TO the people of the Marianas:
We are witnessing a defining moment in the history of our islands. For too long, federal agencies and military interests have treated our archipelago as a collection of disjointed “strategic assets” rather than a single, living ecosystem with a 4,000-year-old heart. But the people of the Marianas are no longer allowing our voices to be siloed or silenced.
Thanks to the relentless advocacy of Prutehi Guåhan and the legal expertise of Earthjustice, the decades-long practice of open-air detonations at Tarague Beach is finally facing the scrutiny it deserves. As the U.S. Supreme Court prepares to hear the Air Force’s challenge to our environmental protections, we must recognize this as a critical battleground. We are asserting our right to breathe clean air and protect the Northern Guam Lens Aquifer from the spreading plumes of legacy toxins — like Dieldrin and PFAS/PFOS — that continue to seep into our lifeblood. We already see the consequences: the Guam EPA’s warnings regarding toxins found in the fish of Tumon Bay represent a direct poisoning of our food chain and our most sacred shores.
The assault on our sovereignty reaches a fever pitch with the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management. In a historic display of regional unity, the leadership of both Guam and the Northern Mariana Islands stood as one to reject the fast-tracking of deep-sea mining. Our communities responded with an overwhelming 65,000 public comments — a massive roar of dissent. Yet, in a blatant act of bureaucratic erasure, federal officials “pondered” a mere 346 as “substantive,” effectively throttling the collective breath of tens of thousands of our people. Doubling the Area of Potential Effect to nearly 70 million acres is a transparent, calculated act of aggression that treats our ocean as a vacant laboratory for extraction.
This pattern of fracture is how the Marianas are partitioned for military utility and U.S. interests. We see the whole picture of this assault when we look north: from the expanding live-fire ranges on Tinian to the unrelenting target practice on No’os (Farallon de Medinilla). By treating the Marianas as disjointed assets and exploiting our separate political statuses to create artificial divisions, federal agencies ignore our deep cultural and ecological interconnectedness rooted in an ancestral history that predates any artificial boundary.
The 38th Guam Legislature has the opportunity to blow a historic kulo’ in the form of Bill 253-38, signaling to the world that we have the fighting spirit to stand our ground and protect our profoundly valued, living ocean resource. We call upon the leadership of both Guam and the Northern Mariana Islands to go further: to codify this unity into a shared legal framework — a unified law that stands as a single, unbreakable shield for our waters against extraction and exploitation.
We must ensure that the generations who follow receive the same sacred inheritance handed down to us by our First People. We refuse to be a mere coordinate in a military-industrial strategy that does not include our survival.
We must stand as a unified Marianas — one people, one ocean, one breath.
Si Yu’os yan Saina Ma’åse’,
BALTAZAR B. AGUON
Tomhom, Guahan, M.I.
