How the CNMI

The Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands (CNMI) voted for its independence in 1975. Before the vote for independence (plebiscite), the Northern Mariana Islands were a territory of the United States. However, the Commonwealth did not become a self-governing territory until 1978.

CMNI’s story begins centuries earlier when the first European settlers from Spain colonized the archipelago. Located 100 miles from Guam, the Commonwealth is comprised of 14 islands encompassing 183.5 square miles. Most of the islands are largely uninhabited, except for Saipan, Tinian, and Rota, which are its principal islands.

In the early 16th century, Ferdinand Magellan briefly landed on the group of islands he named the Ladrones (thieves). Almost 100 years later, Diego Luis de San Vitores, a Jesuit priest, named the islands the Marianas in honor of the Spanish regent, Mariana of Austria. Unfortunately, the trip to convert the indigenous people (Chamorro) ended badly, with the Chamorros revolting.

By the end of the 17th century, the Chamorros were subjugated and made to take an oath to the Spanish crown. As part of their colonization, they wore European-style fashions, ate meat, and adopted artisan crafts such as sewing, spinning, weaving, iron forging, tanning, and stone masonry.

Spain expanded its reach into all of Micronesia, but its conflicts with Britain and Germany placed the Marianas in the middle of these rivalries. While the Spanish averted a war with Germany in 1886 through the mediation of Pope Leo XIII, its empire eventually weakened when it became entangled in the Spanish-American War at the end of the 19th century (1898).

By 1899, after the United States defeated Spain and took the Philippines, Spain removed itself entirely from the Pacific, selling all of the Marianas (except for Guam) to the Germans. This began a new era in the archipelago’s history, a time when Guam became separated from the Northern Marianas. Up until its independence in the latter part of the 20th century, the Germans and then the Japanese controlled the island.

Under the Germans, Saipan was the administrative center. The Germans also set up schools, hospitals, and other civic services and encouraged immigration to the islands. They also produced coconuts and the derivative copra (the dried part of the coconut), on coconut plantations.

After WWI, German colonization ended when the Japanese navy first took over the Marianas as part of a secret agreement with Britain to keep peace in Asia. Later, through the Treaty of Versailles, Japan received the Northern Marianas. Under Japanese rule, the laws governing the islands were an extension of those in Japan, with a few modifications.

Additionally, Japanese language education was a part of the educational system, which was restricted. At the same time, the Japanese built hospitals, public health improved, and everyone was employed.

The high employment rate grew out of Japan’s focus on economic development resulting in the establishment of sugar cane plantations and refineries on Saipan and Rota. Japan’s colonization of the Marianas ended at the end of WWII.

By WWII, the Marianas, including Guam, belonged to Japan, which established bases to help the country expand south and east. The United States took back Guam, Saipan, and Tinian, the island where the planes that dropped the bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki took off from. After the war, the islands were returned to the U.S. when President Harry S. Truman signed the Trust Territory of the Pacific Islands.

Under this agreement, the UN Security Council had ultimate jurisdiction, but the islands were a U.S. territory. Between the early 1950s when the agreement was signed and the Marianas’ independence, the U.S. worked toward helping the Marianas become a self-governing independent government whose citizens retained the rights of American citizenship but could not vote in U.S. elections.

Today, the Marianas are comprised of diverse peoples that are under the purview of the U.S. government, which regulates its minimum wage laws and immigration and border controls. While the Marianas had a garment manufacturing industry at one time, competition from larger countries where labor costs were lower and a series of typhoons caused the islands' industries to suffer.