NO REST FOR THE AWAKE - MINAGAHET CHAMORRO

Ever since we created the Chamorro Studies Program at UOG, there has been an expected tension within the university over what should or should not constitute the program offerings. While there isn't much debate over whether the Chamorro Studies program should offer courses in Chamoru language, Chamoru history or that discuss Chamoru culture from a theoretical perspective, there are regular disagreements over whether or not the program should offer "culture" courses. As someone who went off to grad school with the intent of helping to "decolonize" the University of Guam, a place where I had received my BA and my first MA, this conflict is usually very personal. Most everyone can agree that academia should make room for "indigenous knowledge" in a trendy or fad-like sense. In the same way in which everyone might want to connect something about climate change to their work to be aligned with prevailing intellectual currents, we find something similar in

I've been lost in Power Point presentations for the past few days. I'll be teaching for the next month at Kobe University in Japan. My course is an accelerated one and so I'm teaching a month-long course in just a week. I don't normally prepare Power Points for any of my lectures in Guam, but since my students here in Japan will be primarily those who did not learn English as a first language, the visuals and potential outline skeleton it provides will help keep them engaged. My course focuses on US militarization in the Asia-Pacific Region, and it will link together US strategic interests from Okinawa, to the Philippines, to Guam, to the Marshall Islands and Hawai'i, while also linking together the popular movements for demilitarization or decolonization against those bases. For me, este kalang un guinife-hu mumagahet. I am been working on this issue as an activist and an academic for many years. In 2011 I published my article "The Gift of Imagination: Sol

--> The island of Pagan, in the northern Marianas has made international news as it might soon become yet another beautiful island to be destroyed by the US military for its testing and training purposes. Although now I regularly hear news about Pagan, in years past I scarcely heard about it in a Chamorro context, but rather always in either a strict environmental context or in a Japanese historical context. Environmentalists are the first line of defense in some ways against militarization, although history has shown they often have trouble working cooperatively with the locals and natives who claim those lands. For them Pagan is an ecological paradise and needs to be protected. I would hear random tidbits about Pagan in this regard, as being a place with exciting species (including snails) that should be researched and explored.  I also heard about it in the context of Japanese, as settlers lived there during the Japanese colonial period in the CNMI. In fact in historical

This semester I was very excited to offer a new course, Tiningo' Tinifok at UOG, which focused on teaching the basics for weaving. We had 12 students for the class, who learned how to weave a variety of objects in both hagon niyok (coconut leaf) and akgak (pandanus). I look forward to offering more courses like this in the future, which focus on material culture and traditional knowledge and make academic connections between the two. Here are some images from the class:

Earlier today I had the honor of giving a presentation before the Guam National Football (Soccer) Team. They have a friendly tournament coming up on island where they'll be facing off against teams like Saipan, Macau and Mongolia. I was asked by some of the coaches and staff for the team to speak about traditional navigation and use it as a metaphor to inspire the players. Traditional navigation in Micronesia is something to absolutely be proud of, even on Guam where it was lost for centuries and is being incorporated back into life again. People say that Magellan put Guam on the map. He did so only for Europeans. Peoples in Micronesia had their own maps and Guam was already on them. Chamorros had their own maps and these maps stretched from Asia to the Marshall Islands covering thousands of miles. To fixate on Magellan putting Guam on an map helps us forget so much that we can and should be proud of. Magellan puts Guam on the map 3500 years after Chamorros put it

UOG Launches Oral History Project to Collect Chamorro Stories Elders are being asked to share their stories for project and museum FOR RELEASE, September 17, 2013 – As part of its mission to perpetuate and promote the Chamorro language and culture, the University of Guam is embarking on an oral history project focused collecting traditional Chamorro knowledge. The project is entitled, Hinekka’ i Tiningo’ i Manåmko’ which translates to, “The collection of the knowledge of the elders.” It is being coordinated by the Chamorro Studies Program and is tied to the development of the Guam Museum. Historian Michael Lujan Bevacqua, Ph.D. and writer Victoria-Lola Leon Guerrero, MFA are working on the writing for the Guam Museum, and are conducting this oral history project. Their goal is to ensure that the voices and knowledge of our elders, particularly in relation to the complexities and creativity of the Chamorro language, are not lost. Leon Guerrero will be leading efforts to interview eld

I receive regular updates about news on the Korean peninsula from a group called the Korea Policy Institute. The description from their website is as follows: The Korea Policy Institute is an independent research and educational institute whose mission is to provide timely analysis of United States policies toward Korea and developments on the Korean peninsula. If you would like to receive their emails and updates you can easily sign up . You can also donate to support them by clicking here . After traveling to South Korea last year, I keep up with news there about places that I visited and people that I met. One reason I appreciated visiting there was the way it helped deepen my understanding not just about South Korea itself, but about the larger network of US bases in the Asia-Pacific region. From Guam you know the US has bases all over the place, but you think about that network and much of the world through those bases and not through the countries that "host" them.

Gof ya-hu pumenta i pilan. Ti tu tungo' sa' hafa, sa' ti meggai i tinigo'-hu put i pilan yan i kinalamten-na. My daughter is named after a phase that the moon takes each lunar month. But I will admit that when I first heard the word many years ago, I didn't know exactly what it meant when the moon "waxes." I know also, that the moon was very important to ancient Chamorros, like so many cultures. It played a huge role in organizing their yearly schedule. It was the means by which they made their yearly calendar, with thirteen months, for the thirteen moons in a year. They also noted that different moons symoblized different ideal moments for different activities. A certain type of crab is best hunted after a particular moon, and the arrival of a certain moon means that people should prepare for a period of heat or regular rain. The moon was so important that "moon talk" or "fino' gualafon" or "talk of the full moon" wa

I have to really apologize. I haven't put together an issue of Minagahet Zine in close to a year, nine months actually. Its not because nothing has been happening on Guam or to Chamorros around the world. Its quite the opposite really. Over the past nine months there have been too many things happening, and so I tried to get someone to guest edit an issue of Minagahet. One of my friends agreed and started putting it together but never finished. I was so busy with finishing my dissertation, and now working at the University of Guam that I couldn't work on it either, even after it was obvious that my friend wasn't going to finish it. So I just wanted to put out a quick note saying that the next issue is on its way. I'm trying to find some time this weekend to organize and upload it. So many things have been happening lately, and a few things that were supposed to happen, haven't yet. The Draft Environmental Impact Statement for the bulk of the construction for the m

Mumamatmos yu' gi i tumutuge'-na i qualifying exam-hu, pues asi'i yu' bai hu taigue gi este na simana. Lao i fino' Al Gore pau tahgue yu'. Published on Thursday, May 17, 2007 by Time Magazine Book Excerpt: The Assault on Reason by Al Gore Not long before our nation launched the invasion of Iraq, our longest-serving Senator, Robert Byrd of West Virginia, stood on the Senate floor and said: “This chamber is, for the most part, silent—ominously, dreadfully silent. There is no debate, no discussion, no attempt to lay out for the nation the pros and cons of this particular war. There is nothing. We stand passively mute in the United States Senate.” Why was the Senate silent? In describing the empty chamber the way he did, Byrd invited a specific version of the same general question millions of us have been asking: “Why do reason, logic and truth seem to play a sharply diminished role in the way America now makes important decisions?” The persisten