Hagan-Haga: Blood Daughter
Hagan-Haga’: Language, Lifeblood, and Legacy in Chamorro
University of Pennsylvania, 2024
Abstract
Early accounts of life in the Pacific Marianas describe the importance of matrilineality and female authority within the traditional Chamorro worldview. However, since the late 16th century, the archipelago became politically divided and patrilineally dominated through the colonization from world powers including Spain, Germany, Japan, and the United States. Today, the southernmost island of Guahan and the remaining 14 islands of the archipelago, collectively known as the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands (CNMI), struggle to maintain their cultural heritage in an era of language endangerment, environmental degradation, and the pressures of Western urbanization. This paper aims to strengthen Chamorro scholarship through a linguistic-anthropological analysis of “hagan-haga”, a term which translates across a range of meanings from ‘blood turtle’ and ‘daughter of blood’ to ‘lineage continuation’ and ‘heritage discovery’. Additionally, this work broadens the scope of Chamorro language praxis by engaging with the oral tradition known as ‘Deep Chamorro’, or historic Chamorro word usage, maintained through the lineages of traditional makana (Chamorro medical practitioners) within my own family. Following in the footsteps of feminist Chamorro scholar Laura Souder-Jaffery’s Daughters of the Island (1984) and Malay-Indonesian scholar Andrew Carruthers’ anthropological methods on ‘keywords’ and ‘keyness’(2023), I argue for a more inclusive, female-centric Chamorro ‘herstory’ centered around the stem ‘haga’ (daughter/blood) which more closely aligns with the traditional Chamorro worldview.
Introduction
In the beginning, there was Fu’una and Puntan, two siblings of harmony who lived together in the formless nothing. There was neither good nor bad, no time nor space, but only peaceful emptiness. Within this nothingness, an idea sprung out from them— that of somethingness, and its harmonious being with that very nothingness. Their realization imploded upon itself as they sought to balance the ideas that cascaded: realization and ignorance, harmony and disorder, reciprocity and denial, existence and nonexistence. In an instant, Fu’una and Puntan together created the possibility for all things existing in harmony in some way or another. Yet also in that instant, Puntan’s immortality collapsed to balance the realization of life. As death encroached upon Puntan, he realized that sadness and loneliness would come to affect his sister. In his dying breaths, Puntan told his sister of the world he would like her to create with his body parts, describing to her the twinkling of the stars, the freshness of the rain, the softness of the petals, and the flow of the ocean. Fu’una held his head in her lap, listening, until his words dulled, and his voice quieted. When there was no more breath in Puntan’s body, Fu’una wailed and cried, lifting his head into her chest. Through her heart, she let life flow back into his emptiness, and created the world that Puntan had imagined for her to live in.
After the world was created, Fu’una swam through the ocean, following the sharks and the whales, until she reached a string of islands. She walked across their beaches, chased ghost crabs, collected shells, watched the birds soar, and the plants grow. But she was still lonely. On the very last island, Fu’una sat on the shore to watch the sunset with its pink, orange glow reflecting on the waves in front of her. She felt the water and the sand brush gently on her feet as she thought about Puntan. “To live in harmony is simply to live together —to have peace and chaos, to be empty and full, to have life and death, altogether, with you.”
As Fu’una said this, she closed her eyes, and transformed herself into a massive limestone rock. When the waves hit her toes again, they were solid, and she had no more breath. As the waves continued to wash over her body, small particles of life eroded into the ocean. Slowly but surely, these sediments set off to create all kinds of humans throughout the world, both good and bad, and on islands of varying sizes. Some life sediments returned to Fu’una, and they became known as the Chamorro. As each life-filled limestone sediment hardened and lost their breath, the next generation of Chamorros would use their solid bodies to raise their homes from the ground. These were the stones that gave the Chamorro their distinct megalithic housing structures called latte-stones, built atop the graves of their deceased kin. Those with large latte-houses became chiefs because they passed down the knowledge of Puntan and Fu’una, creating harmony out of the chaos of family, ocean, and life.
Fu’una and Puntan are referred to as the first maga’haga (female chief) and maga’lahi (male chief) of the Chamorro tribe. Puntan’s fatal sacrifice to his sister and the disintegration of Fu’una into her children set the foundations for traditional Chamorro matriarchy, a social organization based on female authority. Yet, in the early 1600s, the arrival of Spanish missionaries on the southernmost island of Guahan prompted not only the downfall of this female-centric society, but a complete restructuring of the Chamorroworld. Now entwined with the project of colonization, Guahan and its sisters in the Mariana Archipelago (today known as the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands, CNMI) were exchanged as tokens on global gambling tables and tossed through the wallets of Germany, Japan, and the United States. Harmony, still the ruling value of Chamorro social practice, produced for these nations a compliant class of laborers willing to shift their lives to accommodate their new maga’lahis. Using this cosmological background as its base, this paper aims to interrogate the term ‘haga’, a term spanning a range of meanings, including intense desire, love, daughter, bloodline, and blood, to investigate how Chamorro, past and present, organize their world around maga-haga Fu’una.
This paper additionally contributes to Indigenous and anthropological interests within the archipelagic world. Like other archipelagos (specifically, Malay-Indonesia), the Marianas exist as two politically separate entities which have endured a long and fraught historical relationship both toward and against unification. Further, the distinctions between the populations of Guahan and the CNMI have led many scholars and government-affiliated entities to explicitly state their political status as being from Guahan or from the CNMI despite most research being done across both territories. This has resulted in issues of identity as locals turn to labels such as ‘Guamanian’ (from Guam, may or may not be Indigenous), ‘Chamorro’ (Americanized, but Indigenous), or ‘Chamorro’ (Indigenous, likely from Guam) (Cruz 2012). While Guahan seeks to centralize itself as the exemplary center of the CHamoru, this paper aims to present another such exemplary center of the Chamorro (namely, that of Rota Island, CNMI) in alignment with current theories of centrality within an archipelagic world. In other words, multiple ideas, or exemplary centers, of what might be considered ‘true’ Indigenous identity can co-exist without singularization or essentialization. To make this explicitly clear, I use the specific orthographic spelling ‘Chamorro’ to distinguish itself from literatures of CHamoru originating from Guahan.
The significance of language, both politically and individually, has never been more pronounced in the Marianas Archipelago. Within this context, the Chamorro language, recognized as endangered, faces challenges not just in preservation but also in the diversity of its expression. Standardization efforts, through grammar rules and language textbooks, have inadvertently narrowed the range of speech variations. This study aims to safeguard not merely the dialects of Chamorrobut also its semiotics, particularly those emanating from Rota Island (CNMI). By analyzing what Carruthers (2023) calls the rapport of keywords, or the processes that affect word usage, I aim to contribute to the conservation and understanding of heritage and legacy within my home island of Rota.
Hagan-Haga: The Origins of Discovery
This paper comes out of a critical interrogation of the term ‘hagan-haga’ as used by feminist CHamoru scholar Laura Torres Souder-Jaffery in her work Daughters of the Island (1987). Souder-Jaffery states:
“Haga’ means blood. Pronounced slightly differently, haga means daughter. I am a blood-daughter of my Chamorro ancestors who migrated to Guahan over three thousand years ago. Our people created a new life on an inconspicuous volcanic peak in the vast waters of the Western Pacific and called our homeland “the place which has.” This work is an attempt of one hagan-haga’ to discover and share a part of the continuing story of our Chamorro cultural heritage.” (Souder-Jaffery 1987, 5).
Following this excerpt, it is possible to infer several relationships among the terms haga, hagan, and hagan-haga with CHamoru heritage. Firstly, the relationship between haga’ and haga exemplifies the Chamorro matriarchal structure in which daughters form the bloodline and lineage of the tribe (hence, “I am a blood-daughter…”). Secondly, within ‘hagan-haga’, the role of ‘hagan’ is to transform ‘haga’ into a completed conceptualization of (re)discovery. Thus, the term ‘hagan’ might possess the concept of discovery, while ‘haga’ possesses the concept of lineage. Together, ‘hagan-haga’, as described by Souder-Jaffery, is taken to mean ‘to discover heritage’.
Despite these inferences, ‘hagan-haga’ and its derivatives (hagan or haga) do not appear as a term used to describe discovery or heritage in everyday Chamorro speech. Instead, ‘hagan-haga’ is translated directly as ‘blood-turtle’, where ‘hagan’ translates to ‘turtle’ and ‘haga’ translates to ‘blood’. According to Topping’s original Chamorro-English Dictionary (1975), the following glosses of haga, haga’, and haggan are found:
Chamorro Lexical Item → English Gloss
Haga → Daughter
Haga’ → Blood
Haggan → Turtle, tortoise
Table 1. English Glosses of Haga, Haga’, Haggan.
Several questions arise based on these findings. Firstly, what is the difference between (1) haga and haga’ and (2) hagan and haggan in everyday Chamorro speech? Second, how does Souder-Jaffery arrive at the translation of ‘hagan-haga’ as heritage discovery? The former question can be answered by acknowledging the difference between spoken and written Chamorro language. In the previous excerpt, Sauder-Jaffery (1987) mentions that there is a slight pronunciation difference between the terms haga and haga’. This is not the case in everyday, contemporary Chamorro speech patterns on Rota Island, CNMI. Instead, (1) haga and haga’ are pronounced identically and are translated according to their semantic co-text. Furthermore, there is no such translation for singlular-g (2) ‘hagan’ in everyday speech. Instead, only double-g haggan is used to mean either ‘turtle’ or ‘daughter of’ depending on its semantic co-text (See Table 3). To answer the latter question regarding Souder-Jaffery’s (1987) gloss of hagan-haga, a deeper linguistic-anthropological analysis is necessary to understand the depth of the stem -haga- used through these terms.
Linguistic Anthropological Analysis of Stem Haga: Intense Desire (Love)
This section embarks on a morpho-lexical-grammatical (MLG) examination of ‘haga’ to uncover its underlying meanings related to discovery and lineage. To begin, Topping’s Chamorro-English Dictionary (1975) lists several terms which hold the stem haga:
Hagas → Period of time before the present
Hagasas → Dead branch of coconut tree
Hagatna → Heart organ, or the capital of Guahan
Hagadot → Gambler
Hagan hanom → Diving beetle (or freshwater turtle)
Maga-haga → Female chief
Table 2. Related words for Haga and their English glosses.
Glossing over these terms reveal two over-arching themes surrounding haga: time and vitality (in terms of biological life). Ideas of haga meaning daughter and blood can easily be linked to time through social power dynamics (matriarchy), bloodline, and lineage. Here, hagas glossed as time directly relates to this formulation. This same rationale can be applied to hagasas, the time which has passed for a coconut branch. The term hagatna is similarly linked through ‘haga’ as blood. Hagadot and hagan-hanom, however, require some effort to break down. First, let us examine the major term ‘haga’ itself.
Cross-referencing across several Chamorro language texts (Topping, 1969, 1975, 1980; Chung, 2020; Utugrafihan CHamoru Guahan, 2020; Untalan, 2024), ‘haga’ can be broken down into the prefixes ‘ha’ (intensifier) and ‘ga’ (to like, have preference, desire). Similarly, ‘hagan’ can be broken down into ‘ha’, ‘ga’, and ‘na’ (linking particle, causation, to cause) (See Table 3). A more accurate English gloss of ‘haga’ is thus ‘to have intense preference, or love’, whereas ‘hagan’ is ‘to have intense preference, or love, caused by a marked entity’. This revised translation can be seen through several examples:
(1) Si Lani ha
[HON] [SBJ]lani [INTS]
‘Lani, alone’
(HON = honorific, INTS = intensifier)
(2) Guaha haga go patas-hu
[AGR]exist [INTS]-[AGR]desire [INDF]in [SBJ]foot-[POSS]my
‘There exists [intense desire, love, daughter, bloodline, blood] in my foot’
‘I have blood in my foot’
(INDF = indefinite article)
(3) Haggan Lynette
[INTS]-[AGR]desire-[ATRB] or [AGR]turtle [SBJ]
‘[intense desire, love, daughter, bloodline, blood][because of] Lynette’
(ATRB= attributive)
In the first example, “Si Lani ha” is directly translated to “Lani, alone”. To achieve this, the honorific marker ‘si’ is placed to introduce the upcoming proper noun ‘Lani’. The term ‘ha’ is added as an intensifier, to formulate the statement ‘Lani (intensely)’. The intensification of the proper noun finally produces the English gloss ‘Lani, alone’. In the second example, several transformations are necessary following an analysis of the lexical structure of the expression. While the term ‘guaha’ generally translates to ‘to have’, MLG analysis breaks the term down into the prefixes ‘gu’ (existence), ‘a’ (reciprocity or togetherness), and ‘ha’ (intensifier). This shifts the definition from a generalized ‘to have’ to a more specific translation ‘to exist together with’. Following ‘guaha’, the term ‘haga’ is introduced with a wide range of meanings including (1) intense desire or love, (2) daughter, (3) bloodline, or (4) blood. To resolve this issue, a lexicological analysis is necessary to clarify which definition should be properly selected. The following phrase ‘go patas-hu’ translates literally as ‘in foot-I’. Putting all this together, the expression states the following: ‘there exists together with (range of haga terms) in foot-I’ or ‘there exists with me (range of haga terms) in my foot’. Within this context, the lexical decision to translate ‘haga’ as (4) blood becomes clear. Thus, the final sentence becomes ‘there exists blood in my foot’ or, more generally, ‘I have blood in my foot’.
In the third example, ‘Haggan Lynette’, the term ‘haga’ shifts into ‘haggan’ through two important grammatical transformations. First, the linking particle ‘na’ transforms into the attributive suffix ‘-an’, which consequently makes way for a pronominal entity. Second, the singular consonant ‘g’ transforms into a germinate consonant ‘gg’. Like the difference between haga’and haga, this doubling of the ‘g’ consonant is often unnoticeable among speakers and is only relevant for orthographic purposes. How, then, would speakers differentiate between ‘haggan’ (turtle) and ‘haggan’ (range of haga terms + attributed entity)? The lexicological structure is again invoked: the pronominal usage of the entity ‘Lynette’ versus a general noun or adjective, such as ‘hanom’ (water), allows community members formulate the distinction of ‘daughter’ following the completion of the expression. However, this is not to say that the formulation of ‘Turtle Lynette’ is neither incorrect nor inappropriate. Scholars have long written about the significance of turtles and turtle shells across the Pacific. Similarly, the Chamorro people have historic relations with turtles, such as the usage of turtle meat as ceremonial delicacies and turtle shells as specialty craft material for jewelry, weapons, or tools (Wusstig, 2021). Regarding daughters, Souder-Jaffery (1987) writes:
Prior to the introduction of Catholicism in the Marianas, premarital consorting of the sexes was institutionalized. In fact, a virginal bride would have been an embarrassment to her family. The Urritao, associations of unmarried young men, bought or rented young girls from their parents for two or three iron hoops and a few turtle shells, according to Padre Diego Luis San Vitores (Souder-Jaffery 1987, 44).
Thus, based on known information, two inferences regarding the relationship between turtles and daughters can be made. Firstly, that turtles were highly valued entities that permitted their usage amongst elders for their daughters. Since females were important in the CHamoRu social system, such prized materials were required for their favor. Second, the long lifespan of turtles could be implicated in the range of meanings represented by ‘haga’ as bloodline and lineage. Therefore, English glosses including daughter of Lynette, bloodline of Lynette, blood of Lynette, or turtle of Lynette are all appropriate. A summary of these selected examples is shown below:
haga = ha + ga ; hag(g)an = haga + na
ha → intensifier
ga → like, preference, desire
na → linking particle, to cause, causation
Lexical Item → Example Usage → English Gloss
Ha → Si Lani ha → Only Lani, Lani alone
Ga → Ga’chotda → He/she loves bananas
Na → Bunita na Amerikana → Beautiful American, Beautiful because American
Haga → (1) Guaha haga go patas-ha; (2) Maga-haga Fu’una
1. There exists blood in my foot
2. Chief female (daughter) Fu’una
Hag(g)an → (1) Haggan Lynette; (2) Hu li’e’ bula na haggan hanom
1. Daughter of Lynette
2. I saw a lot of freshwater turtles
Table 3. Morphological Prefix Breakdown of Haga and Hag(g)an, with Examples
Following this method, the terms ‘hagan hanom’ and ‘hagadot’ can be translated as intense love of the water, and intense love of inheritance/gifts (from CHamoRu term doti) respectively. Regarding the term ‘hagan-haga’, however, several meanings can be derived:
hagan-haga
haga + na + haga = [ha + ga] [na] [ha + ga]
Morphological breakdown
ha → intensifier
ga → like, preference, desire
na → linking particle, to cause, causation
ha → intensifier
ga → like, preference, desire
Gloss
1. Love
2. Daughter
3. Bloodline
4. Blood
Linking, causing, because of
1. Love
2. Daughter
3. Bloodline
4. Blood
Lexicological context (Sauder-Jaffery)
Love
Linking, causing
Bloodline
Revised English Gloss:
hagan-haga → intense desire (love) for the bloodline → re(dis)cover heritage
Table 4. MLG analysis for hagan-haga.
Meta-Linguistic Verification of Deep Chamorro
The inferences and linguistic analyses presented thus far have been hypothetically created based on MLG examination of ‘haga’ and its related terms. Yet, the question remains as to how true these hypotheses hold in everyday Chamorro praxis. According to several interlocutors, the distinction between (1) haga’ and haga’ and (2) hagan and haggan are entirely context dependent. In other words, contemporary Chamorros contend that there is no difference in the words when spoken. What, then, is the purpose of the apostrophe in CHamoRu orthography? According to the Kumision I Fino CHamoru Yan Fina Na’Guen I Historia Yan Lina’la I Taotao Tano’ (Commision on CHamoru Language and the Teaching of the History & Culture of the Indigenous People of Guam), the glota (apostrophe) is listed as its own consonant, meaning that it is possible for the speech sound to be noticed in pronunciation. Yet, immediately after this, a note on rapid speech is made: “Speakers of CHamoru often merge sounds in rapid speech much like English speakers who used contractions,” (Utugrafihan CHamoru Guahan, 2020, pg 3). The purpose of the glota, then, is entirely orthographic and for the purpose of standardizing the CHamoru language for written text (Utugrafihan CHamoru Guahan, 2020, Foreword).
Acknowledging the fact that language standards are flexible and subject to change leads to questions as to which parts of language show stability and durability across time. Following my previous fieldwork in 2021 and in recent communications with interlocutors in 2024, Deep Chamorro has been referenced as a separate, more historic version of contemporary Chamorrothat only manamko’ (elders) may know about. Taken further, traditional Chamorro healers, known as makana or suruhana, may have more information regarding the meaning of certain words and how they are expressed in Deep Chamorro language. Keeping this in mind, I’ve chosen to speak with experienced suruhanu (male equivalent of suruhana) within my own family (based in Songsong Village, Rota) to understand the meta-language surrounding the term ‘haga’. Below is an excerpt from a transcript with a primary interlocutor, otherwise known as my father, Kenneth:
Kenneth: Haga and haga’ sound the same when you say it. I don’t know how Guam is doing these words. When you say it, it’s the same. It depends how you say it.
Kaylani: What does ‘ga’ mean?
Kenneth: How are you using that?
Kaylani: Ga’chong, Ga’chotda hao, Ga’salape’ si Craig
Kenneth: Ga’chong means friend. Ga’chotda hao is saying they love bananas, and Ga’salape si Craig… si Craig loves money, no, boy? (laugh, looking at Craig)
Craig: Yeah! (laugh)
Kaylani: So ‘ga’ means love? Like the ‘ga’ in ga’chong means a friend you love.
Kenneth: Yes, but its not like your wife or husband kind of love.
Kaylani: So would you say that ‘haga’ can mean like ‘to love a lot’. If I say ‘haggan Lynette’, it is like the love of Lynette, not in a romantic way.
Kenneth: Yes—daughter of Lynette. Exactly. Mothers are very important in our culture. Make sure you take care of your mother. Haga is you, her love… her daughter. Ae dae si Lani girl… you understand CHamoRu? (laugh)
--Excerpt from Transcript, Manglona, 2024
Following this conversation, I asked other interlocutors whether the words contemporary Chamorro use come from Deep Chamorro. They agreed that while some words have survived contemporary use, most lexical items have been imported from Spanish and Japanese languages. On the one hand, some Chamorro words have completely fallen out of use because no one could remember their meaning. On the other hand, some are still being used even if they don’t know the meaning, including several chants used for medicinal healing or standardizations of the term ‘haga’. Finding ways to derive original meaning after all this time, then, becomes a matter of heritage discovery and Chamorro preservation. In other words, such linguistic-anthropological analyses become vital to the performance of hagan-haga.
Hagan-Haga: Recovering Heritage through Rapport
Keywords are captions or placeholders for fashions of speaking and forms of life whose relative keyness or importance is a function of partial and interested construal. What remains is to inquire into the rapports undergirding such fashions and forms. This would encourage us to hone a rapport for rapport and a feeling for form-feeling. It would incite us to rethink the relative relationality of our ethnographic accounts. It would urge a critical awareness of the long-standing patterns in the anthropological imagination. (Carruthers, 2023, 489)
This analysis unveils the linguistic or broadly semiotic roots that surround the keyword ‘haga’ with a spectrum of meaning ranging from intense desire and love, to turtle, daughter, and bloodline. This paper provides the etymological justification for the term ‘hagan-haga’ as originally used by Souder-Jaffery in 1987 (re-discovering a lineage), as well as its usage in contemporary Chamorro (blood-turtle). Taken further, hagan-haga as discovery can be transformed to recovery through the morphological analysis of ‘haga’ within the current political state of language endangerment across the Marianas. The term ‘haga’ can additionally be traced back into Chamorro cosmology as the intense love for the female sibling (daughter), Fu’una, as the origin or cause for creation within CHamoru episteme. The transformation of the term ‘haga’ into ‘hag(g)an’ supports its social significance as reported by historical records of early CHamoRu kinship practices. The presence of ‘haga’ across Topping’s (1975) Chamorro-English Dictionary terms listed in this paper can similarly be justified according to ontological openings provided by the stem ‘haga’. In other words, when a CHamoRu-speaker hears the term ‘haga’, their mind is already adjusted toward conceptualizations of women, blood, turtles, and lineages before the next term of phrase. It is not until the entire lexical content has been produced that the term ‘haga’ can be clarified. This same technique can be used for the term ‘Guahan’, defined by Souder-Jaffery as ‘the place which has’, to support the cosmological episteme:
Original English Gloss: Guahan → to have, the place which has
Guahan → gu + a+ ha + na
Gloss
gu → existence
a → reciprocity, together
ha → intensifier
na → Linking particle, causation
Lexicological context
(Reference to Place)
Existence + Together + Intensely + Causation
Revised English Gloss: Guahan → Place causing existence together
Table 5. MLG analysis of Guahan.
This revised translation more accurately depicts the formation of the CHamoru people on the island of Guahan as a place which causes (1) Fu’una and Puntan to exist together in taotaomona (spiritual being) form, and (2) Indigenous CHamorus, past and present, to exist together alongside Fu’una and Puntan.
As a final goal, this paper builds upon an enriched anthropological methodology that focuses on the ‘rapport’ of lexical-social relations, rather than on a stabilized ‘keyword’. According to Carruthers, the formulation of the keyword comes not just from the lexical item’s meaning, but also its more comprehensive construction as root-stems activated within the world it occurs in:
Rapport keys to questions of interactional meangingfulness and “means-ends-fulness” in fieldwork encounters. […] In the anthropological imagination, then, rapport may be best understood in a technical sense as an ethnometapragmatic chronotope. It is “chronotopic” in Bakhtin’s sense inasmuch as it is assumed to unfold within a particular envelope of space-time-personhood. It is “metapragmatic” inasmuch as it involves activities and modalized activity descriptions. And it is ethnometapragmatic inasmuch as these activities and activity descriptions are linked to a particular social domain of persons. […] Rapport, so understood incites attention to affinities, associations, comparisons and relational coming-together.
Piecing together Whorf’s (1956) work on configurative rapport, or patterned relationality, with Stengers’ (2011) acknowledgement of rapport as that which ‘incites attention to affinities, associations, comparisons, and relational coming-together’, Carruthers argues for a contemporary approach that favors ethnographies of ‘keyness’ rather than of ‘keywords’ themselves. Following this method, I have shown the MLG progression of the keyword ‘haga’ and traced it backwards from its contemporary usage to its possible formation within a more historic variety, known as Deep Chamorro.
Conclusion:
In Chamorro cosmology, the narrative of Fu’una and Puntan stands as a foundational origin story that speaks to the interconnectedness of life, death, and the perpetuation of cultural heritage. The exploration of the term 'hagan-haga' has sought to illuminate the ways in which the CHamoru people of Rota Island navigate their world through the language, lineage, and cosmology. This has underscored the enduring power of language as a vessel for heritage, revealing how the term 'haga'—with its layers of meaning encompassing love, lineage, and life—serves as a conduit for connecting the past with the present. The linguistic analysis presented herein not only deciphers the semantic depths of 'hagan-haga' but also reiterates the importance of preserving such terms that encapsulate the essence of CHamoru identity and epistemology. It is through this lens that this paper contributes to a broader understanding of Indigenous and anthropological studies within the archipelagic context, highlighting the unique cultural narratives and linguistic practices that define the Mariana Archipelago. Moreover, this work has challenged the notion of a singular, centralized Indigenous identity by presenting Rota Island's perspective as a vibrant center of Chamorro culture. Such understandings call for a recognition of multiple centers of Indigenous identity, advocating for a more pluralistic, or rather, archipelagic understanding that embraces diversity within unity.
In conclusion, this paper not only interrogates ‘hagan-haga’ but also traverses cosmology, linguistic anthropology, and cultural preservation to emphasize how language is essential to the maintenance of Chamorro tradition. As the CHamoru people continue to navigate the challenges of modernity and American assimilation, the preservation of their language and heritage remains an attestation of their enduring connection to the land, the ancestors, and each other. The past and the present merge, guided through the performance of 'hagan-haga', as the Chamorro people forge their path forward, anchored in the strength of their identity and the depth of their ancestral bonds.
Bibliography
Benjamin, Walter. “The Translator’s Task.” Translated by Steven Rendall. Traduction, terminologie, redaction, 2e, 10, no. 2 (1997): 151–65. https://doi.org/10.7202/037301ar.
Carruthers, Andrew M. “In Lieu of ‘Keywords’: Toward an Anthropology of Rapport.” American Anthropologist 125, no. 3 (June 22, 2023): 478–92. https://doi.org/10.1111/aman.13881.
Carruthers, Andrew M. “Specters of Excess: Passing and Policing in the Malay‐Speaking Archipelago.” Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 33, no. 2 (August 2023): 131–60. https://doi.org/10.1111/jola.12398.
Cruz, Mary R. “(Re)searching identity: being Chamorro in an American colony.” ScholarSpace. Manoa, Hawaii: University of Hawaii at Manoa, 2012.
Cunningham, Lawrence J. Ancient Chamorro Society. Honolulu, Hawaii: The Bess Press, 1992.
Flood, Bo. Mariana Island Legends: Myth and Magic. Honolulu, Hawaii: The Bess Press, 2001.
Kumisión i Fino’ CHamoru yan i Fina’nå’guen i Historia yan i Lina’la’ i Taotao Tåno’. Utugrafihan CHamoru, Guåhan Guam CHamoru Orthography, 2020. https://kumisionchamoru.guam.gov/sites/default/files/utugrafihan_chamoru_guahan.pdf.
Souder-Jaffery, Laura Marie. Daughters of the Island: Contemporary Chamorro Women Organizers on Guam. Micronesian Area Research Center, University of Guam, 1987.
Stengers, Isabelle. “Comparison as a Matter of Concern.” Common Knowledge 17, no. 1 (January 1, 2011): 48–63. https://doi.org/10.1215/0961754x-2010-035.
Topping, Donald M, and Bernadita C Dungca. Chamorro Reference Grammar. Honolulu, Hawaii: University of Hawaii Press, 1980.
Topping, Donald M, and Pedro M Ogo. Spoken Chamorro. Honolulu, Hawaii: University of Hawaii Press, 1969.
Topping, Donald M, Pedro M Ogo, and Bernadita C Dungca. Chamorro-English Dictionary. Honolulu, Hawaii: University of Hawaii Press, 1975.
Untalan, Faye. Finu’ Chamorro for Beginners. University of Guam Press, 2024.
Whorf, Benjamin Lee. Language, Thought, and Reality: Selected Writings. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1956.
Wusstig, Shawn. “Haggan: Green Sea Turtle.” Guampedia, March 14, 2023. https://www.guampedia.com/haggan-green-sea-turtle/.