The land rule, he added, also protect locals from suffering the fate of native Hawaiians who were displaced in their own homeland.
Several individuals in the community are advocating for the removal of the CNMI Constitution’s Article 12 which restricts the ownership of land to people of NMI-descent.
A nonprofit group known as the “Citizens of Change of Article 12” described Article 12 as “discriminatory and outdated.”
The group launched a campaign to educate the local community about what it believes are myths and misinterpretations regarding land issues.
But Cabrera said the sluggish economy of the islands should not be blamed on the land alienation rule.
He said foreign investors poured in millions of dollars to build hotels and other facilities here despite Article 12.
“Based on what the CNMI has seen over the last two decades, land ownership restrictions should not be blamed as the cause of the commonwealth’s sluggish economy. External pressures, and perhaps, to a greater extent, internal issues, including but not limited to, instability in governance have wreaked the greater havoc,” he said in a paper about land alienation that he submitted to the NMI Council for the Humanities.
Different studies in Hawaii show that its indigenous people have lost their ancestral land due to unrestricted land rules.
For instance, the Pacific Justice and Reconciliation Center said only a small fraction of the islands’ lands are reserved for Native Hawaiians, leaving many of them displaced.
“Accordingly, there are literally thousands of Native Hawaiians that are still homeless, and they could be found everywhere, especially on the main islands of Kauai, Oahu, Moloka’I, Maui and Hawaii [the Big Island]. One can fund homeless Native Hawaiians in public places and beaches living in pitched tents, broken buses and cars and lean-to’s,” said Cabrera.
The Covenant allows the CNMI to revisit its land alienation rule in 2011.
Cabrera said locals should understand that Article 12 protects their heritage and their identity as Chamorros and Carolinians.
“The language we speak, the culture we live, and the customs and traditions that we continue to practice are all a part of our identity as a unique group of people. We should attribute our resiliency for being Chamorro to the fact that we have never been displaced from our land unlike the Native Hawaiians,” he said.
“The negotiators of the Covenant, were indeed, right that land ownership is important for the preservation of the cultures and traditions of the people of the Northern Mariana Islands, and that there is no better measure of protection for such other than to restrict land ownership to only persons of Northern Marianas descent as provided under Article 12 of the Constitution of the Northern Mariana Islands,” he added.
