Puti'on Stories On Love, Intimacy, and Healing During Intense Grief

This digital storyboard is a compilation of works I completed in a deep moment of intense grief from the loss of my mother. In the span of 10 months, I had experienced several challenges and had to make difficult life choices to allow myself space to process and grieve. In this storyboard, I offer up some reflections on love, intimacy, healing, and grief. As someone who is Gela' and a Queer CHamoru, I often find myself dreaming up an indigenous future that generates and expands spaces for Gela', Tina'laoan, Mamflorita, Manmalalahi, Machom and other Queer and Transgender CHamoru and Pacific Islander people to heal from the collective harms of colonization on our communities. Like Kānaka Maoli healer and social worker Lynette Panglinawan; Mana Wāhine scholars Nohelani Teves and Heolimeleikalani Osorio; and my colleagues and famalao'an CHamoru Randizia B. Crisostomo, Anne Hattori, and Tina Taitano DeLisle historicize and note, colonialism has disrupted Pacific peoples cultural ways of grieving in order to assimilate and erase us. Though I am not an expert in traditional grief protocol nor am I a grief counselor, social worker, or practitioner, I am living in this moment of intense grief and navigating experiences and feelings of love, loss, intimacy, hardship, and healing without my mother no longer present with us in this realm. As a social work scholar and an artist, I wanted to share with you, through my grief work, my art, how I "theorize" or understand the world from this place of grief. Grief, like dreaming and imagination, can be a way of knowing. Dreaming, Imagination, and Grief, as Tanana Athabascan poet and scholar Dian Million puts it in her essay Intense Dreaming, "are “theory,” since they posit proposition and paradigm on how the world works." Simply put theories help us to know because they are a way to interpret, predict, and understand the world around us. They are for me, as a Gela' and Queer CHamoru, a way to make sense of new worlds that shift around me. Grief, like imagination and dreaming, allows me to maintain, (re)member, and reconnect with ancestors I can no longer see, to kin and community I've lost connection with, and even to places I long to return to. In this way, I believe grief, like dreaming and imagination, has the power to route us as a people towards an Indigenous futurity that escapes colonialism.

"Dreaming, theory, narrative, and critical thinking are not exclusive of each other. They form different ways of knowing, and I will ask that we might imagine them as uneasy relations and alliances that may acknowledge inclusion while we call for respecting necessary boundaries." Dian MIllion, Intense Dreaming

Why puti'on stories? Puti'on (stars), as Pohnpeian scholar Vicente Diaz discusses in his short film Paafu Stories, are our oldest ancestors that we continuously learn, remember, and build from as we navigate our futurities as Pacific peoples. In his written piece on Anti-colonial Voyaging, he suggests there is a line of sight that voyaging affords us beyond our current colonial conditions through routes connected to indigenous places and activated through old and resurged ways of canoe travel between our islands. When we know how we move, how our ancestors moved, we can resist and generate Pacific futurities through navigation as a way of knowing. Understanding the world through navigation means understanding it through experience, stories, song, dance, body adornment, spiritual encounters, and through sensing. Knowledge about our lands, oceans, skies, cosmos that have existed for millenia that can teach us a way forward that escapes colonizations grip on our identities and politics. Leanne Betasamosake Simpson reminds us that stars represent past, present, and future. That they exist somewhere in the present and are moving towards the future. That we perceive their existence in the past as their light travels long distances to reach our eyes. For her constellations are a place of gathering. Constellations exist as a place for collective resistance of communities that suffer under colonial regimes. By creating "theory" from this place of knowing taught to me by ancestors and kin through spirit, though land, through ocean, and through sky and cosmos above, I offer up this digital story and collection of my creative work as a way to route our grief towards healing. To voyage through dreaming and imagining places where our ancestors go when they move on from this realm. How do we love, hold intimacy, hold grief, and heal in these moments of intense feeling? How do we face our past traumas and harms and and the trauma and harms experienced by our ancestors? How do we work towards a futurity where we are all included? One where our communities and families no longer perpetuate lateral oppression and violence onto us. These routes often seem too vast, like an ocean metaverse where we can easily become disoriented. They often seem overwhelming to map, to feel grounded in, sometimes to even be whole. But these routes also offer us the potential for change and healing. They offer a future where Gela', Tinalao'an, Mamflorita, Manmalalahi, Machom, and other Queer and Transgender CHamorus can live unrestrained by the bounds colonization draws between us on our community.

Click on the buttons below to explore my works. They are listed in the order I hoped to present them to you. Many of these pieces are in the Guma' Gela' exhibit, some of them are located here for you to explore more deeply. There is also a QR code below to this website if you want to explore this on your own at a later time or are short on time. Dangkolo' na Saina Ma'ase for witnessing and engaging with my grief work. I hope that it brings you comfort, ease, or learning.

Bibliography

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Date last edited: March 2023