Angelo Villagomez

I addressed the 2026 East Pacific Kelp Congress on January 21, 2026. Beyond 30x30: Re-Imagining Ocean Conservation Success The next time you are in one of those virtual professional settings where you are staring at a bunch of faces you don’t know and you have to do that awkward thing where you all introduce yourself, ask each person to finish their introduction by naming their special ocean place. Yesterday’s meeting repeatedly evoked memories of my special ocean place, Obyan Beach on the southern end of Saipan, the island in the western Pacific where I am from. Every time one of you spoke about purple urchin harvesting or removal, I flashed back to my childhood and my father teaching me how to gather sea urchins on the reef flat during low tide. He convinced me when I was about 8 years old that I was the world’s greatest sea urchin hunter, that nobody did it better in the history of the Chamorro people. For years this inspired me to gather sea urchins on my own, and to deliver...

A candid photo of some modern Indigenous conservationists, and some of our colleagues There’s a certain look people sometimes give me when I’m introduced as a Pacific Islander. Sometimes it opens doors.  We talk for five minutes and figure out that our parents know each other or that we're cousins.  Other times they close, like when the National Academy scientist told me I “didn’t look like someone who worked at Pew.” New friends may search my face for ancient wisdom or a hint of magical powers to commune with fish. It’s well‑intentioned, perhaps, but it reveals something uncomfortable: many people in conservation prefer Indigenous people as symbols rather than as full, complicated human beings. I am an Indigenous scientist , a modern mixed-race Chamorro man , not your noble savage. Indigenous identity is messy. It is shaped not only by heritage, but by colonization, migration, intermarriage, economics, and politics. Every one of our peoples carries its own story of su...