For years, the relationship between the United States and the Mariana Islands could be called “give and take”; the islanders gave and the United States took. Vanessa Warheit’s The Insular Empire: America in the Mariana Islands is an exploration, among other things, of what the U.N. describes as “The Guam Question.”
This Stanford-educated filmmaker, now a Vancouver resident, sums up the last few decades since these islands ended up in our domain. Guam itself was a spoil of the Spanish-American war. The northern Marianas were taken from Imperial Japan and given to the U.N., but they’re so firmly in the U.S. domain that this legal status is almost fictional: we don’t test many H-bombs on much of the U.N.’s other protectorates. The islands are subject to a bewildering patchwork of legal statuses, which Warheit explains quite adequately. In small, we see some of the history of Hawaii repeated here, including the efforts to wipe out of the native language and to use the terrain for military purposes.
Considering the previous management by the Spaniards, Guam is estimated as the longest continually occupied colony in the world. In some respects, the citizens of Guam are more American than the Americans, if one cites their contribution to the U.S. wars. The islands’ sons become Uncle Sam’s soldiers; their casualties in Iraq and Afghanistan alone are far out of proportion to the size of the local population.
Colonialism is always ambiguous, as Warheit explains, and it goes beyond an appreciation for Coca-Cola and ice cream. The biggest national holiday in the Marianas is the military parade in honor of the liberation from the Japanese. And the northern Marianas are still considered sacred places in U.S. Marine military history: ask a leatherneck about the islands of Saipan and Tinian.
Despite all this, Guam and the Marianas remain without adequate political representation. The people have U.S. passports but a distinctly second-class citizenship. Liberation in World War II ended with the military seizing lands that were paved over with airstrips or used as CIA, Navy or Marine bases.
What Warheit doesn’t report on here, likely because of the lack of cooperation from the local military commanders, is the even worse news to come. Ecologically disastrous plans are being drawn up for the as-yet-untouched parts of Guam, such as a proposal to smash a coral reef to make a port for nuclear aircraft carriers. Koohan Paik’s article in The Nation this April, “Living at ‘The Tip of the Spear,” outlines some of the plans; director Warheit mentions these troubles only in passing, essentially as a huge increase of population as U.S. soldiers arrive to man newly built bases. And then there’s the matter of the Marianas’ more recent notoriety as a floating sweatshop, where slave-labor made clothes were branded “Made in USA”—see Alex Gibney’s documentary Casino Jack and the United States of Money for that sordid tale.
The future of these islands is discussed with locally famed politicians and activists. One is former Miss Guam, ex-senator and current Chamorro-language revivalist Hope Cristobal, whose namesake daughter is continuing to petition for Guam’s rights at the U.N.. And after years of political activism, Saipan’s Lino Olopai is now trying to keep alive maybe the most amazing cultural achievement of the people of the South Seas. This itself is a subject perfect for a film festival dedicated to the Pacific Rim: namely, the art of celestial navigation, which enabled the Polynesians to throw a civilization over the vastest spaces on earth.
THE INSULAR EMPIRE: AMERICA IN THE MARIANA ISLANDS (Unrated; 60 min.) screens Tuesday, Oct. 19, at 5pm at the Rio Theatre, 1205 Soquel Ave., Santa Cruz. Free. For full schedule see program or visit www.pacrimfilmfestival.org
