Abstract
This chapter focuses on the mental health factors that impact student success for Indigenous youth within the higher education landscape in the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands (CNMI). It emphasizes the need to address these mental health factors by strengthening cultural identity to support the success of students in higher education. The authors explain how Indigenous rights can be used to address legacies of genocidal colonialism and how implementing Indigenous-based curriculum for effective student learning may provide pathways to improve academic and mental health outcomes. Several programs in Saipan that underscore the significance of reinforcing cultural identity to help mitigate and alleviate these negative outcomes are discussed. The authors conclude by providing examples of how cultural identity can be strengthened through the implementation of Indigenous rights-based legislation, thereby simultaneously safeguarding mental health and academic success for Indigenous youth in the CNMI.
TopBackground
The Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands (“CNMI” or “Commonwealth”) is a 14-island Micronesian territory of the United States in the Pacific, which has staggering disparities for their Indigenous peoples in education (Dela Cruz et al., 2018) and health care (Sakamoto et al., 2020), just to name a few. While strong arguments exist for historic and systemic causal roots of these disparities (Miller, 2020), the legacy of centuries of colonial genocide have, to large extents, systematically disconnected the Indigenous people of the Marianas from their traditional culture and lifestyles (Miller, 2020; Wexler, 2009). Incredible grassroots advocacy and initiatives from local organizations to combat cultural identity loss are growing for Indigenous peoples in the CNMI and Guahan (“Guam”) (Souder, 2019). These initiatives also expose the existing cultural disconnect if revival organizations are needed in the first place.
Key Terms in this Chapter
Colonial Genocide: The decimation, land theft, and forced assimilation of Indigenous peoples by European invaders. It began through the “Doctrine of Discovery”-based justification for European global “Discovery & Conquest” of non-Christian peoples and their lands, that included elements of human and cultural genocide, enslavement, ethnic cleansing, forced conversion, land theft, and other modern-day war crimes.
Socioeconomic: Social and economic factors that impact individuals and groups.
Cultural identity: Self and collective perception connecting an individual to a unique culture or group.
Indigenous-Based Curriculum: A method of teaching that focuses on using Indigenous knowledge, history, cultures, and traditions in an educational setting.
Outcomes: Results or consequences.
Disparities: Significant and disproportional differences.
Indigenous: First peoples of a particular place; native. The CNMI’s Indigenous peoples are the Chamorro and Refaluwasch (“Carolinian”).
Megalithic: Large, prehistoric stone structures with varying meanings, styles, and sizes that usually mystify modern scientists behind their construction methods.
Intergenerational Trauma: Multi-generational living legacies of injury from experiences like colonial genocide and forced acculturation, so severe that its impact goes beyond behavior-influencing progeny and into altered genetic inheritance. Psychopathologies such as depression, anxiety, post-traumatic stress disorder, and addiction are potential outcomes of this type of trauma, unless there is elimination of external environmental insults.
Systemic Racism: A form of racism which utilizes laws, institutions, systems, and organizations to discriminate against people based on their race and/or ethnicity. This type of racism can be overt or covert, expressed or implied.
Psychosocial: The influence of social factors on mental health.