Since the United States seized control of Guam during World War II, the US military has slowly turned the Pacific island into a military garrison, destroying cultural sites, food sources, and, importantly, limestone forests that contain medicinal plants used by the Indigenous Chamorro people.
As the expansion continues, the US began building a new military base in 2023, the construction of which requires clearing a thousand acres of land and restricting key parts of a national wildlife refuge.
It’s already difficult for Guam’s Chamorro medicine women, or yo’åmte, to gather medicinal plants from traditional lands, which are now considered US military property. The new base, constructed on yet more traditional lands, will only make it harder. This affects the medicine women’s ability to heal their community and realize the Chamorro’s right to health and to pass on their medicinal knowledge to a new generation of yo’åmte. Human Rights Watch spoke with three yo’åmte—all grandmothers in their 70s and 80s—about how the US militarization of Guam infringes on their ability to realize the rights of Chamorro people.
“Are You Satisfied?”
Rosalia Fejeran Mateo, known as Mama Chai, an 88-year-old Indigenous Chamorro yo’åmte, was collecting medicinal plants together with her apprentice in March 2023 when they were stopped by two US military officials on the island. Mama Chai and her apprentice had mistakenly entered a restricted military zone while searching for medicine in the forest. The officers, seeing the plants in Mama Chai’s hand, asked her what she was carrying. Mama Chai, who has a healing center on the island, explained that she was collecting medicine in the forest. The officers then informed her that she could be arrested for trespassing on military land.
“I just threw [the medicine] down on the sand [and said to them:] ‘My god … are you satisfied?’” The military officials eventually let Mama Chai and her apprentice go. When she returned home, she told her son: “Your mom nearly didn’t come home … But I’m free.”
As the US military operation on the island grows, yo’åmte are increasingly subjected to restrictions, preventing medicine women from realizing the right to health for themselves and for the Chamorro people they serve.
Drawing on the work of Harvard University academic Rob Nixon, policy experts characterize these restrictions and ongoing threats to the physical and mental health of Chamorro people as a form of “slow violence” that takes place gradually and often in full view. The Chamorro people of Guam have long experienced slow violence at the hands of the US military. For the yo’åmte, slow violence includes restrictions on access to medicinal plants, which the Chamorro experience as the erasure of Indigenous identity, culture, and knowledge systems on the one hand, and the promotion of hegemonic Western beliefs centered on militarism, capitalism, and biomedical conceptions of health instead.
The US Military
As the US military expands its already-significant footprint on the island through what some activists call “settler colonialism,” years of colonization have left a legacy of unaddressed human rights challenges. These include land seizure, toxic contamination, and serious health harms that are coming to a head because of the military buildup on Guam.
Approximately 28 percent of the island is occupied by the US military, but the extent and impact of their presence, including environmental contamination stemming from the military’s open burn and detonation activity, is far greater. Recently, the US military announced plans to invest billions of dollars in missile defense systems on Guam and build a new shooting range over a wildlife refuge.
The US is also constructing a new military base, Camp Blaz, which is expected to house 5,000 marines and their dependents, who will be relocated from Okinawa, Japan. The camp’s construction will require clearing a thousand acres of land and restricting key parts of a national wildlife refuge at an area called Ritidian Point. This includes clearing native limestone forests that take hundreds of thousands of years to develop naturally and are an important carbon sink.
These habitats contain numerous endangered species, ancient burial sites, and invaluable medicinal plants. Given the scale of environmental, human, and cultural destruction, Chamorro activist groups like Prutehi Litekyan: Save Ritidian (Prutehi), along with traditional medicine women, fishers, and advocates, have continuously resisted the military buildup.
Moneaka Flores, a member of Prutehi, shared her views on the destruction of the environment to create Camp Blaz and the closure of Ritidian Point to build a gun range. It’s “a violation of our inherent rights as the Indigenous people of this land, which is to be the stewards of the land and of our ancestral remains and of each other. Seeing that devastation [of Camp Blaz], seeing the clearing and the grading, how many feet it went down, it’s just a scarring of the land and the planet, and it’s so massive,” she said. “It’s almost like you can feel that the land is in pain, and you are carrying that pain in your body as well.”
The destruction of parts of Ritidian Point weigh heavily on her and other Chamorro. “It’s going to impact access for traditional medicines, access to fishing, but moreover, it’s adding to a trauma and an injustice of the families who’ve lost that land,” she said. She added that it will be a loss for “all of us who love Ritidian so deeply and feel how powerful and special a place it is when we are there.”
As a result of the US military expansion, Prutehi submitted a complaint to the United Nations special rapporteur on the rights of Indigenous peoples on October 14, 2024, alleging various human rights violations committed by the US government against the Chamorro people. The complaint details the ongoing US colonization of Guam, one of the last formally recognized colonies in the world.
The United States, as the colonial administrator of the territory, is obligated under international law to respect the right to self-determination of the people of Guam. Despite being US citizens, Chamorro people have no meaningful representation within the US political system as colonial subjects; they have no representation in Congress and no right to vote in US presidential elections.
Resisting Colonization
The UN has consistently raised concerns to the US about Guam’s status as a colony, and in a 2021 resolution the General Assembly noted that “in the process of decolonization of Guam, there is no alternative to the principle of self-determination, which is also a fundamental human right.” Continued US colonial occupation of Guam constitutes a denial of the right to self-determination and gives rise to violations of other human rights of the Chamorro people.
As Chamorro people continue to resist US colonization and assert their human rights, they do so with the understanding that respect for human rights is intrinsically connected to their Indigneous identity, which includes the role Taotaomo’na—ancestors who serve as guardians of the land and forests—play in protecting rights pertaining to nature. Ancestors play a crucial role in facilitating the medicine women’s access to medicinal plants. As yo’åmte Frances Meno—better known as Auntie Frances—stated: “That’s how I see my connection between land and humans. And I’m not saying I’m a healer, because I’m not. It’s actually God and our mother nature, which is the herbs that are growing from our natural environment.”
Revealing the profound spiritual and ecological dimensions inherent in Indigenous healing practices, Auntie Frances emphasizes the interconnectedness between spiritual beliefs, ecological balance, and traditional methods of healing. Dr. Anne Hattori, professor of History, Micronesian Studies, and CHamoru Studies at the University of Guam, agrees. When Hattori teaches her students about the role of Chamorro healers, she emphasizes that for Chamorro, their relationships with the natural world around them are interrelated to their physical health and bodies. When she describes healers, “I tell my students, you’re basically combining a priest and a medical doctor in one.” The yo’åmte therefore serve a dual role of providing health and spiritual care through their holistic approach to healing, which is essential for the social reproduction of Chamorro culture and the transfer of Indigenous knowledge.
Gathering the Plants
The process of locating and collecting medicinal plants is deeply spiritual for yo’åmte. First, in accordance with Chamorro tradition, it is necessary to ask the ancestors for permission to enter the forest. Yo’åmte often pray while collecting plants, deeply aware of their connection to the land and the role of the earth in providing vital medicine. The yo’åmte know that they may not always find the plants they need if the spiritual connection to the land cannot be attained.
“Sometimes the herbs are there. The spirit of the land—which we call our ancestors—if they want to give it to you, it will be right there,” Yo’åmte Auntie Frances, who works with two apprentices, explained about the process of going into the forest to collect the plants. “If they don’t want you to have that [the plants], it’s there, but you can’t see it. Sometimes they don’t give it to me. Then I have to go back the next day and try again. Then it’s there.”
The most important native plants that grow in the forests of Guam cannot be grown outside of the unique limestone and forest environment; they must grow in the wild in the presence of the spirits. With the destruction of Guam’s forests and restrictions imposed on access to Ritidian Point’s natural reserve, healers lose both the important ancestral connection with their land as well as access to a large variety of these ancient medicinal plants. For yo’åmte apprentice Vinessa Duenas, “so much land has been taken that we cannot access the medicine.”
Current US military policies blocking access to key areas where Indigenous plants frequently grow pose significant barriers for yo’åmte to search for and collect medicinal plants.
“The military areas are prime landscapes for medicine,” said yo’åmte apprentice Caley Jay Chargualaf. “There’s medicine found in the limestone areas, there’s medicine found near the ocean and the beaches, and they [the military] take up a lot of that land. And unfortunately, it’s not very accessible to us. We have to [fill out] so many forms, [jump] through so many hoops … and even then, there’s been so many stories of yo’åmtes getting in trouble from the federal government because they’re crossing boundaries.”
Under the military regulations, yo’åmte have to be registered and make a formal request to access land controlled by the armed forces for medicinal collection purposes. They are then given permission and escorted by a military official to collect medicine from their own rightful, sacred land. Many of the yo’åmte with whom we spoke shared experiences of the difficulties that they face in trying to navigate military regulations to access areas at the Andersen Air Force Base and the Naval Base. They argued that there is a dissonance between the spiritual connection to the land which defines the way the yo’åmte work and the bureaucratic rigidity of the military procedures.
Yo’åmte collect fresh herbs and plants in response to specific needs. They cannot pre-plan what they are likely to need. Therefore, making an advance request to access military sites is often not possible. Auntie Frances explained the challenges she faces:
“We don’t know when we are going to go and need that plant, and if we need it at that certain time, we have to go in and get it. We cannot wait for them to say, ‘okay, I have somebody available next week. I’ll come in and get you next week.’ No, we want to get it at that time, because we do need it for maybe the next day.”
The transgenerational passing of knowledge of Indigenous medicine is essential to preserve Chamorro healing practices for the future. For the Chamorro, it is also an important expression of resistance to US colonialism and militarization. For Yo’åmte Auntie Lou Manglona, who works with professors and academics to create a program for Indigenous medicine at the University of Guam, “the reason I’ve created a Chamorro medicine class, is … it is very important to maintain our culture … it’s also very important that you have a good relationship with the plant. Because if you don’t have a good relationship with the plant, you cannot be a healer.”
The yo’åmtes’ resistance is in many ways quiet. It does not manifest in the form of mass protests or an uprising against the US military. But it is exhibited in daily practices of choosing to hold onto and pass down Indigenous knowledge and identity. And these master yo’åmtes, alongside their apprentices, are in many respects the face of Chamorro resistance.