NO REST FOR THE AWAKE - MINAGAHET CHAMORRO

Last year I got the chance to work with a great group of people on a film project. It is tentatively titled Lalahen Sinahi. I co-wrote the script with Kenneth Gofigan Kuper, and we made it almost entirely in Chamorro. We had an intense couple of weeks filming it, only to have some of the scenes disappear on us. Ken is currently off-island attending graduate school, but when he returns next month we'll need to figure out what to do next with the project, if we should shoot it again or try to salvage what we have.  As we were writing the screenplay, a specter who was always shadowing our discussions was Quentin Tarantino. His dialogue driven stories was something we both wanted to capture in small and large ways. Sometimes people can get irritated with that type of storytelling, but when it works, it is incredibly effective and ridiculously engrossing. The flavors that he infuses into the dialogue, the tension he builds can be amazing. I am hoping that in either this project or o

  Questionable Shootings Raise Tensions in Custer County Brian Daffron 1/14/14 Indian Country Today Media Network   Within the heart of the Cheyenne and Arapaho tribal jurisdiction in western Oklahoma sits Custer County. The county’s namesake made a name for himself as an “Indian Fighter” by attacking Black Kettle’s village on the Washita River in 1868—four years after Black Kettle survived the Sand Creek Massacre of 1864. In the past few years, Custer has found itself linked again to the mysterious deaths of Cheyenne and Arapaho tribal members. On June 28, 2012, police officers in the city of Clinton, within Custer County, shot and killed 34-year-old Benjamin Whiteshield outside of their police station. According to the Oklahoman , Whiteshield’s family took him to the police station to get help for an alleged delusional episode. The report said that Whiteshield was armed with a crescent wrench, but nothing in the news report stated whether or not he

For my CM 102 class or Beginners Chamorro Language 2, I've been experimenting with different assignments. I heard last year about a Navajo Star Wars, or the project to translate Star Wars into the Navajo language. For me, somehow who thinks that everything should be translated into Chamorro and is hoping to create a lexicon for playing 'Magic: The Gathering" in Chamorro, taking such an iconic nerdy movie and translating it into a native language is the height of awesome. I decided to incorporate something on a much smaller scale into my class.    Each student had to pick five minutes from a different movie and translate that portion into Chamorro. I told them to make sure that the segment wouldn't be too difficult for them to translate, because certain genres like sci-fi for example, might be a bit difficult for a lowly 102 student to translate effectively. They had to then record themselves or others reading the scene in Chamorro and then dub it into the film i