Humanities Council awards community grants

The NMI Council for the Humanities recently awarded two Community Grants to support local humanities projects.

According to council executive director Paz C. Younis, lawyer and historian Howard Willens was awarded an $8,066 grant to produce digital copies of a large collection of federal documents relating to the political status negotiations between the U.S. government and the Marianas Political Status Commission in the early 1970s.

These documents, comprising roughly 55,000 pages, were originally classified by the federal government and unavailable for use by researchers. Willens and his wife Deanne Siemer were forced to sue several federal agencies under the Freedom of Information Act in order to gain access to them.

Willens and Siemer subsequently used these documents to prepare two books that examine the historical events leading to the creation of the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands.

The grant will allow Willens to scan these documents and copy them onto a set of compact discs. Younis noted that due to recently developed technology, these digital files will be fully searchable.

The CD sets will be made available to libraries, archives and other repositories in the Commonwealth, the Pacific region, and the United States.

Younis noted that this collection represents a very valuable historical resource. “These documents should be of great interest to those who wish to study the events leading up the establishment of our Commonwealth,” Younis said.

The council also awarded a $2,000 grant to the Northern Marianas College to sponsor five humanities-based radio programs for a one-year period.

These programs include Saipan Radio Theater, the Novel Hour, Performance Today, Jazz Profiles and Piano Jazz. Younis said that these five programs will be aired weekly on KRNM, the island’s only public radio station.

She noted that the grant will also support the Humanities Round Table, a periodic program featuring interviews with humanities scholars and discussions on a variety of humanities topics.

Younis invited interested individuals, groups and organizations to contact the Humanities Council at 234-4785/7 or fax 235-4786 to learn more about its Community Grants Program.

The Humanities Council is a private non-profit corporation whose mission is to foster awareness, understanding, and appreciation for the humanities through support of educational programs that relate the humanities to the indigenous cultures and to the intellectual needs and interests of the people of the Commonwealth.