Micronesia is a region of thousands of small islands scattered across the western Pacific north of the equator — the Mariana, Caroline, and Marshall archipelagoes, along with Palau, Nauru, and the Gilbert Islands of Kiribati. It is also a nineteenth-century European label, meaning 'small islands,' that gathered hundreds of distinct communities under one name coined from outside. The region holds both a deep human past and a colonial classification that its own people still argue over.
A navigator from a Caroline atoll could push a sailing canoe onto open water, point it at the horizon, and steer for weeks toward an island he had never seen and could not have marked on any chart. He held the whole voyage in memory as a moving pattern of rising stars, ocean swells, and the dawn flight of seabirds. His target was a low green speck smaller than a village, hidden below the curve of the sea, in an ocean that covers more of the planet than all of its land combined.