"Commonwealth Now!": Envisioning Indigenous Chamorro Self-Determination in a Multicultural Guam

Kristin Oberiano • Wesleyan University

September 18th @ 6pm • Daniel Family Commons

As a United States territory, the Pacific Island of Guam remains one of the world’s last seventeen, “non-self-governing territories”—the United Nations’ euphemistic phrase for “colony.” Since the 1970s, the Indigenous Chamorro people have sought to rectify this colonial status by advocating for self-determination and negotiating renewed federal-territorial relations with the U.S. In what is called the "Chamorro Self-Determination Movement,” Chamorros articulated a sense of peoplehood through indigeneity to justify their inherent and special right to self-determination vis-à-vis an increasingly larger population of White settlers and Asian immigrants. The movement reveals the structural possibilities and impossibilities for Indigenous peoples who attempt to assert sovereignty within a multicultural, settler colonial empire. This presentation explores local, imperial, and international dimensions of the Chamorro Self-Determination Movement through the rise and fall of the Guam Commonwealth Act in the 1980s to show the connections between settler colonialism, multiculturalism, and racial liberalism within the U.S. Empire.

Personhood
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