When I was younger, my father shared stories about the war. My father, born at the end of the war, spoke from my grandfather’s perspective. But no one talked about the war when my grandfather was in the room. He didn’t want to.
My grandparents lost their first child during the war. She was born — I know that. But I don’t think she lived to be a year old. That was one story they did not want to tell. Her name and my grandparents’ names are on the Asan Bay Overlook Memorial Wall.
These days, I find myself wondering: Who is telling Guam’s story now? Who gets to shape the record — and how?
History helps us grow our humanity. There’s nothing more humbling than being trusted with someone’s truth.
Columnist Rindraty Limtiaco
Over the past few years, I’ve had the privilege of working with the University of Guam Press, editing memoir manuscripts from the late Gov. Ricardo Bordallo and Señot Peter Onedera. I’m currently editing a third. These books have filled in blanks for me — and in some cases, completely reframed the history I thought I knew.
I’ve always had a dynamic relationship with Guam history — not always through textbooks, but always through stories told to me. I could sit and listen to my grandmother, my father, my aunts and uncles for hours. And later, as a journalist, I felt the same pull — to document the voices of masters, manåmko’, and families who carried their stories with grace and grit.
History helps us grow our humanity. There’s nothing more humbling than being trusted with someone’s truth.
I used to tell my newsroom reporters: “We’re not historians. We’re journalists. Cover the issue the best you can in the time you have.” I no longer see it that way.
The work we did allowed for a written record of what was happening. That is history. That is the archive.
History lives in many forms: in print, on canvas, in voices, in movement. It lives in art, in songs, in conversations that don’t get recorded — and in some that do.
It lives in the work of those who make memory their medium: artists, activists, singers. They’re shaping how we understand the present and how we’ll remember the past.
I think of JD Crutch — a CHamoru singer-songwriter my father used to sing along to on the radio. Some songs made you laugh. Some made you remember. All of them left a record.
Traditionally, Pacific history was passed down orally from one generation to another. Written history, when it came, often came through outsiders. Today, Guam’s story is layered: the indigenous, the colonial, the blended. It’s a tapestry woven from oral tradition, colonization, resistance and resilience.
So how do we keep track of it all — these layers, this blending, these voices across time?
I’ve learned that the people who make preservation their priority — the ones who document, remember and retell — are our island’s treasure keepers. We don’t always refer to them as historians. Sometimes they’re directors, professors, writers. But they are all memory keepers.
So what makes someone a historian on Guam — and why does it matter?
Some of today’s Guam historians are people I’ve known much of my life. They are all part of my history too: Dr. Robert Underwood, Dr. Anne Hattori, UOG Press Director Victoria Leon Guerrero and Guampedia Director Shannon Murphy.
I wish I could have included Eduardo Camacho in here. Before he passed away last year, he asked me to edit his memoirs — not for publication, but for his family. In them were reflections on Guam’s business and community history. It was personal, but it was also a legacy. His family is lucky to have that.
Dr. Anne Hattori, whom I’ve known since childhood, became the first CHamoru woman to earn a Ph.D. in history. Now a professor at UOG, she’s become a significant voice in Pacific and Micronesian studies.
“My role as a historian involves not only conducting research about our pasts, but also, and just as importantly, sharing that with students,” Hattori says. “As a professional historian, my training is to identify weaknesses, inaccuracies and silences in what is known of our past, and do my best to address them.
“We live in a rapidly changing world, and it’s too easy for the past to be viewed as irrelevant to an electronics-dominated present,” she adds. “Yet knowledge of the past is CRITICAL. It allows us to make decisions for the present and the future based on wisdoms gained from our past experiences.”
Shannon Murphy, my first editor at the Pacific Daily News in 1991, has worked in island media for more than four decades. Today, she leads Guampedia — Guam’s first online encyclopedia.
“In starting Guampedia back in 2002, our small staff decided that it was high time CHamorus told their own story,” Murphy says. “We vowed that Guampedia would be written with an indigenous perspective.”
Victoria Leon Guerrero, director of UOG Press, began as a standout intern in our newsroom. She now leads efforts to publish regional and local works rooted in Micronesian identity.
“I imagine my role as a midwife of stories,” she says. “A large part of my life's work has been to listen to and gather stories that have never been told and help bring them to life, so that we can learn the lessons they contain about history.”
Former Guam Delegate Dr. Robert Underwood — a scholar, activist, and historian — was one of my first interviewees as a reporter.
“Every human being has a memory and therefore qualifies as a historian for themselves,” Underwood says. “But not all people have a habit of memory — thinking about and organizing the past in order to make meaningful decisions about the future and in order to be inspired in the present.”
For all four, the urgency of history is clear.
“The military buildup will set the dynamics for Guam society and economy for the next 25 to 50 years,” Underwood explains. “It isn’t World War II that changed Guam — it was its subsequent militarization after the war was over.”
Each of them has dedicated time, energy and heart to ensuring Guam’s stories are told, remembered and hopefully, acted upon.
Without people committed to this work, the risk of losing vital pieces of who we are is real.
What’s at stake isn’t just the past. It’s our ability to see ourselves clearly — and to leave a record for the next generation.
Without the memory keepers, we risk erasing more than stories. We risk erasing identity.
My grandfather didn’t want to talk about the war. But the silence taught me something too — that what’s remembered, and what’s not, shapes who we are.
That’s why this work matters.
We’re not just keeping records. We’re keeping identity.
— Rindraty Celes Limtiaco is a veteran journalist, editor and former publisher of the Pacific Daily News on Guam. With more than 30 years of experience in media, she has dedicated her career to empowering communities through credible, values-driven storytelling. Now writing from Virginia, she is the co-creator of My Jungle Rules, a platform built on creative freedom and unfiltered insight. Her column explores Guam’s politics, culture and identity with boldness, clarity and care—asking the hard questions and honoring the complexity of island life.