NO REST FOR THE AWAKE - MINAGAHET CHAMORRO

I've spent the last year thinking a lot about Magellan.

Well as a Guam historian, I think about Magellan a lot and quite regularly, whether I want to or not.

But the particular ways I've been thinking about Magellan lately have centered around the fact that the 500th anniversary of the circumnavigation he led will take place in 2021.

There will be several voyages that will be following his route around the world and they will naturally stop in Guam in March 2021.

I was invited to a conference on behalf of Guam and the University of Guam last March, which was seen as being a launching event for the Spanish Navy for their anniversary commemoration.

I wrote about it on this blog as part of my Circumnavigations series.

Since then I've been working with a few other people, most notably Robert Underwood, David Atienza and Carlos Madrid on pushing for the development of a commission that can organize Guam's own events around this commemoration and also work with other countr…

Last June, Masahide Ota, former Governor of Okinawa passed away. He had been governor of the islands in 1995, when long-time resentment and culture of protest against the US military bases achieved a much greater and more widespread character after the rape of a 12 year old girl by three US servicemen. His was a powerful voice for peace and demilitarization in Okinawa. During a trip in October of 2015 Edward A. Alvarez and I (with the help of the intrepid interpreter Shinako Oyakawa) got to visit him at his Naha office one afternoon. When he learned that we were from Guam, he mentioned several Chamorros that he had met over the years and inquired about them. He told us a number of stories from his life, including as experience after being drafted into the Japanese army during the war. He shared others about the struggles to survive for average Okinawans, after the destruction of their island and displacement in order to build new US military bases. I have long written that Okinawa and…

For decades Guam has been used to being a joke. Generations of comedians have used it, such as Johnny Carson, David Lettermen and even Conan O'Brien. Robert Underwood has invoked the comedy specter of Rodney Dangerfield in order to explain Guam's situation, saying it is an island that gets no respect!

The mere mention of Guam in this way stems from the fact that it is a signifier that floats around, it is always out there, especially for those in the US, but there often isn't any actual knowledge attached to it. That means that you can deploy it in ridiculous ways, a familiar, but empty signifier that can create laughter as the listener confronts that awkward gap between their knowledge and whatever might lie beyond the horizon of their understanding. That's why when you would say something random like "I'm headed to Guam!" it would elicit laughter, because of the way the audience would slip on the banana peel shaped gap between their knowledge and reali…

In my Chamorro Studies class last week we were discussing the concept of inafa'maolek, which has become canonized as a central value of Chamoru culture as of late. The term fa'maolek has long been in use, it even occurs in the Garrido Manuscript from 18th century Guam. Inafa'maolek most likely was used as well, but not necessarily as a primal or central concept for defining Chamoru identity or culture. That comes about much more recently, primarily through the work of Robert Underwood when he uses the terms in the 1970s, while trying to define what the Chamoru cosmology of the 19th century was, and what of it had persisted up until the 20th century. 

Inafa'maolek has many meanings, all of them however focus around expressing community through interdependence or through cooperation. It is about working together to sustain a society. It is about humans sustaining nature, sustaining their families and so on. It is a collective concept that is focused on building sustainabl…

I have spent untold hours in the collection of the Micronesian Area Research center going through stacks upon stacks of newspapers looking at ads of those running for political office in Guam. Although I don't mention it much, when I began my masters thesis at the University of Guam in Micronesian Studies, my initial topics was actually political campaigns in Guam and analyzing Chamoru discourse in campaigns. I conducted around 50 interviews over several months, with a wide range of people. My intent was to reveal what role Chamoru "culture" or "language" or "identity" played in the organizing of political campaigns, the outreach, the strategizing or rationale.

My own motivation for taking on this project was tied to the 2002 Guam gubernatorial campaign. I was a young Chamoru grad student, who had started learning speaking Chamoru the year prior and was functionally, albeit awkwardly fluent in Chamoru. I was spending most of my free time in MARC doin…

On April 7, 2017, more than 800 people gathered in the field in front of the Ricardo J. Bordallo Government Complex in Adelup, Guåhan for the “Respect the Chamoru People Rally.” The event, organized by a grassroots collective of volunteers, aimed at celebrating the culture of the island’s indigenous people, the Chamorros, and at helping remind the Guam community about the need to maintain a respectful relationship to them in their island homeland. The event was non-partisan, backing no political candidates or agendas.

Over the course of the event’s 2 ½ hours, 15 speakers shared stories of the struggles of Chamorros in the past and the need to protect their island and heritage for future generations. Cultural groups offered blessings. Poets and musicians delivered inspiration through powerful words and melodies. Community organizations manned tables providing information on the military buildup, decolonization, and cultural preservation. The Håya Foundation, which seeks to preserve a…

Fanhokkåyan is my series where I share articles, writings and other documents from some of my previous websites, most notably the Kopbla Amerika/Chamorro Information Activist website and Minagahet Zine. The one I'm sharing today is an intriguing one, as it represents a piece that helped shape alot of my own perceptions as an early activist about Chamorro issues, in particular their relationship to colonial legacies. This piece, which I co-wrote with a friend of mine at the time, built off the idea of "soul wound" a theory that was first popularized in considering the contemporary place of Native Americans in relation to their historical (or continuing) trauma. It is far too easy for us to argue that we shouldn't be stuck in the past by recounting how Chamorros have been hurt by colonizers, that is a common interpassive point. In truth, we need to recount it and we need to understand it, most importantly so that we can change things today, so that we can reshape the …