Lieweila: A Micronesian Story (review)

Lieweila: A Micronesian Story, 58 minutes, vhs, color, 1998. Filmmakers: Beret E Strong and Cinta Matagolai Kaipat; distributor: First Run/Icarus Films. Sale, $390; rental, $75.

Cinta Matagolai Kaipat, a lawyer and filmmaker, has made an interesting video, presenting the history and present circumstances of her family and her people, the Refalawasch (also known as the Carolinians) of the Northern Mariana Islands. Probably it is too long and too richly detailed for easy classroom use (at least outside the Marianas), but after all it is the first such documentary (so far as I know), just as Ms Kaipat is the first Refalawasch woman to become an attorney (so the film states). But what to make of it?

First things first. Two people are listed as producers of Lieweila: Beret E Strong and Cinta M Kaipat. Beyond this, though, Strong's role is not made at all explicit. The film is narrated by Kaipat in the first person, highlighting her story, her family, her people. Rather than trying to sort out the relative contributions of each, I will simplify matters and focus on Kaipat as the creator of this work.

As Kaipat informs viewers, the Refalawasch are the "poor people" of the Northern Marianas (an American commonwealth, formerly part of UN-mandated Micronesia). Making very creative use of rich archival material, she illustrates the history of this minority community from its nineteenth-century beginnings, when people from the Caroline Islands, in what is now the Federated States of Micronesia, migrated north to settle on Spanish-ruled Saipan. Told with a strong narrative voice, with arresting images and intriguing music, this is a tale of relocation, resistance, and culture change. Intertwined with this history is the more personal story of Kaipat and her family. Viewers learn of the murder of her father, shot during a confrontation twenty years or so ago on the remote island where he and his family (including the filmmaker) had attempted to carve out a semi-subsistence life for themselves, far from the complexities of rapidly modernizing Saipan. Then, after ten years on the mainland, Kaipat returns to the Marianas and is astounded at the incredible changes the inflow of investment has made to this society and economy.

The title of the film translates into English as "listen to our story." That story, as told here, is characterized by several themes, the most important of which seem to be nostalgia for an idealized past and an assertion of communal pride. Interestingly, both themes seem to reveal strongly American cultural premises at work.

Nostalgia is for two lost worlds--first the ancestral Caroline Islands, then the remote islands north of Saipan where the filmmaker grew up. Both are presented as Edenic settings of environmentally sensitive, mutually cooperative communities. In other words, the ideology of "ecologism" permeates their description. Both were shattered by natural disasters (storms and earthquakes) and, more to the film's point, by human failure. Greed, jealousy, envy led to the violent wreckage of these near utopias as prelapsarian virtue was subverted first by the imperial powers (Spain, Germany, Japan, America) and then, finally, by factionalism within the community itself, which is apparently what led to the murder of Kaipat's father.

This sad tale is not all pain and loss, though. There are flashes of humor and of hope. A scene in which an elderly Refalawasch laughs in disbelief when told that she is now an American (citizenship having been granted when Saipan and the other Northern Marianas were brought into the American constitutional system) is marvelously warm and appealing. Signs that the Refalawasch are beginning to achieve the kind of respect and acceptance so long denied them by the majority Chamorro population are highlighted, as are attempts to document and preserve Refalawasch traditions and customs. Indeed some of that documentation, or at least illustration, is present in the film itself, in service to a call to preserve and take pride in the special Refalawasch heritage. This is Kaipat...