Pacific Daily News

My column this week is written in response to Paul Zerzan’s op-ed on Oct. 29 dealing with the death of the Chamorro language.

Men with the same complexion and attitudes as Zerzan have long felt it their right to determine the life or death of things related to indigenous people in the Pacific. For Chamorros, these sorts of pronouncements are common. We have been struggling against them for centuries and only recently realized that just because a man with a flag comes to claim us, it doesn’t mean he discovered us. Just because a man with a degree that says he is an expert, says we have no culture, doesn’t mean that we have nothing to call our own. Zerzan joins a host of others who sometimes say the language is useless, sometimes say its primitive, other times say its bastardized and not a real language. All of it is tied to the longstanding feud over what makes Guam, Guam. Is Guam on the map because Magellan found it? Is Guam part of history because Henry Glass took it? Is Guam a place that exists to be discovered by outsiders or does it have its own identity through its indigenous people?

Zerzan’s claims are polemical in the worst sort of way, as in they have no evidence to support them other than the flawed ruminations of the writer. By every metric that matters the Chamorro language is not dead. There are still tens of thousands of speakers of Chamorro in the world today. The Chamorro language is clearly endangered, but several hundred young people still learn the language each year and become fluent. I have raised some of them and continue to speak to them in Chamorro every day.

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Zerzan’s reference to Latin and Chamorro as being useless shows the limitations of his thinking. In truth, Latin is far from useless, and in understanding why it might be valuable, you can see how languages are so much more than about convenient communication. As social organisms, they are far more complicated and multilayered. Learning Latin can help you navigate a world where Latin may no longer be fluently spoken, but is nonetheless integrated into the web of meanings in the sciences, in the legal world and life in general. Languages are social and do not just connect people to each other, but also connect them to the world around them, give form to their abstract ideas and provide the means through which we can express what are our values and culture. The Chamorro language has changed as this place and its people have changed. It is intimately tied to so many aspects of history, anthropology and geography here. Languages are not simply about communication, and never have been. They are the means through which we access and express all that is life. This is why people, large and small, seek to protect and promote their languages, because it represents one of their most concrete connections to the world.

In his characterization of languages, their movements and their deaths, we can get a sense of the type of worldview that Zerzan is invoking, and it isn’t particularly accurate or helpful. The myth of the Tower of Babel lurks behind his words, the idea that at one point we all spoke the same convenient language but because of some horrific original sin, the world has become a basket of conflicting tongues. In his mind globalization is taking us back towards efficient monolingualism, where every small language is quietly steamrolled to make way for the big languages. But the multiplicity of languages does not exist because of some angry deity. It exists because of the diversity of human experience. Languages bear the marks of human progress and innovation. They are scarred and track history in the same ways the rings within an ancient tree do.

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This is the most fundamental lesson from languages, the lesson that is beyond the words themselves. It is that the purpose of life is not to dominate, but rather to understand. Zerzan should not seek to occupy the same position as those missionaries, Naval governors or members of Congress who sought to dominate the Chamorros and their language or culture. He should instead, if he cares anything about this place, seek to protect this language that is closely connected to it, and support the Chamorro people in this effort.

Michael Lujan Bevacqua is an author, artist, activist and assistant professor of Chamorro studies at the University of Guam.