NO REST FOR THE AWAKE - MINAGAHET CHAMORRO

  Last year, the Guam Cultural Repository merged to become part of the Guam Museum (which in turn falls under the Department of CHamoru Affairs). While the facility has been open and active for several years now, many people are still unfamiliar with its genesis and purpose.    For many decades, the Guam Museum acted as Guam's depository, holding a variety of historical or culturally significant materials for the public good. Since the 1970s, this has included archeological collections and also the remains from burials disturbed by construction. As a result the Guam Museum has grown since World War II, to a massive collection of several hundred thousand items, which break down into different categories, ranging from archives, to cultural and educational artifacts and finally things held for the people of Guam in our depository/repository function.    In the storage annex for the Guam Museum we have close to 2,000 boxes of artifacts, soil samples, project files a...

I have been asked repeatedly in recent weeks about the use of the prefix e- or o- in Chamoru meaning to look for or hunt for things. People have been asking me in the context of how to say things that we know we've practiced for centuries if not millennia, but no longer have explicit words for in our language, or at some point adopted Spanish or English words to express it, likely displacing an older way and the cosmological and metaphorical dimensions attached. Some good examples of this are words like energy, where most of the words we use today are all borrowed from Spanish, but no doubt Chamorus would have had some word or many words prior to colonization. In this case, we can find an example in the word kåhna, where 100 years ago, perhaps no Chamorus used this word on its own to express energy, strength or essence, power. But the word lived on in other forms, to cast spells, the one who cast spells, and so there is a clear link that indicates that this is a likely candidate.  ...

  Art has long provided communities with a way to express who they are, preserve what matters to them, and imagine their futures. This October, Independent Guahan's Youth Organizing Fellowship members invite the community to take the stage and share their talents through music, poetry, storytelling, comedy, and other forms of creative expression. The group is hosting an Open Mic Night on Saturday, October 17, 2026, from 7:00-10:00 p.m. at 105GU in the Tumon View Plaza. Local performers are encouraged to share pieces centered around the themes of indigenous culture, language, values, and sovereignty. The event is free and open to the public, and people of all ages and backgrounds are encouraged to attend. Independent Guahan, a local organization that educates the community about the possibilities of independence as a future political status for Guahan, began a youth fellowship program this summer with the intention of fostering leadership and community organizing skills for a group ...

  It is common for young kids, especially young boys to like skeletons. Makåhna has a love, fright relationship with them.    He is fascinated with them, loves to watch them, but also gets intensely and unexpectedly frightened by them at times.    When the family went to Home Depot last month, he saw a literal bag of plastic bones in the area of Halloween Decorations and insisted that he had to have it. We brought it home and he has been taking the bones with him everywhere.    Bringing them to visit my dad. Wanting them during car rides. Unsuccessfully trying to take them to daycare. He even wants to bring them into the shower.    It is easy for my to see my boy's joy around skeletons as a phase. But as someone who also spends a lot of time researching, teaching, talking about Chamoru history and culture, across time. I have seen so many echoes of our ancestors prior to colonization and at the time of Spanish colonization.    For e...

Chelef is someone from Guam’s history you may not be very familiar with. But the fact that we know his name had all, means he was a consequential figure. He lived at a time when Chamoru culture and the Chamoru people were under heavy assault by the Spanish, and being forced to give up their way of life in order to become Christians.  He is not as famous as figures such as Maga'låhi such as Hurao, Matå’pang well-known for challenging the Spanish or even those like Maga'låhi Kepuha or So'on, who were allied with the Spanish.   But he was nonetheless very infamous and notorious in his day and age. The story of Chelef often begins with the story of Dikike’ and her family.  In 1676, Dikike’ was a young girl from the village of Orote or Uloti on what is today Navy Base Guam.  Unlike most Chamorus at the time who were passively resistant to the Spanish, apprehensive or outright defiant, she was an eager and willing convert, even to the point of being willing to marry a...

What does Liberation Day on Guam make you think of? Does it remind you of parades? Beauty queens? Canopies? Columns of military marching? Does it remind you of rain? Fireworks? Playing games at the carnival? Spending time with family? I think of all of these things and one thing that most might not: I think of people chastising me for not really knowing what Liberation Day is really about. Today many people know me for writing a regular newspaper column. For the past 10 years I’ve had a column in the Pacific Daily News, and for around six years before that I wrote a column in the Marianas Variety (now known as the Guam Daily Post). But while I was a graduate student, I would sometimes write letters to the editor of the Pacific Daily News and occasionally they would get published. One of the first of these letters was published in 2003 and at that time there was a discussion around the official naming of Marine Drive to Marine Corps Drive. While Guam’s central road was well-known as Mar...