NO REST FOR THE AWAKE - MINAGAHET CHAMORRO

The representative from Hawai'i at the Island Language Revitalizaation Forum this week at Ryukyu University is Noelani Iokepa-Guerrero. She is both a professor at University of Hawai'i, Hilo but also Program Director for the Punana Leo Hawaiian Medium preschools. She is very much involved in the training of Native Hawaiian teachers and the perpetuation of the immersion school programs that have been created there over the past 30 years. Her presentation at the conference was "Hawaiian Language Revitalization: 30 Years of Lessons Learned" and it laid out the approach to teaching the language that Native Hawaiians have developed. In the early days of their revitalization efforts they simply translated materials from other languages and other contexts. This proved ineffective and so efforts were made to create a curriciulum that was rooted in Native Hawaiian language, history adn culture. As a result of this they came to develop 5 key lessons or insights. These 5 sim...

I can’t get my students at UOG excited about the 2012 Presidential race. This is to be expected considering that Guam, as a territory has no Electoral College votes and so it doesn’t get to help choose the next most powerful man in the world. In most similar classrooms across the United States, a group of apathetic students is an affront to democracy and self-government! But what is the point of calling on people in Guam to care about a race that they are prohibited from participating in? This November when you head to the polls you will get a ballot that asks you if you want to vote for either Willard Mitt Romney or Barack Hussein Obama. But since the vote doesn’t count, it makes you wonder why we even do it at all? It is yet another way that people on Guam seek to create the illusion of Guam being a secure and full part of the United States rather than face the truth of the situation. It is akin to seeing someone who is hallucinating that they are eating a gourmet meal...

Published on Friday, December 30, 2011 by CultureStrike Ethnic Studies Ruling Escalates Arizona Schools Struggle by Michelle Chen While students were on their holiday break, Arizona issued a disturbing wake-up call to anyone who thought the education system had evolved to reflect America’s diversity. In a legal challenge to a controversial law passed in 2010, an administrative law judge pummeled a flagship educational initiative by supporting restrictions on programs based on Latino history and culture. Tucson students occupy a school board meeting  The judge decided that the curriculum used in Tucson’s Mexican American studies programs was biased against white people, apparently because it advocates critical historical perspectives and emphasizes struggles of indigenous and Latino communities, as well as the links between that legacy and contemporary politics. The ruling comes as no surprise, as the struggle between the school district and school superinten...

Arizona Bans Ethnic Studies and, Along With it, Reason and Justice Tuesday 28 December 2010 by: Randall Amster J.D., Ph.D., t r u t h o u t News Analysis While much condemnation has rightly been expressed toward Arizona's anti-immigrant law, SB 1070, a less-reported and potentially more sinister measure is set to take effect on January 1, 2011. This new law, which was passed by the conservative state legislature at the behest of then-School Superintendent (and now Attorney General-elect) Tom Horne, is designated HB 2281 and is colloquially referred to as a measure to ban ethnic studies programs in the state. As with SB 1070, the implications of this law are problematic, wide-ranging and decidedly hate filled. Whereas SB 1070 focused primarily on the ostensible control of bodies, HB 2281 is predominantly about controlling minds. In this sense, it is the software counterpart of Arizona's race-based politicking, paired with the hardware embodied in SB 1070's "sho...

A great post below from The Drowning Mermaid , titled " Desiree, Be a Lady ." My favorite line is this one: "The "melting pot," the "my land is your land, from California to blah blah blah blah" (I never bothered to learn that song) is only fun, positive, or happy when you are not the one losing yourself, or if you are not the one acting as the gracious host for someone rich and powerful enough to hit you over the head for not being enthusiastic about "sharing." It's not fun or easy to accept if the brand of "unity" they are pushing always forces you to "accept," while they "come together." The problem with decolonization in today's "multicultural" world is that there is so much pressure to give in, to let the prevailing powers, prevail. To give in and let the way things are continue as they are, since to challenge things or try to change things would mean making people feel uncomfortable, ...

This article reminds me of the movie and book A Time to Kill... I want to explain more about why, other than the obvious hypothetical racial replacement strategy, whereby you ask someone to hypothetically replace the race of someone in order to reveal the ways in which things are radically different or radically similar to something else. But alas, this week is going to be spent working on a huge project, which unfortunately not only keeps me from blogging, but preparing for my classes and hanging out with Sumahi. I can't wait for this week to be over, but in the meantime, here's an article asking you to think what things would be like if "The Tea Party movement was black?" ************************** What If the Tea Party Were Black? By Tim Wise, AlterNet Posted on April 25, 2010, Printed on July 18, 2010 http://www.alternet.org/story/146616/ Let’s play a game, shall we? The name of the game is called “Imagine.” The way it’s played is simple: we’ll envision recent hap...