Culture traceable to truly indigenous origins is sketchy at best, though there’s undeniably a rich cultural heritage gleaned from contact with various Western and Asian influences over the past 500 years. The Spanish wiped out some 95 percent of indigenous Chamorros in the 1600s, destroying much of the original culture in the process. We know that indigenous Chamorros were good sailors and boat builders, though those now dubbed “Micronesians” — primarily Carolinians — were actually the master navigators and far-ranging seafarers, and the tradition lives on today to some degree.
For many, the modern view of ancient Chamorro culture includes: the carabao and bullcart — both imported from the Philippines — cockfights and fiestas of Spanish origin; undeniably lovely Spanish-style dress and dance; and “Chamorro” food, mostly based on imported meats, vegetables and recipes. Seafood and fresh fruit were abundant in prehistoric times but Guam had no large mammals.
As for music and dance there’s the very popular chacha from Cuba by way of the United States; U.S. country and Western-style music with Chamorro words; and “re-created” quasi-Polynesian dances. One tourist attraction once featured a lead performer straight out of old American Western movies — the spitting image of an Apache warrior with long hair, loincloth, headband and spear.
“Lost Chamorro chants” that emerged within the past two decades have no verifiable origin in early Chamorro history. They appear to have been invented several years ago by a notorious Chamorro conman as part of a 900-number telephone scam.
Early Western explorers found a Neolithic (New Stone Age) society here. Indigenous Chamorros built thatched huts and crafted articles from available materials like every other primitive tropical tribe on the planet and quarried monolithic stone artifacts — also a practice of other primitive cultures, most notably the Easter Islanders — but had no written language. They produced crude and interesting pottery, but little evidence of sophisticated indigenous art survives. Excepting a few stick-man pictographs that may or may not be of Chamorro origin, there’s no indigenous equivalent of the prehistoric paintings of Europe, Australia, the Americas and elsewhere, or the exquisite potteries found in some much older cultures.
Recent genetic studies indicate that all Pacific Islanders and Southeast Asians, including indigenous Chamorros, actually originated in China and Taiwan. With origins in —and closely related to — languages of Indonesia and Southeast Asia, the Chamorro language apparently worked well for thousands of years during a time of no appreciable advance, change or progress in the Marianas. Then came the Westerners with new concepts, new ideas, new objectives and new temptations, and over the course of a few hundred years the language evolved to accommodate new realities. Modern Chamorro incorporates words and phrases from Spanish, English, Tagalog, Japanese and several other languages. According to 2000 census data, it’s used by fewer than 60,000 people worldwide In summary, much of what is purported to be culturally indigenous almost certainly had its origins somewhere else.
DAVE DAVIS
Yigo, Guam
