The Ancestral Skull at the Dinner Table
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...