NO REST FOR THE AWAKE - MINAGAHET CHAMORRO

Retellings of Guam history focus heavily on the end of the World War II on the island, and de-emphasize the start of the war. It is like this for some obvious and some less-obvious reasons. As I've written about before, where you place the narrative locus for these 32 months of Chamoru history will heavily affect what type of lessons or ideas emerge. If you focus on the end, the triumphant American return, where the Japanese are defeated and Chamorus are liberated from tyranny, the lessons seem pretty clear. American power and benevolence and propensity for liberation and democracy spreading. Chamorus become attached to the US and its history through that ending, as an object of their grandeur or their exceptional excellence and virtue. But if we switch the story's focus to the beginning things get much more complicated. We see at the beginning of war, an island where Chamorus trust the US to tell them the truth, to keep them safe, but they also understand in an important

When I was writing my dissertation more than 10 years ago, one question that I constantly had, was what is the "Department of Interior" in the United States, especially in relation to the territories. The easy answer is that it is the office to oversees them. It is the office that oversees the natural resource, the parks, the relations with Native Americans, but also the way the US connects to its insular areas and colonies. We can refer to the Department of the Interior as the make-shift colonial office, a colonial office in denial that it is a colonial office. The office manages resources and helps to remind those of us who live in the territories that we are a resource, that our lands, our lives are more explicitly than any other place within the US and its empire, thought of as a commodity. The fact that our strongest link to the federal bureaucracy is the DOI is key in understanding our relationship to the US. We may have a variety of fantasies about what we are to

While I was away in St. Vincent attending the UN C24 Regional Seminar, i nobia-hu Dr. Isa Kelley Bowman, penned a simple, insightful and incisive bilingual! article about the very issues that were being discussed on the other side of the world. Her article is below and deals with the difficult realities of having a colonizer who has convinced themselves no matter what they have done or continue to do, that they represent freedom and liberty. Having colonies like Guam for more than a century belies that idea in obvious and easy ways. And that doesn't even go into the more nefarious history of the US, featuring slavery, displacement and genocide. But like all countries, the US can change. There is a commonsensical power in that notion that mala hechura asta sepultura, but there is nonetheless always the possibility for changing course, for social or political movements to change the course of a country towards something more just and more invested in equality, peace or righteousnes

The late French philosopher Jacques Derrida referred to “justice” as a term we use for impossible things. It is a word that we use for things that we can’t ever seem to resolve, about the problems of the past and the present. When a wrong is committed, justice is the word we use for things done in the name of fixing the problems that emerge from that violence, from that harm. But there is no precise science to justice, no easy way to agree upon what is the appropriate means of making amends for something. Criminal justice systems, restorative justice, reparations, apologies, these are all ways that we try to channel the trauma of the past. There is no equation for justice equivalence. Whatever happens in the name of justice will either be too much or too little. It cannot replace what was taken away, or those who have to give up something in the name of past wrongs will insist that they shouldn’t have to sacrifice for the sins of others. But the conversation and the process of de

Every few years the issue of decolonization in Guam is taken up in a national or international context. This is always an interesting thing to witness, as so much of it depends on the attitude of the journalist. Guam is not something well-known in any context that is not centered around US military bases, Spam consumption or the travel of Japanese tourists. So, whenever a journalist has to take up the issue of covering Guam, either for a single instance or become the "beat" reporter for US territories, or the Western Pacific or for something else, it can be interesting to observe. Older analysts have referred to the constant rediscovery of Guam in this way, as every new journalist that is tasked with covering Guam has to undergo a short or very short process of learning about it and then making it known to their reading/viewing public. Sometimes they take a securely American position in their crafting of their narrative, and as such Guam is simply a forgotten or disres

Yesterday I spent the day at the Yasukuni Shrine in Tokyo. It was a very surreal experience. On the surface it appears like many other shrines or places or worship or reflection in Japan, but it was an incredibly militaristic space. It featured museums dedicated to a whitewashed military history of Japan, thousands of letters from soldiers writing home about how happy they were to die for Japan, and statues for the courage of war widows. The shrine is meant to serve the more than two million souls who have died as soldiers for Japan over the past century, so the militaristic and warmongering tone makes sense, but given what I know of Japanese history it was still shocking to see the way things were twisted in order to create a sense of sinlessness and honor in the midst of a very blatantly imperial period of their history. The shrine reminded me that if you win your wars, you can always explain and justify the deaths involved as heroic, as necessary, as part of a teleology of g

At first I was going to put "revisionist history news" as the title for this post, but the more I thought about it, Japan and Germany, those villains of World War II, are cited the most frequently as being the most forgetful and the nations most likely to erase or whitewash their histories. This is a very seductive discursive proposition, because by focusing on the way other nations wish to hide their shameful violent and inhuman past, it can easily make you righteously oblivious to your own nation's terrifying past. The United States certainly shouldn't treat Japan as some terrible white-washer of history, especially when the United States itself is built on genocide and has several national holidays that perpetuate pathetic myths about the origin of the US, rather than acknowledging that genocidal genesis. ********************   Japanese crown prince says country must not rewrite history of WW2 Naruhito makes rare statement on importance of ‘correctly