NO REST FOR THE AWAKE - MINAGAHET CHAMORRO

A few times each year I testify publicly on Guam about something.  Usually it is at the Guam Legislature over a bill or a resolution or as part of a hearing.  Regardless of what the topic is, I try to do it in Chamoru, especially if I have time to prepare my written comments ahead of time, so they go into the public record.  Chamoru is a national language for Guam, which means that it can be used regularly for public activities and public representations.  Official documents can be in both Chamoru and English. Signage around the island can be bilingual.  The fact that Chamoru is an official and national language of Guam is something that many indigenous groups around the world might be envious of, since it provides for a far amount of existing legitimacy and social/political power.  You don't have to fight for recognition, since the law already accepts it. But sadly we don't do more to build off to this.  It could begin in simple ways, such as public signage and go from there. 

I've spent the last year thinking a lot about Magellan. Well as a Guam historian, I think about Magellan a lot and quite regularly, whether I want to or not. But the particular ways I've been thinking about Magellan lately have centered around the fact that the 500th anniversary of the circumnavigation he led will take place in 2021. There will be several voyages that will be following his route around the world and they will naturally stop in Guam in March 2021. I was invited to a conference on behalf of Guam and the University of Guam last March, which was seen as being a launching event for the Spanish Navy for their anniversary commemoration. I wrote about it on this blog as part of my Circumnavigations series. Since then I've been working with a few other people, most notably Robert Underwood, David Atienza and Carlos Madrid on pushing for the development of a commission that can organize Guam's own events around this commemoration and also work wit

While watching the health care drama unfold for Republicans over the past few weeks and months, I kept thinking, who does this remind me of? Today it finally hit me, the Republican party, with their years of whining about Obamacare and promises to repeal and replace as soon as they were put in power, are like some of my worst students. For years they promised this, they knew that eventually it would happen and they would face a real test. But instead of studying, instead of preparing, they just kept procrastinating and accomplishing nothing helpful. Now, even their best efforts are laughable in the face of the fact that they had so much time to work something out, and can only resort of the dirtiest tricks now to try to get something, anything passed. *************** How Republicans Got Stuck on Repeal by Jennifer Haberkorn Politico 7/31/17 Republicans openly speculated in November whether they could fast-track an Obamacare repeal bill to Donald Trump's desk by Inaugur

"Donald Trump Has No Plan to Make America Great Again" by Derek Thompson The Atlantic June 7, 2017 It’s “Infrastructure Week” at the White House. Theoretically. On Monday, the administration announced a plan to spend $200 billion on infrastructure and overhaul U.S. air traffic control. There was a high-profile signing in the East Wing before dozens of cheering lawmakers and industry titans. It was supposed to be the beginning of a weeklong push to fix America’s roads, bridges, and airports. But in the next two days, Trump spent more energy burning metaphorical bridges than trying to build literal ones. He could have stayed on message for several hours, gathered Democrats and Republicans to discuss a bipartisan agreement, and announced a timeframe. Instead he quickly turned his attention to Twitter to accuse media companies of “Fake News” while undermining an alliance with Qatar based on what may be, fittingly, a fake news story . It’s a microco

It is strange to study and document the impacts of colonization. There are always incredibly obvious ways that colonization affects a community, but there are always more minute and less perceptible ways it happens. One way that we can see colonialism in very dramatic but almost invisible ways, is how Guam, because of its attachment to the US, often times imagines itself to be somewhere else on the planet and something else entirely, whether it be politically, economically or environmentally. Colonization makes it possible for people on Guam to conceive of this island in the Pacific as not really an island, but an imagined extension of the US, therefore not capable of having its own interests or its own limitations, advantages and so on, but simply accountable or a beneficiary of whatever the US contends with. Just because the US flag flies over the island, doesn't mean that Guam is like California or Wyoming or Nevada or Alabama. It is an island in the Western Pacific and to ima

Commonwealth is a word that continues to haunt discussions of decolonization in Guam. For most younger people, they have no idea what Commonwealth means in a Guam context, although they know of it in the context of the CNMI's political status. It is something that has some very profound meanings for people of a certain age, most older than I am, because of the way it represents nostalgia for a time when political status change on Guam seemed to have a more clearly defined direction. Commonwealth in terms of Guam, was a decades long movement to try to get the island to a new political status, something along the lines of "improved status quo." It involved long negotiations with different presidential administrations, different iterations of Congress, all in the hopes of moving Guam to a slightly better political position. In terms of political status options, Commonwealth would fall between integration and free association. It kept Guam and the US tightly conne