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Guam Museum not exactly doing stellar job of preserving Guam's culture
With Mes Chamorro is just around the corner, the island's elected leaders have resolved that march be a month dedicated to celebrating Chamorro history and traditions unique to the Marianas. But ironically enough, the Guam Museum - whose main purpose is to preserve and protect ancient Chamorro artifacts - is doing anything but celebrating.
For an island community so deeply rooted in culture and tradition, who would've guessed that the very little of what's left of Chamorro history sits in old military barracks collecting dust and deteriorating with time. For archeologists like Rosalind Hunter-Anderson of Micronesian Archeological Research Services, handing over precious items to the Guam Museum is more like a guessing game than anything else. "Whatever we manage to retrieve in a systematic documented way we put in to the museum hopeful that it will be available for future study, I don't know," Hunter-Anderson told KUAM News.
She says a trip to the Tiyan museum holding facility is always an interesting one, with no guarantee of what she'll find. She continued, "There is no order in where things are stacked and its dark and you have to squeeze behind the row of boxes and ask what does it say up there, is that the one we want?"
Guam Museum director Tony Palomo doesn't disagree; he says the facility wasn't built to hold artifacts, and there is no professional curator on board to see that the objects are treated with the proper care. But with the Museum's budget scaled down from $450,000 to $300,000, and cutting help from ten employees to just five over the past five years, the space has been rent-free, which helps keep costs down. But that is only until recently. "This was about three weeks ago when I received a letter informing me that this museum is on a property that has been deeded to the former owners," said Palomo.
Now the director and his skeleton staff are waiting, with no money to pay rent, the museum is in limbo. "We are not boxing them to move because there is no place to go to, therefore we are just getting prepared in case we move," he explained.
Like Palomo, Hunter-Anderson is wondering how it has gone on this long, she says those who genuinely care about Guam's history are tired of hearing empty promises from the Camacho Administration and the island's elected leaders who have promised help in the past. She told KUAM News, "If we make enough noise maybe something good will come out of this, but it has reached a crisis point."
She says the decision makers in charge are letting down future generations that may have wanted to study their ancient heritage by letting the Guam Museum deteriorate right before their eyes. "Its not just put it away in a box and forget it we put it there," she said, "so we have access a gain to it or people in the future, students, your children if they want to study they go into it and its there for them to learn."
As for Palomo, he says he and his staff are doing the best they can with what they have been given, and will be slowly boxing up their belongings and asking the question: where else can we go?
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