I USED to wonder why the indigenous call for sovereignty, for a long-overdue end to our colonial condition, has oftentimes been accompanied by gut-reactions that ask if we Natives would prefer to return to our alleged days of “savagery.”
Could it be, perhaps, that the legitimacy with which we speak poses a considerable threat to neocolonial interests seeking to exploit our homelands?
Could it be that this simple act of speaking out in such dire times and affirming our human right to life evokes fear from those who gain profit from our subjugation?
Take heed of the dispossession currently taking place in parts of Africa, the Middle East, Asia, and throughout our islands of the Pacific.
Take heed, and become aware of the dross of New World Order (read: neocolonial) profiteering that is creating more riches for the rich and bringing death to the deprived masses.
We do not wish to continue this path toward annihilation.
We do not desire to play the exotic backdrop for military war games.
War is definitely not the answer.
In the wisdom of an American who understood what we are saying:
“The Western arrogance of feeling that it has everything to teach others and nothing to learn from them is not just. A true revolution of values will lay hands on the world order and say of war: ‘This way of settling differences is not just.’ This business of burning human beings with napalm, of filling our nation’s homes with orphans and widows, of injecting poisonous drugs of hate into veins of people normally humane, of sending men home from dark and bloody battlefields physically handicapped and psychologically deranged, cannot be reconciled with wisdom, justice and love. A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.”
That’s from “Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence” by the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
Despite attempts to skew our movement, our message is plain: let us again begin to celebrate life. Maybe we are not savages, after all.
One Love,

FANAI CASTRO
Guåhan, Matao Archipelago