A Conversation with Julian Aguon
Friday, August 27, 2021
5:30-6:30 PM (HST)
We hope you enjoyed this conversation between internationally renowned human rights lawyer and writer Julian Aguon, and Director of the Ulu Lehua Scholars Program Professor Troy Andrade, as Julian reflected on his legal career and new book, The Properties of Perpetual Light.
The Properties of Perpetual Light is a collection of soulful ruminations about love, loss, struggle, resilience, and power. Part memoir, part manifesto, the book is both a coming-of-age story and a call for justice—for everyone but in particular for indigenous peoples, Aguon’s own and others. With bracing prose and bouts of poetry, Aguon weaves together stories from his childhood in the villages of Guam with searing political commentary about everything from nuclear weapons to climate change. Deftly deploying the feminist insight that the personal is political, Aguon culls from the light of his own life experiences, from losing his father to cancer to working for Mother Teresa to meeting Sherman Alexie in a Spokane bookstore, to illuminate a path out of the darkness.
Co-sponsors: The Ulu Lehua Scholars Program, King Kamehameha V Judiciary History Center, Ka Huli Ao Center for Excellence in Native Hawaiian Law, and the William S. Richardson School of Law Alumni Association
Julian Aguon is an indigenous human rights lawyer and writer from Guam. He is the founder of Blue Ocean Law, a progressive firm that works at the intersection of indigenous rights and environmental justice. He is brilliant, soulful, and deeply engaged in the struggles of peoples across Oceania to liberate themselves from colonial rule, defend their sacred sites, and obtain justice for a range of harms inflicted upon them by outside forces—from nuclear weapons testing and nonconsensual medical experimentation to extractive industries and climate change. He serves on the Global Advisory Council of Progressive International—a global collective that launched in May 2020 with the mission of mobilizing progressive forces around the world behind a shared vision of social justice.
