NO REST FOR THE AWAKE - MINAGAHET CHAMORRO

 In his book Saina Chamorro poet and scholar Craig Santos Perez does something that really intrigued me. I recently wrote a review essay of his three poetry books hacha, Saina and Guma', and this was one thing that caught my eye. Throughout parts of the book he includes the names of soldiers from Micronesia, who will serving in the US military were killed in the Middle East, in the Horn of Africa, Afghanistan and Iraq. He lists them in the way that is customary for KIA lists, with their age and a hometown. He crosses out however everything except their names.  The tactic of crossing things out can be a beautiful strategy. I used to use it alot before, most notably in my article "The (Un)exceptional Life of a Chamorro Soldier: Tracing the Militarization of Desire in Guam, USA. The act of crossing it out can mean that this doesn't really exist. It can be a way of de-emphasizing something. It can be a way of drawing attention to it, albeit in a circu

For "Sindalu" the Guam Humanities Council Exhibit that I am working on, one of the tasks I did was to collect as many of the articles about Chamorros that have died in Afghanistan and Iraq as possible. Part of the problem with collecting these articles is that many of the Chamorro soldiers who have died lived elsewhere and were recruited outside of the Marianas. Sometimes these soldiers will show up in lists of dead from the Marianas, sometimes they don't. These lists are also more complicated by the fact that some of them will include the deaths of soldiers who were deployed but not killed in combat and others will exclude them. What makes it even more convoluted is that the metrics for counting the dead has changed as well. During Vietnam, the number was strictly Chamorros, even though there were a handful of soldiers from other islands in Micronesia who did serve. But in the Wars on Terror, the fights in Afghanistan, Iraq and the Horn of Africa, more and more non-C

This Thursday at 6 pm at the Dededo Senior Center I'll be on a panel to discuss a rough cut of the documentary "Island Soldier." The film by Nathan Fitch is about the experiences of FSM Citizens who serve in the US military. I have been hearing about this film for quite a while from its director and I'm very excited to see what he has created. Micronesia is often dismissed by the world due to its smallness and its distance from places that are considered to be naturally important. What can there be of value here expect for those things which people associate with smallness, isolation and getting away from the "real" world. But one thing that this part of the world and the American Empire can claim is to have overwhelming per capita enlistment statistics in the US military. It is something that anyone who knows the United States in terms of its statistics or numerical reality is aware of, but is unsure how to process. The collection of islands that the US

  Legal watchdog takes up the cudgels for Davis case Monday, 17 Jun 2013 03:00am BY MAR-VIC CAGURANGAN | Marianas VARIETY NEWS STAFF Arnold ''Dave'' Davis PACIFIC Legal Foundation (PLF) has taken up the cudgels for Arnold “Dave” Davis’ plebiscite lawsuit, citing the courts’ role in protecting political minorities from “discrimination and marginalization” in the political process. “Here, Arnold Davis alleges that Guam is preventing him from engaging in the political process because of his race,” PLF said in an amicus curiae brief filed Friday in the Ninth Circuit Court. “Because he has been treated differently than other voters, he has suffered an injury-in-fact and has standing to challenge the unequal treatment,” the legal watchdog said. The case reached the Ninth Circuit Court in January on the heels of Chief Federal Judge Frances Tydingco-Gatewood’s dismissal of Davis’ civil rights suit. Davis sued the government after he

Published on Thursday, January 3, 2013 by Common Dreams I Do Not Support the Troops Why those who say "I Support the Troops" really don't by Michael Moore   I don't support the troops, America, and neither do you. I am tired of the ruse we are playing on these brave citizens in our armed forces. And guess what -- a lot of these soldiers and sailors and airmen and Marines see right through the bull**** of those words, "I support the troops!," spoken by Americans with such false sincerity -- false because our actions don't match our words. These young men and women sign up to risk their very lives to protect us -- and this is what they get in return:1. They get sent off to wars that have NOTHING to do with defending America or saving our lives. They are used as pawns so that the military-industrial complex can make billions of dollars and the rich here can expand thei

The shortcut for talking about the US military fighting in Afghanistan is to say "Afghanistan." Even though fighting there has dramatically increased in the past two years, it still hasn't come to the point where it has been embedded in peoples' minds as being a "war." There are few very people who say Afghanistan War and the phrasing of "the war in Afghanistan" could simply be descriptive and not meant to convey a unique particular set of events or a stand-alone period of time. Although the war there is getting bloodier and bloodier and more and more hopeless (at least it seems), it still is not its own experience, or hasn't had its own substantive impact on the US and its psyche. Even tiny, public relations wars such as Grenada have their own particular meaning, even if the events of the US invading a tiny island in the Caribbean for no real reason cannot under any circumstances be counted as enough to shoulder the label of being a "war.

Thankfully, it has been a while now since a soldier from Guam was killed in the current slate of US Wars on Terror. But as the US prepares to increase its presence in Afghanistan, I cannot help but think back to several years ago, when the wars in both Afghanistan and Iraq were in full force and it seemed like someone from Guam or from Micronesia were dying every month. I remember writing several emotional and sometimes angry posts about the way these precious lives were being wasted on imperial ventures. For obvious reasons, these sorts of posts are very difficult and sensitive, for so many reasons. Malingu un lina'la'. A life is lost. A Chamorro life is lost. A Chamorro life is lost fighting for the United States, which has been and continues to be his or her colonizer. A brown body is lost fighting other brown bodies, usually for the sake and interest of rich white people, or at least rich people. Lastly though we reach the most difficult point, which I articulated several