The Culture High Screening


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Chamoru Love Sayings

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A student from my Zoom Chamoru classes recently asked me for some suggestions for some Chamoru sayings or words of wisdom that she could use for a speech she had to give for a friend's wedding.  I get this type of request pretty frequently and so over the years I have a number of lists of ways to say "I Love You" in Chamoru. For years that was one of the my most visited pages on this blog, a simple page that had more than a dozen different ways to say "Hu Guaiya Hao" ranging from the poetic and deep, to the silly and sexy.  When I looked at many of those lists, I realized that the majority of the ways love was expressed, was indeed written in Chamoru, but not necessarily rooted in Chamoru. What I mean by this, is that alot of the sayings were simply translated from English or variants of ways that love would be expressed in English.  For me, I am definitely in support of these sorts of things, I love having our language adapt and take on new forms, especially wh...
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Bush and flip flops

George W. Bush, the ultimate flip flopper. He is the master of flip flopping kwan. I was remembering the other day how Bush, his pitbull Cheney and their apostles went hard after Kerry for his "flip flopping." Kerry was a wishy washy guy, always changing his mind, hardly leadership material. Bush in contrast, was supposed to be stiff and stubborn, the leader who, even though the majority of the country wanted the US out of Iraq, wouldn't even bend beneath the democratic pressure of his own electorate. The funny thing though is that more and more, Bush is leaving behind that stubborness and embracing his flip flopping nature, becoming a greatly skilled and masterful artist. He is so great in fact, he makes John Kerry look like some confused, afigao, nedok novice. Bush is a pro, for reals umbee. Unlike Kerry who usually needed at least two statements to flip and flop (with the notable exception of his claim to "have voted for the funding for the Iraq war, before voting...
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Act of Decolonization #19: Don't Celebrate Independence Day

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People often conceive of colonization as being a formal process carried out by militaries or governments. These institutions play essential roles and the political system naturally becomes the primarily target for most movements for decolonization, but as I have stated many times, the process is much more diverse and complicated. Although it is easy to focus on what we consider to be the formal and concrete forms of power, they way that things are forcibly imposed, the world of the abstract, the conceptual and the ideological can have a deeper and more lasting impact. If we see for example in two former epochs of colonization in Guam, the formal ways in which things were imposed on Chamorros did not necessarily have a significant colonizing impact on the identity and consciousness of Chamorros. The imposition of governments on Guam by the Spanish and by the US led to great outward changes on the island, and histories tend to conflate the effect on the outward appearance of the i...
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