STAR Young Writers

Young Medisa Lisa Messo Onni, at age 10 a year ago, wrote about her Chamorro grandmother’s recollection of the concluding hostilities of World War II when it forced itself into her family home. With a brief write-up and a couple of illustrations, Medisa conveyed her grandmother’s memories and sentiments. Hers is one of 74 accounts recalling the battles for Saipan and Tinian written by public and private school grade K-12 students, as told by “our elders,” in a commemorative book titled “We Drank Our Tears,” for this year’s 60th year anniversary of the military invasion of the islands.

The handsome and brightly illustrated hardbound edition, whose publication was supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities, would make for an excellent holiday gift this year. It is destined to grace many a coffee table display of homes here on the Mariana Islands and of dwellings of CNMI-originating families abroad. The historical and contemporary pictures in the book will surely bring a lot of tears to many, both of sadness and joy. The prose may trigger memories long buried in the debris of forgotten times, but the poignant illustrations drawn by the innocent eyes of the young reveal an overarching rainbow perspective that has since embraced and assimilated the sufferings and tragedies of those remembered days.

For their efforts, and in celebration of Humanities Month, the NMI Council for the Humanities is honoring the Pacific STAR Center for Young Writers with the “Preservation of CNMI History” award during the annual Governor’s Humanities Award this Friday evening. Each year, the Council awards outstanding individual achievements in research and publication, history, and the preservation of traditional practices. It also identifies an outstanding humanities teacher. This year, the Council also decided to grant a Lifetime Achievement Award in the Humanities to a deserving couple.
The award to the Pacific STAR Center for Young Writers, however, is the first one to be granted to recognize a group effort. The accolade is well deserved. For the Center is not resting on its laurels. With another Humanities’ supported endeavor, the STAR Center is engaging some 40 third-to-six grade classes at Dandan, William S. Reyes, and San Vicente Elementary Schools in a “One Commonwealth, Many Cultures” book project.

The group’s director, the imaginative and energetic Humanities 2003 awardee Katharyn Tuten-Puckett, and collaborating school coordinators are locating some 40 presenters of one of the 50 identified ethnic/cultural groups that has come to be a part of the CNMI community. Each class will focus on one such ethnic/cultural identity, research and study a pre-visit lesson plan, and then host a designated presenter. These presenters will convey to the class the qualities of the culture s/he represents through its culinary, literary, audio-visual and performing arts. She will also identify what might be a useful contribution that culture brings to the mosaic-in-the-making that the nation has become and the CNMI family is becoming.

The encounter between the students and presenter will be the subject of the student’s documentation and write-up. The students’ dialogue with the presenter, photos and illustrations of the visit, will become the grist from which the “One Commonwealth, Many Cultures” book will emerge.

The Center has put its fingers on a reality that the Commonwealth is slowly awakening into, which is the quietly brooded fact that the CNMI is becoming a sort of western Ellis Island of the United States. It has now become common knowledge that not a few alien visitors and contract workers have made it their intent to find ways of gaining entry into the United States through the Commonwealth. An example is the widely known occurrences of well-to-do would-be mothers from neighboring countries coming to the CNMI to deliver their babies and gain the child’s immediate qualification for a US passport. But horror of horrors, there are even allegations that some enterprising parents who after receiving the much coveted blue book for their children, return to their countries of origin and parley their child’s passport to well-off interested parties for some handsome sum of money.

Ten years ago, Peter Brimelow, a well-respected senior editor of the Forbes Magazine, wrote a book called “Alien Nation,” with the subtitle, common sense about America’s immigration disaster. Brimelow contended that the Immigration Act of 1965 was a well-intended reform legislation gone demonstrably wrong. It changed the make-up of American society from its traditional Anglo-European moorings to a multicultural society that has triggered an unprecedented ethnic and racial transformation of the nation, which he and those who share his political perspective viewed with extreme alarm. At the same time, Ronald Takaki of UC-Berkeley published “A Different Mirror,” a history of multicultural America. Having previously penned “Strangers from a Different Shore” about Asian-American immigrants, Takaki’s thesis is that our cultural diversity has become a given, and that we need to understand each other if we were, in the language of Rodney King at the time, to “get along.” These two perspectives have come to define a seething conflict within the self-story and identity of the nation.

The effort of the Pacific STAR Center for Young Writers not only to organize a Social Studies event for our Elementary grades, albeit, in a limited scope, but also to publish an account of the proceedings, can only add to our understanding of the diversity of cultures that has been visited upon us by the exigencies of economic history. The effort can only assist public enlightenment on this relevant issue.

Medisa Onni will once again be part of this publication effort. Her class at San Vicente Elementary School will take part in the program. Also, Medisa’s Mom is one of the few persons on island who hails from Finland. The likelihood of her being asked to be one of the presenters, though perhaps, not Medisa’s class, is very high.

Meanwhile, if any reader wants to recommend a particular person who may be a worthy presenter of any of the island?s non-Chamorro/Refaluwasch cultures, please contact pacificstarcenter4yw@yahoo.com.

As to the rest of the Humanities Awardees for 2004, watch this week’s news!

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Vergara is a Social Studies 6th grade teacher at San Vicente Elementary School and writes a regular column for the Saipan Tribune.