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 example, at breakfast one Sunday, Makåhna, much to the dismay of his sister Lulai, insisted that he take the skull with him to the table where he was eating so it could eat too. It was cute, maybe a little disturbing. But it also reminded me of the practices of Chamorus in the past. 

 

For those unfamiliar. When the Spanish arrived and encountered the religion of our people, they were dismissive. They didn't see a religion like their own, instead it was rituals, beliefs tied to ancestral veneration and much of it was connected to the keeping and caring for the bones of your relatives and ancestors who had passed on. 

 

Keeping the bones of your relatives safe, keeping them in the home, meant keeping their aniti, their spirit tied to your family, and meant that their power, their protection, their favor, could also be there should the family need it. 

 

This meant that Chamorus did keep skulls in the house. They did take the leg bones of their fathers and grandfather and turn them into spears. They may have even taken the skeletal hands of great matriarchs to symbolize their authority or their nurturing strength. It is in Fray Juan Pobre's 1602 account from Rota that we get the first insight into this religion and these cultural beliefs. And I thought about this and Makåhna because one of the things that Chamorus would do, is even take skulls with them to share food with them and talk to them as if their spirits are still with the family. 

 

Here is an excerpt from Pobre's account. 

 

"Then the relatives and closest neighbors are summoned and they make fiesta for their skulls, drinking ground rice mixed with water or with grated coconut milk. They then make signs and perform ceremonies, as if inviting the old skull to eat. Then they begin to sing very loudly, as if giving thanks to the fisherman. They tell him, 'You are much beloved, this head loves you very much. This skull loves you dearly because he has made you very lucky in fishing and he honours you so much.'"

 

It is hard to tell some days whether this boy is being gof Chamoru or just gof kaduku, or whether these things truly go hand in hand. Ai lokkue'!