Thursday’s open house event at the Cultural Repository at the University of Guam, hosted by Joint Region Marianas, was met with concerns from Speaker Therese Terlaje over how historic sites are being handled.
Terlaje, head of the legislative committee overseeing land and culture, issued a statement the day of the open house, calling for the military to do more to ensure the community is informed of the true impacts to cultural sites and to use every possible option to preserve sites in place.
The Programmatic Agreement – which outlines commitments and processes the military will abide by during the course of the relocation of thousands of Marines from Okinawa to Guam – is not the success story for the island “as the Department of Defense (DOD) would have you believe,” Terlaje said in a press release.
“It was a success story for DOD versus the people of Guam. The Department of Defense was able to lump almost all its projects on Guam ‘related to the buildup’ under one agreement, and treat them all identical, regardless of historical significance,” Terlaje said.
Despite saying preservation in place would be prioritized, the speaker said, the agreement has allowed DOD to be the sole decision-maker as to whether preservation in place is possible.
“Preservation in place is a hugely different way of treating historical places and allows future generations with different technology to stand in those places and see for themselves the landscapes and the environment where the CHamoru lived for thousands of years, where the CHamoru were able to survive for thousands of years,” Terlaje stated.
The legislative speaker said she appreciated outreach efforts such as the open house, but said these events are “still not responsive” to requests for public access to historic sites on military property.
“We need the military to go beyond the minimum requirements of the 2011 Programmatic Agreement in good faith to ensure our community stakeholders are truly informed regarding the impacts to our cultural and historic sites, cultural landscapes and ancestral burials and that every possible option is utilized to preserve any remaining historic sites in place,” she added.
Group writes to elected officials
The meeting also drew criticism from the indigenous-women-led organization I Hagan Famalao’an Guåhan.
“Since its inception, the Guam Cultural Repository has been described by the Department of Defense and local representatives as purely beneficial for the people of Guam without acknowledging that this facility exists to house artifacts unearthed during military buildup construction; construction that has moved forward without the free, prior, and informed consent of the CHamoru people, as acknowledged by United Nations human rights experts in 2021,” Famalao’an Guåhan stated in a letter calling on the governor and lawmakers to consider the harmful impacts of the repository.
The letter was dated Jan. 18, the day before the open house event.
The group went on to say that government officials have described the repository as something to be proud of, before reminding elected leaders to consider all contexts, including the perspective that “perpetuates the continued desecration of CHamoru settlements that should not have been cleared in the first place, especially without certain protections in place.”
Twenty organizations called on the governor’s office in 2019 to establish a local committee to oversee military construction with recommendations that included nullifying the 2011 Programmatic Agreement regarding the relocation of U.S. military personnel to Guam.
None of the recommendations were implemented and, if they had been, it would have mitigated harm done to the cultural sites, the group stated.