Julian Aguon, a native of Guam, is using his skills as a writer and a lawyer to tackle issues of environmental justice — tangled in complicated political history.
It's been a year since he published a collection of essays called “No Country for Eight-Spot Butterflies." He's in Honolulu as a featured speaker at the University of Hawaiʻi’s Better Tomorrow Speaker Series.
He vividly remembers the day in 2005 that sent him on a path as a human rights advocate.
"The scale of the military buildup on Guam, then-planned, was staggering and it still is. And so I really wanted to go to law school precisely because I wanted to do the opposite thing with law," he said.
"I wanted to embark on a very different kind of project, which is using language and the language of the law to clarify my intent, not to cloud it, and to sort of deploy it on behalf of vulnerable communities like my own — the Indigenous Chamorro people of Guam," Aguon told The Conversation.
The title of his talk Thursday, "Gathering Flowers by the Road: An Indigenous Pursuit of Climate Justice," alludes to a book he's writing based on an essay about climate justice that propelled him to the global stage as a Pulitzer finalist.
The event at the UH Art Auditorium is sold out, but overflow crowds are still welcome. The talk will be available later online.
This interview aired on The Conversation on Sept. 20, 2023. The Conversation airs weekdays at 11 a.m. on HPR-1.
