NO REST FOR THE AWAKE - MINAGAHET CHAMORRO

 I recently worked on a few different research projects assisting scholars and news teams who were conducting research on the Chamoru-Japanese families in Guam.   Some of these projects focused on the waves of Japanese migration and how Japanese people were integrated or treated by the Spanish or American colonial administrations. Others focused on the Chamoru families that blended with the Japanese migrants and their experiences. Some of this interest was spurred by the publication last year of a book by Master of Chamoru Culture for Playwrighting Peter Onedera "A Borrowed Land."  I remember first encountering the sometimes complicated nature of their history, especially when it came to Guam's World War II period, when I was a young graduate student, just starting to do my oral history research. I was in Micronesian Studies at the University of Guam, traveling around, usually with my grandmother, visiting her friends and relatives, practicing my Chamoru, but also as...

Chris Perez Howard was born in 1940 to Mariquita Aguon Perez and Edward Neal Howard. When the Japanese invaded Guam the following year, his father, a US Navy sailor, was taken away as a prisoner of war, leaving his mother and family to care for Chris and his younger sister Helen. By the war's end, Mariquita would, like hundreds of other Chamorus during the occupation, become a victim of Japanese brutality. As a result, Chris would have few memories of her and soon after his father’s return to Guam at the end of the war, would be taken away from Guam and not return for almost two decades.  In the 1970s, Chris found his way back to his island home and begin to conduct research into the life and death of his mother. He pored through military archives and also interviewed family and friends, all of which helped him put together a literary portrait of her as an intelligent and resilient Chamoru woman.  In 1982 he published a biography for her titled, “Mariquita: A Tragedy o...

  Ya-hu este na litråtu. Lao guaha råson siha, ni' muna'ti ya-hu lokkue'.    I posted this image a few months ago on the Guam Museum's social media as well as my own.    It shows a Guam classroom in the late 1940s. Manggagaige todu, i ma'estra yan i estudiante siha gi halom un kuatto. Tumotohge i ma'estra gi me'nan i pisåra. Esta matuge' guihi i leksion. Uno na hobensita tumotohge mientras i otro manmata'ta'chong. Håfa ilelek-ña este na påtgon? Kao magacha' gui'? Pat kao gof osgon na estudiante ya ha kehåhayi i otro estudiante lol. Hekkua'.   Regardless of whatever is happening in the image itself, I have mixed feelings about this picture, reasons I really like it and reasons it makes me feel uneasy. I like this picture because it shows Chamorus just a few years after the end of the Japanese occupation, life is returning to normal. Schools have been built or rebuilt. Education which was paused or disrupted for two to three years becau...

  Prior to World War II, Sumay was the second largest village of Guam and because of its location near Apra Harbor, was very economically important as a hub for the island in terms of communications and trade. Because of this status, the families with ties there had a great deal of pride in their village identity and community.   The Trans-Pacific Cable Company, which laid the first telegraph wire across the Pacific, set up its station in the village in 1903. Sumay was also the landing site for the China Clipper from Pan American Airways, which built a hotel there in 1935.    Most of the first bombs that fell on Guam in the Japanese attack on the island on December 8th, 1941 were dropped on Sumay because of its strategic importance. The US Marine Barracks and tanks from Standard Oil were both hit. Within days after the Japanese invasion, all residents were evicted.    The bombardment and subsequent re-invasion of the island by US forces in July 1944 almost ...

  From 2014-2015 I spent a year in Atåte in the village of Malesso’. Not in a physical sense mind you, but in an intellectual and scholarly sense. During that time I was a professor in the Chamorro Studies Program at the University of Guam, and I worked with the late Jose Måta Torres to publish his memoirs “Massacre at Atåte” through the University of Guam. I was so thankful that we were able to see his book to completion in 2015, as he would pass away later that year.   In addition to being the memoirs of a young man, coming of age in Japanese-occupied Guam, the book also provides a first-hand account of the uprising of the people from Malesso'. After the people of the village learned that the Japanese had attempted to massacre 60 of their friends and family at Tinta and Faha, most felt that it is only a matter of time before the rest were slaughtered. On the eve of the US invasion, a group of men led by Jose "Tonko" Reyes, surprised the Japanese, killing most of them an...

  For the past 10 weeks, I've been writing columns for the Pacific Daily News providing historical context for the 1946 protest of US Navy Radioman George Tweed by more than a 100 Chamorus. Today marked my last column on the series. Although I did get a great deal more hate messages and a hateful comments during this series, I still greatly enjoyed writing these pieces. George Tweed was such an incredibly important symbol for Chamorus during the Japanese occupation. For me as a historian it is fascinating to think about how, just two years after the end of that occupation, more than a 100 Chamorus felt compelled to make signs and protest him when he returned to island. They didn't do this in the dead of night, but in the middle of the Plaza de España in front of the leadership of the US Navy on Guam. As I wrote in this last column, it was a multitude of things that compelled Chamorus to take this act, but many of them weren't about Tweed himself. Chamorus were frustrated th...

I have done so many interviews with older Chamorus that sometimes I lose track. Some interviews stay with me and I remember for the most part very clearly, others blend together. I have tapes. I have digital video. I have thousands of pages of notes in notebooks, in legal pads, in the margins of books and random scraps of paper. I have lost exact count of how many of these oral history interviews I have done, but it is well over 400 at this point.  In addition to these interviews that I've done personally, I also for many years had my students do simple interviews with elders. I have hundreds of these interviews as well, one of which I've included below from a student that I had for Elementary Chamoru 1, who interviewed her grandmother. Sometimes the Chamoru sayings or phrases that I share with my students or on social media come from these interviews.  I have so much in terms of raw material for these interviews, this cache of oral history, but I scarcely have time to do anyt...