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I cannot fault Rogers in terms of his completeness or accuracy, he has taken nearly every text imaginable pretaining to Guam and somehow woven them all together into a narrative of some sort, which is occasionally exciting but ultimately demeaning, archaic and mediocre.
Rogers cannot sustain his own biases for more than a chapter in his text. Beginning with the always questionable "parable of the tribes," which is one of those wonderful little bed time stories that haole people tell themselves in practical and academic forms to soothe their aching consciences and souls. I found myself reiterating time and time again, where is the agency, where is the spirit? Where is the soul of the Chamorro people in this? "Where are they themselves?" I asked myself at times.
It was Victorian Anthropological deja'vu for me, reading a text written today through a mindset of a century ago. The title in itself alludes to the mettle of the text, "destiny's landfall." Sounds something white western and exciting. Of course this all comes at the espense of the indengous inhabitants as this history of Guam celebrates the actions, accomplishments of those luckly losers who made landfall on Guam and gives little attention to those unfortunate people, already on Guam, that they fell upon. The Chamorro people, save for the contemporary sections of the text are painted as little more than mannequins which are placed and posed at the whims of primary texts from European/Western explorers, priests government officials and other washouts. No attempt is made to mitigate the racist writings of the past centuries, the history of Guam is reported as it has always been, of a victimized people, with no power over anything (as destiny the Spanish, Japanese or Americans control them), who somehow have survived, but lost everything in the process.
A point could be made that this is because of the lack of any voice of defense for the Chamorros in the source documents since they were all written by outsiders, however this intimates to less of a hope for objectivity and search for truth by the author, but more for a racist laziness, which would report everything from old Spanish documents, near verbatim, except for where Magellan landed.
I rate this text with a three despite my loathing for it, because the comprehensive nature of it cannot be denied. The rating would be much higher if Rogers had attempted to create a balanced history, implying a new and different voice, one which centered around those that have lived on Guam for thousands of years, rather than its Europeans explorers, tyrannical tourists and lazy lay-overs, rather than retiterating the voice of every Spanish and American Govenror of Guam since time immemorial. But since it did not, the rating is only average, for in spirit it is an average text, anyone could of put this together.
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