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Island artifacts belong to us
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Posted on Dec 15 2005
I want to express my concern to the Historical Preservation Office. Yes, my name is Fabian Indalecio, and I care for all artifacts existing in the CNMI. I love them and they are priceless. My dream is to own anything that pertains to our island history, either photos or objects. I have owned some of ancient Chamorro artifacts as well as WWII artifacts, and it will stay on the island as long as I live.
I once took my collection to school and showed it with pride to students for educational purposes. My concern is the recent finding of a WWII airplane in the Northern Islands. To the HPO, please make sure that this artifact is not being removed from its original location and being taken away from our island. The war is over, and the U.S. has left a lot of WWII junk on our island, and that to include PCB. So, they don’t need it. I can accept and respect the fact they want to recover the bones of the soldier who died to liberate our island. But please, not the artifacts.
As far as I’m concerned, it belongs to the people of the CNMI, it belongs to our museum for display. Director Epifano Cabrera, please, always be POSSESSIVE and not let our artifacts escape the CNMI and on to another foreign country. It is us to tell the history of the plane, not in some other foreign country. And to Mr. Noel Quituqua, prim, we have conversations about how much pride we share about this kind of artifacts, I look up to you brother to help Mr. Cabrera to insure that he makes the right decisions to safeguard our artifacts. We are so blessed with so much history on our island. Let’s not have the outsider enter our island and dictate what they want to do with their finding. I’m afraid they will be sneaky and start stealing this piece by piece of our history. Even before you know it, they will bring lawyers and federal regulation to scare you. I say, they can shove it and tell them to go home.
Like what Mr. Lino Olopai is doing, protect our culture and custom, because it’s our history we are talking about. Let’s not loose them because we are careless.
SSG Fabian Indalecio
Balad, Iraq
