NO REST FOR THE AWAKE - MINAGAHET CHAMORRO

Some of the Guam Mentions that can be found on the website Common Dreams .  They cover an interesting spectrum of political possibilities. The list of Guam Mentions is so oddly diverse, it was collections like this which made my dissertation such a strange trip to write. Guam is a military base, an independent country, a territory within just a few hundreds words of text. It is quintessentially American in one article, a foreign country in another, the edges of its empire in one and then the breakdown of its soul and its morality in the next. To see what I mean, check out the articles below: ********************* World Watches North Korea, But No Missiles Yet Deadline came and went, but US intel believes chances of test launch remain 'very high' by Jon Queally, staff writer Common Dreams April 10, 2013 Following weeks of growing tensions, Wednesday April 10 was the day officials in Pyongyang had threatened to test one or more of its Musudan

In a few days I'll be heading to Japan to teach there but also learn more about peace, demilitarization and antinuclear movements there. Later this year I'll be traveling to Okinawa to work more with independence and demilitarization groups there. Somewhere on the horizon is a trip I'm planning to take to Taiwan to meet with indigenous groups. I wrote an article several years ago on solidarity in the Asia-Pacific region, and argued a core feature of it was imagination and sharing an imaginary. One of the most intriguing aspects of human consciousness is the way we can feel disconnected to those right next to us and intimately connected to people on the other side of the world. Proximity or similarity don't necessarily dictate these things, because there is always the possibility of solidarity, that disparate groups can nonetheless find a common cause of purpose or goal together. If we consider all the islands that have been damaged by US military testing, training and

 I'm excited this summer because I'll be a visiting scholar in Japan at Kobe University. I'll be teaching a course on transnational relations that focuses on militarization and militarism in the Asia-Pacific region. I'll be using two books for the course Militarized Currents edited by Setsu Shigematsu and Keith Camacho and The Bases of Empire edited by Catherine Lutz. Catherine Lutz has been a friend of Micronesia for a very long time and last came through Guam a few years ago. Here work is very important in terms of giving a structure to militarization and militarism and not just letting them be things taken for granted as natural parts of life, but being able to drawn them out of the background here and force them to become objects of analysis and critique. Her work when she came through Guam and gave several presentations and even testified in front of the Guam Legislature was very eye-opening to people about the nature of military bases and how they affect the c

Looking at the ‘tip of the spear’ How U.S. Military policy in Guam, a proposed “mega build-up” and population displacement are destroying the island and its people.  by Craig Santos Perez June 6, 2014 The Hawaii Independent Guåhan (Guam), an unincorporated territory of the United States, is the largest and most populated island in Micronesia. For a local comparison, Guåhan is larger than Lanaʻi yet smaller than Molokaʻi. Similar to Oʻahu, U.S.military bases occupy a third of Guåhan’s landmass. Kanaka Maoli activist and scholar Kaleikoa Kaʻeo once described the U.S. military as a monstrous heʻe (octopus). Imagine Pacific Command headquarters as its head, the mountaintop telescopes as its eyes, and the supercomputers and fiber optic networks as its brain and nerve system. Now imagine one of its weaponized tentacles strangling Guåhan: “The Tip of the Spear.” In 2009, details of a military “ mega-buildup ” on Guåhan were released in a dra