Explore the Series
Series title: Museum Stories that Shape Us By Kelly Marsh-Taitano
Stories from the Collections: — Research and Insights from the Guam Museum
Explore artifacts, ancestral lifeways, CHamoru culture, and the history of Guåhan through articles written by Guam Museum curators and other staff.
- Feb 17, 2026
Museums around the world are created for many reasons. Some preserve art. Others focus on science or history. Many do all of this at once.
The Guam Museum has its own story, one rooted deeply in community, care, and the long work of remembering
The CHamoru creation story has been shared, remembered, and carried forward for perhaps millennia.
At the Guam Museum, visitors can experience that story in a powerful and immersive way through the film I Hinanao-Ta, “Our Journey.”
Before stepping into the museum’s theater to watch the CHamoru creation story or moving into the main exhibition space, visitors first enter a quiet room.
There, I Maga’håga welcomes guests to the Guam Museum and all it has to offer. It is both a threshold and an invitation, a space that prepares us for the journey of the CHamoru people over time.
- Mar 31, 2026
The beginning of the Guam Museum’s permanent exhibit offers visitors a rare experience.
While standing inside the gallery, one feels connected to the outdoors. Images of the ocean, trees, and waterfalls surround the space, gently dissolving the boundary between building and environment.
A ¼-scale sakman or ocean-going canoe rests quietly under soft light in the museum’s gallery, Ginen I Mañaina-ta or Our Ancient Heritage.
Built by the tatåsi or seafarers of Guåhan, its lines are well-designed and true, looking ready to slip into the water at any moment.
There are certain objects in the museum that carry more than form and function. They carry values and memory.
Among them is a small but remarkable ancestral fishing tool known as the poi’u, one that tells us not only of ingenuity and skill, but also of the community values of caring for one another.
In CHamoru life, fishing has long been about more than the catch; it has also been about people. Traditionally, it meant showing up, sharing the labor when one could, and sharing the fish whether one had been able to help or not. The ocean provided, but it was the community that ensured everyone benefited.
- May 19, 2026
The story of the museum begins decades ago, nearly 100 years in fact.
The first museums were small buildings at Plaza de España, with most of its years at one of Guam’s oldest buildings, the Garden House.
For generations, CHamoru families wove baskets, mats, fans, and countless other useful items from niyok (coconut palm) and åkgak (pandanus leaves).
In the humid environment of the Mariana Islands, woven materials naturally decompose over time. Because of this, woven objects once used daily by i Manaotåomo’na (the People of Before) have yet to be directly recovered from ancestral villages, burials, or other places where they were once used.
For more than 3,500 years, i Manaotåomo’na, the People of Before, made their homes throughout Guåhan and across the islands of Laguas yan Gåni, the Mariana Islands. Over those many generations, they continued to observe, experiment, and innovate so that canoes carried them faster, fishhooks became more effective, and tools made from stone, shell, and bone were refined.
The ornaments they wore changed as well.
Small enough to fit in the palm of a hand are remarkable artifacts: ancestral compound fishhook shanks and points, two carefully shaped pieces traditionally lashed together into an effective fishing tool, revealing the ingenuity and engineering skill of CHamoru ancestors.
Yet they also represent something much larger: thousands of years of CHamoru presence within their waters of Låguas yan Gåni, the Mariana Islands.
Many World War II artifacts tell the story of the war itself. Far fewer tell the stories families carry from it. One of the few in the Guam Museum’s collection is a small hand-sewn American flag.
Displayed above the well-known photograph of two young boys holding handmade flags tied to sugarcane stalks, the photograph and the flag together convey something words alone cannot. The expressions on the boys’ faces speak of hardship, while the carefully stitched flag speaks of hope. During the Japanese occupation of Guåhan, creating or hiding such a flag could have placed an entire family in danger. Yet, despite that, families found ways to survive and hold onto hope, including sewing flags such as these.
- Jul 21, 2026
Each year, fewer of the elders who experienced World War II on Guåhan remain with us. Their memories of the occupation, liberation, and rebuilding of their lives are part of our families’ stories, carried forward and told more often today by their children and grandchildren.
Now, it is our turn to listen, learn, and remember.
Many families know at least part of their wartime story. Others may know only fragments. Perhaps a grandmother spoke of life under the occupation. Perhaps a grandfather recalled being forced to leave home, enduring the hardships of a concentration camp, or returning after the war to find a village forever changed. Some families remember relatives who never came home. Others tell of courage, sacrifice, acts of resistance, and neighbors helping one another survive.
- Aug 04, 2026
Thanks Saina ma’åse’ to Judy Amesbury, Simon Maluwelmeng, and Frank Rabon for their insights and discussion for this article.
Sources Freycinet, L. C. de. (2002). The Freycinet Expedition, 1818–1819 (R. Lévesque, Ed. & Trans.). In History of Micronesia: A collection of source documents (Vol. 19). Lévesque Publications.
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One of the rarest ancestral CHamoru objects within the Guam Museum’s collections is a kulo’, a horn made from a large marine shell.
Imagine standing in an ancestral village. The air is filled with the sounds of manhoben (children) playing, lalåhi (men) preparing canoes for the sea, and shell adzes carving wood to repair a house. Nearby, someone harvests rice using perhaps a sharpened shell from a palus (sunset clam) or a sainan do’gas, fashioned from the outer lip of a spider conch shell. Beside them, famalao’an (women) carefully pound the unhulled rice, loosening the husks without crushing the grain itself.
Although we do not yet know how far back in time activities like these first became part of life in Låguas yan Gåni (the Mariana Islands), we are now learning that the story of rice here began with some of the earliest i Manaotåomo’na (People of Before).
In envisioning a rice field in ancestral Guåhan, we might see stalks heavy with grain and nearly ready for harvest. But before anyone reaches for a harvesting tool, perhaps something else must happen first—a chant, an offering, or words spoken quietly to the rice.
We do not yet know if this occurred in Låguas yan Gåni (the Mariana Islands). But looking more closely into rice cultivation and harvesting gives us reason to wonder whether i Manaotåomo’na (the People of Before) carried more across the ocean than rice itself.
Rooted — from the Guam Museum.
Originally published in Dwell Well Guam and shared here courtesy of the magazine publisher.
Across the world and across time, people have used horns to send messages. Long before phones or radios, sound already carried meaning. From animal horns and metal trumpets to shell horns shaped by island artisans, these instruments sent messages farther than the human voice. A single breath could announce an arrival, warn of danger, celebrate success, express grief, or call people together. Sound became a shared language.
When we rehouse, inventory, catalog, and care for the Guam Museum’s collections, we are doing more than organizing objects. We are listening. Each artifact offers a quiet invitation to learn how people before us lived, how they moved across the land and sea, and how they understood their world.
Tomhom, known widely today as Tumon, carries meanings that stretch across centuries. For thousands of years, this bay has been a powerful and vibrant part of Guåhan. What many now experience as a district of hotels, beaches, and evening lights was once a constellation of villages, families, and daily rhythms rooted deeply in land and sea.
There are places along the northern coast of Guåhan that feel both deeply connected to the island and, at the same time, somehow set apart. Cliffs rise sharply above the sea, caves open quietly into shadow, and the wind moves through the trees in a way that feels less like passing air and more like a presence. These are places layered with memory, where story and landscape are inseparable, and where one can feel, and often see through the traces left behind, the ancestors who once lived, hunted, fished, gardened, played, loved, and lived there.
There was a time when Guåhan’s horizon was filled with wooden vessels. Sakman crossed between islands, smaller canoes moved along the coast, and eventually ships from distant places appeared beyond the sea.
I Manaotåomo’na (the People of Before) were master navigators, traders, and artisans, long before Europeans entered their waters, traveling across parts of what we understand today as Micronesia and likely to islands that now make up the Philippines, building relationships that stretched across hundreds, perhaps thousands, of miles.
People often think of museums as places that care for physical artifacts, and they do. But museums also preserve intangible heritage, photographs of cultural practices, historic events, and everyday life, as well as oral narratives that carry memories, cultural traditions, skills, knowledge, life histories, and lived experiences.
This kind of heritage is significant when we think about the shared and intertwined histories of Guåhan, the Northern Mariana Islands, and the broader regions of Island Southeast Asia and the Pacific. Much of their interconnectedness is found in the intangible, in language, customs, Indigenous and colonial histories, and ever-evolving relationships.