Desiree Taimanglo Ventura, who writes the Drowning Mermaid blog about life on U.S.-occupied Guahan / Guam, posted a vivid account of a few of her everyday encounters with foreigners as an indigenous Chamorro woman. One is an insulting exchange between several U.S. military personnel and herself that reveals the often overlooked racial and sexual politics of militarization in occupied lands such as Guahan. It is guaranteed that these kinds of cultural, racial and sexual transgressions will intensify after the military expansion there. The environmental impact statement cannot possibly capture the social cost of these daily indignities that serve as a constant reminder that your land, your people and your country are under a foreign occupation.
The other story explores the complex and multilayered oppression of tourism, colonialism, and cultural appropriation/genocide. Immigrants imitating native dancers, appropriating cultures from other parts of the Pacific, to entertain tourists. Tourism takes the comodified culture of the indigenous as souvenirs as it devours the land and living culture in its hunger for profit.
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http://thedrowningmermaid.blogspot.com/2010/08/someone-from-here.html
Someone from “here.”
I stood in line at a small gas station. Behind me, the loud, carefree voices of visiting soldiers pushed their way through the air, slamming against my ears and interrupting my trance. I stared down at the floor, staring intently at the blue nail polish over my toe nails.
“I will not hear them,” I thought to myself.
My body unexpectedly jerked forward, shoved from behind. I turned around in irritation to the red faces of our country, giggling, as if I missed the punch line of a joke the room was laughing over.
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