Basement Books | No Country for Eight-Spot Butterflies:...
No Country for Eight-Spot Butterflies: With an introduction by Arundhati Roy
Author: Julian Aguon
Contributors: Arundhati Roy
Synopsis:
A powerful, beautiful book. Its fierce love — of the land, the ocean, the elders and the ancestors — warms the heart and moves the spirit. — Alice Walker, author of The Color Purple.
Part memoir, part manifesto, Chamorro climate activist Julian Aguon's No Country for Eight-Spot Butterflies is a coming-of-age story and a call for justice—for everyone, but in particular, for Indigenous peoples.
Aguon beautifully weaves together stories from his childhood in the villages of Guam with searing political commentary about matters ranging from nuclear weapons to global warming. Bearing witness and reckoning with the challenges of truth-telling in an era of rampant obfuscation, he culls from his own life experiences to illuminate a collective path out of the darkness.
Key Themes:
- Indigenous rights and environmental justice
- Colonial struggles and the fight for liberation
In No Country for Eight-Spot Butterflies, Aguon shares his wisdom and reflections on love, grief, joy, and triumph, and extends an offer to join him in a hard-earned hope for a better world.
Everything I learned from "No Country for Eight-Spot Butterflies" by Julian Aguon
- In the 1900s, the US navy established a leper colony in Guam where Chamorros thought to be afflicted were quarantined on a beach. In 1912, they were forcibly deported to the Culion Leper Colony in the Philippines.
- From 1946-1958 the U.S. conducted a nuclear testing program in the Marshall Islands where it detonated 67 automatic and thermonucelar weapons. The worst of these tests was "Bravo" which deposited life-threatening quantities of radioactive fallout onto the Marshallese. This impacted local health significantly, leading to increased congenital diseases, birth defects, miscarriages, and cancers.
- The U.S. Department of Defense is relocating 5,000 Marines from Okinawa to Guam, destroying historical and cultural sites in order to build a firing range complex that is dangerously close to Guam's primary source of drinking water: the Northern Guam Lens Aquifer.
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