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Land as part of local culture
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Posted on Oct 08 2008
The reason we have “land alienation” law is to protect the indigenous culture and land practices from disappearing, which will surely cause massive social breakdown and will bring poverty to the local people. This is what our forefathers feared the most and is why they included this safeguard provision in their Covenant negotiations with the United States.
Now 33 years later, some of us local people want to repeal Article XII of our Constitution because we feel it is preventing us from getting rich quickly and is hampering our economy. We want to do whatever we want with our lands, regardless of the foresight our forefathers thought best for us.
Let me ask you these: Do we really want to forsake our unique culture and land customs where we had lived and sustained together for centuries as indigenous people in our small beautiful islands? Are we ready to leap into the great future not caring where we will end up as minority groups of people (Carolinian and Chamorro) among other great nations? Are we ready for outsiders to come in and buy up our lands and move us out of the islands to who-knows-where? Do you want to end up a beggar on your own island?
Land is very much a part of our culture that you cannot separate both from each other. Without land our culture will disintegrate and that will be the end of the local people taking control of their destiny.
A lot of local people end up broke after they leased out their land and frivolously spent the millions of dollars in rental payments they received from the leases. They will be broke or landless for a long time before their land can revert to them. Imagine if they had sold their land without investing their sudden income wisely—they would end up as renters, or worse, homeless forever.
With land we can build a small shack to shelter us when the need arises without the worry of being homeless. We can also prevent hunger by feeding off the land. We can always count on the “family land” being there to help us out in times of needs.
These have always been our traditions and the more reasons we need to hold on to Article 12 because the law makes more sense to our culture and customs than without it, as our forefathers contemplated.
[B]Enrique K. Seman[/B] [I]Kagman, Saipan[/I]
