NO REST FOR THE AWAKE - MINAGAHET CHAMORRO

The United States has long ignored its obligation to Guam with regards to educating the people on their political status and enhancing their understanding of self-determination with the intent of pushing them towards a greater degree of self-government. For decades, activists and Government of Guam officials have called on the United States to fulfill this obligation, with little to no success. This past year however represented the first instance in recent memory of the United States accepting this obligation, as the Department of Interior has provided a grant of $300,000 to the Government of Guam to be used for political status education. Similar grants were also provided to other colonial possessions of the United States, with a similar educational purpose in mind. This money is promising, however most likely unique. Previous attempts to get this type of funding were met with confused responses at multiple levels and didn't go anywhere. As of today it isn't clear what ex

For the past year I've been working under Dr. Faye Untalan on the I Ma'adahen Fino' Chamorro gi Koleho project, a grant funded by the Administration of Native Americans to create a standardized curriculum for teaching Chamorro at the college level. I've been working with Chamorro teachers from the Marianas and Hawai'i to put together a draft curriculum and we are currently pilot testing it at GCC, NMC and GCC. With the drafting of this curriculum we've gone through months of editing and polishing. Hundreds and perhaps more than a thousand potential pages were produced for the curriculum thus far, and the majority of it has been edited and erased. These pages contained exercises, activities, drills, vocabulary lists, grammar lessons and of course dialogues. Alot of these materials I've been holding on to since it can always be used somewhere else, even if it doesn't make it into this particular project. Below is one of the dialogues that was cut. It w

When I took Chamorro at the University of Guam I was fortunate in that for CM101 and CM102 I had the same professor, Peter Onedera. As I moved from one to the next there was a smooth transition, we picked up in the second semester easily from where we had left off the semester before. Other students however had different experiences. They would take one professor for CM101 and another for CM102 and often times they would find that two faculty from the same institution would start and end up at completely different for their courses. Even now as I teach Chamorro language at the University of Guam I have noticed these gaps. Sometimes they are minor, but sometimes they can be serious. Part of this problem is the lack of any standardized textbooks that instructors can use to help maintain a continuity between various levels of Chamorro. At present instructors use a variety of materials in order to teach their courses. The books created by Donald Topping, most famous for co-a

Read below to learn more about a project I will be working on for the next few years: I Ma’adahen i Fino Chamorro gi Koleho. ************************ UOG Received a 3-Year Federally Funded Grant to standardize the Chamorro language curriculum for post-secondary instruction; it also plans to produce a textbook for student use. Starting this Fall Semester, the University of Guam will begin this 3-year project funded by the Administration of Native Americans to create a standardized curriculum for teaching the Chamorro language at the college level. The project entitled   “I Ma Adahen i Fino’ Chamorro gi Koleho” or “The Preservation of the Chamorro Language at the Post-Secondary Level” will bring together the four colleges that currently offer Chamorro language in their curriculum to work together to determine a unified curriculum for instruction for four-semesters of Chamorro language. Dr. Faye Untalan is the Principal Investigator of this project.   The Cham

This coming year looks so exciting for me in terms of the many projects that I will be organizing or be involved in. For the next few months I will literally have three full time jobs. I will be teaching Chamorro language and culture classes at UOG. I will be leading the writing team for the Guam Museum. Finally I will be coordinating a 3 year grant, totaling more than $600,000 to create a standardized text for teaching Chamorro at the college level. This is in addition to all the other many activities that I will be continuing. I may find it hard to even find time to play any SC2 before the end of the year. One thing that has unfortunately suffered as I become more and more busy is my painting. For years I would have every couple of months marathon painting sessions, where I would paint for hours and cover the entire floors of apartments with paintings and often times paint splatters. I have a CAHA grant that I received to paint an image that combines the experiences of both Cham

Last month I did a quick “Chamorro” tour of southern California. While flying to a UN conference in Quito, Ecuador, I stopped off in California for a few days to visit family, friends and the lively network of Chamorro groups that have formed in recent years. I flew into San Francisco and over three days drove 1000 miles from the Bay Area, to Los Angeles, Long Beach and San Diego. For people who live in the states, this may not seem like a great distance, but for people on Guam, this is the equivalent of driving from the northern to the southern tips of the island 15 times. This tour was a personally enriching experience as I got to catch up with people I had worked with before and see projects that I supported at the beginning see completion and success. In Long Beach, I visited the Guam Communications Network and spent the afternoon with the staff there. GCN is the oldest Chamorro non-profit in the states. It was first started following a typhoon in the early 90’s, when communi

The past few weeks have been crazy. You may or may not have noticed this on the lack of posting. The sparse amount of posts in no way means that I haven’t been doing anything. The truth is the opposite, I have been doing way to much lately. Sen tinane’ yu’, ya esta liso yu’ para bei lalango. I am working on two Administration for Native American Grants. One to standardize Chamorro curriculum at the college level. The other to create a publishing house at the University of Guam that will publish Chamorro children’s books. I’m not writing them alone, but for those familiar with ANA grants, there always seems to be an endless amount of workplans, appendixes and so on to tweak and fine tune. Another grant that I need to finish by next month is for the Guam Preservation Trust, and is requesting support to hold a mini-conference in the fall on language and culture shifts amongst Chamorros today. I am working with Faye Untalan, who teaches Chamorro at UOG on th

I have barely been on my blog this week and I apologize. I've been busy with a grant application that is due today and two articles due this weekend. I promise next week to return to this blog and give it the respect it deserves. I have also been distracted this week with my Tumblrs. I have my personal Tumblr, Sumahi going strong again. I also have a new Starcraft 2 Tumblr, dedicated to the team Startale. For those interested check them out with the links below: sumahi.tumblr.com startalefan.tumblr.com

Mapuno' i birak. Esta hagas na tiempo hu u'uke' este na birak. Kada pekkat-hu ha chungat yu. Kada diha, kalang sinanggra yu' ni' i malago'-na. Para Hamyo, ni' ti en kempreprende hafa ilelek-hu guini, pat hafa este na estaba na birak-hu, manaplika yu' "grant" halacha. Ya para dos meses ayu sumagayi i lina'la'-hu. Lao makpo' este put fin, ya ha fattoigue yu' ta'lo i minagof-hu, i gailugat-hu. For those who don't understand the Chamorro section above, my life was taken over recently by applying for a National Science Foundation grant. I have applied for grants before, but never one such as this. This grant was twice as large as the largest grant I've ever helped apply for (this one is $220,000), three times longer than the longest grant I've ever applied for (3 years) and stretched my ability to sound "scientific" in a grant proposal. Suette yu', because the grant was on something I take se

Gof tinane' yu' gi este mamaila na simana. Guaha inaplikan grant ni' bai hu na'halom antes di Tuesday. Guaha meggai na bai hu na'listo para i singko na klas-hu siha. Guaha tinige'-hu review put i lepblon Vince Diaz ( Repositioning the Missionary) ni' bai hu tuge' antes di i finakpo' i mes. Guaha dos na kaduku na patgon-hu, ya kalang gof ga'tumane' i dos nu Guahu. And so since I won't be posting much for a few days because I have too many things to do, I've pasted below a picture of two dogs riding a karabao. Fa'na'an i duenon este na tres ga'ga' i bisinun Si tata-hu giya Piti. Lao yanggen sesso matto hao giya i kanton tasi Assan, sesso lokkue' sina un ripara este na tres manmamomokkat guihi. Adios, esta otro biahi!

This month or next I'll be finishing off an art project I've been working on for more than a year with my brother Jack and  i nananfamagu'on-hu Jessica Chan. To be truthful, while I have been working on it for more than a year, the hardwork is actually being done by these artists, I'm doing more of the conceptualizing of it. The project is titled The Untold Story of the Chamurai: How Chamorro and Samurai Warriors Fought off the Spanish in Guam in 1616. I will provide the description below for you to read to get a better idea of what I'm intending, and you should be interested after reading such a weird title. I received a Guam CAHA grant for this project and so the excerpt below is from my grant proposal. The artwork will be displayed in an exhibit sometime this fall. I'm not sure where. I might have a small exhibit in a few months of the just the artwork, perhaps at I.P. Coffee or a similar place. Then later around December I might have a more serious show

While I was in San Diego attending graduate school I worked with alot of the Chamorro community out there, in particular the non-profit group CHELU Inc. CHELU stands for Chamorro Hands in Education Links Unity and it was created to support the Chamorro people and the maintenance of their health, their language and their heritage. I served briefly as a board member to CHELU, during which time I helped write for them a $100,000 ANA or Administration of Native Americans Grant, to study the state of the Chamorro language in San Diego county, which hosts the largest population of Chamorros anywhere outside of the Marianas. The grant was called Tungo' i Estao i Fino'-ta , and despite the group being rejected for the same grant the year earlier, with my help we received it and the study was conducted. When I helped organize three Famoksaiyan conferences in San Diego and the Bay Area, many Guam clubs or Chamorro groups were not supportive and sometimes openly hostile of what we were

Shiro's Head: The Muna Brothers (Kel and Don) are trying to raise money in order to fly to Los Angeles next month so they can screen their film "Shiro's Head" as part of the 25th Annual Los Angeles Asian Pacific Film Festival, from April 30, 2009 to May 7, 2009. A fundraiser will be held from 6 to 10 p.m. on April 21 at Ralphy's in East Agana. Proceeds from the event will pay for the Muna brothers' travel and accommodation expenses. For more information on their film Shiro's Head which premiered last year head to the its website: http://www.shirosheadthelegend.com/ *************************************** I Fuetsan I Taotao: The film's Director Alex Munoz has just received word that two NFL players, brothers Brandon and Femi Ayanbadejo are on board to play minor roles in the film, which will begin filming later this year. Munoz released the first issue of a mini-comic series to help build interest in the film and support Guam non-profits earlier this

I've never have much luck writing grants over the years, and so humuyongna na mampos ti ya-hu mamangge' grants. I know amongst Chamorros there is a real need right now for good grants writers who can help get public and private monies for alot of community projects, unfortunately as I tell most people, my voice when I write isn't the one you want when a panel is considering who to fund. I can give you all the information and ideas, but chances are the form that I would put them in would scare people off. In my academic work I tend to write in a combination of visceral intensity and abstract philosophical waxing. On my blog, I tend to write, well just read some of the post below, with a firm commitment to the truth, but no real commitment to showing "both sides of the issues" or feigning objectivity. My writing on my blog is explicitly political and I make very few attempts to shroud that. If you've ever been to a grant writing workshop, than you'll know t