CHamoru Legends: A creation myth and a childhood visit by duendes

Bruce Lloyd | Pacific Daily News

Show Caption Hide Caption Pontan and Fo’na, brother and sister and god-like, according to the legend. Illustrator Dorathina Herrero Artist Dorathina Herrero on Pontan and Fo'na legend.

The soon-to-be published CHamoru Legends, A gathering of stories, is not the first public effort to preserve a vital part of Guam’s culture. There have been many retellings of these stories that are very familiar to those native to Guam and those who have become familiar with the island during many years of residence. The University of Guam Press has tapped skilled writers, translators and artists to produce an edition, in both CHamoru and English, back to back, that will bring these often told tales to a wider audience and encourage them to tell and retell their own tales.

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Pontan and Fo’na

Different cultures and religions have a creation myth to explain how the world came to be, so it’s appropriate that the new Guam Legends book starts out with Pontan and Fo’na, brother and sister and god-like, according to the legend. The illustration for this founding myth was a challenge to artist Dorathina Herrero and has a place of pride on both the CHamoru and English covers of this reversible book.

From the book:

"The death of Pontan alerts Fo’na to her powers and she proceeds to use them:

She created the ocean, i tasi, with his blood

She took his eyebrows and made rainbows, i isa

One of his eyes became the sun, i atdao

The other became the moon, i pilan"

Some believe that her tears, which had flowed down her brother’s body, formed the ocean currents and even became the stars in the sky, and that perhaps the locks of her hair, ripped from her scalp as she mourned, formed into the grass and trees upon landing on i tano’.

“Parts where it says, ‘she created the ocean’ I actually try to illustrate that with his blood coming down into the ocean,” Herrero said. “I try to incorporate motifs, symbols pertaining to the myth.”

Growing up on Guam, Herrero was very aware of the myths and legends surrounding her. “My earliest memory of a Guam legend would be the legend of the white lady. There’s actually two versions of that. It’s actually one of my favorites, but yes, I did grow up with the stories.”

And she heard them at home. “I don’t know why, but a lot of my family members when they tell these stories, they would always talk about how they actually encountered the spirit, where it was true or not, for the sake of storytelling.”

Which sort of begs the question, what’s your experience? And she has one, involving the duendes, the little people who roam the jungle and as the CHamoru version of a very widespread myth goes, disguise themselves as children in order to kidnap human children.

Herrero and her brother, ages 6 and 7 then, were playing in their backyard with two young boys they assumed were neighbors.

“And they actually led us into the jungle, into the boonies and then we got lost,” Herrero said. “My brother and I got lost trying to chase after them. We were playing but we didn’t see them again. We got scared, came back out and that was it.”