NO REST FOR THE AWAKE - MINAGAHET CHAMORRO

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...

More than a decade ago, a statue was unveiled in Hagåtña for the late Angel L.G. Santos in the park which bears his name in memoriam.  It has been more than two decades since the passing of this iconic Chamoru figure. It has always intrigued me the way Santos morphed in meaning locally – from a patriotic, military-serving young Chamoru, to a loincloth-wearing taimamahlao chattaotao activist, to politician and defender of human rights, to visage on stickers, T-shirts and symbol of Chamoru strength and pride. Angel Santos and Nasion Chamoru worked hard, in particular in the 1990s, to push to the forefront of the island’s consciousness issues such as Chamoru rights, especially around political status and land.  One of their biggest successes is not the sinahi-necklace-wearing that has become so commonplace, but rather their protest efforts in getting the Chamorro Land Trust implemented and formalized.  Debates over the changing of the rules last year for the Chamo...

Last month, my family launched our latest bilingual Chamoru-English children’s book titled “An Tåya’ Elektrisidåt” or “When There’s No Electricity.” In the book, three Chamoru children, based on three of my own kids, struggle with boredom after a typhoon has devastated Guam, leaving them without electricity and without data for their cellphones. With some helpful guidance from their nånan biha (grandmother) they are reminded that there are still plenty of ways to have fun on Guam, even without their iPads or video games. Across the book, the children learn that through their island’s natural beauty, cultural and community, there are still plenty of ways to enjoy life. They participate in a village-wide chongka competition, they go hunting for duendes, they enjoy the beauty of a Guam sunset. They hear stories of ghosts and spirits and taotaomo’na. My personal favorite is when they say the rosary for their devices that are dead and no longer have any charge. While many people have ...