https://doi.org/10.1177/1750698019894690 Memory Studies 1–13 © The Author(s) 2019 Article reuse guidelines: sagepub.com/journals-permissions DOI: 10.1177/1750698019894690 journals.sagepub.com/home/mss Remade: Sovereign: Decolonizing Guam in the age of environmental anxiety Francisco Delgado Borough of Manhattan Community College, USA Abstract Linking Cultural Memory Studies, Indigenous Studies, as well as the growing field of Environmental Humanities, my article casts decolonization efforts in Guam not only as a process steeped in history, politics, and economics, but also as a necessary means to address environmental precarity. I use Craig Santos Perez’s poetry to highlight the multifaceted scope of decolonization: namely, that it entails the use of the Indigenous Chamorro language, the decolonizing of the imaginations of Chamorro people, who continue to enlist for (and die for) a nation that exploits their lands, waters, and bodies and finally the deliberate retrieval of cultural memory that promotes balance between humans and nature. Cultural memory and decolonization are thus linked. Together, they assuage the environmental impact of settler colonialism in Guam and elsewhere. Keywords colonialism, cultural memory, decolonization, Guam, sovereignty Craig Santos Perez’s collection of books, from unincorporated territory, is an ambitious undertak- ing. Through a series of interrelated poems that span the entire oeuvre—beginning with [hacha] in 2008, 2010’s [saina], 2014’s [guma’], which won the American Book Award, and most recently 2017’s [lukao]—Perez captures the tensions of his home island of Guam as they appear in the minds of his fellow Chamorros (the Indigenous 1 people of Guam), politicians on the island and in Washington, DC, military personnel, tourists, environmentalists, and activists. Taken together, Perez’s books provide an ongoing collage from which readers can perhaps piece together a com- plete image of the island, which was among the first Pacific locations under colonial rule and remains one of the last to achieve independence. 2 The title of this article “Remade: Sovereign,” is taken from Perez’s (2008) poem, “from lisiensan ga’lago” in [hacha] about how Chamorro sover- eignty movements challenge the dominant narrative of Guam as an outpost for the United States and as a fruitful military recruitment site (p. 16, line 15). The phrase emphasizes that to achieve sovereignty, the island must first be remade through decolonization. A remaking of the island Corresponding author: Francisco Delgado, Borough of Manhattan Community College, 199 Chambers Street, New York, NY 10007-1097, USA. Email: FDelgado@bmcc.cuny.edu 894690MSS 0 0 10.1177/1750698019894690Memory StudiesDelgado research-article 2019 Article