Searching for Crabs

The next story for our Saturday practice group is about a father and son, providing a warm narrative that frames the transmission of knowledge from one generation to the next. This will be one of the longer pieces that we’ve used for our group, and for good reason: we get to see both a small slice of the life led by the father-son pair as well as several sets of instructions that detail the fabrication and use of various types of traps and other implements for gathering crabs under different conditions. And on a more personal note, our friend Dabit will be facilitating several Saturday practice sessions in our stead while we take some time for a loss in our family.

As ever, in this post you’ll find the Chamorro text, an English translation, and an audio narration by Jay Che’le. Footnotes to follow. Happy reading!

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How Customs Were

Our practice group recently voted on the kind of content that we’re interested in reading. Two themes came out on top: History and Culture, and this week’s story brings us a bit of both. It’s a short piece from the bilingual education programs of the Northern Marianas that gives a narrative account of Mr. Enrique N. Kisa’s reflections on the past and thoughts on changes he was seeing in the late 1970s. This post includes the Chamorro text, the English translation, and a Chamorro audio narration by Jay Che’le. Happy reading!

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