NO REST FOR THE AWAKE - MINAGAHET CHAMORRO

The Guam Museum is open in Hagåtña. Well it is sort of and kind of open. The permanent exhibit text, which I have been helping write for several years now isn't complete, although a temporary exhibit about the history of the Guam Museum has been set up in the meantime. It is strange to have the structure, the physical building finished and mostly ready, but still the museum itself, the story or i hinanao-ta, that it is supposed to represent isn't quite ready. While going through some of my old files on my computer I noted (and was reminded) that Guam didn't have a museum for quite a while. I recall visiting the museum as a young child at the Plaza de Espana and also at Adelup, but for most of my life there has been no national museum on Guam. When my kids were first born, the museum was, interestingly enough just a little annex in the Micronesian Mall that few people even knew existed. The discussion over a museum has been underway for a very long time, although it pains

The play Pagat, that I co-wrote with Victoria Leon Guerrero was performed several weeks ago at the UOG Fine Arts Theater and was a huge success. Although it was performed six nights total, the last three nights were not only sold out, but hundreds of people were turned away. It was amazing to see an original local play sell out its tickets within fifteen minutes of opening the box office, and that people started to line up to get tickets two hours before the box office even opened. On the last two nights, the playwrights and the director, we all gave up our seats in order to make room for those who wanted to see the play. I’ve never been so elated to lose my seat before. On three of the nights there were talk backs, or discussions where the audience could ask questions to the crew and the cast. The conversations were very important to me, because I got a sense of what people were seeing and feeling about the play, and how closely or not so closely their inte

My previous trips to Okinawa revolved around demilitarism and decolonization in a political sense. This trip, because of my participation in the Island Language Revitalization Symposium at Ryukyu University was focused on decolonization with regards to the language in Okinawa. As people have asked me about my trip to Okinawa and what it was like I have developed a sort of easy to use, easy to understand narrative that I rely upon. Most think of Okinawa and Guam as places that are linked only through the presence of US military bases. Chamorros from Guam know Okinawa primarily through the imaginary of the military, as a place where they once lived, trained or heard stories of how the people there protest the US military. I want to challenge those limited ideas and show that there are more potential connections beyond that, more chances for solidarity. I want to help people see Okinawa from Guam not through the lens that you get by serving in the military, or

Kao malago’ hao tumungo’ mas put este na islå-ta? Do you want to know more about this island of ours? Kao malago’ hao tumungo’ mas put i kutturan Chamoru? Do you want to know more about Chamorro culture? Kao malago’ hao tumungo’ taimanu fumino’ Chamoru? Do you want to know how to speak Chamorro? Kao malago’ hao tumungo’ taimanu månnge’ gi fino’ Chamoru? Do you want to know how to write in Chamorro? Chamorro Studies is a new major at UOG that can help you with all these things. Chamorro Studies is an interdisciplinary program, where students can choose from a diverse range of electives including Biology, Literature, History, Anthropology and Psychology and can choose what sort of emphasis they want to take in terms of studying Chamorros, their history, language and culture. Email me at mlbasquiat@hotmail.com if you would like to know more about Chamorro Studies at UOG.

For a person of any ethnicity undergoing an identity crisis, there are various stages that you must go through in your search for answers. Some of these stages you may move through quickly, others you may spent more time in, you may find your way to a new space and then decide you don't like it and then turn around and return to a previous point in your journey. For those who feel that they have been deprived of a cultural identity one stage that they must pass through, but which can be fairly dangerous, is the "uniku" stage, or unique stage. Their feelings of loss can come from many sources. They can be from the diaspora and feel like this barrier of oceans or continents stands between them and their identity. It can be an issue of dominant society blocking cultural expression and making them, their parents or their community feel like their cultural has to be neutralized or sterilized before it can be passed on. It can even be a railing and rallying against history

I had meant to write about Avatar a few months ago after first watching it, but so many things were happening in my life and Guam and so I never got around to it. Gof ya-hu ayu na mubi, achokka’ guaha meggai ni’ siña hu tacha. I cheered and yelled throughout the movie, as I expressed my excitement and also my frustration. All in all though, I enjoyed the movie far more than I found it problematic. But as I once told an old friend, i kayu-hu estaba giya Berkeley, there is nothing fun which is not problematic. I cringed for plenty of reasons, at times it was like anthropology porn, and therefore it had all the elements that Ethnic Studies scholars are supposed to hate, meaning it was just like Dances with Wolves, where a white man is needed to save a helpless primitive, brown people. From the gaze of any “modern” subject, it is just too tempting not to engage in this fantasy, it is the most fun liberal form of viewing the rest of the world. There is something for everyone. If you

I've said this regularly on this blog, but I'm going to say it again one more time, achokka' esta hu tungo' na para bai hu sangan este ta'lo: there is no such thing as authentic culture, and there is no culture which is authentic or pure. I know this may come as a shock to some of you, but its completely true. No matter what you may think about yourself, your culture, your history or your people, they are not authentic now and never actually been authentic or pure. The idea of a people truly embodying or accepting or living "their culture" is not possible, there are always exceptions, always variations, always ways in which cultures are changing or being contested. It doesn't matter if you claim that your language and culture hasn't changed in a 1000 years, that in no way means you can claim any more authenticity than anyone else. The easy answer as to why this is the case is that culture simply doesn't work that way, for it to ever be pure o

Whenever I come back to Guam, I find myself closer and closer to death and mortality. When I speak about the state of affairs on Guam both here on the island and elsewhere, one of the shocking statistics that I tend to bring up is the almost unbelievable rates of death for certain cancers on Guam. According to research done by Dr. Lisa Natividad, for some of these cancers, the rates of death are 40 times higher on Guam than they are for the rest of the United States. Another statistic that I often cite is the number of Chamorros from Guam and the CNMI that have been killed fighting in America's "War on Terror." The numbers are appalling considering the small populations of Chamorros. When you combine them with the deaths of soldiers and contractors from other Micronesian islands, you have more than thirty people killed in Iraq, Afghanistan, the Horn of Africa and the Persian Gulf. I wrote on these deaths several months ago in my post " We Are War Stories ." A