NO REST FOR THE AWAKE - MINAGAHET CHAMORRO

Several years ago, Senator Tommy Morrison was pushing for the reinstatement of Discovery Day as a local, Government of Guam holiday. For those younger or more forgetful than myself, Discovery Day was a holiday created in 1971 to commemorate the "discovering" of Guam by Ferdinand Magellan in 1521. It was celebrated until the early 2000s when it was removed as a local holiday. For those who aren't familiar with the festivities associated with Discovery Day, it was normally a time for the southern village of Umatac/Humatak to shine. A fair or carnival would be held in the village, with the highlight of the day being a re-enactment of the arrival of Magellan.  If you have never been to a Discovery Day before I suggest you go just to witness the surreal nature of this reenactment where Chamoru huts are burnt and Chamoru are killed by a guy in Spanish armor who usually arrives in Umatac Bay via a motorboat. The village of Umatac in particular enjoyed this holiday as it brou

Liberation Day is here again. I'm not on island for it and so in most ways I am insulated from it. Facebook is one of the main ways that I'm experiencing it this year. My dash is inundated with images from the parade, pictures of manamko', food, flags, uniformed troops and village floats. There are also quite a few posts weighing on the issue of Liberation Day itself, contending with the political meanings involved. Some people referred to it as reoccupation day or dependence day. They called into question, quite rightly, whether it is right to call this day a real liberation. Others pushed back against these critiques, some of them whining about the comfortable generations of today not appreciating the sacrifices of the past. They argued that if the generation of war survivors doesn't question the liberation aspects of the day, who gives us the right to? So much of this discourse relies on the idea that the older generation never complained and always endured, but it

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

I didn’t grow up singing any Chamorro Christmas songs. There was little to no Chamorro in my house growing up in Mangilao. We celebrated Christmas, but didn’t do it in the way that many Chamorros do it. Where it involves a bilen, the creation of a nativity scene, the making of bunelos dagu, or the singing of Chamorro Christmas songs, the majority of which are Catholic in nature. So learning about Chamorro Christmas experiences, the stereotypical, more general kind is bewildering in a way. I am coming into traditions that people who sometimes know far less Chamorro language than I do and much much less Chamorro knowledge or history than I do, know more intimately than I do. To them these experiences are commonplace, are normal, are kind of boring. For me they are interesting. While for most of my students the idea of gathering material for a bilen is irritating and frustrating, it is intriguing to me. Something I would like to do one day, not because of any affec