UCLA

In the U.S. Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands (CNMI), there are at least two groups of people with privileged claims to the islands' territory: The U.S. Military and the native Chamorro and Refaluwasch peoples. As some of the longest colonized islands in the Pacific, nestled among waters with great biodiversity, the CNMI is an exemplary site of the intersections between militarism, indigeneity and the environment. The U.S. military retains certain legal rights over the islands-including the adjacent sea and air space-and conducts weapons testing and training such as live-fire exercises, and chemical and munitions testing. At the same time, the CNMI's Constitution grants exclusive legal rights over the ownership of land to people of Northern Marianas Descent (NMD) to protect its scarcity and sacredness. Increasingly, both Indigenous people and the Department of Defense (DOD) articulate territorial claims in terms of “the environment”-stewardship, conservation, and protection for future generations. Using ethnographic methods, this research examines the shared cultural spaces that emerge from the overlapping claims to the environment made by Chamorros, Refaluwasch and the U.S. Military. By understanding the environment as a contested site situated within a longer history of imperialism in the Pacific, this research asks: how do U.S. Military and Indigenous Peoples’ claims to the environment overlap and diverge? What are the multiple understandings of and relationships to "the environment," and what is at stake? The findings from this research reveal that the environment (land/sea/sky) remains a critical site from which to explore contemporary manifestations of United States imperialism in the Northern Mariana Islands, where militarism is naturalized through various federal environmental planning processes that work to reconfigure Indigenous lands into spaces of U.S. sovereign power. Ultimately, this work argues that the current framing of sovereignty in the CNMI forecloses possibilities for Indigenous self-determination by privileging statist ideologies that are bound to U.S. political status. Sovereignty must therefore be re-conceptualized to account for a more dynamic and holistic vision of contemporary Indigenous sociopolitical life and its connections to the land.