Julian
Aguon, a Chamoru human rights scholar and recognized international activist
on Micronesian and Chamoru issues, published his third book, What
We Bury At Night: Disposable Humanity, in early 2008. Julian is
a third year student at the William S. Richardson School of Law and
the author of two other books, The Fire this Time and Just
Left of the Setting Sun.
Julian
received the Cohen International Human Rights Fellowship from the Sam
L. Cohen Foundation to conduct research throughout Micronesia during
the summer of 2007. His work culminated in this groundbreaking book.
What
We Bury at Night is a series of essays describing the present day
realities of the U.S.-Micronesia relationship through the eyes of the
people on the ground who are disappearing. Both elders and youth tell
of the continuing harm of the U.S. colonial project in Micronesia, revealing
how that project continues to starve the imaginations of entire peoples.
Made
up of more than 2,000 islands and atolls in three major archipelagos,
the Carolines, the Marshalls, and the Marianas, Micronesia was known
from the last World War until the 1970s as the Trust Territory of the
Pacific Islands. It includes the Republic of the Marshall Islands, the
Federated States of Micronesia, the Republic of Palau (Belau), and the
Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands, less Guam, which was cut
from the rest after the Spanish-American War and lumped with the other
1898 “Unfortunates:” the Philippines; Puerto Rico; and Cuba. In
What We Bury at Night, Aguon argues that while the world looks
away, this region of the planet is staring down death – and mostly losing.
Current U.S. militarist and corporate plans for the region now threaten
to destroy the life-affirming values that bind and sustain these ancient
civilizations by deepening dispossession of the people.
For
Aguon, the fate of Micronesia is the fate of sustainable humanity. Micronesia
is at a crossroads, as is the human race. It is the region least “affected”
by the increasingly global culture of conspicuous consumption and individualistic
materialism. If the last region on earth – in which, among the majority
of the population, communal living based on interconnectedness, extended
families, shared resources, non-linear thinking, and a sustainable relationship
with the natural environment is the norm – is allowed to be destroyed,
the future of humanity is truly in jeopardy. When the imagination of
Indigenous youth and the viability of sustainable living are allowed
to die, so does hope for the entire human race. Micronesia is one of
the last corners on earth where people, on the whole, still pattern
life in humane and interdependent arrangements built on sustaining,
life-supporting values. This resilience, perhaps, is an offering of
beauty – Micronesia’s contribution to the world.