NO REST FOR THE AWAKE - MINAGAHET CHAMORRO

Independent Guåhan's August Meeting will honor the late Ricky Bordallo and tackle the question “Does Size Matter?” in terms of island development For Immediate Release, August 20, 2018  Independent Guåhan (IG) invites the public to attend our August General Assembly ( GA ) on Thursday, August 30th, from 6:00 to 7:30 p.m. at the Main Pavilion of the Chamorro Village in Ha gå tña. The event will focus on how Guåhan can be successful and prosperous as an independent country, and that being a small island does not truly hold us back. At each   GA , Independent Guåhan honors a   ma ga ’taotao : a notable figure that has helped guide the island and the Chamoru people on their quest for self-determination. This month, IG will be honoring the le ga cy of the late governor of Guåhan, Ricardo “Ricky” Bordallo. Bordallo served in  I Liheslaturan Guåhan  seven times and was elected twice as Guåhan’s governor. He was a strong believer in Guåhan, that its people were capable of great thi

A 2014 study by The Guardian/UK shows that in 50 different colonies/territories since 1860, 88% of the time they chose independence as their option. Very very few chose to become integrated into their colonizer, it was almost natural to seek their own fortune and destiny, even if it might lead to a time of difficulty. The study looked at places such as Samoa, East Timor, Mongolia, Iceland and Iraq. Given the way in which independence is often imagined in places such as Guam that remain colonies today, it is intrigued to see how normal seeking independence was in the past, but how today it feels so fearful. Most people would argue that the resistance that people in Guam feel today is tied to the island being too political immature or the island being too small or too far away from the centers of power. All of these points make some sense, but not enough to really build up the type of fear that people experience when discussing the notion of Guam becoming independent. As the United N

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

I've been lost in Power Point presentations for the past few days. I'll be teaching for the next month at Kobe University in Japan. My course is an accelerated one and so I'm teaching a month-long course in just a week. I don't normally prepare Power Points for any of my lectures in Guam, but since my students here in Japan will be primarily those who did not learn English as a first language, the visuals and potential outline skeleton it provides will help keep them engaged. My course focuses on US militarization in the Asia-Pacific Region, and it will link together US strategic interests from Okinawa, to the Philippines, to Guam, to the Marshall Islands and Hawai'i, while also linking together the popular movements for demilitarization or decolonization against those bases. For me, este kalang un guinife-hu mumagahet. I am been working on this issue as an activist and an academic for many years. In 2011 I published my article "The Gift of Imagination: Sol

I have heard some people say that colonization deprives colonized people of the ability to imagine. I might have even said this at some point over the years. There is some truth to this, but over time I've come to realize that it is not really an issue of not imagining or not knowing how to imagine, to envision a possible future. But it is more about the constricting of the colonized's imagination, of contorting and distorting it so that it will always move and evolve within a groove that matches the example of the colonizer. The vision of the future will always be filled with the shadow of the colonizer's massive presence. It will force the flow of future possibility so that it always seems to head to up towards the colonizer, that the future for the colonized isn't something that is about their freedom, their choices. But instead it is about their accepting the teleology of the colonizer, of becoming him and shaping your future to become a minor version of it. This is

Ilek-na Si Henry Kissinger, ayu na sen dangkolu na galabok taotao, put iya Micronesia, “There are only 90,000 people out there. Who gives a damn?” I meggaina na taotao guini ti ma tungo’ put este na sinangan ya ti ma tungo’ lokkue’ hayi este na Henry. Lao para i manggaitiningo’, ti mannina’manman nu este. Ayu na hinasso, ayu na pine’lo, put i mineddong-ta guini gof annok gi i na’an-ta. Atan i na’an ni’ mana’i hit para este na lugat: Micronesia. Kumekeilekna “dikike’ na isla.” Sigun hafa hu fa’na’an i “pragmatics of size” taya’ gaibali giya Micronesia, todu taibali. Hunggan, buente anggen malago’ hao bumuteya hanom tasi, sen gefsaga’ este na lugat. Lao dinirihi i hinasson i taotao sanhiyong ni’ tano’. Ayu nai muna’hasso siha put finitme, siguridad, yan anggokuyon na fuetsa. Para siha i hanom yan i tasi, ti anggokuyon, machalek, todu tiempo matulailaika. Todu i tumuge’ i Bipblia ginen ayu na hinasso. Hafa ilek-na guihi put este? Estague ginen as San Mateo: Enao i humungok

The way people conceive of Guam's economic health is mired in colonial feelings of inferiority and the contradictions that naturally emerge. As a small island in the middle of the ocean, Guam is naturally thought to have nothing according to the base epistemology of Europeans. Such a way of seeing the world and mapping its sense of value and naturalness is tied to the land. The land is safe, the land is secure, the land is what offers the chance to build, to horde, to make something. The ocean is the opposite. The ocean is the frightening infinite, the terrorizing endlessness, it holds the possibilities for imagining and perceiving that which is beyond the immediate and apparent, but the cost of this is that it cannot be trusted. The ocean and those places defined by it surrounding and connecting them, are the exceptions not the norm. Even if the land has its own inconsistencies and problems (kao manmaleffa todu put i linao siha?), the ocean is seen as impossible in contrast to

“The Talented Island of Guam” by Michael Lujan Bevacqua July 31, 2014 The Marianas Variety If you didn’t get a chance to watch “Talent Town,” the latest film from the filmmaking duo The Muña Brothers this past month, you really missed out. The film was an engaging and exciting take on the state of art and creativity in Guam today and a call for both artists and their audience here to take things to the next level in terms of representing Guam. Full disclosure, I am one of the people featured in the film and so I do have some positive bias towards it. The Muña Brothers are known for their work on “Shiro’s Head,” which is considered to be the first Chamorro/ Guam-movie. Other movies were filmed on Guam before “Shiro’s Head,” but this was the first one that took the island’s identity, especially its Chamorro heritage seriously. Whereas other films such as “Noon Sunday” and “Kaiju-ta no Kessen Gojira no Musuko” just used Guam as just a backdrop and bas

The Militarized Pacific: An Anniversary Without End Wednesday, 14 May 2014 10:13 By Jon Letman , Truthout | Op-Ed Marshallese children swim and play amongst a junk heap on the shore of tiny Ebeye island, one of the most densely populated places on earth. Some 11-12,000 people are packed onto the 80 acre island. (Photo by Richard Ross)   March 1, the 60th anniversary of the Castle Bravo test - a nuclear detonation over a thousand times more powerful than the bomb that destroyed Hiroshima - has come and gone. Predictably, major decadal events, like a 15-megaton explosion over a Micronesian atoll, garner fleeting attention, but it's all the days between the anniversaries that tell the real story of those who live with the impacts. For the people of the Marshall Islands, where Enewetak, Bikini and neighboring atolls were irradiated and rendered uninhabitable by 67 nuclear tests between 1946 and 1958, the brief anniv

When I was in graduate school I spent years collecting Guam mentions. I would hunt for them everywhere. In every database I could find. In every archive. In every index for every book. I would search through websites, through blogs, on Youtube videos. As I was writing my dissertation these Guam mentions represented a significant part of my "data." These were the things I wanted to analyze. These were the things I wanted to find some underlying structure for. It was difficult not in terms of articulating my thoughts, but articulating them in such a way that other people might care. When you are writing about "small" cultures or "small" islands, there is always the burden that your smallness puts on you. There is always a need to force you next to something larger so you can feel more relevant or more familiar. There is a need to put Chamorros next to another group, Native Hawaiians, Puerto Ricans, Filipinos, Okinawans, any other group that might be more