Independent Guåhan March General Assembly

LEARN MORE ABOUT RECENT THREATS TO CHAMORRO RIGHTS AT INDPENDENT GUÅHAN’S MARCH GENERAL ASSEMBLY THURSDAY

Educational Presentations will focus on the Davis vs. Guam case, the Chamorro Land Trust and moving forward towards self-determination

For Immediate Release, March 20, 2017 – Independent Guåhan invites the public to its monthly General Assembly (GA) on Thursday, March 23rd from 6 – 7:30 p.m. at the Main Pavilion of the Chamorro Village in Hagåtña.

This month’s educational presentations will focus on the need to respect the Chamorro people in their quest to self-determination in light of current actions on behalf of the US Federal Government deeming the decolonization plebiscite and Chamorro Land Trust, “race-based discrimination”. In honor of Mes Chamoru, the meeting will be bilingual in both English and Chamorro.

Eartlier this month, Federal Justice France Tydingco-Gatewood ruled that a non-binding decolonization vote for Guam’s native inhabitants is unconstitutional and cannot take place. Also, the Chamorro Land Trust, which provides land leases to landless Chamorros, has come under the scrutiny of the US Department of Justice, which has suggested the program is unconstitutional and racist. Both of these programs exist as forms of restorative justice meant to remedy acts of colonization, which have denied Chamorros their ancestral lands and sovereignty.

The educational discussion for this month’s GA will provide an overview of these and other threats to Chamorro rights and the movement to self-determination, with an eye towards developing strategies to ensure that the Chamorro people are respected and protected in their home islands.

This GA will honor the late Clotilde “Ding” Castro Gould as Independent Guåhan’s monthly Maga’taotao. Tan Gould was a war-survivor, an educator, author, song-writer and a master story-teller. She is best known for her creation of the Chamorro language comic strip Juan Malimanga, which appears in the Pacific Daily News six times a week and her role in helping develop the bilingual and bicultural education program in Guam’s public school system.

Tan Gould was also a member of PARA and OPI-R, and as a political activist fought hard for the right to self-determination of the Chamorro people.

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