There is a scene in it Craig Santos Perez‘s book of poems from an unincorporated area [åmot] which feels awfully familiar. The author, an English professor at the University of Hawaiʻi, was walking through the San Diego Zoo when he saw a cage Guam sihekan endangered native kingfisher of Guam.
Perez was born and raised on Guam, but this is the first time he has seen the bird in real life, with its blue tail, green wings and orange and white feathers. The creatures no longer live in Guam’s jungles, eradicated by invasive brown tree snakes brought by US military ships. Like many others Chamurus of Guam, Perez grew up accustomed to the silence of native birdsong.
Like Perez, I am native to the Marianas, and although I grew up on a neighboring island, I spent a lot of time on Guam as a child. At the time, snake-induced power outages felt normal, and so did the birds’ absence. It wasn’t until I was in college, walking through the Bronx Zoo, that I also saw the sihek, held captive for its own survival thousands of miles away from home. It felt shocking.
Even stranger is the feeling of seeing my language and experiences reflected in a book, especially one that is highly regarded. Last month Perez the first Pacific Islander to win a National Book Awardstanding in a suit at the New York City award ceremony in front of a crowd that included Oprah. The next day, 8,000 miles away on Guam, WhatsApp threads lit up with the YouTube clip of his acceptance speech in which he thanked the crowd in Chamoru.
That distance is part of what made that award feel so important. In his poetry, Perez grapples with the invisibility of Guam (“Are you a citizen?”), the ongoing legacy of colonialism, the effects of continued militarization, and the ever-increasing threat of rising seas. “The rape of Oceania began with Guam,” he quotes at one point.
There is a heavy sadness in his exploration of what CHamorus has lost, and stands to lose with climate change, and a more personal sadness embedded in his poetry about his grandparents, who passed away during the writing of the book. But there is also a lightness to his work, especially in his lists of contemporary åmotor medicine, for stateside CHamorus feeling mahålang for the house.
I spoke with Perez last week to hear his reflections on the book and how his poetry relates to climate change, environmental justice and the broader experiences of indigenous peoples. This interview has been condensed and edited.
Q. You mentioned that you write for yourself and your family and our people, but you also write for the wider global community in the US and beyond. One of the challenges facing indigenous peoples is the way our stories are often erased from history, or in the case of indigenous Pacific peoples, we are literally relegated to the margins of maps or footnotes in textbooks. What do you see as your book’s role within that broader context?
A. So much of my work is about making the struggles of our people visible, and the history and politics of Guam, in particular, visible, on a national and international stage. It’s a way for me to write against the erasure of Pacific Islander history specifically and Indigenous histories in general. I have been so inspired for decades by Native American writers writing against their own extinction and raising their voices to highlight issues facing their own communities, so I wanted to do the same thing with my own work. And as you know, the connection to the environment, to lands and waters, is a core component of Indigenous identity and culture, and so I always wanted that to be at the fore.
When our homelands and our peoples are made invisible, it makes it easier for colonial nations or corporations to exploit us and to turn our homelands into sacrifice zones. But when we expose these issues, it creates a way for us to not only cultivate empathy for our struggles, but also to establish alliances and solidarity with other communities who have experienced similar kinds of environmental justice issues. And then I think it also empowers our own people to keep fighting and struggling for justice. And so for me, poetry and storytelling play a crucial role in the environmental justice movement.
Q. Your poem about the Guam sihek resonated with me because I had the same experience at the Bronx Zoo: encountering the bird in a cage thousands of miles away from home, which I had never seen in the wild or had not heard, and felt struck by the irony and sadness of it. Can you share more about that experience and what you hoped to convey with your writing?
A. When I was growing up on Guam, the time was when the birds all disappeared, and zookeepers came in and “saved” the last remaining wild birds. I have no memory at all of the native birds in Guam, other than just studying them in school and looking at pictures in the classroom. And when I saw that bird for the first time at the San Diego Zoo, it was just such an incredible experience. I’m still kind of processing the depths of what I felt at that moment. Part of it was just feeling the deep loss of extinction, threat, extinction, and so on, but at the same time feeling this deep sense of survival and resilience.
I also wanted to honor the birds in the same way I would honor my grandparents in the poems. I thought about extinction, not just a species loss, but also as a whole matrix of loss: the waterfall that happens in the jungles, the rainforest, what happens when birds disappear from the landscape? What happens to the people who are close to these birds when they are gone? The birds have deep meaning in our culture and still have meaning today. But of course they are different things when they are no longer wild.
Q. One of your poems describes how “map makers called our part of the ocean ‘Micronesia’ because they considered our islands and cultures small and insignificant.” Then you list the empires that have taken over our islands, and their consequences, a sort of progression of colonization, and at the very end you describe our islands slipping under rising seas. What were you thinking when you started this poem about colonization and ended it with climate change?
A. Colonialism has led to the environmental destruction of our home islands: Our islands are often used for many extractive industries, whether it is plantation agriculture in Hawaiʻi or on Guam, the military using our lands and waters for bases and military testing, and so on. All of these industries are based on fossil fuels, and they have all directly led to the rising sea levels and all the other impacts on climate change that we are seeing in the Pacific and globally. Things we need to do to change this, it is almost impossible to implement because, whether our islands are still colonized or in terms of the independent Pacific, they all exist within these neocolonial capitalist frameworks. And so to address climate change, we must also take into account the legacy and ongoing impact of colonialism. And so for me it was always important to be part of the decolonization movement along with environmental justice and climate justice, because it’s all connected.
Q. Another poem you wrote that resonated with me was about how diasporic CHamorus become strange in their own homelands after their departure, as their islands change and become strange to them. I was wondering if you could talk about what an acceleration of out-migration due to worsening storms and other climate change impacts might mean for our people and our culture.
A. In the beginning of the emphasis on the Pacific in the climate change discourse, there was a lot of rhetoric about: “If the Pacific Islanders are forced to move from our homelands, we are nothing, we are nothing without our islands not,” which was a rhetorically powerful rallying cry. But my criticism of that is that this is true, but at the same time we need to look at our diasporic Pacific communities. Even when we leave our homelands, we are not nothing. Not only do we become dead souls, but we still carry our culture with us, even though we are forced to migrate. Of course it is tragic, when and if we have to migrate due to climate change and we must do everything to prevent it naturally, so that we can stay in our homelands. But at the same time, if that future does come, I think we know it’s important for us to highlight the strength of our diaspora communities and to have faith in our people that we will be able to preserve our cultures and languages. to maintain, even if we ‘are forced to leave the house.
Q. Speaking of language, I noticed that throughout your book you deliberately included a lot of CHamoru words and phrases. For natives, speaking our languages is often in itself a political act because of how they were oppressed. What went into your decision and what did you hope to achieve?
A. Through poetry, I have found the space where I can kind of reclaim the language, even if it is for example just a few words or simple phrases or even quotes from the rosary in CHamoru. For me, poetry, like much indigenous poetry, has become a space of language recovery in the face of the long history of language colonialism and erasure.
I actually read a study that found a link between biodiversity loss and language loss. And part of the thesis was that because, let’s say, a rainforest in the Amazon is being cut down for timber or something and many of those tribes are displaced, forced to move to the city, and in the city they have to speak Spanish or another colonial language.
There are many narratives of doom and extinction like that. But I think there are many indigenous people, despite displacement and colonialism, they are still able to be resilient and maintain culture and language within diasporic spaces. Not ideal, but I think it speaks to the power of indigenous peoples.
Q. Throughout your book, you write a lot about your grandmother: playing bingo with her, watching her rub achiote seeds to make red rice, listening to her speak CHamoru. Can you tell me more about her? When you think about the brutal Japanese occupation what her generation experienced during World War II and the subsequent loss of land to the US military, how do you see this relating to the challenges facing our children’s generation?
A. She was 19, I think, at the beginning of the occupation. And during the march to Mañenggon, she was actually pregnant with what would be her first child. But unfortunately she had a miscarriage during the march. I will always be struck by her resilience to wrap her fetus in banana leaves and carry her daughter the rest of the way on that march and keep going and keep living. She was a very gentle woman and of course very pious.
I can’t even fathom what that generation went through during that time. They not only experienced the war and the occupation and all that sudden violence, but then also just the slow violence after that of the army taking over so much land, displacing so many families from their farms and from their sources of food, forcing them to speak English in school and just the whole violence of colonial education and acculturation. Just think of the changes she has seen in our island from the 1920’s to just a few years ago over her 96 years of life. Although we are still facing a slow violence with climate change, I think at least my generation can learn from that generation how to endure, how to survive, but also how to be resilient and to keep fighting for it in which we believe. My Grandmother was not some kind of radical activist or decolonial activist or anything like that. But she definitely loved our culture and instilled in us a love for all things CHamoru. We have different battles to fight, but the agreement is to keep fighting for what we love, and to do everything we can to protect our families and give our children the best life possible while still trying to maintain our cultures.
