NO REST FOR THE AWAKE - MINAGAHET CHAMORRO

The first book that I bought for my daughter, prior to her even being born was a children's book that focused on the tale of the slaves who killed their captors aboard the ship The Amistad and after a long legal struggle were allowed to return to Africa. I only read it to her a few times over the years because the subject matter was difficult and the historical and racial politics difficult to unpack. Over the years I've tried to do the same with other books, especially liking to read to the kids books that focus on the experiences of Native Americans and African Americans. Parenting is a convoluted endeavor no matter what ethical commitments you do or do not feel. There are always problems, limitations, blindspots and ways in which your best intentions or goals backfire. But pushing your children to accept difficult truths and also feel the both responsibility and capacity to change things for the better is essential. It is one reason why, in my own creative works, includi

People often conceive of colonization as being a formal process carried out by militaries or governments. These institutions play essential roles and the political system naturally becomes the primarily target for most movements for decolonization, but as I have stated many times, the process is much more diverse and complicated. Although it is easy to focus on what we consider to be the formal and concrete forms of power, they way that things are forcibly imposed, the world of the abstract, the conceptual and the ideological can have a deeper and more lasting impact. If we see for example in two former epochs of colonization in Guam, the formal ways in which things were imposed on Chamorros did not necessarily have a significant colonizing impact on the identity and consciousness of Chamorros. The imposition of governments on Guam by the Spanish and by the US led to great outward changes on the island, and histories tend to conflate the effect on the outward appearance of the i

At first I was going to put "revisionist history news" as the title for this post, but the more I thought about it, Japan and Germany, those villains of World War II, are cited the most frequently as being the most forgetful and the nations most likely to erase or whitewash their histories. This is a very seductive discursive proposition, because by focusing on the way other nations wish to hide their shameful violent and inhuman past, it can easily make you righteously oblivious to your own nation's terrifying past. The United States certainly shouldn't treat Japan as some terrible white-washer of history, especially when the United States itself is built on genocide and has several national holidays that perpetuate pathetic myths about the origin of the US, rather than acknowledging that genocidal genesis. ********************   Japanese crown prince says country must not rewrite history of WW2 Naruhito makes rare statement on importance of ‘correctly