The Guam Museum

After settling the Marianas more than three millennia ago, our ancestors developed a stable, self-sustaining and ecologically balanced lifestyle and social order. Although much of the details of these millennia are lost to time, there is still much to learn and understand by exploring archeological collections and artifacts. Our ancestors were not static; they spread out across the Marianas, settling into new villages, traveling across Micronesia and perhaps even Asia. We see in their jewelry, their burials, their pottery that remains changes in their culture and their ways of life.
 
Dramatic change would result however starting around five centuries ago with the arrival of European explorers. Spain arrived with explorers first and later with missionaries and soldiers, forcing a new religion, government and social structure on the land and the people. While some of our ancestors accepted the colonizer openly, the majority resisted whether by fleeing or fighting. Spanish power would take several decades to consolidate. After three decades the conflict that we know today as the CHamoru-Spanish Wars was over, and in the end, more died from the new diseases from the Spain then the outright violence of war. Within a few generations CHamorus adapted Catholicism to their culture and it became an integral part.
 
Even throughout these turbulent times, even as CHamoru identity and culture changed in very profound ways, one things remained constant, the idea that the CHamoru people were a distinct people, with a language, a homeland or home islands and a culture to call their own.
 
In 1926, the Guam Teachers Association made the first documented call for a Guam Museum to be created to help preserve the culture and the history of the CHamoru people. One hundred years later in 2026, it is our responsibility to give life to that dream, not solely to preserve CHamoru past, but to exist as an institution that moves through time and history alongside the CHamoru people. Sometimes collecting artifacts from their past, sometimes acting as a space to ask important questions and sometimes helping to guide our dreams or imaginations for the future.