Abstract
Linking Cultural Memory Studies, Indigenous Studies, as well as the growing field of Environmental Humanities, my article casts decolonization efforts in Guam not only as a process steeped in history, politics, and economics, but also as a necessary means to address environmental precarity. I use Craig Santos Perez’s poetry to highlight the multifaceted scope of decolonization: namely, that it entails the use of the Indigenous Chamorro language, the decolonizing of the imaginations of Chamorro people, who continue to enlist for (and die for) a nation that exploits their lands, waters, and bodies and finally the deliberate retrieval of cultural memory that promotes balance between humans and nature. Cultural memory and decolonization are thus linked. Together, they assuage the environmental impact of settler colonialism in Guam and elsewhere.
Craig Santos Perez’s collection of books, from unincorporated territory, is an ambitious undertaking. Through a series of interrelated poems that span the entire oeuvre—beginning with [hacha] in 2008, 2010’s [saina], 2014’s [guma’], which won the American Book Award, and most recently 2017’s [lukao]—Perez captures the tensions of his home island of Guam as they appear in the minds of his fellow Chamorros (the Indigenous 1 people of Guam), politicians on the island and in Washington, DC, military personnel, tourists, environmentalists, and activists. Taken together, Perez’s books provide an ongoing collage from which readers can perhaps piece together a complete image of the island, which was among the first Pacific locations under colonial rule and remains one of the last to achieve independence. 2 The title of this article “Remade: Sovereign,” is taken from Perez’s (2008) poem, “from lisiensan ga’lago” in [hacha] about how Chamorro sovereignty movements challenge the dominant narrative of Guam as an outpost for the United States and as a fruitful military recruitment site (p. 16, line 15). The phrase emphasizes that to achieve sovereignty, the island must first be remade through decolonization. A remaking of the island means more than taking it back politically, although that is a part of it. Decolonization also means more than easing the presence and influence of the US military, although that is a huge part of it, as well. By examining the poetry of Craig Santos Perez, this article illustrates that decolonization begins by addressing the environmental impacts of colonization. For the ancestors who are embodied in the reef or who protect the jungles, 3 as well as for the generations that follow, Chamorros must contest their colonial occupation by a nation that exploits and ruins their home island to advance its own military and economic agendas in Asia. To promote the possibility of a decolonized future, Chamorros assert the validity of their Indigenous practices and perspectives, or what Memory Studies scholars like Astrid Erll (2010: 1–3) and Jan Assmann (2010b: 110–111), among others, have called cultural memory. Perez’s poems emphasize Guam’s “environmental destruction but also describe alternative environmental processes that evoke still promising places where life might go” (Shewry, 2015: 8). His deployment of cultural memory throughout his books, then, should not be mistaken for a looking-back but a way of looking-forward. Chamorros are not attempting to return to an idyllic, precolonial past but are rather developing a future that privileges their own epistemologies to address their environmental precarity. 4
To decolonize Guam, one must begin by defining it. In “from the legends of juan malo [a malalogue]” at the beginning of [guma’], Perez (2014: 13) provides a variety of descriptions via acrostic poetry, including “Give Us American Military” (line 8) and “Give Us Asian Money” (lines 14–15). While ironic in tone, this passage highlights a colonialist history steeped in exploitative practices and environmental rights violations. This caricature of Guam that begs for “American Military” and “Asian Money,” for instance, is so deeply colonized that it cannot fathom pursuing its own independence. Instead, it must rely on one foreign presence for protection (the United States) and another for job creation and profit (Asian countries, most notably Japan). These supposed debts to foreign nations diminish the importance of Chamorro rights and epistemologies. In other words, if the public image of Chamorros as colonized subjects can persist, their access to their lands and waters can easily be discarded. That these definitions of Guam (and of Chamorros) as dependent on the continued goodwill of foreigners are presented in a poem named after Juan Malo is no small coincidence. A trickster figure in Chamorro folklore, Juan Malo would often undermine the Spanish colonists through cunning and fortitude, as Perez’s speaker does to American and Asian forces in this poem. The current state of the island, addressed directly here by the speaker, exemplifies the concept of militourism, coined by Choctaw-Cherokee writer Louis Owens and developed further by I-Kiribati theorist Teresia Teaiwa, which describes how the US military and the tourist industry combine to (a) deplete the natural resources of the island and (b) mask the machinations and social, cultural, and environmental consequences of the other. 5 Teaiwa (2016) explains that, as a conceptual framework, “militourism provides a crucial conceptual entry point for studies of militarism and tourism that center the native and indigeneity” (p. 852). Rather than depicting Indigenous people and their home islands as corollaries to the military pursuits and vacation fantasies of seemingly more powerful nations and their citizens, militourism highlights the consequences of these histories and, more importantly, how residents continue to challenge them. The emphasis on “the native and indigeneity” that militourism allows is hinted at in the final of this poem, wherein Perez’s speaker states that “Guam is no longer ‘Guam’” (Perez, 2014: 13, line 21).
Less a statement of negation than of promise, the speaker’s declaration that “Guam is no longer ‘Guam’” presents the possibility that Chamorros can exist autonomous from their colonial relationship to the United States (Perez, 2014: 13, line 21). It means that Guam is no longer the stuff of US military strategy and Japanese vacation resorts. Saying that “Guam is no longer ‘Guam’” exceeds the scope of its colonial history (first under Spain, then the United States after the Spanish-American War, then Japanese occupation during World War II, and now again under the United States). It returns Guam to “Guaha,” its Indigenous name, which Perez’s (2014) speaker in “ginen tidelands [pagat, guahan]” informs us “means / to exist” (p. 81, lines 11–12, italics in original). Existence, though, is rooted in place. The emphasis on location throughout Perez’s oeuvre is evident in the prepositions beginning his poems’ titles: the word “from” and ginen, Chamorro for “from,” anchors these works in the geographical context of Guam. Perez’s eco-poetic emphasis on a singular place—in this case, his home island of Guam—also makes his work archipelagic. Dani Redd (2017) writes, Archipelagraphy is a form of counter-mapping that affects a “double-destabilization,” for not only does it sweep aside western notions of the island but also provides a new perspective on the way in which islands are perceived: it both disassembles and reassembles. (p. 306)
Perez’s double-destabilization is decolonial: first “disassembl[ing] the dominant perception of Guam as a remote military outpost or tourist attraction and then “reassembling” it into “guaha.”
The conscious decolonization of Guam, which yields “guaha” into existence, entails a retrieval of many cultural practices neglected during colonial rule, beginning with the speaking of the language. Literary theorist Paul Lai (2011) points out, “In its attention to re-territorializing language, land, and bodies, Perez’s decolonial poetics challenges an American military empire often effaced in the public imaginary, connecting it to longer histories of the Spanish empire and Catholic missionary work.” The title of Perez’s 2015 collection, [guma’], for instance, refers to the Chamorro practice of uritao guma, in which a young man lives with the male family members on his mother’s side to learn cultural practices like hunting and fishing. Uritao guma was halted and outlawed by Spanish missionaries who worried that it spread un-Christian ideologies and undermined their authority. This criminalization of uritao guma not only compromised the transmission of cultural traditions and practices but also strengthened the control of the island’s first colonizing force. Perez’s use of Chamorro in each of his book titles foregerounds the Indigenous language long dismissed by outsiders. The title of his 2015 offering, [guma’], specifically, champions Chamorro culture in that it recalls and enacts the work of uritao guma, teaching readers about cultural practices of the Chamorro and their relevance to the present-day. Jan Assmann (2010b) argues, “Memory enables us to live in groups and communities, and living in groups and communities enables us to build a memory” (p. 109). As part of the colonial conquest, the Spanish purposefully disrupted the process of “build[ing] a memory,” as any such “memory” would recall traditions and ideologies that predate them and call into question their presence and control. Chamorro villages, for instance, were no longer organized around matrilineal clans but instead a church overseen by a Spanish priest.
Assmann’s (2010b) process of “build[ing] a memory” was further disrupted by the United States, which acquired Guam from the Spanish following the Spanish-American War in 1898. Throughout the twentieth century, the United States used Guam for military purposes with seemingly minimal regard for the Chamorro people and their claims to the land and waters. Literary theorist Hsuan Hsu (2012) explains that during the Korean War and Vietnam War, Guam served as a staging area for bombing raids, a storage facility for Agent Orange [and throughout the second-half of the century] has been used by the military for environmentally hazardous waste disposal. (p. 286)
That these uses of the island were approved shows that the United States military was willing to endanger the health and wellbeing of Chamorros for its own purposes. These usages have led to a variety of health issues for Chamorros. Perez (2010) details many of these consequences on the Indigenous people in his address to the UN Political and Decolonization Committee published in [saina]: “various kinds of cancer and neurodegenerative diseases, such as amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, parkinsonism dementia,” as well as “renal dysfunction, cardiovascular disease, liver dysfunction, deafness, blindness, epilepsy, seizures, arthritis, anemia, stillbirths, and infertility” (pp. 107, 114). These effects exemplify what Rob Nixon (2011) has described as “slow violence,” defined as “a violence that occurs gradually and out of sight, a violence of delayed destruction that is dispersed across time and space, an attritional violence that is typically not viewed as violence at all” (p. 2). The “stillbirths, and infertility” that Perez mentions are examples of the violence that Nixon describes as “dispersed across time and space” in that they prevent the possibility of Indigenous futures on the island. These acts of violence are therefore multidirectional: dispersing from the past into the present and extending into the future. 6 The other health issues listed by Perez—from cancer to cardiovascular disease, arthritis to dementia—show how processes of slow violence “occu[r] gradually and out of sight.” In other words, the Chamorro body abets colonization by hiding its ill effects from view. Decolonizing the imaginations of the Chamorro people, as Perez’s work does, is made more difficult by the fact that the consequences of empire are often not visible. Chamorros cannot imagine otherwise if they do not see the reality they are up against. Like the Chamorro body, the natural environment of Guam is disregarded by the United States because it is seen merely as a military asset. To military strategists and mainland American politicians, Guam’s distance from the United States justifies the military’s environmental violations.
But unlike Euro-American settler conceptions of water that emphasize it strictly as a strategic barrier, Chamorros see water as an extension of the island and of themselves. The speaker of “ginen (sub)aerial roots,” in [guma’] explains while looking at a map of Guam, “‘I stared and leaned closer / to get a good look, and there it was, just a tiny dot on this big map’ because [our] blood is eighty percent water hunggan hunggan / hunggan magahet” (Perez, 2014: 79, lines 23–24, italics in original). That last part, translating to “yes yes / yes truth,” is an affirmation of the connection between the human body and water. This outlook combats the notion that Guam is an isolated (and thus expendable) landmass of limited importance. Matt Matsuda (2007) channels Tongan and Fijian writer and theorist, Epeli Hau’ofa, in asking, “Why should islands be cast as small and isolated when their territory is in fact immense and when oceans are not barriers but great lands of migration, transit, and exchange?” (p. 231). Rather than illustrating the remoteness of Guam, then, the ocean makes possible, as Hau’ofa explains, this “exchange” of goods, of languages and cultures, and of belonging to a location greater than any one island. Elizabeth DeLoughrey’s (2007) “tidalectic” or “tidal dialectic” approach, developed from Barbadian theorist Kamau Brathwaite, draws “from a cyclical model, invoking the continual movement and rhythm of the ocean” (p. 2). The “cyclical[ity]” of the ocean speaks to the infinite possibility of return for those that leave, even diasporic Chamorros who leave the island in pursuit of an education, a job, or most commonly due to military service. The ocean’s “rhythm” and continuity referenced here renders it beyond the full control of colonial forces; therefore, not only is a return inevitable, but it is (and will always be) beyond the scope of colonial power to prevent.
By promoting their own cultural knowledge, Chamorros assert their connection to the waters in a way that is not, in contrast to the US military, destructive or self-serving. For instance, the speaker of “ginen (sub)aerial roots” in [guma’] ruminates on the construction and sailing of a sakman, or “large outrigger canoe, by a group named Traditions About Seafaring Islands, or TASI, which also translates to ‘sea’ or ‘ocean’” (Perez, 2014: 39). The speaker explains, “They named the sakman ‘Saina,’ which means parent, elder, spirit, or ancestor . . . The next year, the crew launched Saina from Hagatna boat basin and sailed to the island of Luta, thirty-one miles north” (Perez, 2014: 39). Susan Y. Najita (2006) has shown how canoe-voyaging shows the “entirely fluid set of relations between islands” (p. 1). This “set of relations” emphasize kinship and responsibility over remoteness. Saina’s inaugural voyage, then, undercuts colonial mapping of the region as a set of isolated islands in pursuit of connection: from the people of Guam to the people of Luta (which the Spanish named Rota). Moreover, the name of the sakman shows how the revitalization of Chamorro seafaring traditions rejuvenates the connection between contemporary Chamorros under colonial rule and their ancestors (or saina). This group’s work takes a precolonial set of knowledge, once outlawed by Spanish colonists to prevent Chamorros from escaping Guam and maintaining their connections to other Islander peoples, and transplants it to a contemporary setting, thus asserting the validity of Indigenous modes of understanding and interacting with the world. It counteracts, as Performance Studies scholar Diane Taylor (2003) has argued, “ the colonizing project throughout the Americas [that] consisted in discrediting autonomous ways of preserving and communicating historical understanding” (p. 34). This practice is not exclusive to America-proper. As Perez’s poetry shows us about the history of Guam, it also extends to unincorporated territories of The United States, where people belong to America without receiving full political participation, like being able to vote for President or having representation in Congress. 7 Less a conceptual framework than an active practice, decolonization champions Chamorro epistemologies as a restorative countermeasure to environmental ruin. In the context of Guam, this means alleviating the consequences of military presence and technology. Perez’s (2014) poetry gives us the example of the sea turtles, who “use natural light/ cues/ to navigate” until the military’s “construction lights/disorient” them (p. 42, lines 4–6, 7–8). As with the sea turtles, the US military often makes it difficult for Chamorros to locate themselves in relation to their home island and find their way home.
In “ginen tidelands,” Perez’s speaker elaborates on this destruction of the sea environment around Guam. He describes the Permanent loss– ~ coral weaves dead and living branches clusters algae mats and fronds across generations to buried coral bones— ~ to build an artificial reef with concrete debris and plastic pipes and call it “mitigation.” (Perez, 2014: 42–43, lines 19–32)
The consequences of this buildup are mitigated—at least, according to military strategists and personnel—because the ruined seascapes—the sediment, the “coral weaves,” as well as the “algae mats and / fronds”—are replaced by “concrete debris and plastic / pipes.” While favored by military personnel due to their sturdier compositions, these pipes pose issues to the human beings and animals Indigenous to the region. In addition, the substitution of natural elements with artificial materials only emphasizes the damage taking place. Coral reefs take at least a few thousand years to develop. Their devastation is thus not an easy consequence to reverse. The presence of these harsh materials is felt in the speaker’s mouth through the harsh “b,” “c,” and “p” sounds that permeate this passage. Just as the aforementioned consequences of empire are contained and obscured by the Chamorro body, the ruination of the coral reef is hidden from view by the vast seas surrounding the island.
The link between the water habitat and the Chamorros is a real, embedded thing: in “from aerial roots” in [saina], the speaker talks about the Chamorro cultural memory of learning that the reef around the island is composed of the bones of ancestors (Perez, 2010: 59, lines 1–3). True to the nature of cultural memory, this example defies any exact details of where or from whom the memory was transferred. This lack of specificity, however, hardly depletes its resonance with Chamorros; in fact, such cultural memory transmission helps initiate them into the culture. Sociologist Jeffrey Olick (1999) explains this process in his synopsis of Maurice Halbwachs’ foundational work on “collective memory” in stating that “it is only individuals who remember, even if they do much of this remembering together” (p. 335). In other words, the specifics of the memory are less important than the communal act of remembering that takes place. Such communal remembering brings them into the culture and, in the case of native Chamorros, connects them to the lands and waters surrounding the islands. Jan Assmann (2010b) explains how external symbols, like libraries, museums, and archives, serve as reminders of a cultural or collective memory (p. 111). But these external symbols can also exist in the natural world, as is the case with the coral reefs surrounding the island of Guam. Depleting the reef contributes to the erasure of the Chamorro people (their culture, their history, their claims to the territory), whose interests are secondary to the needs of the US military and international tourism industry. Guam’s waters and lands rely on decolonization, of the Chamorro people asserting their sovereignty (meaning, their right to self-rule and self-govern), and taking back ownership of their territory, a word that, as the speaker in “from liseniensan ga’lago” in [hacha] explains, has the same linguistic roots as “territoriu,” meaning “my heart” (Perez, 2008: 81, line 6). Elizabeth DeLoughrey and George B. Handley (2011) likewise argue that “the land and even the ocean become all the more crucial or recuperative sites of postcolonial historiography” (p. 8). Recuperating the lands and seas from colonial control is imperative in exercising Chamorro sovereignty. Recuperation is a later step in the long process of reconciliation, which comes with no concrete directions but has become more urgent in the twenty-first century as we face the imminent threat of worldwide environmental catastrophe initiated by climate change. Marginalized communities, like Chamorros on their own home island of Guam, are most likely to be affected by the effects of climate change over the rest of the century. 8
The ecology of Guam has already endured some of the irreversible damage that scientists predict across the planet. In addition to polluted lands and waters, the habitat of Guam has also suffered significant loss due to a predatory, invasive species. The introduction of the brown tree snake, which arrived on the island aboard a military cargo ship, has decimated the population of the Micronesian Kingfisher bird Indigenous to Guam, almost bringing it to the point of extinction. In “ginen the micronesian kingfisher [i sihek],” the speaker uses this near-extinction as a metaphor for the consequences of settler colonialism on the Chamorro people: invasion is a continuous chain of immeasurably destructive events in time— is the death [i sihek] origins— is a stillborn [i sihek] future—is the ending of all nests this choked thing. (Perez, 2014: 71, lines 17–26, italics in original)
The future, both for the kingfisher bird and for the Chamorro people and their environment, is increasingly threatened, as is evident by the reference here to it as “stillborn.” Like the bird, the island’s habitat and culture are threatened by the colonialism of outside forces; however, also like the bird, they are slowly being rejuvenated through the conscious decolonial efforts of Chamorro activists looking to reconcile their colonial past with their hopes for a decolonial—meaning, among other things, an environmentally just—future. The connection between the Chamorro people and the Micronesian Kingfisher is emphasized through the speaker’s reference to the bird by its Chamorro name throughout this passage (i sihek). The italicization that accompanies each mention of the bird in Chamorro further draws readers’ eyes to the text, emphasizing the Chamorro language over its English counterpart. Rather than marking an erasure of the island’s colonial history, this inclusion of the Chamorro language serves to validate Indigenous knowledge and modes of expression. However, despite this presentation of the Indigenous language, the colonial threat remains constantly present, as evidenced by the recurring “s” sound in this passage that brings to mind the hissing of the brown tree snake. Guam is not only under colonialist rule but more specifically under what Patrick Wolfe (2006) has described as a settler colonialist rule: the distinction being that settler colonialism, as Wolfe explains, does not rely solely on economic exploitation but absolute cultural and environmental devastation: it, as he puts it, “destroys to replace” (p. 388). In the context of Guam, settler colonialism destroys the Indigenous bird species, the kingfisher (albeit unintentionally), replacing it with an unchecked predacious snake; it destroys the ocean habitat, including the reefs, to replace it with concrete, metal, and plastic. And finally, as I will now discuss, settler colonialism destroys the Indigenous Chamorro body and replaces it with that of a US soldier.
The United States seems only willing to claim the bodies of Chamorros when they become soldiers in their military and die in service. The heavy toll on the Chamorro (and by geographical extension the entire Micronesian) population continues unabated because of the dominant narrative that Chamorros should be grateful to the United States for liberating them from Japanese control at the end of World War II. But as Perez’s (2014) speaker asks, “If we enlist as weapons mount to pay [our] debt of liberation,/ what are [our] bodies worth?” (p. 75, lines 1–2, italics in original). Currently, the US military controls about a third of the island’s land. More than just controlling this rather large fraction of the territory, the US military bars Indigenous people with no military credentials from entering, as Valerie Solar Woodward (2013) points out (p. 69). Thus, the answer (if there is one) to Perez’s rhetorical question is that Chamorro bodies are never, and will never be, worth enough. Chamorro liberation from Japan is commemorated every day on 21 July through Liberation Day, which has become the “most important secular holiday,” according to Chamorro scholar, Christine Taitano DeLisle (2016: 567). Perez seizes onto the public history of the island as a region that is indebted to the United States to explain the high rate of military enlistment among Chamorros.
In his address to the UN Political and Decolonization Committee, Perez (2010) explains that “young chamorros are / joining the u.s. military and dying in america’s wars at alarming rates. in 2005, four of the u.s. army’s top twelve recruitment producers were based on guam. in 2007, guam ranked no. 1 for recruiting success in the army national guard’s assessment of 54 states and territories” (pp. 114, 127, strikethrough in original). Found in [saina], Perez’s address is presented in footnotes separated by multiple pages (as evidenced by the disconnected page numbers in the previous parenthetical citation) and in crossed-out text. This presentation makes his speech difficult to follow, as the reader must often refer back to the previous footnote found many pages earlier, and slow their reading so they do not miss any of the meaning expressed in the strikethrough text. This passage simultaneously reenacts Chamorro erasure while challenging it; it mimics the attempted silencing of colonialism, seen through the strikethrough text, while forcing readers to slow down, thus ensuring that the motivations behind Chamorro decolonization (namely, the desire to be seen as more than military fodder by the United States) are better understood. This trend of enlistment has made Indigenous Chamorros the minority on their own island, furthering the parallel that Perez’s work forges between them and i sihek. Thus, the high rate of enlistment among Chamorros contributes to the difficulties of decolonization, as some Chamorros find it difficult to speak out against a military to which their own loved ones belong. In “ginen fatal impact statements” in [guma’], Perez (2014) presents community members’ comments to the Draft Environmental Impact Statement, henceforth abbreviated to DEIS. One Chamorro states, “I don’t think I’m allowed to say that I’m against the military buildup because both of my parents are for the build up (sic), and my dad is in the Air Force” (Perez, 2014: 27, lines 18–20). Even when members of the community disagree, they are hesitant to speak against the United States because they are unsure if they are even “allowed to” disagree. Their ambivalence reflects the ongoing damage of the dominant narrative of the island as being in perpetual servitude to the United States, the nation that liberated them at the end of World War II.
Perez also touches on the high rate of young Chamorros who die in service of the United States—again a nation that has colonized and polluted their land
While the debates over the military buildup continue, so do the number of Chamorro deaths in combat. In one of the more unsettling parts of [guma’], Perez includes the published obituaries of many young soldiers. The information provided in many of the obituaries indicates the name of the deceased, their home village or island, as well as their military affiliation and in what military operation they were killed. Below is an example on one such obituary:[U.S. Army Spc. John D. Flores, 21, of Barrigada, was killed when his unit came under attack by enemyfire in Iraq] (Perez, 2014: 36, lines 5–6)
Perez strikes through this text, leaving only the deceased’s name visible. This revision of these obituaries foregrounds the deceased as human individuals over their military status. As Memory Studies scholar Doron Taussig (2017) points out, “A narrative identity, as represented in an obituary, is a potential vehicle for sociality: It is an occasion for remembering, and perhaps reiterating or rethinking cultural norms” (p. 463). These individuals are first “social[ized],” or presented to the public, in a manner that correlates their lives with their military service. In contrast, in his revision of their respective obituaries, Perez presents these men and women in a new light that prompts readers to see the deceased beyond their colonial relationship to the United States. Such a decolonial rhetorical act renders them visible to challenge the settler colonialist system that acknowledges their bodies and identities only to the extent that they served in the US military. They are thus visible in a way that the living bodies suffering from the health inflictions Perez outlined in his address to the UN will only be after death. These sample obituaries therefore show that it is only as casualties of war that Chamorros and other Micronesian people can finally belong to the US body politic. Only in death, specifically in military service, is the Chamorro body incorporated. These obituaries, and the processes of remembering and national identity that buttress them, ask readers to forget who these individuals were prior to their military service and unfortunate deaths. To quote Memory Studies scholar Aleida Assmann, (2010a) succinct polemic, “In order to remember some things, other things must be forgotten” (p. 97). Perez, however, makes it impossible for us to forget the ongoing imperial power of the United States as well as its cost on the Indigenous people of the region. Moreover, his re-presentation (or representation) of these obituaries asserts that we cannot possibly forget in order for a decolonized future of the island to be made possible. At the end of this section, the speaker affirms the ongoing life of the people in the Chamorro language: “hu hongge / i lina’la’ tataotao / ta’lo amen,” which translates to “I believe in the centrality of life for the people” (Perez, 2014: 36, lines 22–24). That this statement is expressed in the Chamorro language is not happenstance: by doing so, Perez’s speaker is validating Chamorro forms of expression and, perhaps just as importantly, their ability to render their own truths autonomous from the influence of the US government. The recurring “h” sound at the beginning of this passage simulates the sound of wind/air, manglo’. The sounds that follow—“l” and “t,” respectively—require the tongue for execution. Perez’s speaker’s affirmation of life, then, is done in the sounds of wind and voice at the individual and community level.
The life of the people does not, and cannot, exist beyond the colonial history of the island. Colonialism implicates their environment, their bodies, as well as their imaginations. Even in the passage quoted above, the speaker concludes his affirmation of communal and cultural life of the tataotao with the word “amen,” a clear marker of Catholic influence. However, the narratives that Perez weaves throughout his from unincorporated territory collection are not stories of victimhood and hopelessness. Rather, they portray a people not only responding to their colonial and militouristic histories but assimilating elements of colonial rule into their own sense of individual and collective agencies. One such example of this integration of colonial elements is the Chamorro use of achiote. Indigenous to South and Central America, the achiote plant was introduced to the island by Spanish colonizers, taking from one region under their control and bringing it to another. Rather than destroying the environment like the aforementioned brown tree snake, the achiote plant has become integrated into Chamorro lifestyle, including as a key ingredient in meals like Chamorro rice (or red rice) and chalakiles, a chunky, chicken soup.
In addition to cooking, Perez (2008) describes how Chamorros have used achiote as a treatment for such diverse conditions as “skin problems, burns, venereal disease, and hypertension,” to “heartburn, fever, and sore throat” as well as “liver and blood disease, eye and ear infections, [and] digestive problems” (pp. 19, 20, and 23, italics in original). But rather than attributing the medicinal use of the achiote plant to the Spanish, Perez (2008) in “from achiote” in [hacha] rightfully characterizes it as an Indigenous practice transferred from the plant’s original users to the Chamorros in the Pacific: “the achiote has been traced back to the mayans, who used it as a food spice and dye, as body paint for war and rituals, and. . . for [its] medicinal qualities” (p. 17). In being used as “body paint for war and rituals,” the achiote plant renders the body hypervisible when colonial practices often look to control and contain Indigenous bodies before hiding them from view, in case they show the ill effects of colonialism. Valerie Solar Woodward (2013) writes, “The adaptation of the achiote plant becomes a metaphor for the connection between the far-ranging colonies of the Spanish” (p. 81). This alliance among colonized peoples serves to decolonize the presence and influence of the Spanish, which undermined the intellectual and cultural sovereignty of Indigenous cultures in the Americas and the Pacific alike. These Indigenous peoples, the Chamorro and the peoples of South America, have undercut Spanish influence in using the plant not for trade or profit but rather to heal the Indigenous bodies that the Spanish merely sought to control, exploit, discard, and then make invisible.
Despite the projections and the abuses on the Indigenous body by colonial forces, the Chamorro body is and remains an extension of the lands and waters surrounding the island. Just as the military abuses the Chamorro body and views it as an expendable resource, its abuses of the water are well documented. Mar-Vic Cagurangan (2017), a journalist for the Pacific Island Times, recently reported on the water pollution after a set of wargames conducted by the US military: “When the war games concluded, the military left behind tons of toxic waste—dumped into the ocean—including heavy metals, motor gasoline and chemicals that are harmful to humans and marine life.” This disregard for the natural environment for the sake of the military is far from a one-time occurrence. Cagurangan (2017) explains, “The practice of dumping toxic military waste into the waters has been ongoing for decades, making the U.S. armed forces notorious for being the world’s worst polluter.” These war games continue the “slow violence” of US settler colonialism in Guam. Chamorros are rendered “disposable casualties, with dire consequences for the projected casualties for future wars” (Nixon, 2011: 13). War becomes a spectacle, not a living historical phenomenon, and its consequences are deferred into the future in perpetuity. This constant deference of consequences into the future reduces the real-world impacts of settler colonialism into the abstract, making it more “projected” or hypothetical than already actualized and real. This sentiment is echoed by one of the speakers that Perez (2014) includes in [guma’] in response to the DEIS: “The lives of the native ocean inhabitants are more important than a parking lot for war ships” (p. 25, lines 8–9). As stated earlier, these “native ocean inhabitants” include the ancestors of Chamorros. The neighboring waters of the island contain the pasts and histories and, as a natural extension, the futures of the Chamorro people, and their ongoing degradation marks a complete disregard of the people’s sovereignty by the United States.
The need to address environmental issues is increasingly urgent at this time: more so after each successive warning about the dangers of global warming and the projection that coral reefs will cease to exist as early as the year 2100. The decolonial impulse of Guam is expressed in Perez’s books through its presentations of obituaries, its critiques of US military presence, its championing of groups like TASI, as well as its inclusion of public hearings wherein Chamorro residents speak out against a proposed buildup of US military, which has abated in recent years particularly because of this type of protest. Perez channels the tricksterism of Juan Malo to playfully define Guam, as discussed at the beginning of this article. In a more direct fashion, and speaking of the connection between the people and the environment that this article has emphasized in its analysis of decolonization, one Chamorro laments in response to the DEIS: “And if they do take the lands that/ they want, then what will the meaning of Guam be?” (Perez, 2014: 64, lines 15–16). This article has shown how integral the lands and waters are to the Chamorro, that the meaning of guaha (“to exist”) is living relationally with the lands and waters, as well as our shared histories and future. Using Perez’s from unincorporated territory books as my lens, I have illustrated how Chamorros have drawn on their Indigenous practices to address the environmental consequences of settler colonialism.
Decolonization efforts are nothing new in Guam. Dating back to grassroots groups of the 1970s like Para’ Pada Y Chamorros (“Stop slapping Chamorros”) and Chamoru Nation in the 1990s, the battle of Guam’s future continues to be contested between outsider, colonial forces and the Chamorro people (M. Perez, 2005: 177, 178). Michael Perez (2005) points out that “Chamorro resistance marks the colonial history of Guam” (p. 173). The decolonial pulse of the island, grounded in Chamorro cultural memory and practices, shows the ongoing link of Chamorro people to their lands and waters, their connections to one another, between the past to the present, and the present to the yet-to-be.
