[WIND CHIMES] [OCEAN SURF] [WIND IN TREES] [JOE QUINATA] It starts with the community.

The community identifies what is significant.

The original craftspeople of the house were the community.

Your relatives, your families the whole village would come together and build a thatch house.

Now when you look at the angle from a community standpoint, you're looking at knowing their history, knowing themselves.

And that structure, that home, that building tells all that story.

There is this certain pride that the community has and that pride is reflected in that building... architecturally, or just as Juan San Nicolas's house, as Juan Flores's house, as Doris Lujan's house, as Ana Leon Guerrero's house.

So what we do as preservationists is look at the story and try to preserve the essence of that story into that house.

And so to the architectural field, the engineering field, these techniques, these technologies that were actually developed a long, long, time ago it is of great value to them.

Whether it'd be the 1901 period, 1902 period, we're going to capture that moment and we are going to preserve it as the way it was.

[MUSIC] The Ana Leon Guerrero house is a prime example of historic preservation.

It is really one of the first homes that we sort of dove into to preserve.

So we have to take a look in the integrity of the project itself.

We don't want to do fake things, things that is going to make people think that this is original when it really isn't.

When we go into the Ana Leon Guerrero house, we're looking at a lot of woodwork that is happening there and so of course, we don't want to fool the public and hand hewn all of the wood that we are going to replace so you already would see the big difference between the old, historic flooring wood that is much darker than your new wood and only because we want to make sure that the people know that that is an addition to the original wood.

So we do it by just design or we do it by the material itself.

It's just a very good feeling when you walk into the house.

You have that feeling of nostalgia you may call it, or, in CHamoru we say we get 'mahålang' because it brings you back.

It brings you back to the time that house was bustling with children.

They were cooking and making titiyas in the back kitchen.

So that house represents who we are in Guam, our CHamoru people, the indigenous people and how they look at their heritage, how they preserve their heritage and that's what makes them who they are.

Not by some law or some guideline or some procedure that we have to follow.

Our heritage is our way of life.

To preserve everything that we do as our tradition, our values, our beliefs - and that should always be the basis for historic preservation.

That's what we want to portray as ourselves.

While you talk about historic preservation, I'm going to talk about how we do it everyday.

It - it is our life.

And that's how much pride we have as a CHamoru people into our heritage in this respect, the architectural elements of this house.

[MUSIC FADES] We want our future to know who we are so they know who they are.

And because they know who they are, you can't go wrong.