Mina'tres na Lisayu: The Ga'kariso
Mina'tres na Lisayu for Elizabeth Flores Lujan 12/17/13 My grandmother would cut out anything in the newspapers related to Chamorro language. She gave me several reasons over the years for why she did this (other than her being a hoarder/collector), but once she said to me, that she was worried that the language would disappear from this island just as the songs of our birds had. This statement struck me because I had grown up in an island where the only birds I’d seem to hear were planes and helicopters flying overhead. For most my age the lack of birds is a piece of Guam trivia, a metaphor to use to talk about how fragile the state of the Chamorro people, or how we should be vigilante about what comes into our community, or a footnote to discussing the brown tree snake issue. For my grandmother and her generation the native birds of Guam were half of the soundtrack of life. If you imagine the singing that Chamorros did being the social opera, th