Chamoru Books in Hawai'i

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 Village Thrift, New Memories and others. 

 

We have sent our books around the world through orders, but never really made an effort to have stores or businesses outside of the Marianas try to carry our products. The Guam Bus isn’t really about making money or maximizing profit. We are driven by the fact that when my brothers and I were growing up in the 1980s and 1990s, there wasn’t much in the way of books, comics, videos games, movies that a Chamoru could turn to represent themselves or where they came from. Once we started to have kids and look to the next generation, we decided that, whether anyone would buy what we made or not, we would do our part to create Chamoru books for libraries, Guam comics for collections and games for teaching Chamoru to the next generation. As I often tell my Chamoru language students, who are waiting for someone to write a grant or develop an app to save our language and culture, those sorts of things can help, but all we really need to start with is ourselves. Anggen ti hita pues håyi?

 

Having our products in Hawai’i, at both Native Books and Da Shop, both such wonderful stores, is so exciting! It is a big new step for us, and we look forward to more places where Pacific Islanders buy books or where islander books are sold, possibly picking up our products. 

 

If you are in Hawai’i please stop by, if you pick something up let me know or at least take a picture! You can find other Chamoru and Micronesian books at these two stores, not just ours.

 

Biba Chamoru! Biba Guam Bus!