Native FAQS

I will be heading out of San Diego tomorrow morning for a week of work and family fun.

On Saturday, me and my cousin Alfred Peredo Flores Jr. (familian Robot/Kabesa) and our favorite palao'an Palauan Madelsar Tmetuchl Ngiraingas will be running two counseling/networking sessions at the National Pacific Islander Education Network conference. Our sessions will cover first questions about appyling for college and getting financial (non-military) support for Pacific Islanders, and second how to network, organize and meet other Pacific Islanders in higher education or in the community.

This is the fourth year that I've done this conference, if you are in the area and would like to attend please click on the link above. For the first two years I participated on these panels Michael Perez who is in Socioogy at CSU Fullerton was in charge. Last year however since i kayu-hu couldn't make it, I took over and brought on Madel and Alfred. Here's a photo of us from last year.


A conference like this is especially important given the education statistics and report released recently by Asian American Studies Center at UCLA. For those of you who check out the report and press release, I'll warn you ahead of time, while it is informative and insightful for thinking about the economic and educational position of Pacific Islanders today, it does take the typical social science position of not just comparing numbers of groups, but by making clear the gravity of a situation by comparing Pacific Islanders to some eternally poor performing and pathological group. For example, "these numbers reach almost African American proportions."

The day after this, Sunday the 19th I'll be participating in the Famoksaiyan Southern California meeting to be held at The Guam Communications Network office in Long Beach. If you are interested in attending or knowing more here's the tentative schedule. Although this meeting will be primarily for Chamorros, any and all Pacific Islanders are welcome to attend as allies as are other groups from Guam or interested in progressive politics related to Chamorros and Guam.

If you would like to know more about the group Famoksaiyan you can check out the archives for our listerv (famoksaiyan@lists.riseup.net) through this link. Or we also have a myspace account which has profiles of members and articles and more info. We are basically a progressive Chamorro organization working on different forms of decolonization both in Guam and in the diaspora. Here's a photo from the conference in April.


After the weekend I'll be driving up north to visit my mom and family for Thanksgiving. Although I have made some weak promises to work on my prospectus and other projects, I will most likely end up throwing away most of the weekend playing the new Nintendo Wii with my brother Jack and sister Alina.

One thing which Angie requested I do though over the Thanksgiving break is come up with a sort of either written or recorded Frequently Asked Questions piece for those of you who may not be very familiar with the concepts or discussions we are discussing in our podcasts or posts.

If you have any particular questions that you would like answered or would like to see me try and answer please email them to me at mlbasquiat@hotmail.com