“The Day We Got Our Free-Doom”: Liberation, (Re)Occupation, and Refusing Imperial Romances in Guåhan

• In Event: Unsettling Settler Romances

Abstract

Following the bombing of Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941 in O’ahu, Hawai’i, the Japanese Imperial Army seized the island of Guåhan, the southernmost island of the Låguas yan Gåni (the Mariana archipelago) from the United States. As Japan’s 33-month occupation of the island came to an end in the final months of World War II, the Japanese Imperial Army confined thousands of CHamorus (the Indigenous peoples of Låguas yan Gåni) in concentration camps and subjected them to conditions of forced labor, physical and sexual violence, and massacres. Following a carpet-bombing campaign scarring the landscape, destroying villages, and killing thousands, the US reoccupied Guåhan and began building up the island to serve as a strategic military hub in the Pacific. At the time of this writing, Guåhan is one of the most militarized places on earth (Lutz 2019). The Department of Defense pledged billions of dollars toward hundreds of military infrastructure projects set to be complete throughout the next five years (Lutz 2019; Aguon 2022; Flores 2023). In terms of enlistment, CHamorus bear the greatest burden across the US armed forces than any other state and territory (Flores 2023; Cave 2023). Many CHamoru individuals and activist groups are voicing concerns over environmental desecration and the severing of environmental, cultural, and historical relations, as well as demanding for a reimagining of Indigenous sovereignty in a time of preeminent, but ongoing and familiar, environmental desecration and military escalation (Aguon 2022).

The day of US reoccupation, July 21st, is both spectacularly and annually celebrated as “Liberation Day.” Drawing upon two summers of ethnographic fieldwork, this paper focuses on the Liberation Day Parade, a military procession, as both a habitual spectacle reasserting settler allure and domination (Debord 1967; Al-Saji 2024), and a space for counter-visualizing occupational conditions through confrontation, refusal, and trans-national solidarity with other occupied peoples (Mirzoeff 2011; Campt 2017; Simpson 2007; De la Cadena 2019; Musser 2024; Gilmore 2002; 2023). Through engagement with the affectual and sensorial alongside the tåno (land) and tåsi (sea), material, human, and beyond-human interlocutors, I ultimately contend that Liberation Day is not just a day of remembrance and reenactment, but an opportunity for dislocation from statist prophecies of vectors of demise and sources of survival amid late-stage American empire (Euben 2006; Rubaii 2023).

Author

• Creighton Burns, Brown University