A traditional canoe voyage once lost to time is now making waves between Guam and Saipan. At the helm? A CHamoru woman navigator… the first in living memory. KPRG’s Naina Rao brings us the story of cultural revival, resilience, and a journey guided by stars, memory, and deep ancestral knowledge.
TRANSCRIPT
BYLINE/NAINA RAO: On open ocean between Guam and Saipan, a traditional Micronesian canoe named Ilaol slices through the waves… No GPS. Just stars, memory, and tradition. At the helm is Melissa Taitano... the first CHamoru woman to lead such a voyage in living memory. This journey spanned more than 130 nautical miles and marks the first traditional Micronesian canoe voyage between these islands in decades. Once a vital route connecting Micronesian communities, Taitano says it had all but disappeared.
MELISSA TAITANO: Seafaring was very vibrant within the Marianas, you know, before colonialism, before the Spanish Empire came into the picture.
RAO: That history traces back to the 16th century. But…
TAITANO: I think that contemporary times encourages to forget that.
RAO: In recent years, efforts to revive canoe-building and traditional navigation have gained momentum. In Yap, navigators are once again teaching how to read stars, swells and birds. And at the University of Guam, master navigator Larry Raigetal has been offering a traditional seafaring course since 2017.
LARRY RAIGETAL: To me, there's a lot to learn from canoe culture and sailing, and learning about the ocean.
RAO: Raigetal and his crew had just returned from Saipan, sailing Ilaol alongside Taitano. The voyage also underscores the canoe’s environmental value.
RAIGETAL: We haven't burned any petrol since we came out this distance. You know how much that would cost nowadays in fuel? A lot. For us to go to Saipan and come back, we spent not even one penny. United will charge you a good cost on that. So we are not rich people, we are poor people, but we use and harness the energy provided to us by surrounding environment, right?
RAO: But this wasn’t just about revival. It was a first of another kind. The first time a CHamoru woman has sailed this sacred sea lane as a Pairourou – an ordained traditional navigator – in modern history.
TAITANO: Really late at night, it feels, sometimes that we’re not sailing in the ocean, but sailing in a sea of stars. It’s really a kind of very spiritual and fantastic magical experience.
RAO: Taitano’s journey began in 2017, when she took Raigetal’s class. She learned to carve a canoe, to sail and how to use chisels and gouges. Historically, those roles were held by men – passed from master to apprentice.
TAITANO: Traditionally, women are of the land, and men are of the sea. Women are seen as too valuable to lose at sea; they’re seen as necessary.
RAO: When asked how she feels being a woman in a male-dominated space, Taitano often says: she’s not just a woman – she’s a navigator. But the reality, she admits, is more complex.
TAITANO: It's been a process, right? We've had to negotiate like, you know, it's different for the canoe guys in the Canoe House that have been in the Canoe House all their lives, carving and their sisters, you know, and mothers are well that they never had to share a space with a woman. But then here's this, you know, woman, not even of their own. You know, they're not I, you know, I'm not Carolinian, right? And I don't even speak their language.
RAO: The canoe she sailed is rooted in Carolinian tradition – different from her own CHamoru heritage. That made her presence in the canoe house even more unusual.
TAITANO: And then all of a sudden, right? I'm carving alongside them. And where is my place, like, do I sit with the guys who are doing the carving, or do I sit with the Pairourou’s and the old folks that are, you know, and have been making decisions? So it's a, I think that they had to learn to pull back from that and to let me, you know, do things like bail and to like, trust me to lash things right, so that I'm not just sitting on the canoe, but I'm actually working in the canoe.
RAO: Raigetal says some of the best navigators are women, because…
RAIGETAL: They hold the knowledge. They just don’t sail, but they’re keepers of the knowledge.
RAO: So if anything happens to the men at sea, women are ready to step in. When Ilaol landed in Saipan, it was three a-m. The crew didn’t record tape. But by the next day… Crowds gathered to welcome the delegation for the Flame Tree Festival… an annual celebration of Chamorro, Carolinian and broader Micronesian culture. For Taitano, the journey is just the beginning.
TAITANO: I think contemporary times only allows this notion that we’re really separate, when in fact we have thousands of years, we have common ties, common history, a common identity, and that seafaring is a way that we can rally together. This is just about the young folks, and we want to be able to give them every opportunity to experience that. We’re just planting seeds and we’re hoping that the next generation can continue watering those seeds and planting seeds of their own.
RAO: One of those seeds may be Annie Fay Camacho. She’s a Micronesian Studies student at the University of Guam and a current student of Raigetal’s seafaring class.
ANNIE FAY CAMACHO: I think the beautiful things happen when you merge modern and traditional. For people on the islands, I think it’s a thing to be proud about, like having something so neat, unique to a region that is so wonderful and powerful that you could say that this is your own, and say that it’s been around for so many hundreds of years, and it’s worked and it’s proven.
RAO: Both Camacho and Taitano believe the stars may guide the voyage, but it’s the next generation that’ll carry it forward.
CAMACHO: That canoe is not just a floating piece of wood; it really represents identity. It represents resilience. It’s culture. It’s you.
KPRG News transcripts are created on a rush deadline by a KPRG contractor. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of KPRG's programming is the audio record.
