Signature Event Speaker Series: Christine Taitano DeLisle

Down the “Long Road”: CHamoru Women Confronting the Historical and Gendered Landscapes of U.S. Militarism in Guåhan

This talk explores a history of Native women laborers under U.S. naval colonial administration of Guåhan. DeLisle draws from her forthcoming book (UNC Press) to follow the divergent paths Native midwives and teachers forged down the navy’s early twentieth century civilizing project, especially as these paths intersected with the work of white women. Inspired by the midwives’ insistence on burying the newborn’s placenta (against the navy’s orders to burn or discard it) out of respect for deep cultural meanings and kinship relations, DeLisle theorizes native women’s historical land work as a “placental politics” that can inform a new generation of women stewarding lands, waters, and communities in a new round of military development, desecration, and environmental destruction of CHamoru ancestral homelands.

Bio: Tina Taitano DeLisle is Associate Professor of American Indian Studies at the University of Minnesota Twin-Cities. She is a CHamoru historian whose work focuses on the intersections of colonialism, militarism, indigeneity, and gender in the Pacific Islands, particularly in the region of Micronesia. She also researches and teaches in the fields of global Indigenous studies and heritage and museum studies, and has a strong interest in comparative Native women’s histories and Indigenous feminisms. DeLisle’s book, Placental Politics: CHamoru Women, White Womanhood and Indigeneity under U.S. Colonialism in Guam, is forthcoming with the University of North Carolina Press. Her current project examines the histories of U.S. national park designations, military narratives of conservation, and Indigenous land struggles and stewardship in the Marianas.