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This article explores the colonial-militarized circumstance of the Marianas Archipelago as both a homefront and a frontline of the United States. I argue that the United States reinforces and relies on imperial and gendered ideologies to justify militarized notions of security through the "Pivot to the Pacific" foreign policy. Through the discourse of providing "protection," expanding militarization of the islands is possible through the continued political subordination of the residents. Within this protection framework, the residents are denied political self-determination by the US federal government, while the islands and seas are strategic military installations for the US Department of Defense. Conversely, the Mariana Islands are also spaces of prolonged decolonization struggle and ongoing indigenous resistance to militarism. This article applies a decolonized and gendered lens to highlight how indigenous Chamoru women navigate between federal colonial systems and everyday militarized spaces. Privileging Chamoru women's epistemologies and approaches, I analyze how two high-ranking women decision makers in the Mariana Islands encourage and support the colonial-militarized relationship with the United States, while an indigenous Chamoru women's organization and a Chamoru academic actively oppose it. Overall, the current situation in the Marians Islands provides an example of the unequally militarized world as a US colonial homefront and a militarized frontline.

Keywords: Chamoru feminisms / decolonization / demilitarization / feminist security studies / Mariana Islands / Oceania / resistance / United States of America

Introduction

The United States (US) federal government and the United States Department of Defense (DOD) accentuate the colonial and gendered narrative that the residents and islands of the Marianas Archipelago are in need of governance and guardianship by the United States through aggressive notions of militarized security. This gendered protector/protected approach denies political self-determination and is constructed to validate militarization.1 Continued political subordination of the residents and continuous expanding militarization of the islands create an unequally militarized world. The colonial-militarized treatment of the residents and the region is justified in the masculinist ideal of national security. In US history, gender has been "an organizing principle for war specifically and political thought generally and to serve to empower the masculine and marginalise the feminine" (Sjoberg 2013b, 46-47). A decolonized and gendered analysis of the Mariana Islands prioritizes indigenous Chamoru women's approaches and experiences, as they are playing...

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