NO REST FOR THE AWAKE - MINAGAHET CHAMORRO

A close friend of mine who just started his Ph.D. program has been having trouble with balancing his personal life and academic life, and keeping up with the theoretical workload involved. I sent him some advice, just from my perspective about how to survive in an environment where you are reading so much each week and then expected to speak intelligently on the sheer amount of data and ideas you are expected to absorb. This naturally made me remember my own grad school days, in particular my days of reading multiple theoretical texts a week in my UCSD Ethnic Studies program. I had my own tricks in order to survive, but I was helped by the fact that I read pretty fast and also just loved reading. Not having kids at that time and living away from much of my extended family also helped. The reflection or analytical papers that I wrote in grad school are favorite mementos of mine. They represent a time when my brain was afire with ideas and I was writing and reading constantly. It is

The Sakima Art Museum in Ginowan City Okinawa is a very inspiring place. When you drive up to the museum you might notice that the fence for Futenma Base is almost too close for comfort, right up to the edge of the road. This is because the land was formerly a part of the base, but returned to the family years ago. In 1989, Michio Sakima, an acupuncturist wanted to start an art gallery but didn't have any land to do so. His family's property, including their family crypt was right on the edge of Futenma, and so he requested it be returned so that he could start his gallery. He was able to do so successfully and open his museum in 1994. His intent was that the museum be a place of reflection on the pain of war and importance of peace. Today more than 40,000 people visit the museum each year. One can go there and view the exhibits that change very few months, or one can go there and be taken on a tour of Futenma, which is visible from the roof. In one room they feature the wo

My dissertation in Ethnic Studies is dedicated to three people. One is my daughter Sumåhi, sa’ guiya i mas maolek yan månnge na palao’an gi hilo’ tano’ yan gi todu estoria. The other is for my son Akli’e’. Ti sen maolek gui’ taiguihi i che’lu-ña, lao guiya I mas kinute na patgon gi hilo’ tano’. The last dedication goes to an Ancient Chamorro warrior, a maga’låhi named Chelef, who fought against the Spanish in the late 1670s and was eventually executed for his crimes against them. The dedication to my kids should obvious. I hope that in time I will be able to publish enough things so that everyone I love in my life can have something where their name and a few loving words appear in its opening pages. But why dedicate something to Chelef, a Maga’låhi who is not as famous as figures such as Hurao, Mata’pang, Kepuha or even Agualin? The reason is because of the way one of his acts against the Spanish, mirrored in a way the critical intervention I was attempting in my dissertation. In m

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

I'm working furiously on finishing up my dissertation, and other than the filling in of my 700 footnotes, one of the fun tasks left to finish is the choosing of epigrams from the start of each chapter. An epigram is a quote or passage that you place at the start of the chapter to help set the mood or the tone. It can be tragic, funny, serious, boring, whatever you'd like, but it provides a extra bit of spice, meaning or flavor to help give your chapter a sense of presence or meaning, even before the reader has actually read any of it. For my dissertation I'm torn between using jokes passages, or all passages meant to be silly or funny. So for instance, in one of my chapters on the United Nations, sovereignty and the way the claims of indigenous people for decolonization are reduced to domestic concerns or effects of the nations, I thought about using this quote from an Eddie Izzard show: “So the American government lied to the Native Americans for many, many years, and th

A little less than two weeks before I defend my dissertation. Sumahi and I are heading to San Diego this morning to prepare for my defense and graduation. For those of you who have been interested in what my dissertation is about, and I haven't been able to tell you, or told you I would tell you later. Here's the fragment that I've written to introduce it. ******************************* GUAM! Where the Production of America’s Sovereignty Begins! Tinituhun This title might seem odd for a number of reasons. It collapses, or causes a collision between, a number of different concepts that many might not be familiar with, or feel go together. First we have Guam, a colony of the United States, or as it is more formally known, a territory or a dependency of it. Then we have the United States, which most likely needs no introduction, but the reference to its sovereignty might cause a few eyebrows to be raised. Sovereignty can refer to many things, but generally deals with nat

I just came home from watching The Dark Knight . I thoroughly enjoyed it. There were parts though that I felt were rushed. Where it seemed that a scene had been stripped to its bare minimum in order to keep things flowing and moving. So characters end up talking to each other in ways which are way too concise and compact, its as if (even if they are good actors) they nonetheless appear like robots speaking one after another. Its always a hurried mixture of surreality and unreality watching this sort of thing, because of the way it unintentionally might reveal that in our own lives, when we speak in ways which are perfectly witty, perfectly timed, is there some sort of matrix at work as well? Editing our lives to create that illusion of discourse moving smoothly along? Other than this sort of thing, which is understandable, since they were struggling to squeeze as many story elements from as many different Batman storylines as possible, and somehow make all of them fit into 2 1/2 hours.

I am writing right now two lectures on the Pacific and Pacific Islanders which I'll be giving this week in the Ethnic Studies 1A class at UCSD. I've got the basic idea of what I want to say and what I'll use to say and prove it, but still the actually writing and plotting of it is a bit difficult. I at first wanted to show what Pacific Islanders and their islands mean in relation to the United States, so for other Americans, what do they enable, perform or make possible culturally, politically and militarily. The different segments of a nation and an empire are bound together in various ways, but one important and obvious one being practical or utilitarian. From the vantage of being a "real" citizen, or a "real" American, what it is for example, that different racial or ethnic groups provide to the health and prosperity of the nation. What it is that they bring here that is important? The reason for this is of course to both explain why someone should b