Chamorro people

The Chamorro people are the Indigenous people of the Mariana Islands, politically divided between the United States territory of Guam and the encompassing Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands in Micronesia, a commonwealth of the US. Today, significant Chamorro populations also exist in several US states, including Hawaii, California, Washington, Texas, Tennessee, Oregon, and Nevada, all of which together are designated as Pacific Islander Americans according to the US census. According to the 2020 census, about 63,035 people with Chamorro ancestry live in Guam and another 17,163 live in the Northern Marianas. Among those, 50,420 identified as Chamorro alone in Guam and 12,001 in Northern Marianas.

Etymology

Precolonial society in the Marianas was based on a caste system, Chamori being the name of the ruling, highest caste.
After Spain annexed and colonized the Marianas, the caste system eventually became extinct under Spanish rule, and all of the Indigenous residents of the archipelago eventually came to be referred to by the Spanish exonym Chamorro. The name Chamoru is an endonym derived from the Indigenous orthography of the Spanish exonym. The digraph ch is treated as a single letter, hence both characters are capitalized at the beginning of a sentence or proper noun, much like ij in Dutch.
Some people theorize that Spanish definitions of the word Chamorro played a role in its being used to refer to the island's Indigenous inhabitants. Not only is "Chamorro" a Spanish surname; in Spanish it also means "leg of pork", "beardless ", "bald", "close-cropped", or "shorn/shaven/ cut close to the surface". Around 1670, a Catholic missionary reported that men were sporting a style in which their heads were shaven, save for a "finger-length" amount of hair at the crown. This hairstyle has often been portrayed in modern-day depictions of early Chamorros, but the first European descriptions of the physical appearance of the Chamorro people in the 1520s and '30s report that both sexes had long black hair, which they wore down to their waists or even further. Another description, given about 50 years later, reported that the Native people at that time were tying up their hair into one or two topknots.
Chamorro institutions on Guam advocate for the spelling Chamoru, as reflected in the 2017 Guam Public Law 33-236. In 2018, the Commission on the Chamoru Language and the Teaching of the History and Culture of the Indigenous People of Guam announced Chamoru as the preferred standardized spelling of the language and people, as opposed to the conventional spelling Chamorro.

Language

The Chamorro language is included in the Malayo-Polynesian subgroup of the Austronesian family. Because Guam was colonized by Spain for over 300 years, Chamorro has acquired many loanwords from Spanish. An example is how the traditional Chamorro number system was replaced by Spanish numbers.
Chamorro is often spoken in many homes, but this is becoming less common. However, a resurgence of interest in reviving the language has occurred, and all public schools on both Guam and the Northern Marianas are now required by law to teach the Chamorro language as part of the elementary-, middle-, and high-school curriculum.
A commonly spoken phrase in Chamorro is håfa adai, a greeting which approximates "hello" in English.

History

Early Chamorros

The Chamorros are commonly believed to have arrived in the Marianas Islands from the Philippines. They are most closely related to other Austronesian-speaking Native people from the Philippines, eastern Indonesia, Taiwanese aborigines, and peoples of the Caroline Islands to the south. Recent advanced DNA testing conducted on the remains of ancient Chamorros showed that the lineage of both the Unai and the Latte periods originated during the Holocene Epoch in eastern Indonesia, most likely Sulawesi, with no direct prehistoric connection to the Philippines. They were expert seafarers and skilled craftspeople familiar with intricate weaving and detailed pottery-making. The latte stone, a megalithic rock pillar topped with a hemispherical capstone, was used by early Chamorros as foundation for buildings, and has since been appropriated as a national symbol.
Chamorro society was based on what sociologist Lawrence J. Cunningham termed the "matrilineal avuncuclan", one characteristic of which is that the of the female parent plays a more primary paternal role than biological male parent of a child.

Agriculture

Spanish colonial records show that Chamorro farmers planted seeds according to the phases of the moon. For example, farmers on Guam often plant tuber crops such as sweet potato and yams at full moon during low tide.
According to the University of Guam, Unibetsedåt Guåhan, the history of Agriculture on Guam had an outstanding number of farms reported in the year of 1940. With a high number of reports in 1975 and a decline in 2007, those involved field crop production, livestock and poultry, fish and agriculture. Based on the data, market crop sales decreased and a number of agricultural production is unrecognized.

Culture

Cosmogony and religion

According to early Chamorro legend, the world was created by a twin brother and sister, Puntan and Fu'uña. As he lay dying, Puntan instructed his sister Fu'uña to make his body into the ingredients of the universe. She used his eyes to create the Sun and Moon, his eyebrows to make rainbows, and most of the rest of his parts into various features of the Earth. Once her work was complete, she descended on an island called "Guåhan", and transformed herself into a giant rock. This rock split, and from it emerged all human beings. Some believe that this rock was once located at the site of a church in Agat, while others believe it is the phallic-shaped Laso de Fua located in Fouha Bay in Umatac.
Ancient Chamorros engaged in ancestor veneration, but did not practice a formal "religion" in the sense of worshiping deities. At least one account by Christoph Carl Fernberger in 1623 holds that human sacrifice was practiced to placate a "great fish". This claim may be related to a Chamorro legend about why the island of Guam is narrow in the middle. According to the legend, a gigantic fish was gradually eating away at the island from both sides. Although the ancient Chamorros supposedly had magical abilities, the huge creature eluded them. When the men were unsuccessful in hunting it down, the women used their hair to weave a net, which grew larger as they sang. The singing enchanted the fish, and lured it into the giant net.
Enraged that Father Diego Luis de San Vitores had baptized his child, a Chamorro man and his friend killed the priest and Filipino catechist Pedro Calungsod in April 1672, dumping their bodies in the ocean.

Castes and classes

Chamorro society was divided into two main castes, and continued to be so for well over a century after the Spanish first arrived. According to historical records provided by Europeans, such as Father Charles Le Gobien, apparent racial differences existed between the subservient Manachang caste, and the higher , the Manachang being described as shorter, darker-skinned, and physically less hardy than the Chamori. The Chamori caste was further subdivided into the upper-middle class Achoti/''Acha'ot and the highest, the ruling Matua/Matao'' class. Achoti could gain status as Matua, and Matua could be reduced to Achoti, but Manachang were born and died as such and had no recourse to improve their station. Members of the Manachang and the Chamori were not permitted to intermingle. All three classes performed physical labor, but had specifically different duties. Le Gobien theorized that Chamorro society comprised the geographical convergence of peoples of different ethnic origins. This idea may be supportable by the evidence of linguistic characteristics of the Chamorro language and social customs.

Clothing and beauty practices

Prior to Spanish contact, Chamorro boys and men wore no clothing and went about fully nude at all times. Chamorro girls went nude until around the age of eight to ten, at which point they began to wear a small genital covering made either of bark, one or more leaves, a piece of a turtle shell or in some cases matting. Both sexes at times wore hats of woven leaves to protect themselves from the sun.
Father Pierre Coomans wrote of the practice among Chamorro women of teeth blackening/dental lacquering, which they considered beautiful as a distinction apart from animals. Fernberger wrote in his account of the Chamorros that "penis pins" were employed as a chastity measure for young males, a type of genital piercing similar to those employed by inhabitants of precolonial maritime Southeast Asia.

Folklore

The Chamorro creation story revolves around two celestial siblings named Puntan and Fu'una. In time, this creation story underwent a series of modifications due to the complications in passing the story along from generation to generation. In this Chamorro creation story, Puntan and Fu'una create the world with their body parts and souls. Puntan's various body parts were turned into the land, his chest into the sky, his eyebrows into rainbows, and his eyes into the sun and moon. Fu’una having the ability to give life, brought the sun, soil, and waters to life, and with a final transformation, she turned into stone and gave birth to the Chamorro people. Evidence supporting this creation story can be seen through the names of the villages on Guam as they are named after body parts. Barrigada translates to flank, Tiyan translates to stomach, Hagatna translates to blood and Mongmong translates to a heartbeat.
Taotaomo'na are spirits of ancient Chamorros. Birak is a broader term that may refer not only to the undead, but also to demons or general elemental types. Taotaomona essentially translates to "people of early times," referring to the ancestors of the Chamorro peoples. The Taotaomona is a supernatural ancestral spirit that Chamorros and some neighboring islanders from Rota and Saipan believe in. The Taotaomona possess a strength that far exceeds man and has the ability to cause sickness and death to those who offend them. The appearance of a Taotaomona can vary as they can be a female or male and can take an attractive form or a monstrous form.