Description
This paper explores story sovereignty approaches and community-centered filmmaking experiences gathered from across the Mariana Islands – where story sovereignty is directly related to political self-determination.
The Mariana Islands offer a unique and teachable perspective on the United States (U.S.)
“multi-racial” democracy - where the residents are US citizens but lack voting rights for the U.S. President and have a “non-voting” delegate in the US House of Representatives. Consisting of the largest, non-self-governing territory of Guam, an island with every branch of the Armed Forces, it has the highest recruiting rates anywhere in the U.S. While only a 30-minute (inter)national flight away, the fourteen islands to the north are politically referred to as the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands (CNMI). These political arrangements – which represent an old paradigm and are truly a colonial system of racist inequality, continue to deny full democracy to the residents and create a dependency cycle reliant on U.S. federal funds and Department of Defense projects. The military impact is detrimental to local democracy, while presented as necessary to defend democracy in the region - from the islands without democracy.
Creatives in the Mariana Islands are creating storytelling models for decolonial and demilitarization discussions. These participatory filmmaking approaches allow people to dream of self-determined democratic futures.
