NO REST FOR THE AWAKE - MINAGAHET CHAMORRO

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

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

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