NO REST FOR THE AWAKE - MINAGAHET CHAMORRO

If you ask just about any Chamorro about their thoughts on reunification or the unification of the Marianas Islands, they would most likely all say " Hunggan, gof maolek enao. Hu gof sapotte enao." In the past, differences between the islands due to colonial divisions and anger over treatment during World War II may have kept Chamorros from the north and the south apart, but that isn't really the case anymore. There maystill  be some latent feelings of superiority that people of one island may have over another, because they feel culturally, linguistically or technologically superior, but even that is started to fade at the political level as all the Marianas Islands are basically territories of the United States now, one with more power than the other. So while common sense has changed on this issue, there has been little substantive efforts. All governors of Guam that I can remember have at some point expressed interest in unifying the Marianas Islands. They have sa

I am currently working on an exciting comic project for a friend of mine. My brothers Jack and Jeremy are joining me in the project (and spearheading it), which will look at Guam's political status in a very new way, through the unlikely narrative of sports. To comic will follow the story of Roque Babauta, a Chamorro basketball player who gets wrapped up in national and international politics. As part of it, I wrote up a concept draft which outlined everything the way I was seeing it. Jeremy has gone on to shake things up and make flow better and add in more realism and details. Part of it is a sequence where a sports commentator is ruminating on the connection between politics and sports. Here is the first draft of it: Too often even we who love sports, dismiss it as a diversion, as an opiate for the masses, a distraction from the world. But sports is the world itself. It is not a diversion, but a reflection, a mirror image. The wars between na

I'll be at the Sukicon this weekend at the Phoenix Center at Father Duenas school in Mangilao. I will have a bunch of interesting things to display and even some stuff to sell. Sukicon is a gathering or cosplayers, gaming nerds, anime/manga nerds and even comic book geeks. There is an artist alley and different booths by exhibitors. For me, I'll be displaying/selling the following things: 1. I'll be displaying some of my grandfather's tools. I have a nice complete set of the seven traditional tools that I'll put out, as well as some examples of the 150 year history of Chamorro blacksmithing in my family, most notably a machete that is more than 100 years old, and made by my great-grandfather Mariano Leon Guerrero Lujan (Bittot). I also have some tools that my grandfather made and one or two that I helped him make more recently. This will be interesting as I'm sure most of the people attending Sukicon think of "culture" a bit differently, as usually

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 the writing world, November is a special month, although a generally crazy month. It is known as NaNoWriMo or National Novel Writing Month. During this month all of those who have a passion for writing are encouraged to cast caution into the wind and blitz out the novel they have always dreamed of writing. It is something anyone, from any walk of life can participate in. All it takes is commitment and time management. The link for the website where you can sign up is (nanowrimo.org). For those who take on the NaNoWriMo challenge, the number 50,000 signifies both a hated overseer and a inspiring target. As this process is about getting those who want to write, to write, everyone is given a target, 50,000 words, that they are to reach by the end of the month. Over the course of November you are to type out 50,000 words of your chosen story. Since the target is all that matters you are not encouraged to edit and rewrite as you write, but simply charge forward unt

Social movements, protest movements, radical change movements always work in cycles. They can be difficult to sustain, especially when they operate primarily at an organic, grassroots level. There will be periods of great activity and then periods where nothing much seems to happen. Depending on how you see things, it can sometimes appear as if too much protesting is going on, because you don't perceive the gaps, or it can appear as if not enough is happening and something, some opportunity is being lost in the process. You can list the factors involved in order to better understand how this works, but part of it will always elude you. As they say in Chamorro, "Si Yu'us, Yu'us. I taotao, taotao ha'." Each in their own way is a mystery. Si Yu'us and his/her mysterious ways, structurally incomprehensible to everyone. The impossibility of it is meant to be a test of faith, the ultimate pledge of loyalty without any guarantee that anything you do really ma

The Guam Bus is the creative team that consists of myself and my two brothers. Over they years we've talk about alot of creative projects, and even started some of them, such as Battle for Kamchatka, but we haven't ever really finished any of them. We made ashcans a few years back when we had a table at WonderCon in San Francisco, and I did write the script for four issues of Battle for Kamchatka and Jack did pencil three of them, but we never actually formally published anything. Jack is back on Guam for the next few months and I am taking advantage of his presence here by making him create for me on my various Chamorro Studies and Guam Museum projects. He is also working on a one-shot comic book script I wrote last year about "Makahnan Mimu" or "Warrior Wizards" in Ancient Chamorro times. If all goes well, he should be done with the pencils by the end of next month. Here's a panel from the comic so far:

Maila ya ta fanhita sumilebra i mas nuebu yan mas gefpago na prugrama gi UOG, CHAMORRO STUDIES! Come and let's celebrate the newest and most awesome program at UOG, Chamorro Studies! This Thursday, the launch event will feature presentations, performances, displays and the start of a new Chamorro language lecture series. Below is the schedule:

Last year local businessman Adrian Cruz proposed the creation of a Chamorro newspaper. It would feature articles and columns in the Chamorro language and focus on issues affecting Chamorros. I and a few others submitted articles to support this newspaper. I was happy to learn earlier this year that Adrian had gotten enough advertising and support to print the first issue.  I wrote a story on the reunification of the Marianas, providing some background on how Guam was taken by the United States, but the other islands in the Marianas in Micronesia were not. My column appeared on the editorial page beside columns by Mario Borja who is heading the Chamorro Sakman project in San Diego and the infamous Robert Underwood, who wrote on the fluidity of Chamorro culture and the need to not only honor our ancient ancestors. Just the intellectual layout of the three columns was pretty cool to look at. Another issue is coming out soon. I'm contributing a piece in Cham

The past few months have been difficult in terms of writing. I still write quite a bit, but I just don't find as much time as usual. I am currently the program coordinator for the Chamorro Studies program at UOG and in addition to this I have two kids and teach five classes and so down time where I can type or scratch out my thoughts feels about as rare as seeing a sihek in my backyard. But since November is National Novel Writing Month, I've decided to set aside time each day to work on a novel. Gof magof yu' put este, ya gof excited yu' para i mamaila na mes. My idea is one I've been thinking about for years and I've written about a few times on this blog. I call it "The Legend of the Chamurai." It is a story about how prior to the Spanish colonization of Guam in 1668, an event took place that has almost been completely lost in Guam History. This is the period where the Spanish interacted with Chamorros and visited Guam, but did not settle ther

Estague i che'lu-hu Si Jack yan i lahi-hu Si Akli'e'. Mambisita Si Jack giya Guahan gi i ma'pos na mes. Hu kekekombense gui' na maolekna ha move gui' tatte para este na isla. Gof apmam desde sumaga' Si Jack giya Guahan ya dos biahi ha' ha bisita desde ki ha dingu gui'. Para Guahu gof malago' yu' na u saga' mo'na guini sa' sina manhami yan i dos che'lu-hu. Gof hagas desde na manggaige ham gi i parehu na pidasun tano'.

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

A few months back I started up a Tumblr in hopes of exploring the angsty, curious teenage girl inside of me (j/k). In truth, I have no idea what the teenage girl inside of me is like, we don't talk very much, sina gof ekpe gui' lao ti siguru yu', hassan na kumuentos ham. Actually I did think about getting a Tumblr long ago, but it was precisely the abundance of angsty, curious pre-teen and teenage girls on there which made me shy away. Would getting a Tumblr mark me in a social-virutal way that I wasn't expecting? I don't know how cool or uncool Blogger is, but I'm certain that having a Tumblr is cooler, but would it be the right kind of cool? Esta meggai na blogs-hu siha, lao ti mangcool siha. Ya mungga yu' mama'tinas nuebu ya para bai hu makase' ta'lo. I asked my younger sister Alina who is a living, breathing angsty teenage girl what she thought about Tumblr and her response was, "What's that?" So that's when I decided it

Several years back I posted on Minagahet Zine a page called "Famoksaiyan gi i Rediu" which featured various interviews on the radio given by members and allies of Famoksaiyan regarding issues of militarism, colonialism, decolonization, the UN, cultural revitalization and anything else which someone with a microphone and ten to twenty minutes wanted to chat about. As the years have passed the links for those interviews have gone dead, the files have been moved and even the server for Minagahet Zine itself has changed and is no longer on Geocities but now can be accessed directly at http://www.minagahetzine.com/ Recently, Martha Duenas, who is part of Famoksaiyan West Coast and blogs at Too Late To Stop Now, updated the Famoksaiyan gi i Rediu page, found the new links for interviews and even added some more which have been conducted as the military buildup issue has become even bigger and occassionally garnered the attention of progressive and mainstream national media. I&#

Last month I started yet another regular post thread which brought together my love for anime and the Chamorro language. I named it " Sakigake Chamorro " which translates to "Charge ahead Chamorro!" and is taken from the manga/anime Sakigake! Cromartie High School! What this thread amounts to is the theme songs for anime translated into Chamorro in more fun, less precise fashion. I named it "Sakigake Chamorro" because the first song I chose to translate was from Cromartie High School. This evening, as I was trying to unwind from a long, stressful week of teaching I decided to translate another anime song. I decided to pick one that would be a lot of fun to translate, this meaning one which is really catchy, but also completely nonsensical and insane. The one that immediately popped into my mind from those on my computer was "Ride on Shooting Star" from the anime FLCL. I've never really liked this one, but i che'lu-hu Jack really does,