Episode 8: “A World In Which I Can Exist” featuring Dakota Camacho
Dakota: Usually before I start anything that I do, I take a moment to activate this practice that my people have around acknowledging those that came before us, whether that's the ancestors of the land or the water that we're passing through or the guardians of that space and place. And it's a song of gratitude and respect.
MUSIC: In
Every July, the island commonly known Guam, commemorates what is commonly known as Liberation Day. But as you will hear, both those names, and their meanings are contested. They are part of a history of American colonialism that most Americans would rather not think about. Dakota Camacho had no choice but to think about it. His family is Chamorro, from the island he calls Guahan. But Dakota grew up thousands of miles away, in Washington State. Today, he shares the story of that journey, and his own journey as an artist, a dancer, and an MC.
My name is Meklit and this is Movement: music and migration, remixed.
Dakota: Part politic in the world is to try and understand every place that I visit through the eyes of the people that are of that place. And why is that important to me? Because when people come to the land that I am from, one of the ways that violence happens is that people change the names of the villages. And then there’s environmental destruction and desecration and they are like, oh, this is not the village of Moggach. This is Anderson Air Force Base, you know? And so part of the violence is actually in the renaming of things.
And then at the same time. We live in in a moment, in time in which communities of people know places by the names that we grew up knowing them as. And this is as such an interesting example for me. So my dad grew up knowing our island is Guam. And there's nothing wrong with that, and the indigenous name of that island is Guahan.
But how messed up is it for me to try and correct my dad? You know, about his understanding. Because there's to me, there's a medicine in understanding why Guahan is named Guahan and what the potential meanings of that could be. But, there's also a violence enforcing forcing medicine on people.
Meklit: Yes.
Dakota: So, yeah, those are some things that I'm kind of wrestling with.
Meklit: You talked about your father and in some of our previous conversations, you also mentioned that it was your parents generation that moved from Guahan to the mainland United States. What was it that brought them on their journey and where did you call home growing up?
Dakota: My nana and papa, my dad's mom and dad were born in 1924 and 1925, so at that time the US had called Guahan its colonial possession and in 1940 they abandoned Guahan because they heard that the Japanese military was going to invade.
My nana was on Guahan at the time, but my papa was not. Our papa was only 15, but he had joined the US navy. And he had joined the navy because he needed a way to make money for his family because he had lost his land. He'd lost his land because of the economic system that the Americans were forcing people to work and live under.
Meklit: Mm hmm.
Dakota: And at 15, he joined the military because that was the best way that he knew to provide for his family. So my pop actually spent World War two on a ship. He was a survivor of Pearl Harbor. My nana survived the four years of Japanese military occupation and the Americans decided to come back on July 21st, 1944.
But when they did, they carpet bombed the island and the Americans reinvaded. And they named this day Liberation Day.
Meklit: Oh, God.
Dakota: And it's still known as Liberation Day to this day. And the complex part about it is that some people felt liberated.
Meklit: Mm hmm.
Dakota: And some people did not feel liberated because they thought at least we knew where we stood with the Japanese. With the Americans, we don't know. So that is, that is the life that my papa came back to, of basically having no money and no land, they decided to leave. So that's what brought me to live on this continent here.
Dakota: I grew up raised by a dad who was not taught his language specifically because my family wanted him to be able to live a life unharmed by the discrimination that they faced because of that, the accents that they have and their way of thinking and phrasing things. And I remember being I don't know, I must have been like the seventh grade or something, trying to ask my nana and papa to teach me and my dinga, my twin sister, our language.
And we knew that they wanted to, but that they didn't really know how or they didn't know where to start. That it was too late. And so we learned basically how to cuss people out and how to talk crap about people. And that was, it was important because it taught us that although they wanted us to be able to succeed in this world, they were also aware that other people's limitations were actually what was holding us back.
Meklit: Mm hmm.
Dakota: And not our own.
MUSIC: transition
Dakota: And so I feel like I don't know if I quite have the language for it, but I lived through this really interesting moment where my family both knew that we needed to maintain our relationship and connection to our homeland and to our culture. I grew up in this cultural dance group and I think that people were really struggling with how to do that and also do basic things like have a house, have a family and provide for your kids
Meklit: You've talked about the troop that you grew up performing with. Can you tell us a little bit about it and your experiences in it?
Dakota: Yeah. So I was a part of the Hafa Adai Island Dance Troupe and it was founded by my nana, my grandma, two of my aunties. And there's parts of the story that I don't quite understand completely yet, but what I think I understand is that my aunties learned hula.
And they learned that in this kind of touristy context, but also they wanted to connect to island culture, which I think that they felt like they didn't quite understand.And I think that that's a really complex thing to say and so they learned these dance forms and then they were like, well, there's nothing from the place that we're from. So our early dances were to this Chamorrol music.
And in some ways what was complicated about the dance troupe was that it was kind of always oriented towards telling other people, primarily white people who are the, who are the main audience in the small Navy town in which we lived. That telling them about us. And so, let me see, I'm trying to think about what, you know, what some of the sounds that we would have danced to were. But like, on the island of Guam, there are coconut trees, there are coconut trees. It's a beautiful place where the moon is shining over the sea. It's a paradise in Guam.
Meklit: Wow
Dakota:You know, which has got a very different tune. You know, now that I've spent time getting to know hula and hula practitioners, that's a very different orientation towards telling a story
Meklit: Mm hmm.
Dakota: But it was something and it was, it was a way for my family to celebrate who we are as Island Peoples. And it is a place where I learned about dance and my body in telling stories, and it was very foundational and important to me. You know, I made some of my first choreographies. Actually, I think the first choreography that I remember making, this is a very complicated story. 9/11 had just happened, and my cousins were getting deployed and we were asked to do a performance for my cousin's going away party. And my mom had asked me and my twin to choreograph a dance to I'm Proud To Be an American by Lee Greenwood.
Meklit: Wow. Oh, my goodness.
Dakota: So we're Chomorro kids, right, in Cosulich territory, Missions for Goblin's, which is a Navy town of about twenty thousand people. That's 90 percent white, less than one percent Pacific Islander. Choreographing in the language of hula as it was taught and probably manipulated and changed via the tourist industry, which is a part of the oppression of Chomorrol people and Hawaiians and Pacific Islanders, to I'm Proud To Be An American.
Meklit: There's just so many layers to that
Dakota: In the wake of 9/11, as a 10 year old.
MUSIC: Proud To Be An American
Dakota: There's so many layers to that. Yeah.
Meklit: I would love to hear from you, like, first of all, like how you came to hip hop and then how hip hop and your traditional chant and dance and practice come together to form your, like, artistic path.
Dakota: When I was in the eighth grade, I had a history teacher named Mr. Janello and he welcomed us to US history on the first day by saying welcome to U.S. history. Take a look at the back of the room. Those are your history books. Don't touch them. They're dangerous. And then he passes out the first chapter of a people's history of the United States.
Meklit: Nice.
Dakota: And in that chapter, we read Columbus's writings about the horrible things that he did to the Iwak people. And I started thinking to myself, my family's Catholic. Are we some of the people that did these horrible things? And then I came to find out that actually the horrible things the Catholic people did to the Arawak, many of them they did to our people.
And I became obsessed because I realized that there was another world where none of that seemed to exist or where it was possible, where that didn't exist. And that was the world before colonization.
And it was depressing because the things that I was reading, which were primarily written by white historians, were saying that our language and our culture were dying. And, you know, that this tradition used to be in practice. But then the Spanish stamped it out.
I mean, I was a devout Catholic. I was an altar server. I was the only teenager I knew that had an altar in my room where I would pray the rosary. And I was still, like, really struggling with all these questions. And I found out that my ancestors had different sets of beliefs. And I also knew that my family couldn't teach me about it.
Meklit: Mm hmm.
Dakota: And I also, even though I struggled with my belief in God, I really believed in spirit. I really believed in something that's greater than me. And so I started asking my ancestors for guidance. How did you get to know about this world?
And I learned about this form of poetry that my ancestors practice, which they called in the writings, Cantens Amrita. And it is a form of rhyming improvisational freestyle, like kind of competitive wordplay. Allegorical, metaphorical. About community.
Meklit: My God
Dakota: And I was like, I feel like I'm doing this with some of my friends at lunch, you know?
Meklit: Yes, yes.
Dakota: And so I was like, well, I can't speak my language, but I can speak the language of rhyme. You know, I was like, oh, my God, like there's a world in which I can exist. There's a world in which I can exist. So that's what drew me into connection to hip hop.
One of the things that I've been trying to make sense of recently is how my family ended up here and how we're going to make it to freedom. And not just me and my family, but all of us. All of us,. You know, what is the role of a creator? Of a song maker? Of a singer for indigenous peoples? You know, the things that I've learned over the years, it's an oral historian. It's somebody who can tell you tell us about our people's history. You know, it's somebody who also can use song as a way to generate an opportunity for healing. Right? And that's the way that I try to think about what the potential of being a musician can be.
Dakota’s work also expands beyond hip hop. It encompasses dance, performance art, research, education, and activism. And just so you know, eventually Dakota did learn the Chamorro language of his people. You can hear him rhyme in it a little later in this very song, and you can follow all of his work at dakotacamacho.com
Movement is produced by Ian Coss and myself, Meklit Hadero. Our co-creator and podcast godmother is Julie Caine. Our broadcast partner is The World. We are supported by the Mellon Foundation, the National Geographic Society and distributed by PRX.