Definesia

A Map of the Neighborhood

Someone back Stateside pointed out to me that he couldn’t find Guam on a map. You have to look closely—the island is so small that it will likely be covered by the “G” of the word “Guam” on the map—but it might be helpful if you had a sense of the Pacific neighborhood, as it were. Therefore, welcome to geography class! The things you will learn today!

First, find Sydney, which is located on the southeast coast of the large landmass that has “Australia” printed across it. (Incidentally, I don’t believe that Australia is really orange, the way it is in the atlas, though I could be wrong.) Now go up to the top of Australia. See the northernmost point, to the east of the Gulf of Carpentaria? Trace your finger due north from that point. Pass through Papua New Guinea and you’re in open ocean. You will come close to Guam, though just a little bit west of it. If you hit Japan, you have gone too far. (Tokyo is almost directly north of Guam.) Back down to between 10 and 20 degrees latitude. Guam is at 13 degrees north. You should’ve passed over a set of microdots labeled the Mariana Islands, laid out like a trail of breadcrumbs over the Philippine Sea? Guam is the southernmost of them. It’s a little blip. Well, actually, they all are.

So then. The Pacific Ocean contains three groups of islands: Micronesia, Melanesia, and Polynesia. When I say this, I mean “groups” in a very broad sense: these groups don’t necessarily mean islands that are all that close together, though some of them are. Nevertheless, islands are grouped, sort of, on geographic proximity, “proximity” being a very relative term. There aren’t necessarily cultural or ethnic ties that determine why islands get grouped together, far as I know. Think of these groupings, then, as a short-hand way to get a grip on the vast expanse of blue out here.

Guam is part of Micronesia, which means “little islands,” and collectively that’s what these islands are. Not that there are any big islands out here, really; the total land area of all the Pacific islands is obviously very small, as you can see by consulting a globe. Nevertheless, the Micronesian islands are the little microdots of the Pacific, sometimes no more than an atoll that’s maybe ten to fifteen feet above sea level. If you think global warming is an issue where you live, imagine what the threat of rising ocean levels would mean on an island like that, so stop using all that gas already. Micronesia is found in the west Pacific, both north and south of the equator. When we use the term “South Pacific,” we mean either literally south of the equator or the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical, but Micronesia is not the South Pacific. It’s more like the West Pacific. It includes the American territories of Guam and the Northern Mariana Islands, and some other independent nations: the Federated States of Micronesia (obviously), Palau, the Marshall Islands to the east, Nauru to the southeast, and Kiribati even farther east. Generally, if it’s a microdot of an island, it’s Micronesia.

Melanesia means “dark islands,” and it refers to the islands whose inhabitants have generally very dark skin tones. Melanesian skin tones are comparable to African skin tones, for point of reference, and the Melanesian Islands tend to straddle the equator, both north and south—hence the skin tones, no? Generally, Melanesia lies south of Micronesia. It includes Papua New Guinea, which is a large landmass, the western half of which is Indonesia; the Solomon Islands to its east; Vanuatu and New Caledonia to its south, and Fiji to the east of those islands.

Polynesia means “many islands,” and it covers the most ground, er, water out here, encompassing a huge triangle swath of the Pacific: the Hawai‘ian Islands at its northern point, Easter Island way to the southeast (it’s under the jurisdiction of Chile in South America, which claims it as a territory), and New Zealand to the southwest. That’s about a million miles of earth‘s surface, almost all of it water. And within it are plenty of little island groups, including most of what we call the South Pacific: French Polynesia, Tuvalu, Samoa (both regular and American), Tonga, Niue, the Cook Islands, Tuvalu, and everything else in the large triangle.

Many of these islands were colonies of the European powers, and following World War II, Japan claimed some of them as well, including most of the Marianas, which is why there was such intensely fierce fighting over them in World War II. (Did you know that in the nineteenth century even Germany claimed islands out here? Neither did I.) Many of these little nations received their independence in the past few decades, and the current political map is made up of nations that you’ve likely never heard of: the Federated States of Micronesia, Kiribati (pronounced “keer-ee-bahss”), Palau (“Puh-low,” that is, rhymes with “bough” and not “slow”), and so on. These nations show up for the Olympics with very small national teams in specific sports. Kiribati, for example, doesn’t field a bobsled team, even if Jamaica does, but it did send a lone runner and a lone wrestler to the Athens Games in 2004. Incidentally, Guam fields its own Olympic team, for some reason—another way in which we exist on the United States’ far periphery, sort of in the nation but not of the nation.

Incidentally, a very good resource for reading up on this part of the world is Pacific magazine, which covers this huge area from a primarily, though not exclusively, political and economic standpoint and includes the real power brokers: Australia, Taiwan, China, Japan, and New Zealand. Cultural coverage is a bit less strong, but not bad. You might have a hard time finding this, unless you have access to a research library. Don’t expect it on the shelf at Borders, unless you have a maniacally thorough one, as some of them are.