To Ms. Ogumoro, get real and join the 21st century

“There is a feeling we are losing control of our own land,” said Felicidad Ogumoro, a member of the small nationalist group on Saipan known as Inetnon Taotao Tano, in a 1991 Los Angeles Times article. The group has called for a three-year moratorium on major development projects. “We want to set the rules for our own house. If developers don’t like it, let them go home. We come first,” Ogumoro had said.

You lost your chance so stop complaining. I’ve looked and I can’t find anywhere where you chained yourself to Gov. Pedro Tenorio’s office door to protest his action of the past eight years when Saipan was literally sold down the river to a hundred or so people. What were you doing? You must have known what was going on in the hotel and garment industries, the abuses, the degradation of your fellow human beings. Opps, wait, these aren’t human beings, only Carolinians and Chamorros are human beings. These 30,000 things are just “CW’s” and their only right is to live like animals and serve the masters. I don’t ever want you to forget that these CW’s raised two generations of your kids under the most appalling conditions. I am a witness to what happened to most of those kids and the lie that parents instilled and perpetuated in those kids about their “maids” and “housekeepers.” I just wish the tables could be reversed on the guilty ones for a few years before you die.

You said this at the 3rd Pacific Media Summit: If Section 2109 of the immigration bill is passed, “it will have a devastating effect on Chamorros and Carolinians who have always aspired to maintain their autonomy and be self-governing, a right that is guaranteed and protected under the Covenant.” You added that Section 2109 will “change and disrupt the social, political and economic livelihood and aspirations of the Chamorros and Carolinians. They will lose control of the right to govern themselves, becoming marginalized in the process. The Chamorros and Carolinians will become a powerless minority in their own native land,”

This is 22 years later and I still can’t find anything where you protested the appalling treatment of CW’s at the hands of the select few on Saipan. Your inhumanity and lack of ethics and empathy are showing loud and clear. You benefited from it for 30 years, abused it for 30 years, thought it was OK for 30 years and just now it’s going to make you powerless. It should. You lost that right when you let a handful of people, exploiters all, take control of the island for their own use, and never once raised your voice while they were raping, pillaging, and burning Saipan. Where were you? You are pathetic. You willingly sell your soul to these crooks but want to deny your neighbors and friends, the people that built Saipan from the ground up, and endured decades of abuse by some your fellow islanders, a path to the same citizenship you got just by an accident of birth. This island has been sold out to a few hundred local and foreign elites for 30 years. What you want only exists on places like Puluwat anymore. Suck it up, lady, its 2014. And to the rest of you that feel like Ms. Ogumoro does, I say examine your heart and see if you are devoid of any humanity too. I talk too many of the 15- to 25-year-old crowd and they don’t share your views. Listen to them.

Gary Dubrall
Chalan Piao, Saipan