NO REST FOR THE AWAKE - MINAGAHET CHAMORRO

This video is very inspiring. It captures well a type of native nationalism, born from culture and heritage, but containing political elements. The relationships between the cultural and the political is something that I have written about endlessly on this blog. I even featured some discussion on it in my dissertation because so much of the way I see Chamorro life and the lives of so many indigenous people operating today revolves around the relationship between that which is deemed political and that which is deemed cultural. When the world was cut into pieces with meat sucked from the bones of so many native peoples the new world born from that violence was divided in fundamental ways, usually conceived in binary ways, which the positive being the purview of those with guns, steel, crosses and flags and whatever was left sticking to those who lost land, language, culture and lives. In the world of today, this "modern" world, those who lost that carving up of the world ar

One poem that had a big impact on my while I was in graduate school and cobbling together the first generations of the critical consciousness that I sport today was "Thieves" by Anne Perez Hattori. I took several courses with Anne when I was an undergrad and graduate student at UOG. She was by far the best professor I had, and the one who was most direct in terms of cutting through layers of colonial bullshit and ignorance when dealing with Guam and Chamorro history. When Anne speaks publicly, whether in an interview or on a panel she always has a way of taking something academic and shifting it to be something that a non-academic can engage with and feel that they should engage with. That is the key to someone who wants their work to have an impact beyond just academia. It is not about creating something that people will just understand, but about creating something that people will feel they need to respond to. This is only true if you accept the Marxist axiom about the n

History has a way of reminding you that what you take for granted today did not exist in the past, and worse yet, there may have been a point in the past when what you take for granted today was unimaginable. There is one quote from Robert Underwood that sums of this strange way that history can haunt people and deprive them of a feeling of essentialness with the present. It comes from his essay "Teaching Guam History in Guam High Schools" and it talks about the position of Chamorros from 1898-1941 in relation to the United States. The Chamorro people were not Americans, did not see themselves as Americans-in-waiting, and probably did not care much about being Americans. The US relationship during that period was unapologetically colonial. The US didn't have a colonial office as other countries did, but instead just colonized Guam through the US Navy and racist and paternalistic rhetoric/policies. The US Navy preached the glories of its nation in Guam, but Chamor

The defining difference between the indigenous person and the settler, or the native and the subject of the modern nation, is the ability to change, to adapt and to grow. The native, the indigenous person is defined in relation to the modern nation as a stagnant thing. They have been living in the same place in the same traditional way for centuries, perhaps millenia. They embody old cultures, ancient cultures, and as such are never prepared for the modern world of today. They are the stagnant, stuck images that define the prowess and the adaptability of the modern subject. In the case of the United States for example, this relationship is necessary because of the way in which the origin of the nation is inundated with a dependency upon the native. Early settlers of North America struggled to survive and only did so through their cooperation and learning from Native Americans who were already familiar with the land and the climate. Without them the first settlers would ha

This weekend I'll be taking people up to the literal "top of the island," Guam's tallest "peak" Sabanan Lamlam, or Mount Lamlam. It is part of We Are Guahan's "Heritage Hikes." We went to is Pagat two weeks ago, Cetti and Sella Bay last week, and now our third and final hike up to Mount Lamlam. Even though will be the third time to travel up there in the past month, but I'm still excited about it. Here is one of the reasons why. My cognitive map of Guam, the network of images, symbols, ideas, sights, smells, and so on which I use to imagine what Guam is on a daily basis is dominated by my classrooms where I teach in, the apartment complex where I live in, and the things I pass by the side of the roads as I travel. I spend most of my time in the central part of the island bouncing between Chalan Pago, Hagatna, Tamuning, Barrigada and Mangilao. As such, Guam is a pleasant concrete jungle, dotted every once in a while with random clusters

This week in World History we discussed the great debate over how people came into the Pacific thousand of years ago. Since so much of modern knowledge is based on European ideas, there was a consensus for a very long time that the only way in which the islands in the Pacific could have been peopled was through constant and regular, accidents and drift voyages. Since, so much of Europe was based on its ties to the land and the earth, and so much of discursive ascension of Europe, its elevation above the world was tied to the way it conquered the Ocean, it was inconceivable that people before Magellan, Columbus, De Gama and others could have braved the unknown and rather frightening ocean. Ko'lo'lo'na yanggen ti manaotao Uropa siha. Especially if they weren't Europeans. Since by the time Europeans came into the Pacific, there had been people living there for thousands of years, they could not have beaten the Europeans to them by using their own skills. Remember, people

I had meant to write about Avatar a few months ago after first watching it, but so many things were happening in my life and Guam and so I never got around to it. Gof ya-hu ayu na mubi, achokka’ guaha meggai ni’ siña hu tacha. I cheered and yelled throughout the movie, as I expressed my excitement and also my frustration. All in all though, I enjoyed the movie far more than I found it problematic. But as I once told an old friend, i kayu-hu estaba giya Berkeley, there is nothing fun which is not problematic. I cringed for plenty of reasons, at times it was like anthropology porn, and therefore it had all the elements that Ethnic Studies scholars are supposed to hate, meaning it was just like Dances with Wolves, where a white man is needed to save a helpless primitive, brown people. From the gaze of any “modern” subject, it is just too tempting not to engage in this fantasy, it is the most fun liberal form of viewing the rest of the world. There is something for everyone. If you

Put este na klasin tinige' siha, gof ya-hu Si Zizek. Malate' na taotao gui', ya magahet na gof grabu na isao este, na sina ta diskuti gi publiko' Put este na klasin tinige’ siha, gof ya-hu Si Zizek. Malate’ na taotao gui’ ya magåhet na gof gråbu este na tinilaika, na pa’go siña ta diskuti gi publiko “torture” kulang tåya’, kalang tåya’ guaha. Gi i ma’pos na simåna, gi iyo-ña show “ Real Time ” ilek-ña Si Bill Maher, “Liberals have to stop saying that President Bush hasn’t asked Americans to sacrifice for the War on Terror. On the contrary, he’s asked us to sacrifice something enormous, our civil rights.” Sigun Zizek, mas ki este ha', na ha na'fansakrifisio hit. ************** Knight of the Living Dead By Slavoj Zizek The New York Times March 24, 2007 SINCE the release of Khalid Shaikh Mohammed’s dramatic confessions, moral outrage at the extent of his crimes has been mixed with doubts. Can his claims be trusted? What if he confessed to more than he re

We all know that feeling, when we find the most intimate meaning in most random or even puzzling or paradoxical of places. I know that many Pacific Islanders feel this sort of serendipity or finakcha'i when they watch Bollywood movies. The geographical, cultural, historical, political differences/specificities are obvious, regardless of whether we identify with them because of some post-colonial or anti-colonial solidarity. But yet, amongst so many Pacific Islanders (and occasionally Native Americans, but at a much rarer rate) when they would watch Bollywood movies, they would feel an immediate intimacy with the representations of large families, love of singing and song and "exotic" foods. In the United States, one film through which nearly all groups marked as "ethnic" meaning not apa'ka or not normative, felt a sense of "home" was My Big Fat Greek Wedding . Filipinos, Chamorros, Indians (Asian not American), Mexicans, Black people, some Asia

For those of you who don't know, my dissertation in Ethnic Studies will deal 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. One of the thing which is currently frustrating me is the fact that part of the writing of a dissertation is the preparation of a literature review, or a sometimes helpful, sometimes useless review of what others have said about your topic of choice and how you will use them or defy them. If you are familiar with the bulk of work on sovereignty it all basically says the same things nowadays, drawing mildly different conclusions around assertions that no one can really contest. In historical terms, meaning the development of sovereignty over the past 500 years for example, the ideas of the late Senator Alan Cranston are not so different then the conceptions of Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt. (they draw the same basic geneaology an