NO REST FOR THE AWAKE - MINAGAHET CHAMORRO

For those of you who don’t know, my dissertation in Ethnic Studies dealt with sovereignty, most specifically Guam’s role in producing America’s sovereignty, or what role its invisibility or nothingness plays in producing America as sovereign. This may sound confusing, but what makes it difficult for most to wrap their heads around, is the simple fact of saying that something which has been for hundreds of years produced discursively as being “small” or “faraway” or “faint” or “owned by the US” as somehow creating something as great and grand and mighty as the United States of America. One frustrating aspect of writing my dissertation was the preparing of a literature review, which is a sometimes helpful, sometimes useless review of what others have written about your topic of choice and how you will either use and build on them or defy them. If you are familiar with the bulk of work on sovereignty it all basically says the same thing nowadays, drawing mildly different c

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 image above is drawn from the universe of Starcraft 2 or as I refer to it in Chamorro " Sahyan Estreyas Dos."      One of the reasons the Chamorro language is dying is because it isn’t used for that many things. I try my best in my personal and professional life to use the language for everything or for as many things as I can. This is one instance. Many Chamorros today will draw a line between their "Chamorro" side or their Chamorro identity and the popular cultural forms, such as video games, movies, books, comics and so on, that they enjoy on a day to day basis in what they often feel is very fundamentally different. For me though, those other popular cultural things are not the enemy of the Chamorro language, but universes and domains in which we can extend the language into, find ways to make it at home there, and to expand our own possibilities with our language. Make no mistake, the Chamorro language is a real language, but over the past century,

From Vicente Diaz University of Illinois, UC ***************** Some of you asked for my comments delivered before the Senate on Monday. i couldn't attach it so I paste it here: My name is Vicente M. Diaz. I am an Associate Professor in American Indian Studies and Anthropology. I am also an affiliate faculty member in History and Asian American Studies. I represent American Indian Studies; in fact, I co-chaired the search committee that recommended the hire of Steven Salaita. I’m here to express moral indignation and outrage at the BOT’s denial of Prof. Salaita’s hire. Far from over, and even further from correct, our leadership’s decision is a wrongheaded and misguided action that has tarnished our university’s reputation among academics who know and understand how academia is supposed to work. It has also put us in actual harm’s way, some of us more than others. Above all, this administration has willingly placed political expediency and possibly money over a

Statement to the Regional Seminar on the Implementation of the Third Decade for the Eradication of Colonialism Quito, Ecuador, May 28 – 30, 2013 Michael Lujan Bevacqua, Ph.D. University of Guam / Independence for Guam Task Force The world has come to a consensus that colonization was not right and that colonialism should be eradicated. Whatever rhetoric countries once used to justify exploitation and expansion and their domination over other free peoples has been disproven. Although progress and development can come about through colonization it is neither the most effective or the most moral way of carrying this out. The arc of history seems to clearly bend in one direction, from colony to decolonization. There are only 17 non-self-governing territories left in the world, and close to 200 independent nations, many of them former colonies. This truth however is not manifest in most of the remaining non-self-governing terri

When I left Guam in 2003 to start graduate school in the states I knew I wanted to research and write about Guam and Chamorros, but wasn't sure what angle to take exactly. My tagline for my research while in grad school was "everything Chamorro, anything Guam" and sometimes "everything Guam and anything Chamorro." Decolonization was something I was becoming more and more interested in in scholarly terms, even if it was something I had already been advocating and working on in an activist context. Would I do something more cultural? Something in your typical social movement, social science way? Would I do a historical project and come up with my bounded bundle of time and go from there? I ended up taking a more philosophical route and I'm grateful that my committee was willing to let me engage in that way. I ended up using my "data" and my evidence in a more philosophical way, or the way that philosophical essays and arti

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

My brother Kuri recently graduated from UOG and one of the last classes that he took was a philosophy of religion class. I’ve always enjoyed it when Kuri takes philosophy classes because he’ll talk to me about his readings and I’ll share my ideas with him. Although I would probably never be hired into a philosophy department, my social scientific training was primarily philosophical. Philosophers created the foundations of all social sciences. When I was in Ethnic Studies, it was frustrating having to read so many long dead white Europeans pontificate about the world, but later on I realized that such is the power of knowledge. Their ideas became part of the regimes of knowledge we know today. They moved from being the rantings of a particular person into the universal ways in which we are supposed to see the world. One discussion we had recently was over the issue of Pascal’s Wager. Here is the gist of what Blaise Pascal proposes: 1.      There either is a God, or t

Published on Friday, December 30, 2011 by CultureStrike Ethnic Studies Ruling Escalates Arizona Schools Struggle by Michelle Chen While students were on their holiday break, Arizona issued a disturbing wake-up call to anyone who thought the education system had evolved to reflect America’s diversity. In a legal challenge to a controversial law passed in 2010, an administrative law judge pummeled a flagship educational initiative by supporting restrictions on programs based on Latino history and culture. Tucson students occupy a school board meeting  The judge decided that the curriculum used in Tucson’s Mexican American studies programs was biased against white people, apparently because it advocates critical historical perspectives and emphasizes struggles of indigenous and Latino communities, as well as the links between that legacy and contemporary politics. The ruling comes as no surprise, as the struggle between the school district and school superintendent