NO REST FOR THE AWAKE - MINAGAHET CHAMORRO

After spending a week listening to the stories of Native Americans in Albuquerque and at the Indigenous Comic Con, my mind kept straying back to the story of one Native American woman, Elouise Cobell. As you can see from the articles below, she was a champion in recent Native American struggles to get redress and develop themselves economically after centuries of both abuse and neglect by the United States. She was just awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom although she passed away in 2011. I would have liked to have met her once and sat down and talked to her. What she and others accomplished in terms of suing the US Federal Government was inspirational on so many levels and largely unknown by the wider United States. ********************* Tester Announces Elouise Cobell Honored with Presidential Medal of Freedom November 16, 2016 Press Release (U.S. Senate)-Senator Jon Tester today announced that Elouise Cobell has been recognized with the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

We Are Going to Wait for These People to Die" by Giff Johnson Pacific Politics http://pacificpolitics.com/2013/11/were-going-to-just-wait-for-these-people-to-die/ With the exception of two public hearings in the U.S. Congress eight years ago, a petition from the Marshall Islands seeking additional compensation for nuclear weapons testing damages has languished for 13 years. The lack of a formal response from the U.S. Congress and the Obama Administration prompted a Congressman from New York State, Gary Ackerman, to comment angrily during a 2010 public hearing: The Marshall Islands ‘claim we owe (them) US$2 billion and so what? We’re going to just wait for these people to die, right? We’ve given cancer to them, taken away their property…They’ve put a value on it, and it seems to me that if we know that this is about dignity, then there has to be something besides ‘good luck fellows’ with whatever few years you might have left…You can’t unscrew them is the point. B

Chamorros have been waiting for war reparations for decades. So many who were hoping to receive reparations for their treatment during World War II have passed away, not living long enough to see the reparations become a reality. War reparations has become a general part of political discourse on Guam. It is something that politicians bring up as a foil to target the Federal government or Guam’s non-voting delegates. Since the issue of war reparations is so emotional and given the fact that the longer it takes the more people will continue to die, you can define war reparations as one of those things that people feel very real, almost hyper real things in relation to, but in truth don’t really understand or don’t really conceive properly. For example, as I have written before on this blog, advocates for Guam’s independence and decolonization often use war reparations in order to talk about how the United States continues to disrespect us and treat us as les

I am helping organize a special solemn mass to be held on Wednesday morning, December 8th to commemorate the anniversary of the attack on Guam by the Japanese in 1941 which brought World War II to Guam. In preparation for the event I conducted research, helped write articles and I'll also be helping facilitating a storytelling session with four survivors of World War II on Guam, one of whom is my grandfather Tun Joaquin Flores Lujan, the Chamorro Master Blacksmith. The hope for this event is to not focus on the atrocities, the violence or the liberation, but instead issues of peace and what we can learn from the war. There is also meant to be a dimension of forgiveness in this event, helping the island to move on from that horrible period. This event includes an exhibit of images from prewar Guam and information from the Guam Humanities Council and the War in the Pacific Museum about the war experiences of Chamorros. The whole thing is organized by the office of Senator Frank Blas

Since I came back from Japan last month while attending the 2010 World Conference Against Atomic and Hydrogen Bombs, I've found myself constantly drawing and painting mushroom clouds. The conference, the stories and history I heard there, the images that were etched into my mind by speaker after speaker, were full of mushroom clouds, and not just those from Japan (Hiroshima and Nagasaki), but those from elsewhere as well. Although only two nuclear bombs have been used against populations as explicit acts of war, hundreds of nuclear tests, above and below ground have taken place in the Pacific, the Continental US, Siberia, China, India and Pakistan. For populations who live in those areas, such as the peoples from the Marshall Islands of Bikini and Rogelap, these "peaceful" testing of nuclear missiles may have well been acts of war. In Hadashi no Gen, or Barefoot Gen, a manga written and illustrated by Keiji Nakazawa who was a survivor of the atomic blast in Hiroshima, t

The week during which the anniversaries of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings fall is a time during which the battle over Japanese national identity reaches its peak. For it is during this time that the discourse on Japan being a victim from World War II is thickest and most vibrant. As the stories of hundreds of thousands who died in the atomic blasts are recounted, it is very easy to forget the prologue to that moment, where Japan had spent decades sometimes violently building an empire, which at its peak, during World War II consisted of colonies in China, Indonesia, the Philippines, Korea, Vietnam and Guam. As Japan is utterly defeated and destroyed by the United States after World War II (and bares the radiation scars to prove it) and forced to unconditionally surrender and accept numerous US military bases there as part of their new relationship, it emerges as newly humbled, bearing the shameful mark of defeat. As the nation seeks to move on, it resorts to victimization in orde

Annai hu taitai este na tinige' " Indian tribes buy back thousands of acres of land " gof sinilo' yu'. The article discusses a centuries old injustice and violence committed against hundreds, perhaps thousands of different Native American groups, and is a perfect case study in how injustice operates and is perpetuated and maintained over time. Native American tribes tired of waiting for the U.S. government to honor centuries-old treaties are buying back land where their ancestors lived and putting it in federal trust. Native Americans say the purchases will help protect their culture and way of life by preserving burial grounds and areas where sacred rituals are held. They also provide land for farming, timber and other efforts to make the tribes self-sustaining. The article begins with these sentences, describing how from 1998 - 2007, Native American tribes put close to a million acres in trust. These acres are all purchased in the hopes of rebuilding the land

I attended a meeting on two weeks ago of individuals who are concerned about the Environmental Impact Statement for the impending military buildup of Guam, and who are all interested in working together to read the document and then organize some sort of response to it. The meeting went very well. The EIS , which for those of you who don't know, documents (according to the military, its consultants and certain regulatory agencies) what sort of adverse impacts will take place over the next five years, due to the different projects, activities and populations that the military is proposing to bring to Guam. The meeting went very well, because there are lots of people out there who feel daunted and scared by this document and the future it proposes to describe to us. The idea that it would take anywhere from 8,000 - 11,000 pages in order to chronicle the potential negative impacts that Guam will have to shoulder by 2014 is horrifying. It seems like more and more people are showing co