NO REST FOR THE AWAKE - MINAGAHET CHAMORRO

Over the years, as I’ve traveled around Asia and the Pacific, whether for research, for conferences, for solidarity actions, I’ve found a list of places similar to Guam, that you could call ambiguous. They belong to a certain country, but they don’t really feel like it at times. Okinawa is one such place. There is way that history and culture have combined to create a rift between Japan and Okinawa, that is invisible most of the time, but is the stark the next. There was a sense of pride and identity that could not be explained solely through references to regionalism or local love. It was something more, and something very similar to what we see on Guam. The particularities of history have created the situation where you can stand in either Guam or Okinawa and say with great force that these places are either American or Japanese. Colonialism and imperialism have taken these places and remade them. They might have said they did so for the benefit of the people there, but they noneth...

Since 2003 I have had a number of uneven traditions associated with this blog. Many of these have dissipated as I have used this blog less and less, but a few I have continued to hold on to. One of the longest held traditions is "Happy US Imperialism Day!" It started as a thinking piece while I was working on my Master's Thesis in Micronesian Studies at the University of Guam. I had spent a few years reading as much as I could about Guam History. I had interviewed hundreds of elders born prior to World War II, who had experienced Japanese occupation. I had even begun working for Puerto Rican filmmaker Frances Negron-Muntaner on a documentary that would later become War for Guam. I was also spending time with activists of every stripe on Guam, trying to talk to anyone who I could find who had long been critical of the things I was just starting to learn about the historical and contemporary realities of the Chamoru people.  I was encountering the history and the present of...

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...

I first wrote an article "Happy US Imperialism Day Guam!" about 16 years ago. It was published in Minagahet Zine and later on this blog when I began it soon after. The writing of this article originally was a very formative experience. Part of it eventually became my Masters Thesis in Micronesian Studies. But I also wrote it at a time when I was first trying to find a way to become more public about my critiques and writing letters to the editor of the Pacific Daily News and creating websites/blogs were some of the obvious choices. This article was written when the second Iraq War was only eight months old and the War in Afghanistan was over two years old. It was written at a time when I was feeling frustrated over the deaths of the first few Chamorros in Iraq, Christopher Rivera Wesley being the first. As I said, it was also written at a time when I was first working on developing a critical consciousness and a public voice in terms of writing and philosophy. I had been...

Last year, Our Islands are Sacred and other local activist groups penned a joint letter to Governor of Guam Eddie Calvo, challenging his support for the US military buildup to Guam. In response to the letter, which made a significant splash on social media, the Governor met with some of the authors of the letter to discuss their concerns. Central to rhetoric invoked in the letter focused on how the Governor had made several statements to the media that he was excited about the military buildup and what it might mean to Guam economically. As the military buildup, even in its reduced form, will most likely negatively Guam's environment, economy, security and cultural properties, the writers of the letter were incredulous that Governor Calvo would speak of the buildup with such excitement when so many negative aspects were involved. One of the suggestions that they made to Governor Calvo was that he invite the Governor of Okinawa to visit Guam with his staff and have a conversatio...

--> The island of Pagan, in the northern Marianas has made international news as it might soon become yet another beautiful island to be destroyed by the US military for its testing and training purposes. Although now I regularly hear news about Pagan, in years past I scarcely heard about it in a Chamorro context, but rather always in either a strict environmental context or in a Japanese historical context. Environmentalists are the first line of defense in some ways against militarization, although history has shown they often have trouble working cooperatively with the locals and natives who claim those lands. For them Pagan is an ecological paradise and needs to be protected. I would hear random tidbits about Pagan in this regard, as being a place with exciting species (including snails) that should be researched and explored.  I also heard about it in the context of Japanese, as settlers lived there during the Japanese colonial period in the CNMI. In fact in histori...

I am always intrigued at the way American critiques of Japan often time focus on the way that Japanese conservatives are always seeking to erase of minimize sexual slavery during World War II. The women that were forced into sexual slavery across the empire Japan was seeking to create have a tragically complex ideological function. They are on the one hand discursive means through which the nations formerly colonized by Japan reassert their national power. The bodies of those violated women become the means through which a very masculine national honor can be regained. For the Japanese themselves, they are part of their former colonial past that they struggle to both erase but also deal with. For the conservative part of Japan they are something that is tied to the masculinity of the nation. Part of the way the nation was once allowed to act. Part of the way that, for those conservative sectors, it should not have to apologize for. They do not want to erase the sins of the past, but...