This billboard features a photo I took of the Chief Gadao statue from my last visit to Guåhan. On this return I was supporting my family to relocate from our family home which legally tied our family to the land. This was sadly not the first, WW11 had displaced my grandmother (familian Dådi) from her ancestral land in Sumay (now the Naval base), she settled in Hågat in the years that followed with my grandfather (familian Gadas). The home and store which they built and successfully ran were a testament to their resilience and ingenuity. During breaks of excavating the home with no aircon, I would drive further south with my camera to get some air and ponder this fate.

When your team reached out to me I was elated and then perplexed. How to represent respectfully in the homeland when one is working in the diaspora? In a fit of confusion I called a che'lu to process and blurted out, "the question for us in the diaspora is 'How can we serve our homeland?'". It was then I realized that this question hit to the core of what I want to address as an artist, it could be respectful and honorific in it's provocation.

Jeremy Cepeda was brought in to translate. Jeremy is a CHamoru who is committed to educating our community by re-orienting us to the older styles of speaking or fino' håya. Håfa taimanu nai siña ta fa’che’chu’i i tano’-ta literally translated means: How can we work for our land? Translating the phrase brings up a lot for me, because I am early on my language journey and I am not alone. Like others, when I want to learn words I reach out to a network of family and friends. Translating one Chamoru word can sparked an entire debate from Guåhan, California, Texas and Georgia. If that happens with this billboard, I would feel like it has served a great purpose, though I hope it incites in it's readers and translators the other questions of colonial presence and its effect on all of us, from locals to the diaspora, as I struggle to pronounce the question myself, the child of a CHamoru baby boomer who remembers the signs SPEAK ENGLISH ONLY in school.