Living Downwind: Guåhan, the “Tip of the Spear” in a Nuclear Oceania

On August 6 and 9, 1945, two US military aircrafts left the south Mariana islands of Tinian and Guåhan and went on to drop atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. In the two decades that follow, the fallout of the 67 US nuclear bombings (designated as “tests”) in Micronesia led to deadly health complications for Indigenous people of the region, in particular in Guåhan, from where Chamoru writer and activist Kia Quichocho wrote this text.

A “downwinder” is a person who was exposed to radioactive fallout from atmospheric nuclear testing in the United States between 1945-1963. This distinction was created primarily for people living in US states like Nevada and New Mexico, areas downwind from nuclear test sites which were part of the Manhattan Project. In the precipice of the nuclear age, the Manhattan Project was a culmination of research and development efforts organized by the US government in order to reach the development of an atomic bomb before Nazi Germany. The project eventually led to the recapture of Guåhan by the US for its strategic use in the nuclear bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945. Four years earlier, the US Naval administration which controlled Guåhan ceded control to Japan, evacuating US military personnel and civilians while leaving indigenous Chamorus to endure Japanese occupation until the US returned in 1944 to “liberate” the island. In this piece, I grapple with the cultural value of inafa’maolek (in chamoru, “to restore harmony or order”) and the brute disregard for the lives of natives as an omnipresent theme in the US-Guåhan relationship which has produced the conflicting reality of our island being both a weapon and a target of US imperialism. Through the lens of the downwinder, I then illustrate the contradictory reality kept aflame by our people’s view of the US as a savior and the sentiment of indebtedness despite the consequent disharmony their military agendas continue to bring to our islands and other countries.