Archipelagic rhetoric: remapping the Marianas and challenging militarization from “A Stirring Place”

ABSTRACT

Engaging critical rhetorical fieldwork in the Mariana Islands archipelago, this article destabilizes colonial naming projects and US federal control that dispossess island places from Indigenous peoples. On Euro-American and military maps, archipelagoes are depicted as distant, tiny, empty, or merely (is)lands for US geostrategic control. I argue for a remapping of the Marianas as expansive, oceanic sites of resistance to colonial cartographic violence and US militarization. Fieldwork in the Marianas demonstrates how Indigenous epistemologies function as archipelagic rhetoric enacted through a Chamoru sense of place. I examine these fluid relational connections to place and their implications for decolonization.

KEYWORDS:

• archipelagic rhetoric
• colonialism
• Indigenous
• place
• remapping

Acknowledgements

Saina Ma’åse para i mamaila na linahyan siha ni’ para u prutehi yan difende mo‘na i hanom yan i tano’ Chamoru siha, ya i linahyan ni’ manannok yan mangahulo’ kontra i machule’-ña Litekyan. Thank you to those who will continue to protect and defend Chamoru waters and lands in the future, and to those who have come out and stood up against the taking of Litekyan. My gratitude to Independent Guåhan and Prutehi Litekyan: Save Ritidian members for their assistance with this project, and to Michael Lujan Bevacqua, E. Cram, Ashley Noel Mack, Logan Rae Gomez, and Myles Mason for their critical reading as this essay developed. I sincerely thank Robert DeChaine, Greg Dickinson, and the two anonymous reviewers for their insightful comments and citations to improve this essay.

Notes on contributor

Tiara R. Na’puti is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication at the University of Colorado Boulder. Correspondence to: Tiara Na’puti, Hellems 96, 270 UCB Boulder, CO 80309-0270.

ORCID

Tiara R. Na’puti http://orcid.org/0000-0002-7984-8308

Notes

1 Following other Chamoru and Pacific Studies scholars, I use alternative spellings to avoid Spanish and US colonial naming and terminology.

2 Katrina-Ann R, Kapāʻanaokalāokeola Nākoa Oliveira, Ancestral Places: Understanding Kanaka Geographies (Corvallis: Oregon State University Press, 2014), 78.

3 Ibid., 78.

4 Ibid.

5 Mishuana Goeman, “(Re)Mapping Indigenous Presence on the Land in Native Women’s Literature,” American Quarterly 60, no. 2 (2008): 295–302.

6 Landscape: Casey R. Schmitt, “Contours of the Land: Place-as-Rhetoric and Native American Effigy Mounds,” Western Journal of Communication 79, no. 3 (2015): 307–326; Joshua Ewalt, “A Colonialist Celebration of National <Heritage>: Verbal, Visual, and Landscape Ideographs at Homestead National Monument of America,” Western Journal of Communication 75, no. 4 (2011): 367–385; Memorials & Museums: Greg Dickinson, Carole Blair, and Brian Ott, Places of Public Memory: The Rhetoric of Museums and Memorials (Tuscaloosa, AL: University of Alabama Press, 2010); Suburbia: Robert J. Topinka, “Resisting the Fixity of Suburban Space: The Walker as Rhetorician,” Rhetoric Society Quarterly 42, no. 1 (2012): 65–84.

7 Renee Pualani Louis and Moana Kahele, Kanaka Hawai’i Cartography: Hula, Navigation, and Oratory (Corvallis: Oregon State University Press, 2017).

8 Roberta Chevrette and Aaron Hess, “Unearthing the Native Past: Citizen Archaeology and Modern (Non)Belonging at the Pueblo Grande Museum,” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 12, no. 2 (2015): 139–158; Danielle Endres, “The Rhetoric of Nuclear Colonialism: Rhetorical Exclusion of American Indian Arguments in the Yucca Mountain Nuclear Waste Siting Decision,” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 6, no. 1 (2009): 39–60.

9 Renee Paualani Louis, Jay T. Johnson, and Albertus Hadi Pramono, “Introduction: Indigenous Cartographies and Counter-Mapping,” in “Indigenous Cartographies and Counter-Mapping,” ed. Renee Paualani Louis, Jay T. Johnson, and Albertus Hadi Pramono, Cartographica 47, no. 2 (2012): 77–79.

10 Vicente M. Diaz, “No Island Is an Island,” in Native Studies Keywords, ed. Stephanie Nohelani Teves, Andrea Smith, and Michelle H. Raheja (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2015), 90–108.

11 David Hanlon, Making Micronesia: A Political Biography of Tosiwo Nakayama (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2014).

12 David Hanlon, “The ‘Sea of Little Lands’: Examining Micronesia’s Place in ‘Our Sea of Islands,’” The Contemporary Pacific 21, no. 1 (2009): 93–103.

13 Ibid., 100.

14 Ferdinand Magellan disparagingly named the islands Islas de los Ladrones (Islands of Thieves). Scott Russell, “Gani Revisited: A Historical Overview of the Mariana Archipelago’s Northern Islands,” Pacific Studies 21, no. 4 (December 1998): 83–105.

15 Danko Taboroši, Environments of Guam (Honolulu: Bess Press, 2013), 140.

16 Gåni refers to the islands north of Saipan within the archipelago. Russell, “Gani Revisited,” 89.

17 Ocean environments remain relatively unknown, warning against resource development activities, see: Julie Hunter, Pradeep Singh, and Julian Aguon, “Broadening Common Heritage: Addressing Gaps in the Deep Sea Mining Regulatory Regime,” Harvard Environmental Law Review 42, no. 1 (April 2018), http://harvardelr.com/2018/04/16/broadening-common-heritage/ (accessed October 20, 2018).

18 Christine Taitano DeLisle, “Destination Chamorro Culture: Notes on Realignment, Rebranding, and Post-9/11 Militourism in Guam,” American Quarterly 68, no. 3 (September 2016): 563–72, https://doi.org/10.1353/aq.2016.0052.

19 Ronald Walter Greene and Kevin Douglas Kuswa, “‘From the Arab Spring to Athens, From Occupy Wall Street to Moscow’: Regional Accents and the Rhetorical Cartography of Power,” Rhetoric Society Quarterly 42, no. 3 (2012): 271–88, https://doi.org/10.1080/02773945.2012.682846; Timothy Barney, “‘Gulag’—Slavery, Inc.’: The Power of Place and the Rhetorical Life of a Cold War Map,” Rhetoric & Public Affairs 16, no. 2 (2013): 317–54; Heather Ashley Hayes, Violent Subjects and Rhetorical Cartography in the Age of the Terror Wars (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016).

20 Doreen Massey, Space, Place, and Gender (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994), 7.

21 Raka Shome, “Space Matters: The Power and Practice of Space,” Communication Theory 13, no. 1 (2003): 39–56.

22 Phaedra C. Pezzullo and Catalina M. de Onís, “Rethinking Rhetorical Field Methods on a Precarious Planet,” in Advances in Methods and Statistics, ed. Tamara D. Afifi, Special issue, Communication Monographs 85, no. 1 (2018): 103–122; Also: Danielle Endres and Samantha Senda-Cook, “Location Matters: The Rhetoric of Place in Protest,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 97, no. 3 (2011): 257–282.

23 Armond R. Towns, “Rebels of the Underground: Media, Orality, and the Routes of Black Emancipation,” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 13, no. 2 (2016): 184–97, https://doi.org/10.1080/14791420.2015.1119292.

24 Charles E. Morris III, “My Old Kentucky Homo: Abraham Lincoln, Larry Kramer, and the Politics of Queer Memory,” in Queering Public Address: Sexualities in American Historical Discourse, ed. Charles E. Morris III (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2007), 93–120.

25 See: Mei-Po Kwan, “Feminist Visualization: Re-Envisioning GIS as a Method in Feminist Geographic Research,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 92, no. 4 (2002): 645–661; Joe Bryan and Denis Wood, Weaponizing Maps: Indigenous Peoples and Counterinsurgency in the Americas (New York: Guilford Press, 2015); Traci Brynne Voyles, Wastelanding: Legacies of Uranium Mining in Navajo Country (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015).

26 Nancy Peluso, “Whose Woods are these? Counter-Mapping Forest Territories in Kalimantan, Indonesia,” Antipode 27, no. 4 (1995): 383–406; Joel Wainwright and Joe Bryan, “Cartography, Territory, Property: Postcolonial Reflections on Indigenous Counter-Mapping in Nicaragua and Belize,” in Indigenous Cartographies, ed. Bjørn Sletto, special issue, Cultural Geographies 16, no. 2 (2009): 153–178.

27 Karen Culcasi, “Mapping the Middle East from Within: (Counter-)Cartographies of an Imperialist Construction,” Antipode 44, no. 4 (2012): 1099–1118, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-8330.2011.00941.x.

28 Manissa M. Maharawal and Erin McElroy, “The Anti-Eviction Mapping Project: Counter Mapping and Oral History Toward Bay Area Housing Justice,” in Social Justice and the City, ed. Nik Heynen, Dani Aeillo, Caroline Keegan and Nikki Luke, Annals of the American Association of Geographers 108, no. 2 (2018): 380–389.

29 Louis et al., “Introduction,” 78.

30 Mishuana Goeman, Mark My Words: Native Women Mapping Our Nations, 1st ed (Minneapolis: University Of Minnesota Press, 2013).

31 Louis and Kahele, Kanaka Hawai’i, 81–82.

32 Craig Santos Perez, “Transterritorial Currents and the Imperial Terripelago,” American Quarterly 67, no. 3 (2015): 622.

33 Tiara R. Na’puti, “From Guåhan and Back: Navigating a Both/Neither Analytic for Rhetorical Field Methods,” in Text + Field: Innovations in Rhetorical Method, eds. Sara L. McKinnon, Robert Asen, Karma R. Chávez, and Robert Glenn Howard (University Park, PA: Penn State University Press, 2016), 56–71.

34 Aimee Carrillo Rowe and Eve Tuck, “Settler Colonialism and Cultural Studies: Ongoing Settlement, Cultural Production, and Resistance,” Cultural Studies ↔ Critical Methodologies 17, no. 1 (2017): 3–13, https://doi.org/10.1177/1532708616653693; Catalina M. de Onís, “Energy Colonialism Powers the Ongoing Unnatural Disaster in Puerto Rico,” Frontiers in Communication 3 (2018): 1–5, doi: 10.3389/fcomm.2018.00002; E. Cram, “Archival Ambience and Sensory Memory: Generating Queer Intimacies in the Settler Colonial Archive,” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 13, no. 2 (2016): 109–29, https://doi.org/10.1080/14791420.2015.1119290; Roberta Chevrette, “Holographic Rhetoric: De/Colonizing Public Memory at Pueblo Grande” in Text + Field: Innovations in Rhetorical Methods, eds. Sara L. McKinnon, Robert Asen, Karma R. Chávez, and Robert Glenn Howard (University Park, PA: Penn State University Press, 2016); Jenna N. Hanchey, “All of Us Phantasmic Saviors,” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 15, no. 2 (2018): 144–60, https://doi.org/10.1080/14791420.2018.1454969.

35 Damon Salesa, Island Time: New Zealand’s Pacific Futures (Wellington, New Zealand: Bridget Williams Books, 2017), 222–23.

36 Vicente M. Diaz and J. Kehaulani Kauanui, “Native Pacific Cultural Studies on the Edge,” The Contemporary Pacific 13, no. 2 (2001): 319.

37 Haunani-Kay Trask, From a Native Daughter: Colonialism and Sovereignty in Hawaii, Rev. ed. (Honolulu: Latitude 20, 1999).

38 Charles D. Thompson Jr and Graham Harvey, eds., Indigenous Diasporas and Dislocations (Burlington, VT: Routledge, 2005), 10.

39 Teresia Teaiwa, “Native Thoughts: A Pacific Studies Take on Cultural Studies and Diaspora,” in Indigenous Diasporas and Dislocations, ed. Charles D. Thompson Jr and Graham Harvey (Burlington, VT: Routledge, 2005), 15–35.

40 Epeli Hau’ofa, “Our Sea of Islands,” in A New Oceania: Rediscovering Our Sea of Islands, ed. Eric Waddell, Vijay Naidu, and Epeli Hau’ofa (Suva, Fiji: The University of the South Pacific with Beake House, 1993), 2–16.

41 Vicente M. Diaz, “Voyaging for Anti-Colonial Recovery: Austronesian Seafaring, Archipelagic Rethinking, and the Re-Mapping of Indigeneity,” Pacific Asia Inquiry 2, no. 1 (2011): 21–32.

42 Diaz, “Voyaging,” 22–23; Noelani Goodyear-Ka’opua, The Seeds We Planted: Portraits of a Native Hawaiian Charter School (Minneapolis: University Of Minnesota Press, 2013), 167–169.

43 Oliveira, Ancestral Places, 94.

44 Cristina Bacchilega, Legendary Hawai’i and the Politics of Place: Tradition, Translation, and Tourism (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013), 8–9; 35–36.

45 Diaz and Kauanui, “Native Pacific,” 318.

46 Michael Lujan Bevacqua, “Guam: Protests at the Tip of America’s Spear,” South Atlantic Quarterly 116, no. 1 (2017): 177, https://doi.org/10.1215/00382876-3749592.; Keith L. Camacho, “Transoceanic Flows: Pacific Islander Interventions Across the American Empire,” Amerasia Journal 37, no. 3 (2011): ix–xxxiv, https://doi.org/10.17953/amer.37.3.m372lun15r8p420m; Vicente M. Diaz, Repositioning the Missionary: Rewriting the Histories of Colonialism, Native Catholicism, and Indigeneity in Guam (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2010); Laura Marie Torres Souder, Daughters of the Island: Contemporary Chamorro Women Organizers on Guam, 2nd ed. (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1992).

47 Brian Russell Roberts and Michelle Stephens, “Archipelagic American Studies: Decontinentalizing the Study of American Culture,” in Archipelagic American Studies, ed. Brian Russell Roberts and Michelle Ann Stephens (Durham, NC: Duke University Press Books, 2017), 1–54; Lanny Thompson, “Heuristic Geographies: Territories and Areas, Islands and Archepelagoes,” in Archipelagic American Studies, ed. Brian Russell Roberts and Michelle Ann Stephens (Durham, NC: Duke University Press Books, 2017), 57–73.

48 Roberts and Stephens, Archipelagic, 31.

49 Sasha Davis, Empires’ Edge: Militarization, Resistance, and Transcending Hegemony in the Pacific (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2015), 84; Diaz and Kauanui, “Native Pacific,” 318; de Onís, “Energy Colonialism,” 2; Ayano Ginoza, “Space of ‘Militourism’: Intimacies of US and Japanese Empires and Indigenous Sovereignty in Okinawa,” International Journal of Okinawan Studies 3, no.1 (2012): 7–23; Alexander Mawyer and Jerry K. Jacka, “Sovereignty, Conservation and Island Ecological Futures,” Environmental Conservation 45, no. 3 (2018): 238–251.

50 Juliet Nebolon, “‘Life Given Straight from the Heart’: Settler Militarism, Biopolitics, and Public Health in Hawai’i during World War II,” American Quarterly 69, no. 1 (2017): 25, https://doi.org/10.1353/aq.2017.0002.

51 Craig Santos Perez, “Guam and Archipelagic American Studies,” in Archipelagic American Studies, ed. Brian Russell Roberts and Michelle Ann Stephens (Durham, NC: Duke University Press Books, 2017), 106; see also, Alfred Peredo Flores, “‘No Walk in the Park’: US Empire and the Racialization of Civilian Military Labor in Guam, 1944–1962,” American Quarterly 67, no. 3 (September 2015): 813–835.

52 Roberts and Stephens, Archipelagic, 9.

53 Jeremy W. Crampton, “Maps as Social Constructions: Power, Communication, and Visualization,” Progress in Human Geography 25, no. 2 (2001), 235–252; J.B. Harley, “Maps, Knowledge, and Power,” in The Iconography of Landscape, ed. Denis Cosgrove and Stephen Daniels (Cambridge, UK: University of Cambridge Press, 1989), 277–312; Sasha Davis, “Apparatuses of Occupation: Translocal Social Movements, States, and the Archipelagic Spatialities of Power,” Transactions 42, no. 1 (2017): 110–122.

54 Tiara R. Na’puti and Michael Lujan Bevacqua, “Militarization and Resistance from Guåhan: Protecting and Defending Pågat,” American Quarterly 67, no. 3 (2015): 837–858.

55 On DOD buildup plans for the Marianas Island Range Complex (MIRC), Mariana Islands Training and Testing (MITT), and CNMI Joint Military Training see: Therese M. Terlaje, “MITT, MIRC, and the Programmatic Agreement,” Senator Therese M. Terlaje (blog), February 22, 2017, http://senatorterlaje.com/home/sample-page/ (accessed October 20, 2018); Naval Facilities Engineering Command Pacific, “Draft Supplemental Environmental Impact Statement: Guam and Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands Military Relocation” (Department of the Navy, April 2014), http://www.guambuildupeis.us/draft-documents (accessed October 20, 2018).

56 See: Tiara Rose Na’puti, “Charting Contemporary Chamoru Activism : Anti-Militarization & Social Movements in Guåhan” (PhD diss., The University of Texas at Austin 2013); LisaLinda Natividad and Gwyn Kirk, “Fortress Guam: Resistance to US Military Mega-Buildup,” The Asia-Pacific Journal 8, no. 18 (2010), https://apjjf.org/-LisaLinda-Natividad/3356/article.html; LisaLinda Natividad and Victoria-Lola Leon Guerrero, “The Explosive Growth of US Military Power on Guam Confronts People Power: Experience of an Island People under Spanish, Japanese and American Colonial Rule,” The Asia-Pacific Journal 8, no. 49 (2010), https://apjjf.org/-LisaLinda-Natividad/3454/article.html; Catherine Lutz, “Bureaucratic Weaponry and the Production of Ignorance in Military Operations on Guam,” Current Anthropology 60, Supplement 19 (2018), S000–S000, https://doi.org/10.1086/699937; Catherine Lutz, “The Political Economy and Political Aesthetics of Military Maps,” in Spaces of Security: Ethnographies of Securityscapes, Surveillance, and Control, ed. Setha Low and Mark Maguire (New York: New York University Press, 2019), 184.

57 Mishuana Goeman, “Land as Life: Unsettling the Logics of Containment,” in Native Studies Keywords, ed. Stephanie Nohelani Teves, Andrea Smith, and Michelle Raheja (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2015), 87; Diaz & Kauanui, “Native Pacific,” 320.

58 Richard Flores Taitano Micronesian Area Research Center (MARC), Lina’la’ Portraits of Life at Litekyan (Mangilao: University of Guam Press, 2018), 11; Mike T. Carson, Rediscovering Heritage through Artefacts, Sites, and Landscapes: Translating a 3500-Year Record at Ritidian, Guam (Oxford, UK: Archaeopress Access Archaeology, 2017).

59 James M. Bayman et al., “Latte Household Economic Organization at Ritidian, Guam National Wildlife Refuge, Mariana Islands,” Micronesica 42, no. 1/2 (2012): 258–73.

60 Craig Santos Perez, “The Trans-Pacific Partnership, Pivot and Pathway,” The Hawaii Independent, November 6, 2015, http://hawaiiindependent.net/story/the-trans-pacific-partnership-pivot-and-pathway (accessed October 20, 2018).

61 Na’puti & Bevacqua, “Militarization,” 848–850.

62 Steve Limtiaco, “Work on Firing Range Could Start This Summer,” Pacific Daily News, January 21, 2018, https://www.guampdn.com (accessed July 7, 2018); Jerick Sablan and John I. Borja, “Live-Fire Training Range Complex Contract Awarded to Black Construction,” Pacific Daily News, August 25, 2017 https://www.guampdn.com (accessed July 7, 2018).

63 Robert P. Marzec, Militarizing the Environment: Climate Change and the Security State (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2016).

64 Experiences in the Marianas and elsewhere demonstrate that island places are militarized relatively indiscriminately and absence of inhabitants justifies other types of occupation. see, Sylvia C. Frain, “Women’s Resistance in the Marianas Archipelago: A US Colonial Homefront and Militarized Frontline,” Feminist Formations 29, no. 1 (2017): 97–135, https://doi.org/10.1353/ff.2017.0005.

65 MARC, Lina’la’ Portraits, 12–13.

66 Ayuda Foundation, 20 Facts About the Ancestral Village of Ritidian That Will Amaze You (Middle School Edition) (Kottura Innovations, 2016), iBooks e-book.

67 Ibid.

68 Ibid.

69 Ibid.

70 Prutehi Litekyan: Save Ritidian (PLSR) formed in January 2017, a direct-action group dedicated to protection of natural and cultural resources in all sites identified for DOD live-fire firing training on Guam, https://www.facebook.com/saveritidian/ (accessed October 21, 2018).

71 MARC, Lina’la’ Portraits, 87–111.

72 Bayman et al., “Latte Household,” 269.

73 Ayuda Foundation, 20 Facts, 2.

74 Ibid., 13.

75 MARC, Lina’la’ Portraits, 10.

76 Takeshi Tokashiki, “Research on the Effect of the Air Craft Noise Pollution on the Noise Environment in the School Education of Okinawa Due to the US Military Bases,” (paper presented at the 45th International Congress and Exposition on Noise Control Engineering: Towards a Quieter Future, 1316–1324. Hamburg, Germany: Inter-Noise, August 22, 2016), 1316–1324, http://pub.dega-akustik.de/IN2016/data/articles/000828.pdf (accessed October 21, 2018).

77 Ayuda Foundation, 20 Facts, 5–6.

78 “Guåhan/Okinawa Solidarity Teach-In Feb. 7,” Stripes Guam, February 5, 2018, https://guam.stripes.com/ (accessed October 21, 2018).

79 Interviewee 2 and Interviewee 9, interviews by Tiara R. Na’puti, Hagåtña, Guåhan, July 2018. All interviews were assigned participant numbers in data collection and reporting to ensure confidentiality and safety of participants.

80 Interviewee 9, interview by Tiara R. Na’puti, Hagåtña, Guåhan, July 2018. All interviews were assigned participant numbers in data collection and reporting to ensure confidentiality and safety of participants.

81 Catherine Lutz, “The Political Economy,” 184.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by a WFI Research Grant from Waterhouse Family Institute for the Study of Communication and Society, Villanova University [grant number 18190053].