From Unincorporated Pacific Territory

Welcome to the Blue Humanities Podcast of the Humanities Institute at Arizona State University. My name is Jonathan Bait and I'm the foundation professor of Environmental Humanities here at Arizona State. The Blue Humanities, exploring how the disciplines of the humanities, literary and cultural studies, history, philosophy, religious studies can help us to address the great environmental crises of our time. Blue Humanities is a thriving but new subfield of environmental humanities in which we explore the oceans, the oceans which occupy 70% of the surface of the earth and which are so crucial to the sustainability of life on earth. In these podcasts I talk to a variety of scholars who have done innovative work in the broad field of humanistic ocean studies, blue humanities. Welcome back to the Blue Humanities Podcast. In this episode we're turning our ears to the Pacific Ocean and it's a great pleasure for me to be talking to Craig Santos Perez who is indigenous to the Pacific. He's a poet, a critic and scholar, an environmentalist and an activist and I think rather than me trying to summarize why his place is so important to him, I'm going to allow Craig to do that himself. So Craig, you're from the island of Guam, not all our listeners will know the story of that island. So just begin by telling us a little bit about your place and the importance of that place for you as you are growing up and becoming a writer. Well, half a day to all your listeners. Thank you for having me. I'm honored to be on the podcast today. Yes, I grew up on the island of Guam which is a small island in the western Pacific and it's a tropical island of course so I spend lots of time at the beach in the ocean and hiking through the jungle or the rainforest and the indigenous people of my homeland are called Chamorro and we've been in a Guam and islands in our archipelago called the Mariana's Archipelago for thousands of years. Guam was colonized by Spain in the 16th century and then became a US colony in the 19th century and we still are a territory of the United States today. One of the impacts of that history is that the United States uses a Guam as an important strategic military base in the Asia Pacific region. So about 30% of our island is occupied by military bases and installations. And so that kind of created a juxtaposition growing up on Guam between this beautiful tropical island and a place that is heavily militarized and as a result of that militarization highly contaminated as well. Yeah, so I've been for hundreds of years. It's really been a pressure point in the history of imperialism as you say first with the Spanish then there was of course a Japanese occupancy during the Second World War a terrible time and now it's effectively a US colony. What we're most again to be talking about is a series of poems and writings of yours called From Unincorporated Territory and just before we get into the nitty-gritty of that, you just explained to our listeners the meaning of this phrase unincorporated territory. Yes, so this phrase is a political phrase and throughout US history as the nation acquire new territories it would of course incorporate these territories into states and you know now the United States is comprised of 50 states. However, Guam as a territory has never been incorporated as a state hence the unincorporated territory of political designation. Guam is also an organized unincorporated territory which means that Guam does have an organic act has a organized government legislative and executive branches. Guam residents are also US citizens and so the full kind of political the nomenclature is an organized unincorporated territory again because we are not incorporated as a state. So your US citizens but not able to vote for say the US president? Yes, so it is still a very disempowering political situation, a colonial situation as you mentioned and where we have certain rights of citizenship but not the rights that all citizens have especially those who live in the states. Yeah, now you're a poet so you're very interested in language and in your work we do get words of the Chamorro language but I understand that over the years there's almost been an attempt to suppress that indigenous language as part of a desire to sort of Americanize the communities to get rid of the sense of distinctive indigenous identity would that be right? Yes, that's correct. During the Spanish era of course there was an effort to Hispanicize and Catholicize the population. During that time the Spanish left the Chamorro language intact and it became the language of the church and of family gatherings. However, during the US occupation there were efforts especially by the American colonial school system to suppress the Chamorro language and to teach the people English and so our school system, government system, the media were predominantly in the English language and even my grandparents and my parents' generation when they went to school they were actually punished for speaking our native language as again a way to discipline our native tongues out of our bodies. Yeah, yeah. So would you say that to reclaim at least parts of that language was one of the things that led you to write this sequence of poetry books? In some ways it was actually the opposite where I came to poetry I was mostly writing in English and I wanted to tell the story of my homeland and my people and it was through poetry that for me it was a space where I could practice a language reclamation even if it was only simple words, nouns or simple phrases and poetry became that space of language revitalization for me because I wasn't really ever taught our language how to read or write it in the school system growing up. Yeah, it's fascinating that sort of process of mingling languages. I think has led to some of the great poetry in modern times. I've got a particular interesting anglophone Caribbean poetry when looks at a writer like Derek Walcott where he came from Santa Lucia so there was an indigenous language but French was also very important there in English and it really leads to a wonderful kind of revitalization of poetic language to have that sort of creolization that mixture of languages. Let's just talk about this sequence of volumes. I think the first one, "Hascha" I don't if I'm pronouncing that correctly published back in 2008 and as you say that's that really introduced your readers to the history of Guam and it was particularly interesting for me reading about the Spanish period and for example this the murder of the Padre San Vittores seems to be a very important moment. Can you perhaps talk a little about that? Yes, so father San Vittores as he's also known was kind of the main missionary to Guam and really launched the kind of Catholic missionization of the island and it was really the conduit towards anish military conquest and eventually kind of the absorption of Guam into the Spanish empire and he was able to collaborate with other Chimoral chiefs at the time but of course there were other chiefs and different parts of the island which did not agree with this new religion being introduced and so he was killed by a Chimoral chiefs and of course then this led to a Spanish retaliation and the eventual kind of conquest of kind of Chimoral governance of the island and so history haunts us in the present even though that happened hundreds of years ago and the island it is still very Catholic and kind of the ghost of San Vittores which is often bronze in statues and other kinds of memorials on island it's still strong presence and just a reminder to us of that that violent history and kind of a continuation of other an extension of other kinds of colonialism that we have experienced. Yeah now that makes sense one of the things we're fascinated by in these Blue Humanities podcast is this sense of the the relationship between land and sea and obviously on a small island that's particularly prominent I noticed that a lot of the poems in this first volume of yours come under the title of Tide lands and I guess the tide is particularly important in an island do you want to explain a little bit why Tide lands was one of your themes. Yes it was interesting that you you mentioned your studies in Caribbean literature because that was definitely inspired by kind of the idea of the tidal optics in Caribbean thought and so I wanted to try to explore that idea you know but in a pacific and Chimoral context and so I started working on that series of poems in tidal Tide lands thinking about that space between the water and the land and the space of the shoreline as well. And to think about that, just a fluidity of movement as these kind of different ecologies cross and mingle. And so in those poems as well, I also explored the theme of language revitalization. So I'm thinking of tides of language and specifically English and tomorrow language. How they are interreaving at least in my own poetry. There's a lot of space in those poems as well. So I'm also thinking about tides between the blank space of the page and the text. And of course, I'm thinking about the tides between a silence and voice or silence and speech. So just trying to bring all those themes together that this idea of the tiledic or the tides really brought up for me and trying to kind of embody that in the visual elements of the page. Yeah, now that completely makes sense. Going on to the next volume, the scene, and again, picking up on one of your repeated themes, the sense of each of these fragmentary poems being sort of part of some larger vision. We have a number of poems there from all with ocean views. And I'm guessing this is to do with tourism and its effect on the economy, but I guess also the ecology. Once you start having mass tourism, you begin to get environmental problems. Yes, indeed. The two major economic industries on Guam is the military and tourism as the case in other places in the Pacific like Hawaii. And as you mentioned as well, there's a lot of environmental damage caused by the tourist industry, which creates a lot of waste. And of course, pollutes the oceans and the land. And unfortunately, on Guam, even the construction of the hotel industry, for example, resulted in the unearthing of many ancestral remains. And so even our ancestors have been disturbed by tourism development. And so growing up in that context surrounded by these hotels and the hundreds of thousands of tourists that visit every year, was very conscious of the impacts of tourism. Just beyond the environmental aspect. Of course, I was also thinking about representation where the tourist industry represents our island and of course, islands across the world as these tropical paradises where tourists can fulfill whatever desires they might have about these exotic places. And so for me, I wanted to kind of critique and subvert that narrative and to give an actual look at the reality of the tourism industry beyond the kind of picture postcard. Yeah. And you mentioned tropical paradises. The moment that metaphor of the paradise is used, one sort of thinks of the long tradition in Western mythology, literature, and art of the idea of a paradise that is lost of a garden of Eden from which we've been expelled. And that idea of the fall of humankind, which comes from the arrival of a serpent in paradise, the devil in the form of a snake. But one of the most extraordinary things, in a way, most tragic things about the recent history of Guam, quite apart from the oppression of Indigenous traditions, is that in a very literal sense, a snake entered paradise as a result of which huge costs to the ecology in Lukow, the next of your volumes, displays island of no bird song. And you write about the extraordinary story of the decline, I think pretty well, to extinction of the Micronesian King Fischer. Tell us about that story. Yes, well first thank you for making that connection with the kind of long history of especially European ideals of a paradise and and utopia. As of course, the Pacific was an important site in the European imaginary to articulate those kind of romanticized, exoticized ideas of our islands as paradise or escape from industrial civilization and so on. Yeah, and that makes a powerful connection to the history of invasive species anglum, you're specifically referring to the introduction of the brown tree snakes, which are said to have been stole ways on US military ships after World War II. They arrived to Guam, had no natural predators because Guam had been a snake-free island, and they quickly colonized the entire ecology. And one of the impacts, as you mentioned, the endangerment and extinction of most of the native birds of Guam. And so fortunately, one of those birds of Micronesian King Fischer, as well as others, the last remaining of these species of birds were gathered from the island by zookeepers taken to conservation sites and zoos around the world to try to be protected from the snakes, but also to be put into programs of captive breeding. And this is a big environmental issue back in Guam and across the Pacific to not only try to keep these birds in existence, but also to find ways to mitigate the presence of the brown tree snakes and other invasive species. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, just to give listeners a little bit of a kind of flavor of this ecological question, I'd just like to read a little passage from Luke Hauer, where it's one of these moments where between poems you just put in a little bit of prose and a bit of information. One of the things I find so wonderful about your books, one moment you're sort of taken into a kind of sublime realm of mysterious language, a very beautiful poetry. And then the next you're sort of brought bang down to earth with with hard facts in prose. Ritidian is an ancient Chamorro village in northern Guam. The US first classified Ritidian as a restricted military site, and then it became a wildlife preserve covering 371 acres of coral reefs and 832 acres of terrestrial habitats. Ritidian is home to the endangered Mariana's fruit bat, the Mariana Crow, Hawksville and Green Sea turtles, and many archaeological remains, including Latestones, water wells, cave drawings, and a fishing camp. Today, the US military plans to turn Ritidian into a live firing range complex as part of the Pacific Pivot military buildup. Ritidian comes from the Chamorro word "litechian", which translates as "to stir" or "a stirring place" referring to the waters of the coast. There in just those few sentences, a sense of this extraordinary rich but fragile ecology, the equally rich but fragile indigenous cultural traditions, those cave drawings, and the sense of how the island is being used today by the military. It's very powerful. Well, thank you for reading and commenting on that passage. You know, throughout my work, as you've noticed, I tried to juxtapose kind of lyricism with kind of narrative prose or expository writing. And again, in the effort to kind of on-earth some of that hidden history and to of course expose what's some called environmental or ecological imperialism. And militarism on Guam is a huge issue. There are always, whenever there's a military project or a new buildup where kind of the desires of the military super scene, kind of the health of the environment or even just the desires of the community to protect our lands and waters. And so in addition to having to deal with invasive species or also dealing with kind of the ongoing militarization of our island and the loss of of so many species as well. Yeah, and of course artificial things also get imported spam. I'm telling you about spam. I was quite surprised to find spam being a major part of your work. So similar to brown trees next spam arrived to our island after World War II as this kind of technological meat product that was able to of course travel long distances as it was canned and preserved and was was really instrumental in in feeding my people after after the devastation of the war had destroyed you know many of our trees and left a lot of people homeless and hungry. And so over the generations spam became a regular part of our diet. And fortunately even though it is very delicious it is very unhealthy as well and cause health problems in my people including obesity and heart disease and so on. And it's kind of emblematic as well of the fact that we import about 90% of our food and many of these foods come from the US or Asia and these are often heavily processed foods so really unhealthy and contrasted to traditional Pacific diets which were pretty healthy and but unfortunately with the transition to imported colonial foods has caused a lot of healthy issues. And so that's again a topic I write about partly because it's just a part of the landscape of my childhood growing up, part of what we ate regularly. And something that, again, I want to kind of expose and critique in terms of its colonial dimensions. Yeah. When I was reading about the Organic Act for the Political Organization of the of the territory, I thought that word organic is quite ironic because if we think of the word organic, we think the most healthy food is it's organic, it's local, it's not processed and low-embalmed. What could be less organic than spam? So we knew a new organic act that focuses on organic agriculture and so on. Your 2020 volume of poetry, Habitat Threshold, which I particularly admire, is not part of the sequence from unincorporated territory. I'm guessing because you decided that to take a wider view across the Pacific, Habitat Threshold, it very much a volume of what we would now call eco-peritory of environmental consciousness. A really great example of it. But in some sense, it stands a little bit apart from the other sequence because of the kind of range of material. And just for example, we now talk about how we're in the period of the sixth mass extinction as a result of the Anthropocene and the result of humankind. Another great period of extinction of species across the planet. And you write about that, you have a poem about it, rather brilliantly, I think you demonstrate the idea of extinction by the title of the poem, leaving out the vows and then putting a big blank space before the words come across. Would you like to talk a little bit about how am I right? The Habitat Threshold is a little bit of a broadening of your horizon? Yes, indeed. So all the unincorporated series books are very much focused on Guam and my need of culture. But I also write poems about many other different topics, including the environment that goes beyond Guam. And when I was writing that book, I was living in Hawaii, so I was writing a lot about some of the environmental issues in Hawaii. And I was also involved in kind of environmental and climate justice movements across the Pacific. And so writing poems that were about Hawaii, the Pacific, and then making connections as well to some global environmental issues. Because to me, that's so much of kind of cultivating a eco-consciousness is seeing the interconnections between the local and the global. And so I had all these individual poems about these topics, broadly what what some call eco poetry. And after writing these poems for many years, I realized I had enough for a collection. And so I wanted to, yeah, just step out of my comfort zone and put together a standalone book that brought together all these poems that I was writing about environmental justice, climate change, human animal relations, and of course poems about food as well. And then also thinking about extinction. Yeah, no, it's a superb collection. Congratulations on it. But most recently you've returned to the unincorporated territory with a volume that takes its title from the Chamorro word for medicine. And it's a sense of I suppose a search for healing and an answering to ancestral spirits. Amot, Amot, how do we pronounce it? Tell us a bit about the latest volume. Yeah, so it's called from unincorporated territory Amit, which as you say means medicine and most commonly refers to medicinal herbs that are traditional healers would use as kind of an indigenous medicine. And so I was also thinking about that, of course metaphorically, thinking about what things heal us from all the traumas of colonialism, missionization, tourism, militarism, and environmental injustice. And in the writing of that book, sadly my grandparents passed away as well as my godfather. And I had written about their lives in previous books. I wanted to also write allergies for them in this book. And just to honor their memory and legacy and their own lives. And beyond that, just think about various aspects of our culture that continue to heal us, to bring us together, and to make us stronger as a people. I would certainly love to, and I'm sure our listeners would love to hear you read one of your power from this collection. I don't know if you've got a copy to hand, but if not we could take a brief pause while you get one. But would you be willing to read a short poem for us? Yes, I'm happy to. Let me grab a cup of y'all on with it. You're listening to the Blue Humanities podcast of the Humanities Institute at Arizona State University. And in this episode, I'm in compensation with Craig Santos-Paris, poet, critic, environmentalist, activist from the island of Guam. And Craig very kindly is going to read one of his poems for us. Yes, thank you. I think I'll share the final poem in the book is called "Our Specific Up." And of course, it's kind of a statement about Pacific poetry or art poetics. And it emerged from a trip back to Guam I made in 2010. I was working with the Guam Humanities Council. And they were doing a project on civic engagement through the arts. And so, I basically would visit the public high schools, the community college, and the University of Guam, as well as I had several public events. And at these events, I would read my poetry and then kind of lead discussion amongst the audience on various topics, including a militarism and colonialism. And part of this project was to think about how the humanities can play a role in facilitating these difficult conversations. And in one of the readings that I had at one of the high schools, I had very kind of profound interaction with one of the students. And so that was the trigger for this book. It's titled "Our Specific Up." I return home for the first time after 15 years away and visit an English class at Guam's public high schools. As I read aloud from my new book, I noticed a student crying. "What's wrong?" I asked. She says, "I've never seen our culture in a book before. I just thought we weren't worthy of literature." How many young islanders have dived into the depths of a book only to find bleach, coral, and emptiness? We were taught that missionaries were the first readers in the Pacific because they could decipher the strange signs of the Bible. We were taught that missionaries were the first authors because they possessed the authority of written words. Today, studies show that islander students read and write below grade level. It's natural experts claim your ancestors were an illiterate, oral people. Do not believe their claims. Our ancestors deciphered signs in nature, interpreted star formations and sun positions, cloud and wind patterns, wave currents, and ocean effervescence. That's why Master Navigator Papa Mao once said, "If you can read the ocean, you will never be lost." Now let me tell you about Pacific written traditions. How our ancestors tattooed their skin with defiant scripts of intricately-inked genealogies. How they carved epics into hard wood with sharpened points, their hands, and the pressure and responsibility of memory. How they stenciled petroglyphic lyrics on cave walls with clay, fire, and smoke. So the next time someone tells you our people were illiterate, teach them about our visual literacies, our ability to read the intertextual sacredness of all things, and always remember, if we can write the ocean, we will never be silenced. Oh, that's super. Honestly, I couldn't imagine a better poem for the Blue Humanities bodhisattva. Thank you for reading that so beautifully, Craig. I like that phrase, the Master Navigator. I think there's a sense in which island people are, Master Navigators, from whom we can all learn. Lady, that figure of navigation is in the title of your literary critical book, Navigating Chimoru Poetry, where you talk about some of your fellow poets from Guam, and also sort of use that as developing a kind of theory of poetry as a form of navigation, of way-marking. Do you want to just tell us a little bit about that critical book and your hopes that it could provide a fresh sort of critical vocabulary for readers and students? Yes, so that book grew out of my dissertation, where you see my PhD in ethnic studies from the University of California Berkeley. And it was a research project looking into the history of Chimoru literature, and there's never been a book-length academic study of my people's literature, and so was an important project for me not only academically, but culturally. And I wanted to kind of highlight the rich history and legacy of Chimoru literature, and especially Chimoru poetry. And as I was reading Chimoru poetry, I've of course encountered metaphor of navigation and Of course, the symbol of the canoe and both navigation and the canoe are major themes and tropes across Pacific literature. And so I wanted to kind of honor that as well and to think about navigation as not only a practice of kind of way finding actual ecological space, but to think about it as a form of reading, a kind of interpretive practice, a way of, of course, navigating, you know, signs. And so to me, this made sense theorize as a form of a Pacific literary methodology. And so that's kind of where that title comes from. And again, the theme of navigation, the image and symbol of the canoe is kind of saturated throughout my work. And for me, it's even gets to where I think about just living my life as trying to navigate experience as well. Yeah, absolutely. And the previous episode of the podcast, we had the Maritime Writer Richard J King. And one of his themes was how we learn to sail. He's interested in, particularly in sailing alone, actually, can be a metaphor for how we should live our lives upon the canoe metaphor. I think it's so powerful for that. Just thinking a little more about the American Empire, the Anderson Air Force Base on Guam is one of the two principal American bases for long-range bombing missions, essentially, that in the Pacific. The other one is in the Indian Ocean or the Island of Diego Garcia. And I wonder whether you've had any contact with the Chagos people and a familiar with their story, which has interesting, troubling sort of parallels with all the differences from that of Guam. Yes, I am familiar with that place in the history. I don't have any personal connections to the people who were from there. But yeah, there's definitely a lot of connection, especially in terms of militarization and dispossession of land. And I've also been in contact with folks, writers, and activists from Puerto Rico. The Island of Viekas has a similar history. And of course, I lived in Hawaii for 12 years. And so I have connections there with the Hawaiian people who have similar struggles with militarization. And I've recently been connecting with folks in places like Okinawa, South Korea, and the Philippines, which have also long histories of US militarization and active bases in their lands and waters. So there's been a very profound demilitarization movement that I've been a part of across Asia, the Pacific, Indian Ocean, and of course, the Caribbean. So it's been great to see over the past 10 years or so folks from all these places making these, you know, what we call archipelagic connections, global connections against empire, against militarism. And I always feel that that solidarity makes us stronger when we can see some of the sea, our shared histories and shared struggles. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, the chag -- just for the benefit of listeners who are to other chagos cases, in many ways, the most tragic of all. This is an archipelago in the Indian Ocean. And when the island of Mauritius became independent from the British Empire, the chagos islands didn't achieve independence. And instead, the British leased the largest island in the archipelago Diego Garcia to give United States for their military base, and forcibly expelled from the entire archipelago all of the indigenous people of the islands. This has been agreed by international courts to have been an illegal act, but the British are still not allowing the people back. And in a way, one of the most extraordinary things is that the device that was used by the British and American, quite recent years to prevent the people going back, was that they declared an area of a quarter of a million square miles of ocean around the islands to be a restricted no-take marine area, a marine protected area. So if the people were to go back, they would have no livelihood because they weren't allowed to fish. So something that was done in the name of environmentalism, the great chagos bank is the world's largest coral at all. It sounds fantastic to have a marine protected area where nobody can fish there. It protects the coral, the turtles, the fish, everything. But that was actually done as a device to stop the people coming back. And I think it does remind us that sometimes environmental protection and the rights of people can be at odds with each other. One sort of sees this as both with things like preservation of big game in Africa and India, the sense of the rights of the natural world and the rights of communities that for generations have lived with the natural world, have hunted, but have done so in a sustainable way that these things can be at odds. And I just wonder if there's any sort of sense of that in Guam that as I say, sort of environmentalism and the needs of communities being somehow at odds with each other. It's a difficult question, isn't it? Yes, very difficult. And thank you for sharing more of that history. I've actually written about this issue in terms of ocean conservation and territorialism in the op-ed that I titled a blue washing, the colonization and militarization of the Pacific. And at the time, there was a rush to establish these marine protected areas in the US context there, they're also called marine monuments or marine sanctuaries. And they were not only a form to kind of terrorize that space for usually for military activities, but also, as you say, to keep people out of these marine spaces, which often would impact the livelihood of fishermen or various fisheries throughout the Pacific. And they would also often be used for tourism purposes and also as kind of eco-luxury tourism. And so, anyways, I've written about this issue and it is prevalent on Guam as well as there are marine monuments established around Guam and kind of our northern islands. They're often, like I said, ways to dispossess the people from these oceanic spaces or use conservation as a way to bluewash other activities that may be happening in these waters. And my op-ed and a few responses to them were actually just published in the latest issue of the contemporary Pacific, which is kind of the flagship journal of Pacific Studies. And a lot of the debates around these MPAs or national monuments are relating to deep-sea mining, which is a major concern in the Pacific. And a lot of activists are keeping a close eye on what's happening in these monuments and trying to critique kind of the bluewashing that happens. Conservation is kind of used to hide these other crimes. And you can see that also. You made the connection to kind of the big game hunting of different forms of what some scholars call fortress conservation. And the US context, we could think of also the history of national parks as well as a dispossession of Native American people and kind of a great conservation idea, but obviously has kind of colonial dimensions as well. Yeah, no, it's a very, very important theme in a future episode of the Blue Humanities podcast. We're going to be looking at deep-sea mining, which inevitably as trying to decarbonize the minerals, the cobalt, the lithium that at the moment have mostly taken from land sooner or later, well, already people are beginning to depotion for that. Great. Thank you so much for talking to us here on Arizona State University's Humanities Institute, Blue Humanities podcast. We've arranged widely. I've learnt so much about the culture's traditions of Guam. I've relished reading your poetry and hearing you read it. And then entering into that discussion about some of the crucial political issues that are raised. So, thank you for joining us. And in the next episode, we're going to take a deep dive back into a kind of mythological history. I'm going to be speaking to Geoffrey J. Cohen and Julian Yates, the author of a book called "Nower's Archive." That's archived about ARK, IVE, of course. A book about how throughout history, especially in the West, the image of Noah and his arc as a refuge, as the world is flooded due to climate change, has been a very, very powerful figure. So, please join me again for that. But now, thank you so much for listening. And thank you, Craig Santos-Paretz. Thank you so much for having me.