NO REST FOR THE AWAKE - MINAGAHET CHAMORRO

I wrote a few years ago a letter to the PDN which asked that those of us on Guam please rethink our relationship to the United States. I noted that the best time to reposition, rearticulate and rework this relationship was when, despite the powerfully charged rhetoric of Guam’s Americaness and patriotism and partnership with the US, we get slapped in the face with our colonial existence, our subordinate status. I called this moments “scandals.” One common response that I receive from this point, is that no such scandals exist, that I was merely making it up. The relationship between Guam and America is as smooth and equitable as ever. In exchange for not paying taxes, and not being able to have any sovereignty, we get to enjoy being a strategically important appendage of the greatest country left in the world! If that can’t explain the high levels of Chamorro patriotism towards the United States, then nothing can! Naturally, this isn’t the case. Life as a semi-American in Guam is a te...

Estague un tinige’ i atungo’-hu Si Stephanie Marie Mansfield. Eståba fafana’gue gui’ giya I Eskuelan Mount Carmel, ya mina’tuge’ este put i siña mahuhuchom I eskuela. Sigun i Obispo Guahan, (ni’ chumochonnek este na hinichom) maulailaika i tiempo siha, ya ti guailåyi pa’go un eskuela para i sanhaya na banda. Ti nahong i estudiante, ti nahong i salåpe. Sigun i gof maolek na sainå-hu Zita Pangelinan, Manmana’i siha esta ki 15th April, para u na’siguru este tres nap unto. 1) Guaha ad'minis'trdoro/ra para otro sakan. 2) Ma establisa i Endowment/Alumni Foundation. 3) Guaha 150 na famaguon man fitme na ma "register" yan man ma apasi. Yanggen manmataka’ i tres pues siña masatba i eskuela. Bai hu na’chetton guini mågi i tinige’ Stephanie Marie yan tres na kachido ginnen Youtube. Yanggen malago hao umayuda este na eskuela taitai i tinige’ Stephanie Maria ya egga’ ko’lo’lo’na i kachido siha. Gi i kachido siha pon eyak mas put i estoria i eskuela yan i sinisedi i famagu’on. ~Ste...

There is a very important conference taking place right now in Ecuador about the status of foreign military bases around the world. I am excited and grateful that three Chamorros will be there in order to testify and inform others about the situation in Guam, where because of the simple fact that Guam is not completely "foreign" but neither "domestic," this ambiguous political status somehow becomes transformed into the right of the United States to do whatever it wants to Guam. I'm attaching below a press release from the conference as well as the statement from I Nasion Chamoru put i estao militat giya Guahan pa'go. Magof hu na manggaige hamyo na tres guenao, ya en tachuchuyi ham. Na'tungo' i otro na mannatibu yan i otro na nasion-siha put i estao-ta, ya tungo' nai na gaige ha' giya Hamyo todu tiempo i espiritun i taotao-ta. *********** Declaration: International Conference for the Abolition of Foreign Military Bases, March 5 to 9, 2007 Qu...

Me, Angie (taotao Natibu Amerikanu) and Madel ( taotao Belau) are up to our old voicing indigeneity tricks. After a month-long break in December and January, we started recording again our infamously unknown podcast Voicing Indigeneity . I'm just kidding about the infamously unknown part, in actuality, we have a fairly loyal listener-ship. The blog itself gets around 10-20 hits per day, and from the email that I've gotten from when we started, we have fans from around the United States, west, east, north and south, but also get regular listeners from Taiwan, Australia, Hawai'i, Japan and even a guy from France. We recorded our most recent podcast Harry Potter and the 45th Generation Roman at the 2007 Crossing Borders Conference: Ghosts Monsters and the Dead , last weekend at UCSD. I'll post more about this conference soon, it was quite an experience. As one of its organizers, my main relief though is that it went well. For those of you who are unfamiliar with our podc...

FAMOKSAIYAN: “Our Time to Paddle Forward” Summit on Decolonization and Native Self-Determination April 20-22, 2007 History: On 14 & 15 April 2006 more than 100 Chamorro scholars, activists, and community leaders gathered at the Sons and Daughters of Guam Club in San Diego to share their work and research, and to participate in discussions relating to the future of their people and native homelands. The name of this gathering was Famoksaiyan: Decolonizing Chamorro Histories, Identities and Futures . This initial meeting of native leaders inspired such a great deal of research questions and possibilities that concrete action plans were soon implemented on an international forum. Over the past year we have held regional meetings in Berkeley, Long Beach, Oakland and Guam and helped plan a number of historic events. In October of 2006, several members of Famoksaiyan organized a trip to New York City to testify before the United Nations Committee on Decolonization, about the question of...

Published on Wednesday, February 28, 2007 by CommonDreams.org The Words None Dare Say: Nuclear War by George Lakoff "The elimination of Natanz would be a major setback for Iran's nuclear ambitions, but the conventional weapons in the American arsenal could not insure the destruction of facilities under seventy-five feet of earth and rock, especially if they are reinforced with concrete."—Seymour Hersh, The New Yorker, April 17, 2006 "The second concern is that if an underground laboratory is deeply buried, that can also confound conventional weapons. But the depth of the Natanz facility - reports place the ceiling roughly 30 feet underground - is not prohibitive. The American GBU-28 weapon - the so-called bunker buster - can pierce about 23 feet of concrete and 100 feet of soil. Unless the cover over the Natanz lab is almost entirely rock, bunker busters should be able to reach it. That said, some chance remains that a single strike would fail."—Michael Levi, Ne...

There has been a small spike in the amount of hate mail that I get in the past two weeks, and its one of the things thats been slowing me down. There's actually plenty of things slowing me down lately, but I'm slowly trying to get them organized and together. I'm trying to prepare to support my new baby for the fall. I'm working on getting my prospectus done by the end of the school year. I'm preparing for the 2nd Famoksaiyan conference which is scheduled for April 20-22. I'm also preparing for the conference Crossing Borders 2007: Ghosts, Monsters and The Dead which my department is hosting this weekend, where I'm also presenting a paper. Hate mail, makes a hectic and crazy schedule even crazier. It sucks energy into the writing of nasty and hurried responses which sometimes make you flush with power and pride at the way you vanquished your nemesis' stupid points, but also makes you wrecked with anticipation for their response. I have been getting ha...

I'll be presenting some of the writing I'm doing on sovereignty this weekend at the conference below which my department is hosting. If you've got the time or interest, come by and check it out. There will be a number of papers addressing decolonization, decolonial studies vs. postcolonial studies, and so on. CALL FOR PAPERS CROSSING BORDERS 2007: GHOSTS, MONSTERS, AND THE DEAD 5th Annual Conference of Ethnic Studies in California co-sponsored by: Department of Ethnic Studies and California Cultures in Comparative Perspective, University of California, San Diego Program in American Studies and Ethnicity, University of Southern California Department of Ethnic Studies, University of California, Berkeley Friday, Saturday, and Sunday March 2 – 4, 2007 University of California, San Diego Do you have this frightening sensation that issues of race and ethnicity are being erased from public and academic discourse? This might explain why on college campuses around the country, Ethni...

I just wanted to share with everyone this image, which is a photo ( ginnen Thea) which shows off my blue Risk pieces on the verge of overrunning the world. This image is special to me because it records for posterity, what was my first Risk victory ever. The game began in an interesting way. Me, Jose and Thea (all in Ethnic Studies at UCSD) were sitting at the table at a board game party which, was being attended primarily by Ethnic Studies graduate students from UCSD, and had been early on hijacked by a magic mic and largely assisted by large amounts of alcohol. With all the board games free the three of us faced a difficult choice. After reducing our options by almost a dozen we were left with two choices, capitalism or imperialism. Or as they are known around the world Monopoly and Risk. Gof mappot este na inayek, para Siha ni' manggai"progressive politics." Manhuehuego taiguini kalang mani'isao no? The three of us are all from islands, Guam, the Philippines an...

I've been following the case of Army Lt. Ehren Watada for a while now, with anticipation, fear, and yes, yes, coming from the most colonized place left in the world, Guam, yes, jealousy. I'll explain the jealousy comment in a moment. As you can read below, Watada made alot of people relieved and nervous in 2004 when he refused to deploy to Iraq, claiming that the war was immoral and illegal. Alot of people in lower ranks have made similar claims or attempted to make claims such as this, but their attempts, except in a few cases such as Camilio Meija never receive this sort of national attention. Why the buzz? One reason is simply that Watada is an officer. He isn't part of the rank and file, he's part of the management class of the military. It is understandable if the grunts make noises or try to escape fighting. After all, they aren't getting the material support they need for the war, are fighting next to private contractors who are making ten times as much, a...

I'm deadlocked in the writing of my prospectus right now, so even though kulang machuchuda i tintanos hu ni' meggai na idea siha, I don't have either the frame of mind of the focus right now for posting on my blog. Para hamyo ni' esta un tungo' i kistumbre-ku, this means that I'll be posting response papers from my graduate seminars until I can get back on top of my schedule. Na'magof hao ni' este, ya despensa para i ginagu-hu. Michael Lujan Bevacqua Colonial Sovereignty Jodi Blanco 11/2/06 According to Peter Fitzpatrick, the law becomes the curious fetish of the colonies. From the perspective of the colonizer, a sort of sudden sovereignty emerges at the moments of contact with a “new” world which cannot readily be accounted for in his current imagination. As he bumps up against this “new” gap in the symbolic network, which is never truly a gap, but only the appearance of one, sovereignty erupts as the ability to map not just this new land, but also hims...