Say what? Speak Chamorro
Rita Taitano and husband Canice are no extraordinary couple, but what they’ve just begun is. Both strive to start at home a casual introduction of their kids to the Chamorro language. “It’s important that they can establish their roots,” Canice said. The realization occurred on Rita in a somewhat bizarre way. In a fit of anger, she barked out invectives to one of the kids. She was convinced she had uncorked a load of sting, but the child just stood there with bewildered eyes, unmoved. Then reality sets in: the child doesn’t understand Chamorro.
The Taitano family is not alone. As English invaded many homes, the number of indigenous people who speak Chamorro thinned sharply. The book “The Design of Agreement: Evidence from Chamorro,” issued by the University of Chicago Press last year, mentions in passing that 12,000 speak Chamorro in the CNMI. Apparently, the figure is a roundoff of the 1995 official census of 12,783, according to the Central Statistics Division. Then, the combined population of Chamorro and Carolinian was 20,161. A staff at the Chamorro and Carolinian Language Commission, speaking on the condition of anonymity in deference to the director who was unavailable for the interview, said children aged 13 and below mostly do not speak Chamorro at all.
In truth, even beyond that age range, Chamorro doesn’t find much use either. Consider the case of 18-year-old Mark. He said that he had taken Chamorro classes in school but that he never got to hone his conversational skill to proficiency level. For one thing, he had no one to brush it up with. At home, everybody uses English only. And the friends he hangs out with are equally unlettered with the language. Over time, his spoken Chamorro slipped from bad to worse to nothing. He doesn’t care. He will enter a U.S. university this year or next, so Chamorro knowledge is irrelevant, he says.
Consider further the case of 19-year-old Joseph Michael. Oddly, he demonstrates more adeptness with Japanese than with Chamorro. He said facility in Japanese counts a lot in the hotel industry, where he works part time.
But why must people bother with educating themselves in their native language? For the CNMI’s indigenous population, aren’t they part of the American political family which embraces English as official language? The staff at the commission said learning the Chamorro or the Carolinian language is “a matter of personal choice.” But by not learning it, he said, people will have “neglected part of their culture.”
A corollary theory to that is the one that says, When people get consumed by material pursuits, they take less interest in culture. Instead, they join the rat race — they make a living, save their dollars, buy cars and build beautiful houses. That’s all that matters. Then they grow up not knowing their past.
With no moorings, identity and pride, they will not fight for their own people, although they may be stout and well-fed, so said Salvador Laurel, former Philippine vice president, when asked why the country, for all its economic difficulties, invested millions to mark the 100th year since it became a republic. The celebration, he said, was meant to reawaken the Filipino spirit.
That might be bringing the discussion to the philosophical milieu. But, really, it doesn’t take a genius to discover the explicitness in the loss of the Chamorro spirit in the case of both Mark and Joseph Michael. They never conveyed across a feeling of being one, of belonging to a nation under one flag. Perhaps if the Chamorro spirit had been alive, the youths would have largely spoken on such issues as the federalization and the rapid loss of lands to commercialization.
The staff at the language commission said the parents should take the lead in reigniting this spirit. The homes should be made classrooms for promoting Chamorro with parents as “main teachers,” he said. Indeed, it’s a responsibility every parent must be prepared to confront. The task shouldn’t be as complicated as erecting a chalkboard at home in the strict model of a real school. For the Taitanos, it’s as light as using Chamorro in everyday conversation with kids.
Into the future, the new generation will be asking, What did our forefathers — you — do in their time? If that were asked today, what will your answer be?
