Research lines
This research line investigates the specificities of CHamoru health-related practices, with a focus on the changes and continuities brought about by Spanish colonialism. At the core of this inquiry is the concept of healways, which brings together healing practices, belief systems, embodied actions, and communal knowledge and ideas around health and the body.
Healing practices during the Latte period was a deeply communal and holistic system, closely aligned with the CHamoru value of inafa’maolek, a principle of relational care that centers both individual and collective well-being. Illness was treated as a shared concern, with support extending beyond the sick person to their entire community. Chamoru careways reflected a worldview where health was relational, multisensory, and rooted in ancestral and environmental connection.
During the Spanish colonial period, CHamoru healways demonstrated remarkable resilience. Despite disruptions brought by colonization, Indigenous healing practices remained central to community survival. This endurance was not only a reflection of the deep value CHamoru people placed on their medicinal knowledge, but also a response to the precarious nature of the colonizers’ health-related infrastructure and limited medicinal resources.
During the early years of Spanish presence in the Marianas, colonizers themselves relied heavily on CHamoru medical knowledge, turning to local healers and remedies for treatment. Jesuit missionaries even sent medicinal ingredients from the islands overseas, recognizing their value.
CHamoru healing practices did not simply survive colonization, they adapted, resisted, and evolved while remaining Indigenous. While spiritual specialists like the makåna were persecuted and ancestral remains destroyed, everyday care persisted through domestic routines and community memory, as well as the new healing figures that emerged. Women and elders became key custodians of healing knowledge, ensuring its transmission across generations.
Oral tradition, story, and practice together formed a living archive, a resilient network through which CHamoru healways endured colonial disruption and continued to shape Indigenous well-being.
Part of this research is being developed within a postdoctoral investigation conducted by Matilde Carbajo Usano who has recently contributed a related PhD: Healways in the Mariana Islands. Medicine, colonialism, and spirituality during the Latte period and Spanish colonial rule, c.1000-1769 CE
