NO REST FOR THE AWAKE - MINAGAHET CHAMORRO

In 2022 while attending the first ever Native Hawaiian Pacific Islander Museum Institute (NHPIMI) in Hawai'i, I began to write a series of columns for the Pacific Daily News that covered some of the 90 year history of the Guam Museum.   In recent decades the Guam Museum has a fairly complicated history, where at times for years there was no actual museum, just a collection moving from storage space to storage space. Even at times when there has been a physical, dedicated facility for the museum, sometimes there has been insufficient staff or resources. Even legally where the museum falls within the Government of Guam as an agency has changed over the past forty years.  For these complicating factors, the columns focused on the museum's history from the 1930s to the 1970s.  ******************* “Can a Museum Being a Living Institution?” July 21, 2022   I am spending the month of July at the East-West Center as part of the historic first cohort for the Native...

For all of the damage that Donald Trump can do, he definitely helps bring about exciting renewals and rediscoveries as well. Much has been made of the competition between major newspapers for "scoops," but I would also like to mention how Trump's behavior and his regular, often mindless assaults on the norms of governance, provide great fodder for columnists and editorial boards as well. I've pasted below an editorial from the editorial board for USA Today. I never thought I would ever save an editorial from that newspaper, but with Trump's behavior, even they ended up making an articulate and impassioned case against his behavior. One of the downsides to a year of Trumpsanity, is that the news is constantly happening and evolving, whether through strategy, stupidity or insanity, and there just isn't enough time or energy to write about it or comment on it. That is one thing I've found about this blog for instance, is that I would frequently find myse...

I traveled to Japan last month with Ed Alvarez the Executive Director for Guam's Commission on Decolonization. We were in Japan for just a few days but we were able to give a number of talks at two universities in the Kansai area thanks to our friends Ronni Alexander (Kobe University) and Yasukatsu Matsushima (Ryukkoku University), who arranged our visits to their institutions of higher education. Our visit also got us some coverage in the newspapers Tokyo Shinbun and Chunichi Shinbun. I have no idea what they are saying in the articles or in this article below taken from the website for Ryukkoku Uniersity, but I am hoping they are either speaking positively about the message we had about decolonization in Guam or about the illustrious nature of my beard. Si Yu'us Ma'åse ta'lo nu si Ronni yan si Yasukatsu para i ayudon-ñiha gi este na hinanao! Gof ti apmam, lao gof gaibåli sinembatgo. ************* グアム政府事務局長、グアム大学教授による特別講義を開催（地域経済論ほか） 12/26/16 Ryukkoku Universit...

-->   My addiction to news about the 2016 election for President in the United States reached previously inexperienced levels for me, when a few months ago I did the unthinkable, I signed up for a paid subscription for the digital version of a newspaper. I've had magazine subscriptions before, The Nation, The Smithsonian, Mother Jones, Z Mag, even Guahan back in the day. But newspapers were always something that I either purchased regular physical copies of, or I simply read articles online if they had been reposted into paywall-free forms. This election was different in so many ways for me, primarily because of the type of candidate that Donald Trump represented, whereby he followed very few established conventions for candidates and seemed to relish in energizing some of the grossest aspects of the American present and past. One thing that struck me early on was not his willingness to attack the media, as every candidate claims that they are not being treated fairly...