TWO local activists on Monday morning displayed an inverted U.S. flag during a protect action across from the United States Courthouse on Middle Road in Gualo Rai.
Raymond Quitugua and Herman Tudela said the inverted flag is “an international SOS or call for distress.”
Tudela said they are declaring to the international community that “we are a nation in distress” because “the rights of the Northern Marianas indigenous people are being violated.”
For more than 40 years, he said, “our rights have been violated, our international identities as Chamorros and Carolinians have been obscured.”
Quitugua said the U.S. government in its Federal Register acknowledges that the mwar depicted in the CNMI flag signifies “a life element of the Chamorros,” and “there’s nothing in the Federal Register that makes [a] reference to Carolinians.”
He added that there is only one indigenous people in the CNMI.
”We, the people of the Northern Marianas and Guam, are the Chamorro people. We are the only true indigenous people!” he said.
Northern Marianas Protection and Advocacy Systems Inc. legal counsel Jeanne Rayphand just got out of her car in the parking lot when she noticed the inverted U.S. flag.
She approached Quitugua and Tudela and told them she didn’t want them to fly the flag upside down.
“I just want you to know that I object to our flag being upside down. That is disrespectful. We are part of the U.S. and that’s my opinion,” she told Quitugua and Tudela.
Quitugua replied, “And that’s why I am exercising my rights, because we are in the U.S.”
Community member Joseph Gardinier, for his part, said he is supporting Quitugua and Tudela because he believes in freedom of speech.
“I am supporting Ray and Herman in their quest for better communication with the federal government. I see a lot of the issues that Native Americans have been through in the mainland, so many treaties were broken. I do not want to see it happen here,” Gardinier said.
Indigenous rights activists Raymond Quitugua and Herman Tudela stand next to an inverted U.S. flag during their protest action across from the United States Courthouse on Middle Road.
Indigenous Rights advocates Raymond Quitugua and Herman Tudela raise an inverted U.S. flag during a protest action on Middle Road, across from the United States Courthouse.
