About the Honorable Robert A. Underwood

Following an impressive career as an educator, culminating with the academic vice presidency of Guam’s university, Robert Anacletus Underwood was elected to the US House of Representatives as Guam’s Delegate to the US Congress, where he served from 1992 to 2002. Passionate activism has been the hallmark of his life, especially in the areas of language and cultural and political rights. As a high school student, when speaking languages other than English was a school offense, he asked to give a speech in Chamorro. As a young school teacher, he organized the then controversial but now institutionalized observance of “Chamorro Week”. As a university instructor, he rocked convention by developing a new course, “Culture and education on Guam,” after being denied the opportunity to teach Guam history. In 1975, he founded PARA, a language rights group. He was appointed to the Chamorro Language Commission in 1977. In 1978 he was elected to the Territorial Board of Education and in 1979 was appointed by the US Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare to the National Advisory Council on Bilingual Education. In 1996 he was named Citizen of the Year by the National Association for Bilingual Education for his many contributions to the field. He has written, published and presented more than a hundred articles, papers and speeches on Chamorro culture, history and language, on bilingual education and language preservation in the Pacific, and on the effects of colonialism in the Pacific. In his talk at UH, he will explore the relationship between language policy and indigenous language survival in the U.S., particularly with respect to Pacific island languages, discussing the lack of clarity of the meaning of “language survival” and the failure of federal policy and education in supporting language survival.