NO REST FOR THE AWAKE - MINAGAHET CHAMORRO

In February,  Adolf Sgambelluri or "Sgamby" as many knew him, passed away. He leaves behind a long legacy of accomplishments. To name a few, he was a war survivor, a decorated Vietnam Vet, a GCC Vice President and a Guam Police Chief.     When I was a graduate student in Micronesian Studies at UOG, close to 20 years ago, and I was asking my grandparents who would be great to interview for oral history, about prewar life, war experiences, anything, we made long lists of people we could visit. Sgamby was on that list.    When we visited him however, he wasn’t the focus, but rather his father. Adolfo Camacho Sgambelluri had played a sort of double agent role, while working for the Japanese as a police officer, trying to minimize where he could their violent impact on the lives of Chamorus. I also learned from that visit that we were related with his mother being a close relative to my great-grandfather. Sgamby was eager to tell his father’s story since some up til this day don’t

Since 2003 I have had a number of uneven traditions associated with this blog. Many of these have dissipated as I have used this blog less and less, but a few I have continued to hold on to. One of the longest held traditions is "Happy US Imperialism Day!" It started as a thinking piece while I was working on my Master's Thesis in Micronesian Studies at the University of Guam. I had spent a few years reading as much as I could about Guam History. I had interviewed hundreds of elders born prior to World War II, who had experienced Japanese occupation. I had even begun working for Puerto Rican filmmaker Frances Negron-Muntaner on a documentary that would later become War for Guam. I was also spending time with activists of every stripe on Guam, trying to talk to anyone who I could find who had long been critical of the things I was just starting to learn about the historical and contemporary realities of the Chamoru people.  I was encountering the history and the present of

The UN C24 Regional Seminar in St. Vincent and the Grenadines was my fourth occasion to testify as an expert in this setting. My first invitation was in Ecuador in 2013. This was followed by twice in Nicaragua in 2015 and 2016. After going through my old testimonies in preparation for this year's seminar I did not cringe, as I normally would when reviewing old work or writings. I noticed in my first instance of testifying that I was very general and almost theoretical. I was using elements of the dissertation in Ethnic Studies that I had just finished a few years earlier. In the years since I have shifted to providing more updates to the C24 and more facts about what is happening and the impediments that Chamorros and Guam face.  As a bit of nostalgia, I'll post here my testimony from the regional seminar in Quito, Ecuador. ************************ Statement to the Regional Seminar on the Implementation of the Third Decade for the Eradication of Colonialism Quito

After the Cold War ended, conservative philosopher/political theorist Francis Fukuyama penned an argument about "the End of History." His basic thoughts boiled down to the idea that with the United States victorious in the Cold War, and with Communism and Marxist thought and governments disappearing, the dialectics of history were over. The United States would never have another worthy antagonist, who could challenge it, and that liberal democratic capitalistic ideas would become the norm and nothing viable could ever appear again beyond it. There are many ways that we can see some truth to this argument. Very few people would ever openly argue nowadays that democracy isn’t the best possible for of political government. Capitalism appears to be the happy norm, after all, who could openly argue against the making of money and spreading of wealth? Whereas technology seems to constantly shifting and changing, making previously unthinkable things feel very

The representative from Hawai'i at the Island Language Revitalizaation Forum this week at Ryukyu University is Noelani Iokepa-Guerrero. She is both a professor at University of Hawai'i, Hilo but also Program Director for the Punana Leo Hawaiian Medium preschools. She is very much involved in the training of Native Hawaiian teachers and the perpetuation of the immersion school programs that have been created there over the past 30 years. Her presentation at the conference was "Hawaiian Language Revitalization: 30 Years of Lessons Learned" and it laid out the approach to teaching the language that Native Hawaiians have developed. In the early days of their revitalization efforts they simply translated materials from other languages and other contexts. This proved ineffective and so efforts were made to create a curriciulum that was rooted in Native Hawaiian language, history adn culture. As a result of this they came to develop 5 key lessons or insights. These 5 sim

I just noticed that I passed a pretty big milestone yesterday. As you can see from the image to the left, I recently passed 300,000 hits on this blog. This means that according to Statcounter, pages on this blog have been loaded 300,000 times, and it does not necessarily mean that 300,000 people have read my blog ( olaha mohon na taiguihi). What's weird is that if I follow the internal counter that Blogger uses, then I've had 300,000 hits for quite a while, since Blogger's counter always counts twice as much as Statcounter. Needless to say, this is an exciting day for me and my blog. I started this blog in August 2004, and this post is my 1,431th. I meant to commemorate the 7th year of this blog last month, lao maleffa yu'. In 2004, my blog posts were brutally short. Sometimes one or two sentences, sometimes a paragraph. Sometimes I would post several tiny posts in a day. Although I only had this blog for 4 months in 2004, I still posted 120 times, meaning at least

One of the things which has frustrated me about the Chamorro language, as someone who uses it everyday, writes in it and is passionate about its revitalization is how weak our general usage of the Chamorro language is. And when I say weak, I mean how superficial it is. The Chamorro language is a social thing, something used for casual talk, even emotionally important talk, connecting to old friends or elders, but something which fills the time with chatter and banter until people switch to English to talk about more important things. I often say that we can see the colonization of Guam, its effects in our lives through the way we divide things into the limited and supplementary local and the essential and central colonial. So as I wrote in my masters in Micronesian Studies, even if things are constantly blurred in our lives, there are moments when we make clear distinctions and take strong stands on what is Chamorro and what is not Chamorro. What is local and not local. What is Ameri

This Friday, July 16th my most recent art show, "Before the Storm, After the Fire," at I.P. Coffee in Mangilao, will be coming down. In its place a new exhibit by artist and editor of the Marianas Variety Mar-Vic Cagurangan, called "Naked Truth" will be opening. So Friday night from 6-8 pm we'll be having an opening/closing party, where you can meet both artists, enjoy some good food and wine and also try to pick up some of my pieces before they get stored in the trunk of my car. For this last show I divided my artwork up into different themes. When I paint things, even abstract imagery, they tend to follow a set of regular themes. So even though the artwork is abstract and open to interpretation, when I paint it and when I title it, I often end up coming back to the same sorts of themes: movies, song lyrics, puns, Guam history and so on. So when I was figuring out how to hang my show, I decided to divide them up into groups based on shared imagery or names. Th