From the office of the Archive Manager, welcome to the

NORTHERN MARIANAS HUMANITIES COUNCIL

DIGITAL ARCHIVE!

This project has been the vision of our Executive Director Leo Pangelinan, and arose out of a need to preserve and share all the media that the council accumulated initially as a result of the research that has gone into various projects.

Our mission is to navigate the human experience of the diverse and indigenous peoples of the Marianas, and we do this by creating engaging programming and events, sponsoring and facilitating research, collaborating with other institutions, researchers and writers to publish literary resources, and possibly most importantly, stimulating and engaging in dialogue about our histories, cultures and identities.

The stories in this archive are our stories, the stories of the Marianas and of Micronesia. But the stories are not complete! There are gaps in information, missing names, missing places, missing people, missing artifacts, missing words.

We would like to enroll your help, the help of the community, in filling in these missing pieces of the puzzles. We would like to serve as a respository for your stories as well. We want to see the faces of your families and know the names of your clans.

We just ask that you are respectful of the stories and identities of others as our stories exist alongside and intertwine with each others'. We encourage you to register and fill out a user profile. This will allow you to contribute more information about records as comments that will be reviewed by a moderator and added to that record's information. The ART (Archive & Records Team) will also be setting up sites within the different communities and villages in the Marianas to encourage everyone to come learn how to digitize their own records and create their own collections of historical and cultural content.

If you are not sure where to begin, I recommend searching by collection. You will find the various branches of the US military all have their own archives from which you will find a lot of content surrounding World War II, such as the MARINE CORPS ARCHIVE. Archives named for specific people are a great way to explore what was happening during their generation(s).

American soldiers climb out of and atop a battle tank that has emerged from the lagoon but sinking into the soft sand of the beach. A Soldier in full gear including helmet on his head and a rifle on his backpack kneels down in dirt and reaches through a barbed wire fence with a piece of candy for a young child on the other side who is barefoot with modest clothes and a simple hat on. A young soldier holds up a large military rifle while kneeling, with his jaw dropped in excitement.
Marine Corps Archive No. 67,
Sherman tank bogged down in soft sand. Japanese landing craft in background.		 Marine Corps Archive No. 82,
Marine gives candy to child in internment camp, Tinian.		 Marine Corps Archive No. 80,
Corporal Doris E. Bankhead of Roscoe, Texas displays Japanese light machine gun.
Several men stand over a catch of large sea turtles they hunted, some in loincloths, some in Japanese happi.
Georg Fritz Collection No. 262, Turtle Hunters

THE GEORG FRITZ COLLECTION is one of my personal favorites, featuring photos that the German administrator of that period took himself. You can see in his work how passionate he was about life in the Marianas and about representation of the diverse cultures there, which at the turn of the 20th century included Carolinian, Chamorro, Japanese, Spanish and German peoples. His collection also includes some rare photos in which the subjects were smiling or not facing the camera, which was also unusual for that time period.

 

A KEYWORD SEARCH may also pull up records if your interests are more topical. Some popular searches may include "nurses", "Japanese", "latte", "carabao", or "Pågan". Other less popular or more specific searches may yield less results. However, as we continue adding information and meta-data to each record as it becomes available to us, more and more records will be associated with more and more keywords, so please be patient as we continue this process that will never truly end.

Also keep in mind that this archive contains many other types of media, including copies of the Marianas Variety and documents that were once top secret during World War II that have since been declassified from the National Archive.

Several families of multiple generations of Japanese people pose for a photo in their holiday clothing standing on a coral beach against the rocky backdrop of a cliff.
NKK Collection No. 38, "Okayama harvest team on the season's end family holiday."
An green-toned aerial image of a World War II era Japanese airfield, labelled in Japanese, on the island of Pågan in the Northern Mariana Islands.
Japanese Military Archives No. 40, "Pågan Air Base."

Lastly, your feedback is very valuable to us as we work to troubleshoot inconsistencies in the function, user-friendliness, and efficiency of this platform. Feel free to let us know what is working and what isn't so we can improve the experience and accessibility of this resource.

ATAIHENEHI NIHATIHAN, OLOMWAAY, THANK YOU!

 

Archaeology

A QUONSET HOUSE ON THE BEACH

The son of an archaeologist and anthropologist wrote a letter accompanying the photographs of his father, reminiscing about his life on the beach....more