Metgot i Chamorro

You know something.
I've read some Chamorro forums that talked about the Chamorro culture being dead or will die so might as well not touch it. Like it were some kind of disease. That the language we have had for thousands of years is nothing and shouldn't be important to us.
Ai na piniti para guahu.
Why do people talk about the Chamorro culture being something of the distant past that has been lost?
Why do people talk about the Chamorro culture as if it were something we cannot save or shouldn't save?
This kind of thinking is not what we should be doing.
This is how I see the Chamorro culture and I hope it may help motivate those who think it is dead or shouldn't be saved.

The Chamorro people have shown immense strength and survival through keeping our culture alive for hundreds of years of colonialism and oppression.
It could have been lost hundreds of years ago and we would just be an island that spoke Spanish as the native tongue. But our ancestors did not let this happen. Albeit we put a lot of words into our vocabulary from the Spanish, but the way we pronounce it and our grammar is still the same.
Yes we lost our ancient canoes and our dances, but we still kept many of the things we could manage to keep.
It was hard to do many ancient thigns because the Spanish forbade it and the Chamorros did not want to get in trouble.
But the Chamorro's still were a little aguaguat. They manage to keep the techa, the weaving, the language, the customs like chen'chule and the deep respect for the dead alive.
We have survived through a war that was so hard. And I will never know what they went through, but I imagined it to be ruthless.
With the American colonization we slowly lost many native speakers to the idealism of English being important and the old Chamorro ways not something to strive for. It looked like it was over for us.
But today there is culture revival going on and we can be a part of it. We can learn our tongue, we can learn the skills, we can learn the stories so we can keep it alive.
We are a people that survive and we can show once again that we will survive.
So no Chamorro culture isn't dead we have incorporated what we needed to incorporate to survive. We are still Chamorros.
Chamorros are stong.
Si Yu'us Ma'ase.