Welcome to the Marianas Wartime Oral Histories Portal

This webpage serves as a community gateway to explore firsthand accounts of World War II in the Mariana Islands. Clicking on the images above or cards below leads you to the National Park Service gallery video and audio oral history pages, where you can play, download, and get the transcripts. This builds upon our earlier projects such as Fanhasso: War for Guam, the Pacific World War II Timeline, and Guampedia’s extensive entries on WWII. 

Led by Dr. Jennifer Craig through the Mariana Islands Wartime Experiences through Oral Histories Fellowship, this initiative continues the legacy of Toni “Malia” Ramirez’s Voices of Our Elders. It places community-led storytelling at the heart of understanding and sharing the true history of the Pacific Theater during World War II. The stories offer personal perspectives on survival, resilience, and remembrance, preserving a vital part of our shared history.

These oral histories were recorded by National Park Service staff during commemoration events held throughout the 1980s, 1990s, and early 2000s. From the National Park Service perspective, Dr. Craig’s fellowship has provided the opportunity to do work that is long overdue, that the parks previously did not have the capacity to address adequately.

“Through the work of Dr. Jennifer Craig, we have been able to better understand the wealth of resources we have and can now begin the process of finding appropriate and thoughtful ways to make them accessible to the communities they came from and beyond. Through the fellowship, we have been able to develop an inclusive approach to making accessible oral histories that have been sitting for nearly 40 years. The Fellow has worked with NPS, partners, and families to ensure this is done in a culturally sensitive and appropriate manner throughout the layers and partnerships. Critical to this has been empathy for the stories, those sharing the stories, the people working with these traumatic war memories and our communities,” the National Park Service stated.

Dr. Craig is a maritime archaeologist whose work centers on community-oriented, Indigenous, feminist archaeology. Her work expands collections-based research with heart-centered archaeology. With associates (both living and haunting), Dr. Craig answers scholarly questions by excavating archaeological collections found deep in repositories. Repositories are generated over decades by academic institutions, government agencies, museums, volunteer organizations, and cultural resource management firms.

For the Mariana Islands Wartime Experiences through Oral Histories Fellowship, Dr. Jennifer Craig worked with partners at Guampedia who recognize the coexistence of spirit and living to conduct a reciprocal process of curation on content for public consumption and embrace fatoigue taotaomo’ma (places and people visited by ancestral spirits). The fellowship aims to connect ancestors with descendants by engaging in inåfa’maolek para mo’na mañatatti (restoring harmony/balance moving forward or for future generations). Specifically, the project connects ancestor to descendant by sharing oral histories, some long forgotten, from the National Park Service collection. The project fulfills these goals by digitizing the videos and audio and creating this portal to make them accessible to the community.

The project’s progress was shared in regular community gatherings in the Marianas Storytelling series. As many of our World War II survivors have passed on and the influx of military installations increases, our events served as both a tribute and a call to action. Through partnerships like these and the voices of our storytellers, their legacy will continue to guide us forward.