The Chamorro Creation Story, Guam Land Struggles, and Contemporary Poetry

2020 ◽  
Vol 58 (1) ◽  
pp. 9-20
Author(s):  
Craig Santos Perez

Abstract This essay focuses on the creation story of the Indigenous Chamorro people from the western Pacific Island of Guam. The essay presents and analyzes the deeper meaning of the story of Puntan and Fu’una as they birth the island of Guam and the Chamorro people. Moreover, it maps the history of Catholic missionization that displaced and replaced the Chamorro creation story. The essay covers the related issue of how colonization removed Chamorros from their ancestral lands and appropriated these lands for imperial, military, tourism, and urban development. Then it highlights the decades-long struggle of Chamorro activists to reclaim the land. Lastly, it turns to contemporary Chamorro poetry to illustrate how authors have revitalized and retold the story of Puntan and Fu’una to critique and protest the degradation of Chamorro lands and to advocate for the protection and return of the land.

Author(s):  
Tracey Banivanua Mar

This chapter examines photographs of Pacific Island women laboring in fields in Queensland in the late 1890s, arguing that colonial photography can be a critical means of filling archival silences. It reflects on how we may read this photography in layers, both as a candid snapshot of the physical world of the past, as well as a more subtle register of that world's ideological composition. This is significant in the context of colonial histories in the western Pacific and Australia where indigenous and colonized women's labor, and their contribution to colonial and colonized societies, has been subjected to the violence of a structural amnesia. Photography offers not only visual evidence of a barely told history of Pacific Islander women's labor as told through the agency of their physical presentation. In addition, the medium itself, the photograph and its visual language, points in interesting ways to the discursive contours that shaped indigenous and colonized women's agency.


2021 ◽  
Vol 21 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Neiloy R. Sircar ◽  
Stella A. Bialous

Abstract Background Increasingly, international health bodies frame public health measures, including tobacco control, in the context of human rights (HR). It is unclear how prevalent is the connection between human rights and tobacco control within global health governance. This paper describes the inclusion of HR in tobacco control governance, and the inclusion of tobacco control in HR treaty oversight. We depict the current reach of HR’s normative influence in framing the tobacco epidemic in global, regional, and country-specific contexts. Methods We reviewed documents (agenda, reports) from 2010 to 2019 from the World Health Assembly (WHA); the WHO Western Pacific Regional Committee Meetings (RCM); the WHO Framework Convention on Tobacco Control (WHO FCTC) Conferences of the Parties (COP); and documents provided by Pacific Island Countries party to, or by committees overseeing, HR treaties. We purposively selected the Western Pacific Region, and Pacific Island Countries specifically, to represent countries of varying populations, capacities, and governance. Results Tobacco control and HR are infrequently mentioned together in the WHAs, and primarily in only one COP. Tobacco control is mentioned in 47 HR treaty committee documents for Pacific Island Countries, mostly under the Convention of the Rights of the Child recognizing or calling for ratification of the WHO FCTC. HR and tobacco control are connected in WHO Western Pacific RCM, particularly through their two most-recent action plans adopted by respective RCMs. Discussion Tobacco control as a HR concern is gaining traction within HR treaty bodies, at least with respect to children’s health in the Western Pacific Region. Conclusion Globally, HR is just emerging as an influence in global health governance for tobacco discussions. Within the Western Pacific Region however tobacco control is seen by some authorities as a HR issue. Similarly, to HR experts, tobacco control is becoming important to how Pacific Island Countries fulfill their treaty obligations, suggesting tobacco control advocates might explore these mechanisms to further influence the development of strong tobacco control measures to implement the WHO FCTC.


2020 ◽  
Vol 13 (4) ◽  
pp. 837-853 ◽  
Author(s):  
Takeshi Takeuchi ◽  
Tetsuji Masaoka ◽  
Hideo Aoki ◽  
Ryo Koyanagi ◽  
Manabu Fujie ◽  
...  

Heart Asia ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 9 (2) ◽  
pp. e010948 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marian Abouzeid ◽  
Judith Katzenellenbogen ◽  
Rosemary Wyber ◽  
David Watkins ◽  
Timothy David Johnson ◽  
...  

Author(s):  
Eleonora A. Shevchenko

The article considers the creation of a fortification line of defense of the Russian state during the 15th-16th centuries as a process of formation of a specific settlement system. It puts forward the hypothesis that the formation of a linear defensive-residential structure consisting of residential and defense constructions united by roads into a single structure of interconnected formations for various functions was purposeful. It is noted that one of the insufficiently studied pages of the Russian history of town-planning to this day remains "Watchline" not as object of fortification, but as an object of town-planning art. On the basis of the study of the works of D. Bagaley, F. Laskovsky, I.D. Belyaeva, A.I. Yakovlev and other researchers, including modern researchers, article concludes that the settlement of the XIV-XVI century's period originally had a planned character. That was, in fact, a complex system of resettlement created, based on a fundamentally new urban development technique for the development of territories. The article substantiates the legitimacy of using the concept of "Settlement System" as applied to the period of the XV-XVII centuries - the period of the state formation. It was the emergence of statehood that allowed the creation of a management system and the structure of such town-planning structures as the Zasechnye lines.


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