NO REST FOR THE AWAKE - MINAGAHET CHAMORRO

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

There are currently 17 entities on the list of Non-Self-Governing Territories that the United Nations keeps track of and is mandated to help see through to self-government and decolonization. Although there was a great deal of activity around decolonization in previous decades, both within the United Nations and without, but lately, especially at the level of the United Nation's, fairly little has happened. The last territory to be de-listed, meaning it went through a legitimate and recognized process of decolonization is Timor Leste or as it was known as a colony, East Timor.  East Timor had been a colony under the Portuguese until 1975. A small civil war followed the Portuguese releasing of their colony, in which the neighboring country of Indonesia helped to instigate the conflict. On December 7, 1975, Indonesia invaded East Timor, killing more than a hundred thousand people in just two years. They occupied East Timor for more than two decades despite international efforts t

When I teach about colonialism I am always careful to stress that you should never define colonialism primarily by manifestations of "evil" or overt expressions of racism or violence. If you do, you run the risk of blurring your critical lens and making it so that situations which are clearly colonial don't merit analysis because they aren't gory enough. The late Joe Murphy for example pioneered a commonsensical way of not seeing Guam as a colony in this manner. When confronted with arguments about Guam's colonial status Murphy would usually make two discursive moves. First, he would argue that colonialism is a thing of the past as associated with the atrocities of Spanish priests long ago. That was colonization, it was violent, brutal and cruel, you certainly can't call what Guam experiences today colonialism if that was colonialism as well. Second, he would say that Guam benefits from the relationship with the United States and in colonial relationships