Portraits of the Marianas.

• Position: 'The Insular Empire: America in the Mariana Islands' - Movie review

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

At a Congressional hearing several months ago, Representative Hank Johnson, Democrat from Georgia, asked a Pentagon official if the military's plan to turn Guam into a high-tech super-base might cause the island to "tip over and capsize." Johnson's confounding query went viral on the Internet, as either a cryptic metaphor (as the Congressman later claimed) or a display of staggering ignorance. But let's face it: Few people know much at all about the unsung U.S. territory (or "colony, "as the United Nations has defined it).

Even if someone wanted to learn more about Guam and its 4,000-year-old civilization, there's not a lot to draw from. Very little has been published--or filmed, for that matter--about the Mariana archipelago, comprised of Guam and the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands, flung 6,000 miles to the west of North America.

This comes as no surprise. As with all colonized peoples, the people of the Marianas have struggled--and continue to struggle--with threat after threat of erasure: erasure of a people, a history, a culture, an identity.

This is what makes the latest film from Vanessa Warheit, The Insular Empire: America in the Mariana Islands , so remarkable. The fifty-nine-minute documentary gives a general overview of the last four centuries of political domination, starting with Spain, and including the intricacies following the Spanish-American War, in which Guam was ceded to the United States, while the rest of the nearby islands were sold to Germany. After World War II, the islands, still split into two political entities, came under the jurisdiction of the United States, and have ever since been wrangling with their political identities.

But the real heart of Insular Empire lies in the portraits of the Chamorro and Refaluwasch Carolinian people, the natives of these islands. Warheit follows the lives of four individuals--Hope Cristobal and Carlos Taitano from Guam, and Lino Olopai and Pete Tenorio from the Northern Mariana Islands. Each duo represents the opposing identities that all colonized peoples must reconcile. Simply put, it's a choice between the "Give me liberty or give me death" credo versus the "If you can't beat 'em, join 'em" school of thought.

On the one hand, there are those who manage to adapt to the system laid out by the occupier, as did Taitano, who went on to become a celebrated leader and Coca-Cola bottler, or Tenorio, who now serves in the highest government office...