Creating an Indigenous-led research center

Our community currently lacks a space to access educational, health and political research in the Northern Mariana Islands. 

Create an Indigenous-led research center and database for Indigenous community members (in the public and private sector) to access health, education and political data. 

Our communities throughout the Mariana Islands are known as the “longest colonized islands in the Pacific” beginning in the 16th century with the arrival of Ferdinand Magellan. Our community within the Northern Mariana Islands lacks the capacity to assess and research in culturally-relevant ways.  Importantly, this data is not currently linked to contemporary forms of colonization such as militarization which privileges national security concerns over the everyday livelihoods of Indigenous people throughout the Marianas. This is also a concern about Indigenous data sovereignty, as we believe our health and educational data should remain in the hands of our people and should also be analyzed in culturally-appropriate ways without being extracted or subsumed under the larger “nation state.” 

The target population is the Indigenous Chamorro and Refaluwasch communities in the Northern Mariana Islands. Indigenous Chamorros and Refaluwasch face higher rates of poverty than their non-Indigenous counterparts on island and many rely on federal assistance. As a US territory, the Northern Mariana Islands are often subsumed under the broader “nation” with little regard to the cultural specificities that shape our communities such as language barriers, colonization, militarization and decreasing opportunities for Indigenous-led research and teaching initiatives.   Economic opportunities for Indigenous youth rely on an unsustainable two-pronged approach to development: militarism and tourism. 

Our project team members are an Indigenous Chamorro brother and sister duo whose life work centers on pressing Indigenous social issues that link mental health concerns to the process if Indigenous self-determination. James is a mental health programs evaluator with more than a decade of experience working with communities throughout Micronesia and the Pacific. Theresa is a trained cultural anthropologist with more than a decade of teaching, research, activism and non-profit experience focused on Indigenous resistance, regeneration and sovereignty. We were born and raised in the Northern Mariana Islands and work directly with community members, government agencies and other non-profits on Saipan, Northern Mariana Islands. 

We face technical, financial and cultural barriers that we hope Solve will help us overcome. First, we need technical assistance in order to build out both the capacity to run and employ an Indigenous-led research center. Second, we require the necessary start-up funds to support the creation of a network and database on-island in which individuals can access on-island. Lastly, we face certain cultural barriers that privilege outside “experts” over younger Indigenous members who wish to create positive outcomes in our communities. Our long-colonized mindsets often privilege federal funding and western research frameworks that lack the appropriate context and culturally-specific data to produce long-term outcomes for our community members at a village level that prioritize Indigenous sovereignty. 

The team lead is an Indigenous Chamorro woman with a PhD in anthropology who was born and raised on Saipan and whose life work centers on research, teaching and activism on militarization and Indigenous Pacific Islander sovereignty. 

There is currently no infrastructure for Indigenous youth and adults to access community data to produce research that could influence policy and educational outcomes on island. We see this solution as innovative because we want to promote the protection of Indigenous data sovereignty while producing research outcomes that can be used for real-life policy and educational decision-making at the local and regional level. We see this as an opportunity to invest in the community’s future while protecting our sovereignty. 

Create a safe and accessible space for Indigenous youth and adults to receive technical skills to analyze and produce research for and by our community members that is Indigenous-led. We want to build capacity for Indigenous youth and adults to engage in  research that supports long-term sustainable economic and social practices that do not rely on our primary economic drivers of militarism and tourism. 

We plan to achieve these goals first by providing individuals with training to conduct ethically and culturally relevant research that uplifts Indigenous sovereignty. Second, we plan to develop a database by engaging with various community stakeholders in the health, education and policy realms to collect and archive the most up-to-date datasets about our community including updated demographic information. This database can then be used by Indigenous youth and adults to produce relevant research for policy suggestions, curriculum development and future business models. 

1) By 2030, substantially increase Indigenous youth and adult engagement in social science research through training and service learning opportunities. 

2) Provide economic opportunities for Indigenous youth and adults by training, hiring and funding more Indigenous researchers on-island.

3) Improve access to Indigenous data by creating a database that can be used by community members to develop curriculum, policy papers and other relevant research to promote Indigenous sovereignty in a local and international scale. 

4) Provide an online database  that seamlessly incorporates Indigenous knowledge production into research frameworks that work with community members to improve social and economic outcomes. 

We want to invest in a research center that uplifts Indigenous sovereignty by investing in Indigenous youth and adults to access and analyze data that can be used to better our sociopolitical and economic futures. This research center would allow us to train Indigenous researchers to analyze current datasets and produce research that has the potential to influence local and regional stakeholders including government agencies. The outcome of this training, research and development will be an investment in long-term sustainable social and economic practices that honor our connections to our homelands and prioritize sustainable growth over exploitative business practices.

The core technologies we plan to use are an online database that compliments Indigenous stakeholder knowledge of the land.

We believe that in order to serve our community we need to prioritize investments in our own people rather than look elsewhere. A research center that prioritizes and uplifts Indigenous intelligence is one way to alleviate the long history of colonialism that has long framed the US-affiliated Pacific Islands as a space of deficit. We believe that Indigenous-led businesses promote long term sustainability by honoring our connections to our homelands and create opportunities for independent growth outside of the twin economic drivers of militarism and tourism. 

We provide training services to individuals in order to conduct ethical and culturally appropriate research that will serve the population of the Northern Mariana Islands. We will find this training primarily through grant writing and funding opportunities. Most data about Asian American and Pacific Islanders is not disaggregated or analyzed locally which can lead to broad assumptions about community needs. Creating culturally relevant policy, education and health research to transform policies, curriculum development and promote positive health outcomes in our community requires the protection of Indigenous data sovereignty that allows Indigenous youth and adults to analyze this data themselves. 

We plan to primarily raise funds through sustained grant writing, fees for services (training and. research output) and teaming up with community stakeholders who might invest in overlapping projects that promote Indigenous sovereignty. Trainees will also be assisted with formulating their own grants for sustaining the center. 

The community research that informs the impetus for this research has been funded by the Wenner-Gren Foundation ($19,000), the American Association of University Women ($19,000), the Asia Pacific Women on Law and Development ($13,000) and the University of Berlin & Humboldt University’s Tandem Web Lab ($14,000).