NO REST FOR THE AWAKE - MINAGAHET CHAMORRO

In the film The Matrix, the Agent Smith played by Hugo Weaving holds a short, but memorable philosophical session with his captive, resistance fighter Morpheus. He tells him about the first versions of the Matrix that were created in order to keep the imprisoned human population occupied while their energies were siphoned from them like batteries. In the early versions of the Matrix everything was perfect. It was like paradise, free of conflict and problems. It was a perfect world. That perfection is what made it impossible for humans to accept, and so when confronted with this perfect world humans rejected it wholesale and so those early versions of the Matrix were total failures. So instead of having the Matrix make people happy and give them a perfect world, the machines decided to give them a world similar to what they already knew. Imperfect, full of struggle, pain, loneliness, doubt and rejection. People accepted this and the Matrix continued to functi

It is interesting how I am often seen as a very confrontational person by some; how some people see me as an angry aggressive activist who at every moment fights the power and challenges things. I do think of myself as a critical person in some ways. I am very critical of certain structures of power, most importantly Guam's relationship to the United States. I am very critical sometimes of the way power and race operate at the University of Guam, but I am not the type who articulates this at every turn. I do not go around shaming Americans with every chance I get. Even if I have very serious critiques about the presence of the US military on Guam, I do not go around spitting on them. Part of this is simply because of who I am. I am not a confrontational person. I have never really seen the value of it. I have always sought to find more indirect ways of accomplishing things. Perhaps you could call this a cultural thing, as most people tend to articulate Chamorros as being like thi

The budget showdown which was "averted" yesterday led to one the most intriguing statements I've ever heard. One of the central fronts in this budget war has been the fate of Planned Parenthood. For those who haven't been paying attention to the current slate of petty politics in Washington D.C. the dynamic is new for those with short memories, but old if you remember the last time the Federal Government was shut down, 16 years ago; A resurgent crop of Republicans flood into Congress with plenty of radical rhetoric about taking the country back and playing chicken with a Democratic president over the budget, spending, taxes and so on. Planned Parenthood is an organization which provides a great number of health care services for low-income women, but in the minds of Republicans and in particular it's most extreme kaduku wing, it is synonymous with abortions. Planned Parenthood is an anathema to their facile defense of "life," a place which they charac

In my Guam History classes this last month we read the poem below written by my pare' Julian Aguon, titled "The Mango Trees Already Know." The poem is written in the shadow of the impending military buildup to Guam, and is about how the warning signs, the possible dangers to our island and to the Chamorro people are all around us, but we seem to be incapable of doing anything to protect ourselves. Julian even discusses the death of his father to cancer, and forces an important connection between how Guam has become modernized and militarized since World War II and the alarming rates of cancer and disease. I asked my students this past week "What is it that the mango trees know, that we don't?" or "What is it that they know, that we refuse to recognize?" For me, in answering that questions, my mind quickly turns to the film The Happening, by M. Night Shamalayan. For those unfamiliar with the movie, people in the East Coast of the United States s

Guam is a colony. Anyone who says otherwise simply doesn't want to confront the truth. One of the mistakes that people often conveniently make when discussing the veracity of Guam's contemporary colonial status is making the assumption that in order to call something colonial, it must be the worst and most horrible thing in the world. Make no mistake, Guam is a colony and it is an unjust and immoral fact, but it is not the worst place in the world because of it. But interestingly enough so many people attempt to argue that Guam isn't a colony, just because it it's political status today isn't that bad. They argue that because it's better than before or because it's not as bad as forms of colonialism from time's past, you can't call it a colony. Part of the problem with this is the simplicity through which people are arguing for something. Simplicity and plain-spokenness is one of the easiest ways to appear to be speaking the truth or speaking of

Last year the group TASI or Traditions About Seafaring Islands organized a Sakman Summit, or an event where experts on Chamorro culture, language, history and Micronesian traditional navigation gathered together to discuss various aspects about the recreation of the Chamorro sakman, or open-ocean large canoe. Central to the gathering was developing a standardized vocabulary for all of the terms which you would need for navigation in Chamorro, such as parts of the canoe, tools, sea-birds, names for the different parts of the day, etc. I've written before about how critical in today's Guam the work of TASI is. They are decolonizing. They are not returning to a previous era, but rather showing us how it is entirely possible that things which were lost or prohibited long ago, such as the seafaring skills and technology of Chamorros can find a place in today's world. Decolonization is not about preserving, because preserving assumes that something is dead or on the verge of de

Conferences exists to bring together a large group of people who think and live on the same page, or who would at least like to try and do so. The conference is like a warm, safe blanket around which they can hopefully surround their thoughts, their identities, or at minimum at least something where they can trust the space as safe and will not threaten or antagonize them in certain expected, but unwanted ways. You could all have the same job, be of the same ethnicity or race, or have shared research, political or professional interests, but every conference tends to be a great big bubble. And in that bubble you can hang out, speak jargon, share the feeling of being in your own imagined community and feel safe and secure in the fact that this bubble exists to limit certain potential challenges or critiques. If you are at an Ethnic Studies conference, then it is unlikely that in the middle of your presentation, someone will stand up and defiantly call Ethnic Studies a useless pointless

While driving around Hiroshima in a cab this morning I learned that the driver was the son of a hibakusha , or someone who had been hit in the atomic blast in Hiroshima but had survived. I along with delegates from Nigeria and Vietnam were in the car and when our guide told him that we were all in town for the 2010 World Conference Against Atom and Hydrogen Bombs, he enthusiastically welcomed us all. He went on to talk a little bit about himself and his mother and then summed up his story with an obvious but important point. He said that he could not understand, even after people have seen the horrible damage that they cause, why anyone in this world would want nuclear weapons to continue to be in this world. Para Guiya, ti hongge’on na manggaigaige ha’ gi este na mundo, este na klasin “weapons.” Earlier this year, activists groups from around the world, but activists in particular in Japan had worked to gather signatures worldwide calling for the abolition of nuclear weapons, which

One of the problems in their fight is that while most of Jeju may know about their resistance, news of this fight has barely reached the mainland of South Korea. This was something which I had heard two days earlier from Mr. Kang Sang-won in Pyeongtaek when he was talking about the difficulties in trying to get people outside of the immediate vicinity to care. One of the problems with the rural struggles in South Korea against US base expansion is that the news of their fight barely reaches the large population centers of South Korea. For instance, while most of Jeju Island may know about the resistance of the villagers of Gangjeong or the city of Pyeongtaek may know about the resistance by local farmers, or even the citizens of Paju might know about the displacement of villagers in order to expand the Mugeon-ri training fields, but this news doesn't travel very far otherwise. I heard this most specifically from Mr. Kang Sang-won in Pyeongtaek when he was talking about the difficu