Organized by Sophia Perez, Indigenous Technologies Coordinator for the Berkeley Center for New Media, a weeklong series of public workshops beginning March 9 will feature master navigators teaching everything from traditional canoe technology to ancient star-mapping.<\/p>\n
Sophia Perez thought her 2018 visit to Saipan, in the Pacific Ocean\u2019s Northern Mariana Islands, would only last a few weeks.\u00a0<\/p>\n
She\u2019d graduated from UC Berkeley with a double-major in rhetoric and ethnic studies in 2014, and went on to work in commercial film and media production in Los Angeles and Brooklyn. After a while, she felt a pull toward a different kind of storytelling. She thought visiting Saipan \u2014 one of the primary homes of the Indigenous Chamorro and Carolinian people, and her own ancestral homeland \u2014 would be the right place to ground her new creative direction in her family\u2019s history.<\/p>\n
Sophia grew up hearing stories of the Mariana Islands from her Chamorro grandfather, Herman Perez, who survived the Japanese occupation of Guam during World War II. When she arrived in the Marianas, it felt like home.\u00a0<\/p>\n