Day 1 of the Meetings in SF
It's been an eventful day. We started off by waking up to the Mission District with all it's lovely and no so lovely smells. We stayed with Anj's family overnight. First I have to say we ate the best Mexican food last night which was also cheap!! We walked around the mission and visited Balmy Avenue and the many murals in the district. The picture is of one in another alley which Auntie TK calls Piko Art. I loved it and post it to center me. We had our first dinner together tonight as the network. Women from Guam, South Korea, Okinawa, Japan, CNMI, Philippines, Puerto Rico and the US joined us in a circle. Tonight we introduced ourselves to each other in a unique way. Each woman said her name, where she was from and the gift she brings to the meetings. We sang her name back to her accompanied by using our hands to symbolize her journey and how we bring her name into our hearts. It was poetic and it sounds dorky describing it, but what I got from it was profound and moving. I remember a woman who said that brought her ancestors with her. Another woman whose ancestral ties come from Oceania talked about her endurance. Another woman talked about the gift of her anger. Each woman described something individually but what we felt at the end of the experience was what we embody collectively as people. We all hold anger, we all have endurance, we all bring our ancestors, our ability to connect, our open hearts, our hope. Our sense of humor through the darkness we also feel.
To further introduce ourselves, we split up into groups and were asked to find those we have a close affiliation, whatever that may be by nation, what was a nation, whatever. I saw Ellen and we looked at other Pilipina women in the diaspora, those who live in Hawaii or the US and ended up with the US group. I felt torn because I left Auntie TK and Summer alone. We were asked to identify the freshest wound we could identify with at the moment due to US militarism. I immediately felt the loss of my cousin then the feeling of violence we have from being in the belly of the beast or the "monster" as someone from the Philippines calls the US. We talked about the racism, about domestic violence, of the disconnection and the internalized violence we have in the US, the disempowerment we have ironically as people who come from one of the superpowers of the planet. We were asked to come up with a vision and a concrete action we could do as a group. This was also quite difficult. We talked abstractly, we addressed individual needs to address violence. I said what if the US gave up Hawaii, Guam, Puerto Rico and other places. I know it's pie in the sky, but I wasn't satisfied with something personal. I figure since we are in the belly of the "monster" we should go for something big. Someone asked well what about those of us eg. Filipinos. What are we to do? Leave? I said well it's up to the Kanaka Maoli, they will decide. We have to ask if they want us to stay, we can't assume. We have to trust that they will hold us in their hearts. We have to give up our need for power and trust them. We should not operate from a place of fear. Where does that leave us, most of the folks in the group come from immigrants, none of us native, native to the land called America, except by birth? Just because we were born in US, is this land our birthright? We are in occupied territory, aren't we? Colonized territory? Where does a non-native stand in the vision for self-determination. What kind of self-determination does a disconnected/dispossessed American of non-white ancestry have to the land we live on? Ultimately, self-determination was the vision the US group wanted to hold which would encompass self-determination for dealing with interpersonal violence, violence within and between communities and internationally.
What every group reported back was powerful. Some of the women in the Philippines were denied visas to come to the US. The women of Korea talked about how they felt being treated like criminals to want to travel to the US, from the visa application through coming to customs. The women from Hawaii, Guam, Puerto Rico and CNMI came up with a lovely metaphor of a volcano which is fertile and can create something new. The women from the Philippines came up with 1621. It's been 16 years since the US bases were closed down and 21 years since the overthrow of Marcos. Since that time the presence of US military in the Philippines has escalated and the number of political killings has over tripled since Marcos' time. 16 and 21 years ago there was a strong American movement against Marcos and the US Bases that does not exist today. There are over 1 million Filipinos in the US who send money home, who do not want to talk back to the Master because they serve the Master to feed their families. They want big steps. They need big steps to be taken to deal with the militarization in the Philippines by the US. The Okinawan women talked about the presence of US military feeling like being beaten over and over again. Their visceral description was akin to jabbing and jabbing. The women of Japan talked about the tension of what group to belong to because while they feel a deep kinship with the Okinawan women they have no place being with that group. They needed to give up the need to be with that group when they were coming from a base of power (Japan) and formed their own group. They felt sad because they thought they had dealt with this subject 10 years ago, but the relational issue to power is still there. It reminded me of the work we have to do in Hawaii and the Unsettle Hawaii group and why the need to have our own group to figure out what work we have to accomplish. We have to find some meaning for what self-determination might mean for those of us who live and whose power base is from the belly of the "monster". This is unique and different than what the Kanaka Maoli community must do for themselves. Our quest is to discover what that might mean, then perhaps we can then figure out how not to serve the Master, Our Monster.
