American Samoa

• 1. Introduction

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  American Samoa sits 2,200 miles southwest of Hawaii, making it the southernmost territory the United States holds. It straddles one of the most remote stretches of the Pacific Ocean, tucked inside Polynesia, with the International Date Line to its west and the Cook Islands to its east. The total land area is a modest 199 square kilometers, roughly the footprint of Washington, D.C. Yet within that compact geography live roughly 47,400 people, the vast majority of them ethnic Samoans whose ancestors settled these islands in prehistory.

  Why does the United States hold this speck of ocean so tightly? What kind of place refuses birthright citizenship for its own residents, maintains its own immigration system, and has turned down formal statehood-style organization not once but repeatedly? And how did a series of volcanic islands named after a word meaning "holy center" become a territory that supplies the NFL with players at a rate anywhere from 40 to 56 times higher than the rest of the country?

  The answers run through typhoons and colonial treaties, a governor who quarantined his islands against a pandemic, and a tradition of chiefly governance so resilient it stopped a congressional act in its tracks.

• 2. Before the West Arrived

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  Polynesian oral literature describes a vast confederacy once ruled by the successive Tui Manua dynasties, whose reach extended far beyond the Samoan archipelago. The genealogies and religious stories of Manua suggest the Tui Manua were among the most prestigious and powerful leaders in the Pacific, governing chiefdoms that took in not only Tutuila but distant islands such as Uvea, Futuna, Tokelau, and Tuvalu.

  The dynasty's strength appears to have grown from its control of trade goods. Finely woven ceremonial mats known as Ie Konga were produced for the Tu'i Tonga. Whale ivory called tabua was crafted for Fijian leaders. Obsidian and basalt tools, red feathers reserved for chiefs, and polished nautilus shells and egg cowries moved along documented exchange routes that tied western Polynesian societies together.

  The name "Samoa" itself carries the weight of this era. One derivation takes it from the Samoan words sa, meaning "sacred," and moa, meaning "center." An alternate reading connects it to a local chieftain named Samoa, while a third links it to an indigenous word meaning "place of the moa," a bird then unknown outside New Zealand. What the name meant in practice was a cluster of islands at the heart of a much larger world.

• 3. Encounter and Conflict

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  Dutchman Jacob Roggeveen was the first known European to sight the Samoan Islands, in 1722, calling them the "Baumann Islands" after one of his captains. Louis-Antoine de Bougainville renamed them the "Iles des Navigateurs" in 1768. British explorer James Cook recorded the island names in 1773 without ever landing.

  On the 13th of December 1784, French navigator Jean-Francois de Galaup, comte de Laperouse, landed two exploration parties on Tutuila's north shore. One party came ashore at Fagasa from the Boussole; the other landed at Aasu from L'Astrolabe. On December 11, twelve members of his crew, including First Officer Paul Antoine Fleuriot de Langle, were killed in an attack by Samoans at A'asu Bay. Laperouse described the bay as "this den, more fearful from its treacherous situation and the cruelty of its inhabitants than the lair of a lion or a tiger." He renamed it Massacre Bay, and the name endured. The incident kept Europeans at a distance for four decades until Christian missionaries arrived.

  John Williams of the London Missionary Society reached the Samoas from the Cook Islands and Tahiti in late 1830, beginning the mission work that would transform the islands' religious life. By the late nineteenth century, French, British, German, and American ships were stopping regularly at Pago Pago, prizing its harbor as a refueling station for coal-fired shipping and whaling. In March 1889, an Imperial German naval force entered a Samoan village and destroyed some American property. Three American warships sailed into Apia harbor to face three German warships. Before a shot was fired, a typhoon wrecked both fleets, and the lack of surviving warships forced a sudden armistice.

• 4. The American Claim

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  In 1872, Commander Richard W. Meade of the USS Narragansett sailed from Hawaii to Pago Pago to explore the possibility of a U.S. naval station. The Narragansett reached Pago Pago on February 14, and Meade told High Chief Mauga of his intention to lease land for a naval base. Mauga granted the United States exclusive rights to build and maintain that station in exchange for the friendship and protection of the United States government.

  The 1899 Tripartite Convention settled the larger rivalry. Germany and the United States partitioned the Samoan Islands: the eastern group, including Tutuila in 1900 and Manua in 1904, became a U.S. territory; the western islands became German Samoa, after Britain gave up its Samoan claims in exchange for the end of German rights in Tonga, parts of the Solomon Islands, and areas in West Africa. The Navy took possession, expanded the coaling station at Pago Pago Bay into a full naval station, and secured Deeds of Cession from local leaders.

  The last sovereign of Manua, the Tui Manua Elisala, signed the Deed of Cession of Manua following a series of U.S. naval trials known as the Trial of the Ipu, held in Pago Pago, Tau, and aboard a Pacific Squadron gunboat. On the 17th of July 1911, the territory was officially renamed American Samoa. The name was chosen by the traditional leaders themselves, after the people of Manua objected to being left out of the prior name, Naval Station Tutuila. Governor William Michael Crose had written to the Secretary of the Navy in May 1911 conveying their concerns, and on the 7th of July 1911, the solicitor general of the Navy authorized the governor to proclaim the new name.

• 5. Pandemic and Resistance

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  In 1918, during the final stages of World War I, the Great Influenza epidemic swept the globe. Governor John Martin Poyer heard reports of the outbreak on the radio and immediately requested quarantine ships from the U.S. mainland. American Samoa became one of the very few places in the world to prevent any deaths from the pandemic, alongside New Caledonia and Marajo island in Brazil. Poyer received the Navy Cross for his actions, and American Samoans regarded him as a hero.

  The contrast with the neighboring New Zealand territory of Western Samoa was stark. Ninety percent of Western Samoa's population was infected. Thirty percent of adult men died, as did 22 percent of adult women and 10 percent of children. Poyer offered assistance to his New Zealand counterparts, but Western Samoa's administrator Robert Logan refused, reportedly outraged by the sight of the quarantine ships surrounding American Samoa. Logan cut off communications with the American side entirely.

  After the war, a resistance movement called the American Samoa Mau emerged, led by Samuelu Ripley, a World War I veteran from Leone village on Tutuila. After meetings on the U.S. mainland, Ripley was prevented from disembarking when his ship returned to American Samoa. The Navy suppressed the movement. In 1930, the U.S. Congress sent a committee to investigate the territory's status; it was led by Americans who had participated in the overthrow of the Kingdom of Hawaii.

• 6. Governing on Their Own Terms

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  In 1949, the U.S. Department of the Interior introduced Organic Act 4500, which would have formally incorporated American Samoa into the United States system. Samoan chiefs, led by Tuiasosopo Mariota, organized opposition and Congress halted the bill. Their intervention led instead to the creation of a territorial legislature, the American Samoa Fono, which meets in the village of Fagatogo.

  The constitution that took effect on the 1st of July 1967, established a republican government with separate executive, legislative, and judicial branches. The House of Representatives has 21 members: 20 elected from various districts and one delegate from Swains Island chosen in a public meeting. The Senate has 18 members elected for four-year terms by and from the chiefs of the islands. The Governor and Lieutenant Governor are elected together by popular vote on a four-year ticket.

  The Fono's most pointed recent act came in 2021, when the legislature unanimously passed a resolution opposing birthright citizenship, reversing a federal district court ruling that had found the territory's residents entitled to citizenship under the Fourteenth Amendment. Elected representatives argued that citizenship would erode indigenous governance, the communal ownership of land, and the use of the Samoan language. American Samoa remains the only U.S. territory where people born on the islands are considered nationals but not citizens. Over 90 percent of the land is held communally by extended family groups called aiga, and under local law, no one with less than half native Samoan ancestry may acquire any non-freehold land.

• 7. The World War II Turning Point

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  At 2:26 in the morning on the 13th of January 1942, a Japanese submarine surfaced off Tutuila between Southworth Point and Fagasa Bay and opened fire. Over the next ten minutes, it fired roughly 15 shells from its 5.5-inch deck gun at the U.S. Naval Station Tutuila. The first shell struck the rear of Frank Shimasaki's store, owned by one of Tutuila's few Japanese residents, who had already been interned as an enemy alien. Commander Edwin B. Robinson was bicycling behind an area known as Centipede Row when a piece of shrapnel wounded him in the knee. A member of the Fita Fita Guard also received minor injuries. Those were the only casualties. The fire was not returned, though the Samoan Marines were reportedly eager to engage.

  On the 24th of August 1943, First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt visited American Samoa and inspected the Fita Fita Guard and Band and the First Samoan Battalion of U.S. Marine Corps Reserve at the Naval Station. Her presence, according to one account, was taken as assurance that Tutuila was considered safe.

  During the war, U.S. Marines stationed in Samoa outnumbered the local population and exerted a substantial cultural influence. Young Samoan men from age 14 and above were combat-trained by military personnel. A generation later, the astronaut crews of Apollo 10, 12, 13, 14, and 17 were retrieved a few hundred miles from Pago Pago and transported by helicopter to Pago Pago International Airport before flying on to Honolulu. President Richard Nixon gave three Moon rocks to the American Samoan government; they are now on display in the Jean P. Haydon Museum alongside a flag carried to the Moon on one of those missions.

• 8. Economy, Sport, and Identity

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  Tuna canning is the backbone of the American Samoa economy. StarKist is the one remaining major cannery, exporting several hundred million dollars' worth of canned tuna to the United States each year. The other large plant, Samoa Packing, a Chicken of the Sea subsidiary, shut down in 2009, citing minimum wage increases and increasing foreign competition; 2,041 employees were laid off. From 2002 to 2007, real GDP grew at an average annual rate of only 0.4 percent, while real GDP per capita fell at an average annual rate of 1.9 percent.

  As of 2021, the local U.S. Army recruiting station in Pago Pago ranked first nationally in recruitment. American Samoa holds the highest rate of military enlistment of any U.S. state or territory, a fact often traced directly to economic hardship and limited local opportunity.

  That same channeling of physical talent has produced an extraordinary record in American football. A Samoan male is estimated to be anywhere from 40 to 56 times more likely to play in the NFL than a non-Samoan American. Six-time All-Pro Junior Seau, who was elected to the NFL 1990s All-Decade Team and the Pro Football Hall of Fame, is one of the best-known Americans of Samoan heritage to have played in the league. The men's national soccer team, after losing 31-0 to Australia in a FIFA World Cup qualifier on the 11th of April 2001, won its first-ever World Cup qualifier on the 22nd of November 2011, defeating Tonga 2-1. That journey was documented in the 2014 British film Next Goal Wins, which was later adapted into a feature film directed by Taika Waititi and released in 2023.