NO REST FOR THE AWAKE - MINAGAHET CHAMORRO

Last week, I finished what was literally a long road in the course of my life, when I officially stopped being a student and completed my dissertation. I've been in college in some form or another for 13 years straight now and so I am very much looking forward to this period of my life where hokkok i umestudiante-ku, or I'm through being a student. I first started college in 1997, at Cuesta Community College. I spent three semesters there before transferring to the University of Guam. By spring of 2001 I graduated with a double major from UOG in Fine Arts and English/Literature. While I was an undergraduate at UOG, I had two one-man exhibitions of my artwork, the first in 1999 titled "Typhoon: An Island's Intensity" and the second in 2001 titled "I Matan i Kuttura Siha." I was most known during this time for having paint on my clothes all the time, and some people still remember me as "that painted guy." From there I jumped into the Micronesian...

Graduate students at my department at UCSD are right now working on a Ethnic Studies and Indigenous Studies symposium to take place in May of this year. This symposium is part of a long process over the past few years which includes last year's interdisciplinary conference Postcolonial Futures in a Not Yet Postcolonial World that I helped organize, an Indigenous Studies cluster hire that I helped write two years ago, and the Voicing Indigeneity Podcast that I used to help create with two other indigenous students in the department. The goal of the process was to create a more stable and productive space for those working on indigenous studies projects within Ethnic Studies. For the upcoming symposium the organizers are looking to invite old scholars, new scholars and some graduate students who are all doing work at the intersections of these two discplines, either in their activism or in their academic work. I'm sure I'll have more details soon and there's also a goo...

The Voicing Indigeneity Podcast that me and my friends Madel and Angie do together will be on hiatus over the summer. Madel is in Palau doing research, spending time with family and recovering from her qualifying exams. Angie is writing her master's thesis in Ethnic Studies and audting some classes at UCSD. I'm in Guam for the next two months, doing some research, starting some trouble, and most importantly starting my life as a dad. I'm sure we'll be back though in the fall, and I'll still try to post stuff on the blog for those who pass by the blog while googling random things about indigenous peoples, sovereignty, decolonization and academics singing badly. As a public service, I'm pasting below the links to all the podcasts we've done over the past year, 17 in all. I did get very nostalgic while I was collecting all the links because I've enjoyed so much these conversations and they have really helped pushed me forward in my work. For instance, in J...

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...

I wrote several months ago about Chamorros in the United States as "ethnic achakma'" and the need for Chamorros to assert ourselves in the United States as just another ethnic group that makes exciting and delicious food! In this post, I used the dance group Kutturan Chamoru which operates out of Long Beach, California as a potential example of how Chamorros in the states can break out of these stereotypes and bland minority existences. On Guam right now there has been a proliferation of Pacific dance groups, many Chamorro oriented, but many others clearly Polynesian. In the Chamorro diaspora, there is a high level of participation in Polynesian style dance groups, both in Hawai'i and especially in Southern California. The existence of Kutturan Chamoru is important because it represents a moment where the "Pacific Islander" label which is dominated in the United States by a orientalist Polynesian imaginary, did not dictate what was to be possible, and instea...

Apologies to those who followed the podcast that me and my friends Madel and Angie started a few months ago. School's out for the next few weeks and so there won't be any new podcasts for a while. But Angie swore to me that once school starts up again we'll be sure to start recording them again. In the meantime, for those who haven't seen it, I'm posting below the "declaration of indigeneity" that we drafted to kind of explain our position and the theoretical reasons for why we were saying so many critically unkind things on our podcast. By the way, we plan on taking our little pacific islander/indian show on the road next year. We submitted a panel proposal based on our different projects and podcast discussions for the Indigenous Studies Conference to take place next May at University of Oklahoma. Check out the description and the steering committee, it looks to be a truly exciting/inspiring event. Alii, el mor kemiu el rokui, Hafa adai, mañelu-hu yan ...