Flores Receives Honorable Mention for New Book

Harvey Mudd College Professor of Asian American Studies Alfred Flores received the Best First Book Honorable Mention for his book Tip of the Spear: Land, Labor, and U.S. Settler Militarism in Guåhan, 1944-1962 from the Native American and Indigenous Studies Association (NAISA).

Tip of the Spear explores the tension in the history and relationships between the CHamoru people and the U.S. military in Guåhan. Emphasizing CHamoru resilience, resistance and survival, Flores argues that that the U.S. occupation of the island, one of the most heavily militarized islands in the Western Pacific Ocean, was enabled by a process of settler militarism.

The recognition by NAISA supports Flores’s commitment to increasing awareness about the history of Guåhan (Guam). Through the book, he hopes to expand the ways readers understand the communities in Oceania, “that they’re not isolated islands that are far away,” he says. “And even though Guåhan might be seen as a small place, it’s an important place when it comes to understanding American geopolitics.”

NAISA is an interdisciplinary, international membership-based organization comprised of scholars working in the fields of Native American and Indigenous Studies broadly defined. It is the premier international and interdisciplinary professional organization for scholars, graduate students, independent researchers and community members interested in all aspects of Indigenous studies.

In addition to his teaching at Harvey Mudd, Flores is an extended faculty member in the history department at Claremont Graduate University and a core faculty member in the Intercollegiate American Studies Program at the Claremont Colleges. His research and teaching focuses on diaspora, labor, indigeneity, migration, militarization, oral history and settler colonialism in Oceania.