University of Michigan students and Ann Arbor residents gathered in the Ford School of Public Policy Tuesday evening for “Decolonizing imagination: Narratives, memory and political possibility in the U.S. territories.” The panel hoped to spark conversations about the impact of the United States’ policy on its territories, and how those territories can reclaim cultural and political narratives.
The conversation was hosted in collaboration between the Center for Democracy & Civic Empowerment, Trotter Multicultural Center, Political Science Department, Department of English Language and Literature, Center for Social Solutions and the Latina/o Studies Program as part of the University’s Democracy Week programming.
The panel featured four speakers: Michael Lujan Bevacqua, Guam Museum curator and founder of the first CHamoru Studies Program at the University of Guam; Imani Daniel, executive director of the Virgin Islands Institute for Social Impact, Opulence, and Noetics and delegate of the sixth U.S. Virgin Islands constitutional convention; Victoria-Lola Leon Guerrero, director of publishing at the University of Guam Press; and Hadiya Sewer, co-founder of the St. John Heritage Collective.
Leon Guerrero opened the panel by introducing her work building a K-12 civics curriculum that centers CHamoru and Micronesian history and culture. Leon Guerrero said a key goal in directing publishing at the University of Guam Press is sharing stories children can see themselves in.
“Many of us, all of us growing up in Wahoo, did not have books that we were learning from that taught us about ourselves,” Leon Guerrero said. “So we started the effort of the press by really wanting to find out: What are the kinds of books people want? And, also, what are the obstacles preventing our creative community from publishing?”
Empowering youth has been another one of Leon Guerrero’s goals in uplifting cultural voices, alongside advocating for legislation to promote more local, cultural literature. Leon Guerrero said she hopes a new curriculum can increase cultural visibility for students.
“This really acknowledges that students have been invisible for so long — and they shouldn’t be,” Leon Guerrero said. “Not only should they be visible in their learning, they should feel like active participants. Not just in their learning, but also in their community, in their society”
Sewer continued the conversation by examining the colonial history of the U.S. Virgin Islands. Looking at prevailing narratives on the island, Sewer said conversations about political changes like pushing for statehood or independence are often pushed to the side, something she believes has been largely driven by U.S. control of the islands.
“In many of our prevailing narratives in the territory, this idea of independence — or even resolving our political status dilemma more broadly — gets positioned as something that’s beyond the boundaries of reason itself,” Sewer said.
Sewer compared the crafting practice of chaney to cultural rebuilding and said she feels creating something new with the fragments of a broken empire works to subvert colonial messaging.
“Chaney challenges the premise that fragmentation equals lack,” Sewer said. “It argues that the empire that believes firmly in its sovereignty and wholeness — while it colonizes and barrels foreign military expansion, technological singularity and planetary crisis — cannot see that it too is a shard creating multiple shards.”
The conversation then moved to Bevacqua, who discussed rematriation of artifacts to both Guam and the Mariana through the Guam Museum. Bevacqua said the museum is focused on the cultural preservation of both CHamoru history and the Chamoru people of today.
Bevacqua shared his experience of teaching the native CHamoru language to a generation historically deprived of the opportunity to practice it.
“There was a recognition for me that I might give the language to my children, but if they go out into the world and there’s no one else speaking their age, or if the society that they enter continues to devalue the language, then it doesn’t matter if I gave them a gift — they will throw it away,” Bevacqua said.
Finally, Daniel told the audience her grandmother was considered stateless at birth. Daniel said she feels her grandmother’s citizenship was — and still is — representative of many islanders’ experiences.
“It reflected its political logic,” Daniel said. “The governments negotiating the future of the islands treated the people living there as inhabitants of a transferred territory, but not as people whose consent established legitimate authority within the lands.”
Serving as a delegate to the Sixth Constitutional Convention of the U.S. Virgin Islands, Daniel said she believes regaining political power is an important aspect of reclaiming the agency of the islands.
“When we begin every political discussion with ‘What will Congress allow,’ we’re not merely assessing legal risk like we are at the constitutional convention, but we’re allowing the anticipated response of the dominant power to structure the field of thought before our people even decide what we want,” Daniel said.
In an interview with The Michigan Daily after the event, Public Health student Sarah McNally said she appreciated the spotlight the event placed on Indigenous island communities.
“This discussion in decolonial work introduces what seems to be a novel concept in traditional Western academia, in particular — that there is inherent value in Indigenous knowledge,” McNally said. “There always has been. We’ve always had our own systems of governance, our own systems to take care of our communities.”
Daily News Editor Sarah Palushi can be reached at sarpal@umich.edu.
