NO REST FOR THE AWAKE - MINAGAHET CHAMORRO

One of the most exciting gifts that I received last year, right in time for Christmas was from longtime singer and musician Joe Taimanglo. He sent me a box filled with Chamoru music lyrics books and tapes, since as the curator for the Guam Museum I am always interested in collecting, preserving and then educating about things from our past, but also as the producer for the Fanachu podcast, we've been digitizing and collecting Chamoru music for several years now. To date we've uploaded more than 400 songs to the Fanachu YouTube page .  I've had Siñot Taimanglo on the Fanachu podcast twice as a guest where he has been such a wealth of information on the history of contemporary Chamoru music. He keeps lists of Chamoru musicians, sometimes shares Chamoru music on his social media, still performs, and also writes posts remembering Chamoru and Guam-based musicians who have passed away.    Sumåhi filmed and edited a video of me unboxing this special box from Siñot Joe, filled wi...

After my third child Lulai was born in 2021, I had a month of paternity leave from working at the Guam Museum.  During this time, I would usually take Lulai at night for around four or five hours, to give her mother Desiree a chance to sleep or relax or do anything undisturbed for a while.  I would sing to her, rock her, hold her while she slept. It gave me time to think, to reflect, to watch things, to read. One of the things that I thought alot about at the time was Chamoru music and its future.  I never really made the jump to digital music platforms like Spotify, but I do listen to music on YouTube.  While I would be watching Lulai I would want to sing to her different Chamoru songs and I would look for them on YouTube and not be able to find the songs. I was frustrated because I had the songs on tapes or on CDs or on vinyl records, but my hands were full with a child, or the physical copies were packed away in boxes in storage somewhere and it would take forever...

In October I traveled to Hawai'i for a few days to attend the Hawai'i International Film Festival and moderate a panel featuring filmmakers from Guam, Hawai'i, and the US Virgin Islands. While I was in Oahu, I also had the chance to stop by and visit two bookstores, Native Books in Chinatown and Da Shop in Kaimuki and drop off Chamoru language educational and creative materials from The Guam Bus.    The Guam Bus has been around for 9 years at this point. We first started back in 2015 by publishing our bilingual Chamoru children’s book “Sumåhi and the Karabao” and the comic “Makåhna.” As of today, as we near our 10th anniversary, we have published four bilingual children’s books, three sets of flash cards, 3 comic books, a coloring book, and a Chamoru language bingo game! We mainly sell through our website and also at local fairs and bazaars, but recently we’ve also started to sell our products in local stores such as Faith Bookstore, The Local Shop, Rexall Drugs, It Takes a...

  European museums often contain collections filled with ancestral remains and cultural belongings stolen from peoples across the globe. These historical acts of dispossession are constantly being contested by local and indigenous communities. This work is often difficult however due to great distances between communities seeking the return of the items and the institutions that hold them. For the past three years, Chamoru researchers Samantha Barnett and Andrew Gumataotao have worked on locating and learning the histories of Chamoru ancestral remains in European museums, while organizing efforts alongside the CNMI and Guam historic preservation offices to formally request their return home. The remains of over forty indigenous Chamorus, along with numerous cultural belongings, are currently held in Berlin’s Ethnological Museum. In Spain, the National Museum of Anthropology holds 9 Chamorro and Carolinian ancestral remains, taken from Guam, Saipan, and Ro...

My 19 month old Makåhna, admiring the såkman model that is part of the Hinanao-ta Exhibit at the Guam Museum. I love bringing people into this part of the exhibit, where we can see the features of Chamoru life at the time of contact with Europeans. Their religion and culture. Their weapons and style of warfare. Their diet and architecture of their homes. And of course their navigation and seafaring abilities.    This section is always tinged with some sadness though because of what awaits in the next gallery of the exhibit, the consequences of colonization, one of them being Chamorus losing this connection to the sea and the depth of knowledge to navigate the open ocean as their ancestors before them had done for millennia.    But just as when I see my children playing near this model, hope is also on the horizon as well, if you look a little further. Chamorus have been learning from others in Micronesia for decades now about how to carve and how to navigate and the ...

  I've pasted below a column written by Chamoru writer and filmmaker Dan Ho, that he penned by the Guam Daily post in 2021 to both commemorative and criticize Indigenous Peoples Day in 2021. The title alone gives this away,  "It's un-Indigenous to celebrated Indigenous Peoples Day," and it is one reason why even though Dan Ho doesn't contribute much to these types of conversations anymore, at least not in local newspapers or media, this article still circulates this time of year because of the catchy, polemical title.  Given how some things have shifted, discursively, narratively, culturally, rhetorically in different societies across the world, to provide more possibility for indigenous peoples, and that the fact that more and more people each year are now ditching Columbus Day in favor of Indigenous Peoples is emblematic of this. This shift, like so many, doesn't mean that indigenous people are sovereign, it doesn't mean that land has been given back, it...