Ha’åni Lucia Falo San Nicolas

This project explores how manCHamoru in Guåhan, the largest island of Låguas yan Gåni (the Mariana archipelago) and an unincorporated U.S. territory, enact a particular form of activism theorized as “reproductive liberation,” an inextricable engagement between reproductive justice and CHamoru sovereignty. This research centers CHamoru ancestral and embodied knowledge and confronts the void of famalao’an CHamoru— CHamoru women— in historical accounts by documenting their leadership and work in decolonial movements. This project approaches archival and activist-ethnographic research through an innovative method termed “resurgent poetics,” a way of gathering and sharing the intimacy of CHamoru experiences that repositions reproductive liberation as a return to an Indigenous way of being.