Book summary

A collection of essays on resistance, resilience, and collective power in the age of climate disaster from Chamorro human rights lawyer and organizer Julian Aguon.

My review

This book touched me deeply. Aguon's writing feels like a warm hug and creates moments of hope admist the nightmares in today's world. I learned so much from reading this book and this book is a rallying cry to do something about it.

Everything I learned

• In the 1900s, the US navy established a leper colony in Guam where Chammorros thought to be afflicted were quarantined on a beach. In 1912, they were forcibly deported to the Culion Leper Colony in the Philippines.

Photo from https://www.guampedia.com/us-naval-era-leprosy-local-reaction/

• From 1946-1958 the U.S. conducted a nuclear testing program in the Marshall Islands where it detonated 67 automatic and thermonucelar weapons. The worst of these tests was "Bravo" which deposited life-threatening quanitities of radioactive fallout (3x the estimated external dose people in Chernobyl were exposed to) onto the Marshallese.
  
  These tests resulted in forced exile, increase in congeneital diseases, birth defeects, miscarraiges, and cancers.

  • "The truth is this. Nucelar weapons do not have to be used to be deadly."-Julian Aguon

  
  

• The U.S. Department of Defense is relocating 5,000 Marines from Okinawa to Guam, destroying historical and cultural sites in order to build a firing range complex, which is dangerously close to Guam's primary source of drinking water: the Northern Guam Lens Aquifer. It's also being built 100 feet away from the last remaining håyon lågu tree.
  
  
  Further reading

• https://www.researchgate.net/publication/261967252_Re-membering_the_Past_Photography_leprosy_and_the_Chamorros_of_Guam_1898-_1924

• https://www.boell.de/en/2023/10/09/ongoing-consequences-us-nuclear-testing-program-marshall-islands

• https://www.guampedia.com/we-are-guahan/