NO REST FOR THE AWAKE - MINAGAHET CHAMORRO

One of the best things about the 2010 Conference Against Atomic and Hydrogen Bombs is that they take the Pacific very seriously. I attended so many academic conferences at the states and interacted with various antiwar and peace groups, but the Pacific was always something which you had to struggle to incorporate, or struggle to bring into the discussion. Even if it was an Asian American Pacific Islander event, the emphasis was always on Asians or Americans and the Pacific was always sort of brought in as a cute, exotic or ill-fitting footnote. When talking about these fragments from the Pacific, the equality or horizontal nature of the space would quickly be revealed in its dimension of vertical hierarchy, as the Pacific presence would be dealt with through recognition primarily, as something that needs to be seen, and brought into meaning or existence. The way that you can “recognize” this is if your value to the discussion is all cursory, as if what matters is that we have heard or

I wrote a letter to the editor of The Pacific Daily News about why it seemed that only Chamorros are the one's on Guam who care about things such as decolonization, militarization, colonialism, imperialism, human rights and so on. My response was a pragmatic one, no real suprises there. This is the homeland of the Chamorro people, it has been there home for centuries, for millenia, and so regardless of how much you love the United States, and sleep with caressing your US passport each night, the cold-hard truth is that this land was taken from the Chamorro people in the 17th century, and different colonizers have come up with different claims to owning the island, but they all just try to cover over or legitimize the same old colonial wound. Just like with Native Americans and their various forms of loss and colonial trauma, they may find everyday ways to act like it doesn't matter, or it was all for the better, but it still hurts and there will always be a way in which the cur

Guest Blogged by Rashne Limki I’m sitting right now at the AAPI Caucus meeting. It’s the second one I’m attending, the other being this past Monday. As an Indian, I guess I kind of fit into this rubric and I feel relatively comfortable within it because it is within this community that I became politically active at Oberlin. At Oberlin, one of the issues we grappled with was the ‘inclusion’ of the P or PI within the rubric. During my time at Oberlin, I knew exactly two Pacific Islanders, neither of whom were particularly active in the community. I’m not even sure how they identified, except that they probably put down A/PA on various official forms, just as I have had to do pretty often. I don’t feel particularly comfortable with this census categorization, except when I’m around it as a political community. In any case, sitting here in the AAPI caucus, the situation of Pacific Islanders is absolutely no different than anywhere else… the number of PIs can generally be counted on one