Before moving into the museum’s theater to observe the CHamoru creation story or shifting into the primary exhibition area, guests first enter a quiet room.
There, I Maga’håga welcomes friends to the Guam Museum and all it has to supply. It is each a threshold and an invite, an area that prepares us for the journey of the CHamoru folks over time.
That room can be residence to a number of particular works by extensively revered artists. Directly reverse the entryway hangs an authentic portray of an historical village scene alongside a river titled “I Man Taotao, I Man Mo’na,” donated by famend artist David Lujan Sablan.
David Lujan Sablan is acknowledged as a grasp artist. For a long time, his depictions of ancestral life had been acquainted to households throughout Guåhan, showing in areas akin to McDonald’s, first on the partitions on the Tamuning location and later in Hagåtña. His works are treasured, and for these lucky sufficient to personal a number of, they’re proudly displayed in houses and workplaces all through the Marianas.
Alongside Guam’s first CHamoru archaeologist, Alejandro “Al” Lizama, he helped reawaken a visible custom that reaches again to I Manaotaomo’na, the People of Before, who recorded facets of their lives in pictographs and petroglyphs on stone.
For greater than 300 years of colonial rule, many cultural practices had been suppressed or disrupted. Families had been relocated, villages consolidated, lifeways altered, and inventive traditions interrupted.
For a long time, many mentioned that ancestral life couldn’t be precisely depicted as a result of an excessive amount of had modified earlier than it was formally recorded. Too many tales or traditions had been disrupted from being handed down by way of generations.
Yet that didn’t deter CHamoru artists like Sablan and Lizama.
Lizama labored alongside a number of the earliest archaeologists documenting Guam’s ancestral websites. He additionally inspired Sablan to translate his inventive reward onto canvas and even supplied his first brushes and paints. From there, a deep friendship grew. Together, they visited historical villages.
Sablan shared that when standing in these locations, he may really feel the presence of ancestors and sense how a village would possibly as soon as have appeared, sounded, and moved when it was alive.
Having grown up when the land was much less altered than it’s at present, Sablan knew from expertise which crops and animals had been indigenous or native, and which had been launched. Some of his work replicate ancestral cultural and environmental transitions.
In a big portray within the museum’s multi-purpose room, for instance, Latte-era houses stand alongside launched animals akin to babui (pig), reflecting the early interval of commerce, missionization, and colonization, when the previous and new generally existed facet by facet.
“I Man Taotao, I Man Mo’na” expands our creativeness and understanding past the acquainted coastal village scene. Coastal settlements had been important, however they weren’t the entire story. Ancestral villages thrived alongside rivers, on ridges, and throughout rolling inland hills.
In reality, extra latte websites exist in central and southern Guåhan than many individuals understand, and maybe greater than ever existed alongside the northern coasts. In this portray, we see that life alongside a river for I Manaotaomo’na might be vibrant, considerable, and entire.
If you look intently, Sablan hid a number of native animals inside the scene. Though now not with us, his spirit stays, persevering with to ask every of us to see what number of we will discover.
His portray is a quiet reminder that CHamoru ancestors are nonetheless current, ready for us to pause, observe, and keep in mind.
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