NO REST FOR THE AWAKE - MINAGAHET CHAMORRO

Throughout my interviews that I conducted for my graduate school research, when the issue of decolonization would emerge in the discussion, regardless of the demographic intersections of the interview subject, regardless of their life experiences or their level of education, all of them would find some way of saying that on the topic of political status change, mungga ma'åkka' i kannai ni' muna'boboka hao, don't bite the hand that feeds you. This narrative, while understandable for an island stuck in what I refer to as the decolonial deadlock, it was frustrating for someone who was seeking to study decolonization and convince other Chamorros of the need for it. Eventually, at some point amidst the interview conducting, the critical theory reading and the online ranting, I ended up watching the 200 movie Lumumba directed by Raoul Peck. It tells the story of the final months of Patrice Lumumba, an inspirational figure in African and global decolonization, who was th

I would have loved to have talked to Martin Luther King Jr. And when I say that, I don't mean the fiction that is often trotted out each year by governments and educational systems. That MLK Jr. is a neutralized version of the man I've read about. That figure is one who has been shorn of all his radical content, and becomes a middleman for the American nation, allowing it to bury its racist past and present, without having to adequately deal with either. The MLK that I've studied was eloquent and fiery, but his targets were much higher and much more difficult to strike. He wasn't just seeking white and black children to play together on playgrounds. He wanted some fundamental changes to American society which would ease the terrible systems of economic and social inequality, which continue to disproportionately affect non-whites. I'm looking forward to getting a copy of this book Death of a King: The Real Story of Martin Luther King Jr's Final Year

  Questionable Shootings Raise Tensions in Custer County Brian Daffron 1/14/14 Indian Country Today Media Network   Within the heart of the Cheyenne and Arapaho tribal jurisdiction in western Oklahoma sits Custer County. The county’s namesake made a name for himself as an “Indian Fighter” by attacking Black Kettle’s village on the Washita River in 1868—four years after Black Kettle survived the Sand Creek Massacre of 1864. In the past few years, Custer has found itself linked again to the mysterious deaths of Cheyenne and Arapaho tribal members. On June 28, 2012, police officers in the city of Clinton, within Custer County, shot and killed 34-year-old Benjamin Whiteshield outside of their police station. According to the Oklahoman , Whiteshield’s family took him to the police station to get help for an alleged delusional episode. The report said that Whiteshield was armed with a crescent wrench, but nothing in the news report stated whether or not he

Both Okinawans and Chamorros had the experience of being caught between empires in World War II. Chamorros leaned towards the United States in terms of their patriotism and affinity and suffered at the hands of the Japanese because of it. Okinawans leaned towards the Japanese and suffered at the hands of the United States and Japanese because of it. Both peoples were not fully accounted for in either nation. Chamorros were not US citizens and were discriminated against in so many ways at the start of the war. Okinawa had been forcibly annexed in the 19th century and later became a prefecture, but Okinawans were treated as if they were inferior and found their language and culture attacked by the Japanese. Each felt closer to one colonizer over the other, but that didn't spare them during the war. It has been particularly difficult reading and hearing more stories from Okinawans about the terrifying and violent place they were in during the Battle of Okinawa. It was bad enough

This year's regional seminar featured two keynote addresses by Father Miguel D'Escoto, a longtime priest, champion of human rights and a former President of the United Nations General Assembly. He has been a very controversial figure because of his outspoken criticism of the United States in particular. As a priest in Nicaragua he was very supportive of the Sandanista Revolution even to the point of joining the government of Daniel Ortega and serving as the Minister of Foreign Affairs. For this and his other explicitly political activities he was suspended by Pope John Paul II in 1985. He was reinstated last year after he reportedly petitioned the current Pope that the 81 year old be allowed to perform mass again before he dies. His speeches last week were fiery. He did not pull punches in condemning the United States for its lack of respect for international law. He criticized it for the wars it is carrying out around the world. He admonished it for its role in making Lati

It is intriguing when we see epochs of time shift and change and replace each other. These are like grand markers in time, like huge arches that delineate when everything was one way and when it all changed and became something else. On Guam we have antes di gera and despues di gera which draws a clear line of memory between what existed prior to World War II and after. World War II survivors will tell you the smells in the air, the sounds of the island were different in 1940 as they were in 1945. Most people in the United States and elsewhere in the world mark recent memory with "9/11" as if to say that things were fundamentally different before September 11th, 2001 than they were afterwards. All of this is a fiction of course, but there is still a way that communities tend to lay out the stretches of time behind them in certain blocks, to make them easier to manage, but propping up these important moments as providing the keys to understand all those temporal tectonic shi

Chris Hedges stitches together so much troubling truth about both the film American Sniper and the book it is based on. It is a sobering reflection on the film, the mythology of Chris Kyle and how those things relate to the soul of a nation. After reading this is does make you wonder, for all those people who feel patriotic or a swell of national pride after watching the film, what type of nation do you imagine you are a part of? The film is incredibly effective at focusing the viewer on the sentimentality and sacrifice of one character, much to the detriment of rest of the ideological universe of the film ultimately being unquestioned or unexamined. One is too busy tearing up or saluting the heroism of Chris Kyle, that few seem able to question the rest of the film and what it is hiding or proposing. People crave someone like Kyle as being the tip of their national spear, but don't think about what kind of nation would want that type of person there. That type of person represen

--> I'm already quite tired from a long day, but before I go to bed I wanted to post some articles about American Sniper. I tried to watch the film last weekend on a Sunday night when usually theaters are empty on Guam, but to my surprise it was sold out. In just a week it is now a huge blockbuster and seems to be a commercial and critical success. Amidst all the buzz, people have been criticizing the film because of the incredible amount of fabrication that went into creating the movie figure of America's most lethal sniper. The Chris Kyle in the film is very different than the Chris Kyle of history and who published a memoir and loved to exaggerate his history of violence, even to the point of boasting and lying about fights he was never in and murders he never committed, all in the US, not the Middle East. I have written so many times over the years about the way in which national policies become conflated with the soldiers who enact, in some cases illegall