NO REST FOR THE AWAKE - MINAGAHET CHAMORRO

Next week I am giving a colloquium on Chamorros their creation stories, the village of Humatak and decolonization. It brings together some of the important things I've been helping organize and simply participating in over the past year in a nice way to talk about decolonization and how we can make it a reality in our lives. The colloquium presentation I am working on would not be possible without the help of my Male' Victoria Leon Guerrero, who was key in organizing all the activities I'll mention, far beyond my meager contributions. We did a first draft form of this presentation last year to a group of visiting scholars from Taiwan. I'm hoping to improve on it and eventually we'll co-author it as a article for the journal Micronesian Educator.  Writing for me isn't that difficult a task. Para Guahu mamange' ti gof mappot. Editing, that is hard. Kinirihi. Enao sen ti ya-hu. Every article that I write starts with a writing session, either on paper or on

The first full draft of my dissertation was completed almost a month ago and in the time since I've been editing and fixing up my chapters in preparation for my defense in June. As I've done with my previous chapters, I'm pasting in this post, all the tetehnan or leftovers from my writing of the fourth chapter of my dissertation. To read the tetehnan of my other chapters, click the links below: Chapter 1 Chapter 2 Chapter 3 In this chapter I was discussing sovereignty and decolonization from a more local perspective, writing about and sometimes critiquing the ideas of sovereignty that Chamorros, activists or not, everyday use to articulate their existences, and how a lot of times they set themselves up for failure, dependency, non-existence or eternal colonization through their ideas. You might recognize some of the names in this chapter, and in fact, there might even be a chance that you might be mentioned in this chapter. Read through if you dare, its all over the plac

Despite being an emergency substitute teacher for four History of Guam classes at the University of Guam for the entire month of November, I was still able to finish up the first sprawling draft of the third chapter of my dissertation. Yanggen ti macho'cho'cho' yu', siempre mas nina'funhayan as Guahu. When I say sprawling, I am not exaggerating, this thing is was forty something single spaced pages, and could have gone on longer if I hadn't eventually hadn't considered the damage I would be causing my chair if I continued. The inanakko' of this chapter is due primarily to the fact that it is a sort of mainstream lit review of sovereignty, and an explanation about why I cannot use mainstream sovereignty texts or even the concept itself when talking about Guam's political status and talking about sovereignty for the island. Not wanting to produce a traditional or very simple literature review, I instead created a very convoluted but eventually worthw

I haven't posted anything for quite a while and there's some very good reasons for that. One, which I'll have more info on soon is that I spent the weekend helping my grandfather sell and display his tools at the Micronesian Island Fair at Ipao Beach. The other reason is that I finished up my first full draft of my second chapter for my dissertation. This chapter focuses on answering two obvious questions for a dissertation tentatively titled "Guam: Where the Production of America's Sovereignty Begins!", and those are, "Why Guam?" and "Why Sovereignty?" This chapter also is meant to discuss my methods for my dissertation, and how I will use Catherine Lutz's article "Empire is in the Details" as a frame for using jokes, off-hand remarks, mistakes, blog comments and anecdotes as evidence for my points on sovereignty. Two weeks ago I posted the extra, unused, and edited out sections from my first chapter under the post Tiempon