuclear testing means. This issue has since re-emerged in the twenty-first century, with recent scholars framing the “drenching” and forced resettlement of the Marshall Islands as an issue central to human rights and environmental justice.