Act of Decolonization #16: Guam or Guahan?
![Image](http://web.archive.org./web/20231225134354im_/https://3.bp.blogspot.com/_MA6TSuti-Y8/S7FxL65EyrI/AAAAAAAAD54/3ZnPUcUutik/s400/govstateaddress.jpg)
The day that Governor Felix Camacho first announced that he was planning to change Guam’s official name from Guam to Guahan, I actually had no idea it was happening. The day of his last state of the island address, I had five classes to teach, office hours to hold and then was working with Anne Perez Hattori (a fellow Guam history teacher at UOG) to organize a huge meeting of “cultural practitioners” to write a joint statement/DEIS comment about the dangers the military buildup will pose to the indigenous people of Guam, the Chamorros. In the middle of the meeting, as we were going line by line over the statement which Anne and I had written, I got a call from Mar-Vic Cagurangan, the editor for the Marianas Variety. She was calling to get my comments on the proposal to change Guam’s name and also my insights as a historian about whether what Camacho was saying and proposing was true or not. It was difficult to provide any decent comments since I didn’t quite know what was going on, but