NO REST FOR THE AWAKE - MINAGAHET CHAMORRO

Gaige yu' giya Grand Rapids, Michigan gi este na simåna para i kada såkkan na konferensia para i NASAA (National Assembly of State Arts Agencies). Gof umachågo' iya Guahan yan iya Michigan. Siña este i uttimo na sakkån-hu gi CAHA, nai sumesetbe yu' komo membron board desde 2011. Gi este na konferensia mandanña' membro ginen i arts council gi diferentes na states pat territories, ya ma diskuti hafa guaguaha put prugraman art siha gi i bånda Federåt. Ma diskuti lokkue' diferentes na strategies put i prublema yan chinanada siha i arts councils ma fafana' på'go.

There is a long list of people whom I wish I had the chance to interview and ask some basic questions, the overwhelming majority of which are Chamorros or from Guam. This long, gof annakko' na lista is divided into two parts. First, those whom passed away long before I was born, and those whose lives overlapped with mine, but I never had the chance to sit down and interview. High on my list was Påle' ( Monsignor) Oscar Lujan Calvo, who was close cousins with my grandfather. Påle' Scot as most Chamorros referred to him was the third ever Chamorro Catholic priest. He went to seminary in the Philippines alongside Påle' Jesus Baza Duenas and Påle' Jose Ada Manibusan was ordained in Manila during the war, but died before he could return to Guam. He returned to Guam and war ordained just a few months before World War II hit the island. He, Påle' Duenas and Reverend Joaquin Sablan were the only religious leaders on the island during World War II, meeting the spiri

It is less than 200 days til Guam hosts FESTPAC or the largest cultural festival in the Pacific. I am involved in FESTPAC in a number of forms and there are some ways that we are clearly ready and on course and others where ai adai it seems like it'll take a miracle for us to make it on time. But with each day, more and more things are decided and more and more groups come together. Hunggan sesso tai'esperansa yu' gi este na kinalamten, lao kada tumekkon yu', mafatto tinanga ta'lo. For those of you who would like to receive regular updates about FESTPAC, its planning and organizing go on Facebook and LIKE the official FESTPAC page. Here is the link: https://www.facebook.com/guamfestpac2016 Or, each Friday the Pacific Daily News is featuring a different column under the banner of "Saonao yan Eyak" which covers a different aspect of the organizing taking place and also hopes to help prepare the people for what it is like

This week I am in Taiwan, I'll be attending and presenting at the 2015 International Austronesian Conference. People from Guam have been attending this conference for quite a while and I am honored to be the most recent attendee. I'll be presenting a paper titled, "The Austronesian Sakman: The Role of FESTPAC in Chamorro Efforts at Cultural Revitalization." I am attending on behalf of the Guam Council on the Arts and Humanities Agency (GCAHA) and so I made certain my presentation was connected to FESTPAC which will be held in Guam next year. I'm pasted below my abstract and I'm sure I'll be sharing more about my experiences on this blog. Chamorro culture of the Mariana Islands has been dramatically influenced by centuries of colonization by Spanish, Japanese and American forces. Despite these changes, the Chamorro people have maintained various forms of continuity to their Austronesian ancestors that are still manifest today in

It is now almost 200 days til Guam hosts FESTPAC or the largest cultural festival in the Pacific. I am involved in FESTPAC in a number of forms and there are some ways that we are clearly ready and on course and others where ai adai it seems like it'll take a miracle for us to make it on time.  Para i taotao ni' muna'la'la'la' yan chumochonnek mo'na i kuttura-ta (gi meggai na manera) este na dinana' i mas takhilo', i mas sagradu na tiempo. Kada kuatro na sakkan mandadana' i taotaogues i Pasifiku gi unu na isla, ya manafa'nu'i yan manapatte i kutturan-niha. Un sen dangkolu na onra este na para ta kombida taotao ginen kana trenta diferentes na isla siha magi para i tano'-ta.  For those of you who would like to receive regular updates about FESTPAC, its planning and organizing go on Facebook and LIKE the official FESTPAC page. Here is the link: https://www.facebook.com/guamfestpac2016 Or, each Friday the Pacific Daily N

I will be in the Southern California area at the end of this month for the upcoming Chamorro Cultural Festival in San Marcos (on March 28th). I went out to it last year and did some outreach for UOG and Chamorro Studies and had a wonderful time. Since we are supposed to begin building our online certificate program in Chamorro Studies this summer, I felt it would be good to go back out and keep people up to date of what we've been doing and keep networking. In addition to the Chamorro Cultural Festival I'll also be helping with the FESTPAC diaspora auditions. Next year Guam will become the most important place in the Pacific for two weeks as it hosts the largest arts and culture festival in the region. For this event Guam CAHA is including a group of people from the diaspora as part of the delegation. These auditions and workshops will take place the day after the Chamorro Cultural Festival, the 29th in San Diego. I'll also be doing more UOG/Chamorro Studies outreach

--> It is a surreal experience being a "professor" and a "doctor" in the sense of being an academic. Although I have the degrees and the background to give these labels the appropriate meaning, I still feel first and foremost that I am actually an artist. My sensibilities and my approaches to almost everything are more like that of an artist than that of a scholar. I constantly learn towards creativity and innovation rather than seeking the usual stability of disciplinary sheltering that characterizes most academics. This is why even though my career and so much of my reputation is tied to things such as development of Chamorro language programs, curriculum, Guam History research and the development of programs related to Chamorro culture and identity, I still yearn to create "art." I try my best to force it into the things I do, but I also want to actually create art in the sense of comic books, writing fiction and often times just painting a

The Battle of Guam/Okinawa project took several months but it was well worth it. After visiting the Sakima Art Museum in Okinawa I was consumed by a painting that is in their permanent collection, "The Battle of Okinawa." This painting was designed to show the horror of World War II in Okinawa, when the island was destroyed in a typhoon of steel. This painting was the height of the Museum and filled with imagery that intrigued, haunted and horrified. I knew I could never match up to the intensity of that image, but felt the need to try to create my own intervention. After traveling and visiting Okinawa so many times in the past few years and seeing the way our tragic histories have given us similar difficult experiences, I wanted to build upon the intent of the original Battle of Okinawa painting, but also put my own wishful solidarity, in whatever form I could find it. I decided to try to paint an image that could combine the effects and impacts of World War II in both

In order to get through our lives we will divide our consciousness into layers. There will be things that we will let float atop our consciousness on a daily basis because we judge them to be important enough to have access to all the time. There will be things that the context of each day will force to the surface. Things that we maybe didn’t wish would reveal themselves all the time, but will anyways because of what is happening around us. Then there are the things that we will knowingly or unknowingly push down as far as we can and hope they never emerge. These are notions, faint ideas, principles, realizations which pumuha todu. They have the ability to upset everything, like flipping over a jar filled with water and watching everything within be taken away by the momentum of the chaos. These are things that are banished or submerged deep below because they cost too much to acknowledge on a daily basis. They extract so much ideological flesh in their reco

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

This Thursday I'll be on a panel to discuss the new film "Across the Water in Time." It is being screened at the Hyatt at 6 pm on Wednesday and I'll be part of a panel on Thursday 2 pm at the CAHA Gallery in the Terlaje Building in Hagatna. My panel will be discussion history and how it relates to this wonderful and exciting project. The film is about the descendants of a Chamorro man named Juan Perez who left island as a whaler in the 19th century. He settled in Hawai'i and married and his name was subsequently changed to Paris. Eventually while doing genealogical research from both islands, his descendants and his relatives were reunited. Below is a video interview of Jillette Leon Guerrero the creator of the film with KUAM News Extra. In addition I pasted some info from the website for the film . ************************ Juan D. Perez’s story is an interesting one. He was born in Guam but is believed to have moved to Hawaii sometime between 185

Para bai hu egga' este lamo'na. Gof excited yu' put este na inegga'. Esta apmam ti manegga' yu' play Peter Onedera. Gof malago' yu' sumapotte Si Pedro gi i che'cho'-na, ko'lo'lo'na este na klasi para i kuttura-ta yan i lenguahi-ta. Hu fahan i tiket-hu siha gi este na LINK . Sina un usa Paypal. Ti mappot, gof faset.

This semester at UOG I am organizing a colloquium series for the newly christened Chamorro Studies program. We'll be having four different speakers, a different one each month, to come and discuss with faculty and students their ideas of what Chamorro Studies is or should be, and also what projects they are currently working on elsewhere in the community. Each speaker is someone on island who plays an important role in helping shape ideas of "Chinamorro" or "Chamorroness." For our first speaker we have invited Joseph Artero-Cameron who is the President of the Department of Chamorro Affairs. His talks is titled "I Hinanao-Ta: Our Journey." It will take place tomorrow, January 28th, at 2 pm in the Dean's Professional Development Room in the Humanities and Social Sciences Building at UOG. Here is a description of his talk as well as a bio below: In this colloquium, Cameron, the President of the Department of Chamorro Affairs will provide a dep

I haven't had an art exhibit in about two years now, since my last solo show titled "Before the Storm, After the Fire" in May of 2010. In December 2011, I hung a small exhibit featuring artwork created by my brother Jack but conceived as part of a project I've been working on for quite a while, but only got a small amount of funding to work on last year. The project is titled "The Untold Story of the Chamurai: How Chamorro and Spanish Warriors Fought Against the Spanish in Guam in 1616." The exhibit in it's still unfinished glory is meant to tell the previously unknown tale of how Samurai and Chamorro warriors fought against the Spanish who were attempting to wipe out all of the Chamorros on Guam in 1616. I had first imagined this project more than 10 years ago as a way of combining my interest in samurai manga, anime and fiction with my interest in reading and teaching Chamorro history. I wrote up an entire story arc, filled with action, drama, romanc

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

This past week I hit a big milestone in terms of my Youtube account. I finally got to 100,000 total views for all my videos. I currently have about 360 videos, and get a couple of hundred hits a day. For someone who has no editing program and has used for four years a series of pretty crappy cameras, it is a big deal to have reached this many hits. I thought to celebrate this occasion, I'd paste below my top 18 most watched videos. Now keep in mind that these videos are the most watched and not necessarily the highest-rated or my favorites. Some of them, are simply high up on the list because they were given names which people who know nothing about Guam or care nothing about myself or Chamorros would look up and end up accidentally watching a few seconds of. Some of them are several years old, from when my video cameras had very limited memory and so they are pretty short and quick. Right now I use bigger memory cards which can hold longer files, but I'm still limite