Militarization on Guam and the Erasing of Places.

Sasha Davis , Sept. 2007

I am college professor from Vermont who visited Guam this summer as an academic and activist interested in understanding more about the US plans for the increased militarization of Guam .  While I do not claim to be an expert on the situation I wanted to share what I learned.  I humbly offer these observations as an outsider who has only spent a limited time on Guam and Tinian, but who has visited many other sites of militarization against which I can compare the current situation in the Marianas . 

  Given the hospitality I received while on the island I first want to express my gratitude to all of those that helped educate me about the situation so that I could help my students and fellow activists in the United States become more aware of just what the American government is doing in the Marianas .  As most people in Guam and the NMI are fully aware, to say that Americans do not have much understanding of the issues in the western Pacific would be a drastic understatement.  I hope that I can share with other Americans the understanding I gained through my visit to Guam to chip away at this ignorance.

As a visitor to Guam I think it is important to give a short explanation of where I am coming from when I look at issues going on there.  My analysis of the situation comes from my perspective as an outsider and an academic.  It is necessarily colored by both my academic training and life history.  As a social geographer I tend to look at what places mean to people and how these meanings construct the legitimacy to create (and destroy) places in certain ways.  As someone who grew up in a desert area in the American Southwest that was utterly destroyed and transformed through militarization, “development” and the immigration of wealthy Americans, I come to identify this kind of “development” not as progress but as loss.

In my research I focus on the ways that people and institutions see places.  In particular, I have been studying the ways in which US government agencies, especially the military, have a certain way of speaking and a kind of vision that they apply to the places they want to destroy whether through active combat operations, training and weapons testing, or basing.  Essentially the military, as an institution, promotes a vision of places that is hyper-abstract and devoid of the meanings that people who live in a place attach to places.  In my previous research of other training areas such as the Nevada Test Site, Bikini Atoll and Vieques, Puerto Rico , one constant has been the military’s representation of such places as ‘empty.’  They are seen as a Terra Nullius or “wasteland,” or as a “natural” place with no “real” inhabitants[1].  That is, they are seen not as social landscapes imbued with human meanings and activities, but as blank slates ready to be written upon with military activities.  But, militarized places like Nevada , Bikini, Vieques, Diego Garcia, Guam, Kwajalein , Afghanistan , Iraq , etc… are, of course, not “blank spaces” no matter how much military planners wish them to be.  To distract from this fact, military planners have launched intense discursive campaigns to discredit native connections to the landscape such that it can be classified as “available.”  The usual tropes are brought forward in these campaigns: that native use of the landscape is not intensive enough, modern enough, and rational enough, by European/American standards, to recognize their ownership as legitimate.  Furthermore, even within the continental US, the most noxious of military activities are not conducted where they do the least harm, nor are they sited so that those that receive the most benefit must cope with the most negative impacts, rather they are almost always placed on indigenous land or near other politically weak sub-sets of the population (people of color, the poor, etc).  Of course this process is familiar to anyone who has been living through or studying colonialism.  This has been the standard operating procedure for colonial dispossession for centuries in the Americas , Australia , Africa, Asia and the Pacific.  

The point I want to make here is not just that colonialism is alive and well today.  This point is well known by many people around the world and is excruciatingly obvious on Guam .  What I want to discuss in this essay are some of the details of the impending military build-up and how it demonstrates that the mechanism for dispossession is little changed from how it was done in Bikini, Kwajalein , Vieques, and indeed countless colonial encounters over the centuries.  While the words used may be more carefully selected today, the process is still the same.  It is still focused on undermining the legitimacy of native claims to the landscape by representing places as belonging to nobody or empty through verbal statements, texts, maps, and pictures.   To accomplish this they willfully select some attributes of the landscape as important and erase native claims through the deafening silences of what is not mentioned about particular places.

  The Guam Integrated Military Development Plan – GIMDP (available at http://www.guamgovernor.net/content/view/645/2/ ) is an interesting document that has very detailed maps of proposed activities.  The military claims it is not a final planning document and that the suggestions in it are not necessarily going to happen, but it is interesting to read the document because the text and maps reveal how the military views the island.  It shows where they believe the “empty spaces” to be – those spaces that can be filled with firing ranges and other military activities.  The GIMDP while not a “final” plan includes specific language that particular activities must take place in certain spaces.  For instance the report states, “the only feasible location for the [firing] range siting and GCE / LSE [Ground Combat Element / Logistic Support Element] base is NCTS Finegayan” (p. 1.7 emphasis added).  The plan also fully expects the GLUP77 land parcel that was to be given up by the military to be withheld for these training areas.  There are also other places listed where the “site can only be:” training areas such as Andersen South (training with blanks) and a 60 mm and 81 mm mortar range in the Ordinance Annex / Fena. 

Also, while the GIMDP is not a “binding” document, it should be noted that archaeological surveys are already being done for the proposed areas. There are also some other good documents that demonstrate where the military is planning to do activities.  It is worth looking at archeological plans such as a “Work Plan for Archaeological Survey and Cultural Resources Studies in Support of the Joint Guam Build-Up, Island of Guam”  prepared by Institutional Archaeological Research Institute, Inc. Honolulu through contract with TEC, inc Honolulu . Done by M.J. Tomonari-Tuggle and David J. Welch and also the 2006 Archaeological Assessment Study in Support of the Strategic Forward Basing Initiative, Guam and the Commonwealth of the Northern Marianas Islands  (also by M.J. Tomonari-Tuggle.).  Unlike the GIMDP, these documents clearly show what the military has tried hard to erase.  The Work Plan for Archaeological Survey and Cultural Resources Studies in Support of the Joint Guam Build-Up, Island of Guam notes in regards to the Ordinance Annex that “Eighty-seven traditional Chamorro sites have been documented in the proposed mortar range…. Four date from the late Unai phase, four from the Huyong phase and 47 from the middle and/or late Latte Periods” p. 23.  In the Archaeological Assessment Study in Support of the Strategic Forward Basing Initiative, Guam and the Commonwealth of the Northern Marianas Islands it mentions not only the possible damage to Tinian’s northern beaches which are to be used for amphibious landing practice but that “The Strategic Forward Basing Initiative proposes use of the island [Aguiguan / Goat Island] as a target area for artillery fire from Tinian” and that an extensive archaeological survey of the island should be done, “on the nearly certain assumption that the entire island is potentially eligible for the National Register [of Historic Places]” p. 132. They point out that Aguiguan “has a remarkably preserved historical landscape that includes pre-contact and Japanese-era settlement and associated archaeological deposits” p. 132. 

For anyone familiar with the geography of Tinian and Aguiguan (Goat Island) this brings up an important question: Where on Tinian is this artillery going to be fired from?  Aguiguan is south of Tinian and the current military lands on Tinian are on the northern end.  It would appear that either more land in the south will be needed or shells will be fired over the southern civilian area.  I actually spoke briefly with members of the military while I was on Tinian , and I asked them about this plan. They took pains to say that this may not happen and that there are problems with civilian aircraft routes.  I also should mention that they seemed pretty uncomfortable that I was asking about this.  In discussions I had with government officials on Tinian , they reported they had never been notified of such a plan.

While these examples show that sites of historical and cultural importance are being painted by the military as “empty,” they are likewise doing this with ecological reserves as well.  The proposed firing ranges at Finegayan are planned over the Haputo Ecological Reserve Area and a new large ordinance facility on the Orote Peninsula appears to intrude on the Orote Ecological Reserve Area.  Ironically these reserves were set up because they were mandated in 1984 to mitigate the environmental damage caused by the construction of Kilo Wharf on the Orote Peninsula .  What is to be made of the fact that this designation appears to be so disposable now?  Or will the argument be that the firing ranges and construction at both Finegayan and Orote are not environmentally damaging?  Or will some other site on island be labeled as important environmentally for mitigation purposes? If so, who will that land be taken from? 

One thing that comes through loud and clear in the military plans for Guam is the insistence that any place not including a current dwelling can be viewed as “empty.”  This of course is based on of the stereotypically American spatiality of living where the only places that are deemed to hold importance are within 50 feet of where you sleep.   This is the idea that you only have say over a place if it is on your property and that you have no say over the areas where you gather, pick, hunt, fish, etc.. The irony of course is that this is an extremely limited view of what places hold importance to people and isn’t true anywhere, even in the United States or Europe .  For instance, ask any American if they want a bombing range placed where they go camping or if they want a hotel built over the graves of their ancestors and it will quickly become evident that part of the current practice of imperialism is applying a standard to the colonized that the colonizers would never dream of extending to themselves.  Military planners may begrudgingly give lip service that these areas they plan to destroy are important to people in some ways but that their sacrifice is worth it for military security.  This follows the old cliché that “to make an omelet you have to break a few eggs.”  This, of course, is a phrase only ever said by someone not getting their own eggs broken.

  These military plans view Guam through a distinctly colonial eye.  Preserving historical sites, maintaining the island’s environmental integrity, continuing access for cultural practices, establishing original land ownership; these factors are erased through the representations of place portrayed in the maps and plans the military produces.  What is left off these maps?  What exists under the red dashed lines of future firing ranges?  As a visitor I can not fully understand the variety of meanings attached to these places, but I have heard enough in my brief time here to know some of them and to know they are being actively erased not just within, but through, the military planning documents, news reports, strategic analyses and “tip-of-the-spear” patriotic rhetoric. 

I recognize that the imperialist policies of my government treat people in Guam (and many other places) unfairly and function to tear away land and livelihoods.  I also recognize that my government’s projection of military violence around the world enables a small group of corrupt people to hold not only the rest of the world, but also my own country, hostage to their desire to hold on to wealth and power.  In this spirit I stand in solidarity with all of you making a stand for a better future for Guam and the world.

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