On Hima: Colonial and Indigenous Politics of Conservation in Guåhan

On July 25th 2024, the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) announced that ten species of giant clams in Guåhan (Guam)–-known among the Indigenous CHamoru people as hima—will be classified as endangered and threatened under the U.S. Endangered Species Act (NOAA, “Proposed Rule for 10 Species of Giant Clams under the Endangered Species Act.” 25 July 2024). Under this new classification, the harvesting, crafting, transporting, selling and ownership of newly acquired hima may be criminalized by U.S. federal law. Many CHamoru activists are deeply committed to ecological stewardship, sustainability, and environmental justice. However, they strongly oppose this policy, viewing it as a direct threat to a 3,000-year-old Indigenous CHamoru cultural and religious tradition: the art of shell carving. Among the most significant cultural practices of the CHamoru people is crafting hima (giant clam shell) into sinahi, a crescent-shaped jewelry piece that symbolizes Indigenous CHamoru and Pasifika resistance, pride, voyaging, and navigation. 

This presentation situates the 2024 NOAA classification of the hima as ‘endangered’ and the criminalization of hima harvesting, within the longer history of U.S. conservation policy in Guåhan. I argue that U.S. conservation policy has been used as a legal mechanism to maintain U.S. political and legal authority in Guåhan, while eliding that U.S. imperialism and military occupation is the source of environmental catastrophe in Guåhan. U.S. conservation policy also continues to infringe on CHamoru land sovereignty, political self-determination, and religious expression. The research content presented on this issue at 2025 AAR will be based on the findings of my research conducted in May-June 2025 on the hima collection at the Sagan Kotturan CHamoru (SKC) Cultural Museum. SKC is a renowned Indigenous arts, cultural and religious center in Guam established during a 2006 “LANDBACK!” initiative that aimed at allocating land and government resources to the production and preservation of CHamoru culture. My research presentation will conclude by offering an Indigenous model of conservation rooted in Indigenous sovereignty, self-determination and “In-Place” preservation practices all within the context of LANDBACK! politics in Guåhan.

Conservation and preservation policies issued by settler and imperial states are largely entangled with politics of sovereignty (Gilio-Whitaker, As Long as Grass Grows) within: (a) contexts of settler-territorial expansion, land acquisition, urbanization, and industrialization (Estes, Our History is the Future; Whyte, “Settler Colonialism, Ecology, and Environmental Justice”); (b) the aftermath of “boom-and-bust” extractive economies (Kreitman, Japan’s Ocean Borderlands); (c) national parks and forest and wildlife reserves (Nash, Wilderness and the American Mind); (d) environmental restoration, biodiversity enhancement and extinction prevention (Jacoby, Crimes Against Nature); and (e) government efforts—and jurisdictional arrangements over—natural resource management (Carroll, Roots of Our Renewal). More so, these policies are often based in racist, colonial tropes that Indigenous peoples are incapable of stewarding natural resources, or barriers to conservation campaigns, while eliding how capitalism, colonialism, imperialism, and military occupation are the driving force of environmental catastrophe (LaDuke, “Indigenous Environmental Perspectives” Liboiron, Pollution is Colonialism; Klein, This Changes Everything; Moore, Capitalism in the Web of Life; Tyrell, Crises and the Wasteful Nation). In summary, this paper situates NOAA conservation policies of the hima within a “neocolonial environmentalist architecture” and as a “legal technique of territorial sovereignty claiming” (Kreitman, Japan’s Ocean Borderlands), in which political configurations of sovereignty are shaped by ecological contingencies, ultimately impacting Indigenous CHamoru cultural and religious expression.

2024 NOAA conservation policies in Guåhan are situated within a larger history of Western imperialism (note: Guam is an ‘unincorporated territory’ of the United States and a ‘non-self-governing territory’ under the United Nations) and land acquisition in Guam. For example, after WWII, the U.S. government refused to return land to CHamoru families in the ancient village of Litekyan, claiming they needed to establish a Guam National Wildlife Refuge to preserve endangered plant and animal species (www.fws.gov/refuge/guam/about-us). Another example includes the establishment of the Guam Cultural Repository (GCR) which aims to preserve, conserve and repatriate “Guåhan's cultural and material heritage, artifacts, and archaeological collections and history” (uog.edu/guam-cultural-repository). However, even the GCR acknowledges that recovered “material remains” they aim to preserve and conserve are often only discovered after the imposition of “large-scale developments [...] militarization, tourism, and other construction projects in Guåhan” (uog.edu/guam-cultural-repository). This includes “the concentration of millennia-old artifacts and human remains” which were discovered after the U.S. military bulldozed newly-acquired lands in the village of Mågua to construct U.S. military infrastructure (Boyd, David R. et al. “Mandates of the Special Rapporteur…” Office of the High Commissioner, Human Rights, United Nations, 2021). This political dynamic reveals how U.S. government and military agencies deploy conservation policy as a means to acquire and occupy land in Guåhan and refuse their accountability for environmental impact.

My research presentation will conclude by offering an “Indigenous model of conservation” rooted in Indigenous spirituality, sovereignty, cultural “recontextualization” (Case, Everything Ancient Was Once New), and “In-Place” preservation practices all within the context of contemporary LANDBACK! politics in Guåhan (Fix Solutions Lab, “Returning the Land”; NDN Collective, “LANDBACK MANIFESTO”). My Summer 2025 research project conducted on the hima collection at the Sagan Kotturan CHamoru (SKC) Cultural Museum in Tamuning, Guåhan will serve as a case study. A renowned, grassroots Indigenous collective for CHamoru cultural and religious knowledge production and praxis, SKC sits on 8-9 acres of land granted by the Guam Government in 2006 through the Chamorro Land Trust Commission’s “LANDBACK” initiative which designates land to CHamoru people for the production and preservation of CHamoru culture and spirituality (I Mina’Trentai Tres Na Liheslaturan Guåhan. Bill No. 375-33 (COR), 2016). Religious and cultural practitioners at SKC, engaged in turtle-shell carving, pandanus-weaving, gålaide’ (canoe) artisanship, suruhåna (traditional medicinal healing) and Guålo’ (Indigenous farming/agriculture/cooking), recognize that Indigenous resource conservation and cultural and religious preservation must be grounded in anti-colonial and anti-capitalist Indigenous governance, and centered on Indigenous ethics of land restoration and political autonomy.