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My Grandmother Tongue

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English is my mother tongue, in the sense that it is the language that I grew up with and speak most comfortably. It is my first language. It is however not my favorite language, not the best language and certainly not i mas takhilo' para Guahu. I am a non-native speaker of the Chamoru language as I learned to speak it when I was 20 years old. It is natural for me in some ways, but still unnatural in others, primarily when talking about things that are difficult in general to express in a Chamoru lexicon. This is not only something that I struggle with, but as the Chamoru language has become more and more limited in how and where it is used, many people find themselves constantly switching to English since a potential part of their conversation is something few people have actually used the Chamoru language to convey. What makes speaking, thinking and writing easier is if the topic fits easily within some existing framework or lexicon for carrying meaning. If that framework...
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Chamoru Repatriation News

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Since I began working at the Guam Museum, repatriation of human remains, of artifacts, or cultural materials, has gone from being something that was just on a list of things that indigenous people struggle with in general, to something that is literally part of my job description.  For those unfamiliar with the term, since it can be used in different contexts, repatriation as I'm thinking of it here means the return of cultural properties, ancestral remains to their countries, their peoples, usually from museums, universities or other institutions. As the curation for the Guam Museum, part of what I do deal with seeking possibilities for repatriation of Chamoru artifacts and ancestral remains. Whether they have been taken away a few years ago or decades ago for research or some other reason.  (Rematriation is something I'll have to get into on another post. Less discussed, but critically important as we see the returning of artifacts, as less the end of a process, but an impor...
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Unboxing Chamoru Cassette Tapes from Siñot Joe Taimanglo

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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...
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Miget's Chamoru Vinyl Collection

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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...
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Chamoru Books in Hawai'i

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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...
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New Waves of Return

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  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...
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Tu'los Mo'na Lahi-hu

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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 ...
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