NO REST FOR THE AWAKE - MINAGAHET CHAMORRO

Retellings of Guam history focus heavily on the end of the World War II on the island, and de-emphasize the start of the war. It is like this for some obvious and some less-obvious reasons. As I've written about before, where you place the narrative locus for these 32 months of Chamoru history will heavily affect what type of lessons or ideas emerge. If you focus on the end, the triumphant American return, where the Japanese are defeated and Chamorus are liberated from tyranny, the lessons seem pretty clear. American power and benevolence and propensity for liberation and democracy spreading. Chamorus become attached to the US and its history through that ending, as an object of their grandeur or their exceptional excellence and virtue. But if we switch the story's focus to the beginning things get much more complicated. We see at the beginning of war, an island where Chamorus trust the US to tell them the truth, to keep them safe, but they also understand in an important...

For two weeks there has been non-stop discussions of American exceptionalism across the United States. This has been centered in the national conventions for both of the major parties of the United States, the Republicans and the Democrats. They each proposed different forms of American exceptionalism at least on the surface, one immediately more frightening and menacing, while the other more comforting and friendly. Both of them focused on the idea that the United States is exceptional in history and in the present moment, and holds the keys to human progress and security. But as I've written about before, these conventions are interesting because they represent the last chances for people from the colonies of the United States to participate in American democracy. As people who live in Guam, Puerto Rico, American Samoa, the US Virgin Islands and even the CNMI cannot vote for President of the US (and have no electoral college votes), they get to participate up until this point...

Chamorros have been waiting for war reparations for decades. So many who were hoping to receive reparations for their treatment during World War II have passed away, not living long enough to see the reparations become a reality. War reparations has become a general part of political discourse on Guam. It is something that politicians bring up as a foil to target the Federal government or Guam’s non-voting delegates. Since the issue of war reparations is so emotional and given the fact that the longer it takes the more people will continue to die, you can define war reparations as one of those things that people feel very real, almost hyper real things in relation to, but in truth don’t really understand or don’t really conceive properly. For example, as I have written before on this blog, advocates for Guam’s independence and decolonization often use war reparations in order to talk about how the United States continues to disrespect us and treat us as les...

When I teach modern World History, the island of Taiwan makes a couple of cameo appearances. It appears during the resolution of the Chinese Civil War. Chiang Kai-Shek (CKS) flees to Formosa vowing to keep the fight alive from his new island fortress. In the way that I teach the class CKS is not a very sympathetic character. Coming from a Western perspective he is supposed to be the one that we choose as our champion, the one “our” side made deals with as being either the better or two evils or the lesser of two evils. CKS is no saint and is hardly worth much historical sympathy in my opinion and the conduct from the initial purge of communists, to his retreat to Taiwan to the white terror all attest to this. I don’t shy away from discussing the atrocities of the communists and Mao, but I don’t deny the historical significance and revolutionary nature of some of the communist reforms. As coming from a colony of the “west” I don’t like to take on their heroes...

George Takei discusses Gay Rights, "Star Trek" and Being a Comic Book Hero Christopher Rudolph chris.rudolph@huffingtonpost.com Huffington Post 6/29/13 Decades ago George Takei was warping through space aboard the USS Enterprise on the legendary television series "Star Trek." Lately he's been embarking on some new journeys as an LGBT rights activist and the unofficial "King of the Internet."   With over four million fans on Facebook and over 700,000 followers on Twitter, the beloved actor is a social media force to be reckoned with and he uses his magnificent reach to champion lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender causes. In honor of LGBT Pride Month, the Huffington Post caught up with Takei to chat about everything from his time on "Star Trek" to guest starring in a comic book with Archie Comics' first gay character to bringing his new musical to Broadway and more. The Huffington Post: You wrote a blog a...

History has a way of reminding you that what you take for granted today did not exist in the past, and worse yet, there may have been a point in the past when what you take for granted today was unimaginable. There is one quote from Robert Underwood that sums of this strange way that history can haunt people and deprive them of a feeling of essentialness with the present. It comes from his essay "Teaching Guam History in Guam High Schools" and it talks about the position of Chamorros from 1898-1941 in relation to the United States. The Chamorro people were not Americans, did not see themselves as Americans-in-waiting, and probably did not care much about being Americans. The US relationship during that period was unapologetically colonial. The US didn't have a colonial office as other countries did, but instead just colonized Guam through the US Navy and racist and paternalistic rhetoric/policies. The US Navy preached the glories of its nation in Guam, but Chamor...

Published on Thursday, March 22, 2012 by Common Dreams War Crimes and the Mythology of 'Bad Apples' by Robert C. Koehler So it turns out that mass-murder suspect Robert Bales once used a bad word in a Facebook conversation. This is one of the more bizarre details of his life that has come breathlessly to light in the media, along with his big smile, arrest record and disastrous financial dealings. The word was “hadji” (misspelled “hagi”), which is the racial slur of choice among U.S. troops to denigrate Iraqis; and stories where I have read about his use of it fixate on it judgmentally, as though to suggest it might explain something: the tiny flaw that reveals a propensity for massacring children. Something had to be wrong with him, right? As always, the mainstream media’s unquestioning assumption is that the atrocity is the work of an individual nut . . . a flawed patriot, a bad apple. O...

I’ve been following closely since the start of the year Governor Calvo’s use of colonialism and self-determination when talking about different, sometimes seemingly unrelated issues. As someone who takes seriously the role of contemporary and historical colonialism in shaping Guam, I’ve been impressed with his rhetoric, but also wary as to how much of it is real and how much of it might be simple posturing. Every Governor of Guam has the same choices in terms of their approach to navigating the sometimes stormy, sometimes placid seas of Federal-Territorial relations. You can pretend you are just like a state and accept the Hansel and Gretel like breadcrumbs of tokenism that make you feel like you are moving forward when you are really not. Or you can play the colonial card and try to define yourself from your actual position, which is much more difficult in the short term, but does have the aura of possible helping to lead Guam in the next step of its political evolution. Although ...