I've been thinking about Guam again, not just because I had already planned to write more about it, but because of Puerto Rico. And I've been thinking about Puerto Rico because of Hurricane Irma. What Puerto Rico has in common with Guam, apart from being an island, is that both are unincorporated territories of the United States.
In my previous post, I visualized Guam as being a very small island out in the middle of nowhere. But this isn't really the right way to think about it. It's actually the southernmost island in a string of islands. Geographically, if not politically, it belongs with the Northern Mariana Islands. They are all part of a submerged mountain range. According to Wikipedia, the northern ten islands are volcanic and are currently uninhabited, while the southern five are made of coralline limestone and are inhabited. But though once united culturally, history has divided Guam from the others.
In my last post, I had gotten to the point in history when Spain had colonized the islands, used Guam as a refueling site and reduced the native people to a fraction of their former size both through warfare and the inadvertent introduction of disease. But how did Guam end up becoming a U.S. unincorporated territory?
In an excellent article from the Smithsonian Magazine called "A Brief, 500-Year History of Guam", which happened to come online on the same day that I was starting to look into Guam for my first post about it, Doug Herman describes the strange way in which Guam became separated politically from the other islands. The Spanish-American War was in full swing, but isolated Guam had no idea about that. As Herman tells it:
The Spanish troops and officials stationed in Guam were at first glad to have visitors when the USS Charleston arrived. They didn’t know that war had been declared between the two nations, and mistook their cannon fire for a salute. A peaceful transfer of power ensued.
But the Americans missed a trick in the 1898 Treaty of Paris because while solidifying their possession of Guam, they failed to ask for the other islands in Micronesia that Spain held in its portfolio. One account I read says that they just weren't all that aware of them, but a probably more accurate report has it that America didn't want to appear too greedy, and knew that the German Kaiser was looking for prestige.So Spain sold the rest of their holdings to the Germans, including all the other Mariana Islands. Germany apparently ruled in a fairly relaxed fashion. But enter World War I. The Japanese were allied against the Germans in that war and captured all of Germany's colonial territory, continuing to rule the region for thirty years thereafter.
Guam, however, underwent a different fate. In a poignant bit of Doug Herman's article, he tells us that after the U.S arrived, the leading families of the native Chamorro got together and set up a legislature, expecting to be forming a representative government like the rest of the U.S. But this was not what the American powers were thinking. Instead, they placed the island under the jurisdiction of the Secretary of the U.S. Navy and basically treated the island as a military base. In his words, "Guam was run like a well-ordered battleship under what was essentially martial law."
Apparently, the holding of territory involved the U.S. in some odd mental gymnastics. Again, from Herman:
In a series of Supreme Court rulings known as the Insular Cases of 1901, it was decided that new territories might never be incorporated into the union and were to receive only unspecified ‘‘fundamental’’ Constitutional protections. They were to be governed without the consent of the governed in a system that lacked the checks and balances that underlie the principle of limited government.
This would seem to be bad enough, but perhaps the real tragedy for Guam was that it ended up on the wrong side of the war, at least from its people's perspective. They suffered a different fate with the Japanese than their northern neighbors. From Herman:
While the bombing of Pearl Harbor still lives on in infamy in American memory, the bombing of Guam—four hours later—is virtually forgotten. In a brief but locally well-remembered air and sea attack, Japanese troops seized control of the small American colony and began an occupation that lasted three years. More than 13,000 American subjects suffered injury, forced labor, forced march or internment. A local priest, Father Jesus Baza Dueñas, was tortured and assassinated. At least 1,123 died. To America, they are forgotten.
And if all that wasn't bad enough, history had an extra terrible twist in store for them. Because according to Wikipedia, the Japanese brought down Chamorro people from the Northern Marianas to act as translators and in other capacities. And not under duress, because these people thought of themselves as on Japan's side. So, to this day there is bad feeling between these two groups of people, because the Guamians Chamorros felt they should have been treated with more compassion by the Northern Mariana Chamorros.
Herman cites a Chamorro scholar named Keith Camacho who points out that:
in military narratives of World War II’s Pacific theater, Pacific Islanders play no central role. Instead, military historians tend to envision the Pacific Islands as “a tabula rasa on which to inscribe their histories of heroism and victimization,” forming “a body of discourse in which only Japanese and Americans constitute the agents of change and continuity in the region, erasing the agency and voice of indigenous peoples.”
As I began learning about Guam's northern sister islands, I thought, okay, the Germans don't rule the Marianas anymore, and the Japanese don't rule the Marianas anymore, so who governs them now?Naively, I thought that they had probably been granted their independence after the war.
But no. We, the United States, govern the Northern Marianas. But even though they are part of one island chain, they are governed as a separate entity than Guam. Guam is an unincorporated territory, while the Northern Marianas are a commonwealth, which makes their position more like Puerto Rico's, though I haven't been able to pin down exactly what the precise difference in governance is.
Which brings me back to my initial associations here. As we watched Hurricane Irma roaring across the Caribbean, people didn't seem to be talking about the fact that as it lurched toward Puerto Rico, it was actually heading toward a part of the United States. We didn't have to wait till it hit the Florida Keys to be worried about American citizens. Yet in a poll taken as recently as earlier this year, 41 percent of people did not believe that Puerto Ricans were U.S. Citizens and another 15 percent weren't sure. This despite the fact that anyone born in Puerto Rico is automatically an American citizen, which has been true since 1940. If people don't know that Puerto Ricans are citizens, I am pretty sure that very few of them know that the Guamians are. And never mind about the Northern Mariana Islands.
But since I began thinking about this Hurricane Irma has come and gone, and I now feel that the U.S. Virgin Islands might be even more parallel to Guam. The U.S. Virgin Islands are also part of an island chain colonized by different European countries (the U.S. territory was originally colonized by Denmark and the U.S. bought them in 1916). Though underreported elsewhere, Rachel Maddow and Lawrence O'Donnell have pointed out on their respective MSNBC shows that the American islands of St. John and St. Thomas have been severely damaged by the storm. As Rachel emphasized, the residents are American citizens, and it is the responsibility of this country to help them.
A U.S. territory is not just ours when it's convenient to us to remember it.
 |
| The Mariana Islands in a regional context |
In my previous post, I visualized Guam as being a very small island out in the middle of nowhere. But this isn't really the right way to think about it. It's actually the southernmost island in a string of islands. Geographically, if not politically, it belongs with the Northern Mariana Islands. They are all part of a submerged mountain range. According to Wikipedia, the northern ten islands are volcanic and are currently uninhabited, while the southern five are made of coralline limestone and are inhabited. But though once united culturally, history has divided Guam from the others.
 |
| Guam and the other Mariana Islands |
In my last post, I had gotten to the point in history when Spain had colonized the islands, used Guam as a refueling site and reduced the native people to a fraction of their former size both through warfare and the inadvertent introduction of disease. But how did Guam end up becoming a U.S. unincorporated territory?
In an excellent article from the Smithsonian Magazine called "A Brief, 500-Year History of Guam", which happened to come online on the same day that I was starting to look into Guam for my first post about it, Doug Herman describes the strange way in which Guam became separated politically from the other islands. The Spanish-American War was in full swing, but isolated Guam had no idea about that. As Herman tells it:
The Spanish troops and officials stationed in Guam were at first glad to have visitors when the USS Charleston arrived. They didn’t know that war had been declared between the two nations, and mistook their cannon fire for a salute. A peaceful transfer of power ensued.
 |
| U.S.S. Charleston in Manila Bay, 1898 |
But the Americans missed a trick in the 1898 Treaty of Paris because while solidifying their possession of Guam, they failed to ask for the other islands in Micronesia that Spain held in its portfolio. One account I read says that they just weren't all that aware of them, but a probably more accurate report has it that America didn't want to appear too greedy, and knew that the German Kaiser was looking for prestige.So Spain sold the rest of their holdings to the Germans, including all the other Mariana Islands. Germany apparently ruled in a fairly relaxed fashion. But enter World War I. The Japanese were allied against the Germans in that war and captured all of Germany's colonial territory, continuing to rule the region for thirty years thereafter.
 |
| Apra Harbor at the U.S. Naval Base |
Guam, however, underwent a different fate. In a poignant bit of Doug Herman's article, he tells us that after the U.S arrived, the leading families of the native Chamorro got together and set up a legislature, expecting to be forming a representative government like the rest of the U.S. But this was not what the American powers were thinking. Instead, they placed the island under the jurisdiction of the Secretary of the U.S. Navy and basically treated the island as a military base. In his words, "Guam was run like a well-ordered battleship under what was essentially martial law."
Apparently, the holding of territory involved the U.S. in some odd mental gymnastics. Again, from Herman:
In a series of Supreme Court rulings known as the Insular Cases of 1901, it was decided that new territories might never be incorporated into the union and were to receive only unspecified ‘‘fundamental’’ Constitutional protections. They were to be governed without the consent of the governed in a system that lacked the checks and balances that underlie the principle of limited government.
This would seem to be bad enough, but perhaps the real tragedy for Guam was that it ended up on the wrong side of the war, at least from its people's perspective. They suffered a different fate with the Japanese than their northern neighbors. From Herman:
While the bombing of Pearl Harbor still lives on in infamy in American memory, the bombing of Guam—four hours later—is virtually forgotten. In a brief but locally well-remembered air and sea attack, Japanese troops seized control of the small American colony and began an occupation that lasted three years. More than 13,000 American subjects suffered injury, forced labor, forced march or internment. A local priest, Father Jesus Baza Dueñas, was tortured and assassinated. At least 1,123 died. To America, they are forgotten.
And if all that wasn't bad enough, history had an extra terrible twist in store for them. Because according to Wikipedia, the Japanese brought down Chamorro people from the Northern Marianas to act as translators and in other capacities. And not under duress, because these people thought of themselves as on Japan's side. So, to this day there is bad feeling between these two groups of people, because the Guamians Chamorros felt they should have been treated with more compassion by the Northern Mariana Chamorros.
Herman cites a Chamorro scholar named Keith Camacho who points out that:
in military narratives of World War II’s Pacific theater, Pacific Islanders play no central role. Instead, military historians tend to envision the Pacific Islands as “a tabula rasa on which to inscribe their histories of heroism and victimization,” forming “a body of discourse in which only Japanese and Americans constitute the agents of change and continuity in the region, erasing the agency and voice of indigenous peoples.”
 |
| Battle of Guam, 1944 |
As I began learning about Guam's northern sister islands, I thought, okay, the Germans don't rule the Marianas anymore, and the Japanese don't rule the Marianas anymore, so who governs them now?Naively, I thought that they had probably been granted their independence after the war.
But no. We, the United States, govern the Northern Marianas. But even though they are part of one island chain, they are governed as a separate entity than Guam. Guam is an unincorporated territory, while the Northern Marianas are a commonwealth, which makes their position more like Puerto Rico's, though I haven't been able to pin down exactly what the precise difference in governance is.
Which brings me back to my initial associations here. As we watched Hurricane Irma roaring across the Caribbean, people didn't seem to be talking about the fact that as it lurched toward Puerto Rico, it was actually heading toward a part of the United States. We didn't have to wait till it hit the Florida Keys to be worried about American citizens. Yet in a poll taken as recently as earlier this year, 41 percent of people did not believe that Puerto Ricans were U.S. Citizens and another 15 percent weren't sure. This despite the fact that anyone born in Puerto Rico is automatically an American citizen, which has been true since 1940. If people don't know that Puerto Ricans are citizens, I am pretty sure that very few of them know that the Guamians are. And never mind about the Northern Mariana Islands.
But since I began thinking about this Hurricane Irma has come and gone, and I now feel that the U.S. Virgin Islands might be even more parallel to Guam. The U.S. Virgin Islands are also part of an island chain colonized by different European countries (the U.S. territory was originally colonized by Denmark and the U.S. bought them in 1916). Though underreported elsewhere, Rachel Maddow and Lawrence O'Donnell have pointed out on their respective MSNBC shows that the American islands of St. John and St. Thomas have been severely damaged by the storm. As Rachel emphasized, the residents are American citizens, and it is the responsibility of this country to help them.
 |
| The Virgin Islands |
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