Our Islands, Our Refuge: Response to Craig Santos Perez's "Blue-Washing the Colonization and Militarization of 'Our Ocean'"

Our Islands, Our Refuge:Response to Craig Santos Perez's "Blue-Washing the Colonization and Militarization of 'Our Ocean'" Theresa (Isa) Arriola (bio) While Craig Santos Perez's article was written in 2014 shortly after then President Barack Obama's decision to expand the Pacific Remote Islands Marine National Monument, his critique remains more relevant than ever amid the increased militarization of the Pacific. We are reminded once again of the long and seemingly paradoxical relationship between militarism and the environment, one in which environmental protections themselves can promote violence in the name of conservation. While these outcomes have often been described as "green-washing," Perez's framing of monuments, parks, preserves, refuges, and sanctuaries as "blue-washing" highlights militarism's transformational capacity to shift our relations with the sea toward militarized goals beyond the horizon and deep below the surface. The fact remains that monuments and other spaces of federal oversight throughout the Pacific serve as important sites of territorialization—not always in a legal sense but often conceptually—and rely heavily on militarism to further entrench this reality. As Joe Painter pointed out, "the nature of territory itself—its being and becoming, rather than its consequences and effects—remains under-theorised and too often taken for granted" (2010, 1090). While local disputes over monuments, sanctuaries, and other zones of federal conservation are often oversimplified as debates between those who want more and those who want fewer environmental regulations, their existence points to larger and more systemic issues of power over the meaning making of oceanic space (Steinberg 2001). In this discussion and in response to Perez, I want to continue the conversation by pointing less to the question of what expanding or contracting regulations might look like and more to that of how these regulations influence [End Page 104] Indigenous sovereignty in the region. Perez's assertions lead us to examine how we might reconcile the notion of protection when spaces of environmental conservation simultaneously preserve military defense missions. Specifically, I wish to draw on the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands (CNMI) and the Marianas archipelago more broadly as a case study for this discussion. In the CNMI, the Marianas Trench National Monument overlaps with the Mariana Islands Training and Testing (MITT) Study Area, which includes just under one million square nautical miles currently used for US military training and testing (US Department of the Navy 2015). Just five years ago, the size of the MITT Study Area was merely half of what it is today. If you zoom out a bit on a map of the MITT, you will notice its connection to the Hawaiian Islands Range Complex. Zoom out just a bit farther, and you will find that both complexes are linked to the Southern California Range Complex. Strikingly, as Noelani Goodyear-Ka'ōpua observed, "Together with the existing Hawaiian Islands Range Complex and the transit corridor between them, the new MITT opens America's largest training and weapons testing area in the world" (2019, 92). These ranges are linked not just by militarism but also by zones of economic connection made possible through Indigenous erasure. For example, the MITT Study Area overlaps with Chamorro and Refaluwasch homelands, as well as one of the largest exclusive economic zones (eezs, or "frontiers," as a publication by Bonnie McGregor and Terry Offield on behalf of the US Department of the Interior/Geological Survey describes them [1983]) under US jurisdiction. The ensuing militarization of the land is deeply interwoven with US and Indigenous territorial claims over the air and sea. While Chamorros and Refaluwasch peoples retain legal ownership of the land in the CNMI, processes of US militarization in the name of national defense and nation building are slowly chipping away at their ability to maintain control over the land. Given the central importance of the land and sea for Indigenous Pacific Islanders and their strategic importance for military planning, attention to the ebbs and flows of blue-washing is critical to the maintenance of Indigenous self-governance. The Making of an Ocean Nation "The United States is an Ocean Nation," according to a map released by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association...