American Samoa's history: ceded by its chiefs and held to the terms of the deeds

Who settled the islands before any deed was signed

Polynesians, probably from Tonga, settled the Samoan islands about 1000 BCE, according to Britannica, and by about 500 CE Samoa had become the point from which voyagers set out to settle much of eastern Polynesia. On Tutuila a settlement at Tula existed by 600 BC. The National Park Service records star mounds, old village sites and stone tool workshops inside the park, and notes that many Samoans regard Saua, on Taʻū, as the place where Polynesian culture began.

Oral tradition in Manuʻa describes a wide Polynesian confederacy ruled by successive holders of the Tui Manuʻa title, trading fine mats, whale ivory, red feathers and shell ornaments across western Polynesia. Manuʻa was treated as sacred ground by Samoans and Tongans alike, and it was never brought under Tongan rule. Tutuila was. Around 1200 Tongan forces occupied it for close to two centuries. Tutuila had long been a place of exile for chiefs defeated in the wars on Upolu, and under the Tongans the villages around Pago Pago served the same purpose.

The political structure that later signed the deeds was already in place. Each extended family, the ʻaiga, chose a matai to lead it, and the matai of a village sat together as its council, the fono. That system decided who worked which land, and it is the same system the territory's constitution now protects by name.

How Pago Pago Harbor drew the rival navies

European contact came late and went badly at first. Jacob Roggeveen sighted the islands in 1722 and Louis-Antoine de Bougainville named them the Navigator Islands in 1768. A French expedition under La Pérouse later landed on Tutuila's north shore to take on water, and at Aʻasu twelve of its men, the first officer de Langle among them, were killed. The inlet has been called Massacre Bay ever since. John Williams of the London Missionary Society arrived in 1830 and began the mission work that made the islands Christian.

Tutuila's harbour is what drew outside powers. A United States whaling expedition reported on the commercial value of Pago Pago Bay in 1838, and in 1872 Commander Richard W. Meade sailed the USS Narragansett in to negotiate a naval station. High Chief Mauga granted exclusive rights to build one in exchange for "the friendship and protection of the great government of the United States." A year later Samoan chiefs asked President Ulysses S. Grant to annex the islands outright. Congress refused. Accounts of the period tie the refusal to race, since annexation would have meant extending equal citizenship to Pacific islanders. The coaling-station treaty was signed in 1878.

Germany and Britain signed treaties of their own in 1879, with rival Samoan factions, and the three powers' quarrel became fighting through local allies. In March 1889 American and German warships faced each other in Apia harbour, and a hurricane wrecked both squadrons before a shot was fired. The Treaty of Berlin that year set up a three-power condominium, which collapsed into civil war. A joint commission of the three arrived in May 1899 and by July had decided that the islands had to be divided.

Under the convention Germany took the western islands and the United States the eastern ones. Britain gave up its claims, and in return Germany gave up its rights in Tonga and in parts of the Solomon Islands and West Africa. The American commissioner, Bartlett Tripp, had endorsed the view that the United States should keep Tutuila and its harbour.

What the Tutuila chiefs signed and what they kept

The partition was agreed among three foreign governments. The deed was agreed with the chiefs. Its preamble recites the partition and then states that the chiefs, as "the hereditary representatives of the people," cede Tutuila, Aunuʻu and the surrounding waters between 13° and 15° south and 167° and 171° west to Commander B. F. Tilley of the USS Abarenda.

The articles that follow are short, and two of them have governed the territory ever since. The second binds the United States to "respect and protect the individual rights of all people dwelling in Tutuila to their lands," with land taken for government use only on payment of fair consideration. The third leaves the chiefs of the towns in control of them, provided that control is consistent with United States law.

The deed was signed on 17 April 1900 on Gagamoe, the Mauga family's communal land in Pago Pago. Following custom, the chiefs of each division named one of their number to sign for all of them: Leoso for Fofo and Aitulagi, Pele for Sua and Vaifanua. The barrister E. W. Gurr witnessed it. The flag went up the same day on Sogelau Hill in Fagatogo, above the new coaling wharf.

Manuʻa followed four years later, and its own histories describe the cession as forced. Its sovereign, the Tui Manuʻa Elisara, signed on 16 July 1904 at his residence in Lalopua, after a series of naval proceedings known as the Trial of the Ipu. Manuʻa then had about 2,000 people. Elisara died on 2 July 1909 asking that the title die with him, and the United States took the position that it had already become "District Governor" in 1900. The Anoalo clan holds the title and its estates in custody, and no one has held it since.

Swains Island, a privately owned atoll outside the Samoan chain, was added in 1925. Congress formally accepted the two deeds on 20 February 1929. The Ratification Act vested all civil, judicial and military power in the President, and the act and the two deeds are still counted among the territory's constitutional documents.

How the Navy governed the islands

The United States Navy ran the islands from 1900 to 1951, first as Naval Station Tutuila. People in Manuʻa objected to being left out of that name, the Navy let the traditional leaders choose a new one, and on 17 July 1911 the station became American Samoa. Samoan leaders had little administrative power under the naval governors, and from 1905 the only formal voice was an annual meeting of village delegates advising the governor, who kept the whole of the legislative power.

The naval government's decision of 1918 is the one still credited to it. When news of the influenza pandemic reached Tutuila by radio, Governor John Martin Poyer closed the islands with quarantine ships, and American Samoa recorded no deaths. Western Samoa's New Zealand administration made no attempt to contain the spread: 90% of its population was infected, and 30% of adult men, 22% of adult women and 10% of children died.

Its relations with the chiefs were another matter. A movement known as the Mau rose on Tutuila from 1920, driven by falling copra prices and by complaints that the Navy disregarded Samoan custom and self-government. In 1921 seventeen of its chiefs were arrested and imprisoned with hard labour. Its leader, Samuel Sailele Ripley of Leone, was refused permission to leave the ship bringing him home from California and never returned. A congressional commission visited in 1930 and reported in the Navy's favour, and the movement was put down.

The Second World War turned Tutuila into a garrison. United States Marines outnumbered the local population, Samoan boys from the age of fourteen were given combat training, and in January 1942 a Japanese submarine fired about fifteen shells at the naval station, injuring two men slightly. The first Fono met in 1948 in an advisory capacity: a House of Aliʻi of twelve high chiefs and a House of Representatives of 54 members, most chosen in village meetings according to custom.

Why the chiefs stopped Congress organising the territory

In 1949 the Department of the Interior sponsored Organic Act 4500, a bill to incorporate American Samoa. It was defeated, mainly through the chiefs led by Tuiasosopo Mariota, who feared that incorporation would undermine Samoan culture and customary land ownership. American Samoa has been an unorganised territory ever since.

In place of an organic act, the executive branch made its own arrangement. In 1951 President Truman's Executive Order 10264 passed the President's authority to the Secretary of the Interior, whose appointed governor held full powers. Peter Tali Coleman became the first Samoan-born governor in 1956. A constitution drafted by a convention he chaired was signed by its 68 members and by Interior Secretary Fred Seaton on 27 April 1960. A revised version, approved by referendum in 1966, was promulgated by Stewart Udall and took effect on 1 July 1967.

That constitution wrote the deeds' land article into territorial law. Article I declares it government policy "to protect persons of Samoan ancestry against alienation of their lands and the destruction of the Samoan way of life and language," and it makes any change to land law wait for two successive legislatures voting by two-thirds in each house.

The 1960s also brought money. President Kennedy appointed H. Rex Lee governor in 1961, and federal spending built an international airport, port works, roads, schools, a hospital, a cannery, a hotel and island-wide electricity, and in 1964 an educational television service. Western Samoa's independence in 1962 had raised the question of whether the United States would stay, and that spending helped settle local support for remaining a dependency.

Elected government followed. Voters approved a popularly elected governor in a 1976 referendum, and in 1977 Coleman became the first governor chosen by American Samoans. The first non-voting delegate to the United States House of Representatives was elected in 1981.

How the citizenship question returned through the courts

People born in American Samoa are United States nationals and not citizens at birth, under the Immigration and Nationality Act. The territory's own government has opposed changing that, on the argument that citizenship could let federal judges overturn its land rules, which restrict land transfers to people of at least half Samoan ancestry, and its chiefly political system. Those in favour argue the status restricts their voting rights and their access to public employment.

The question has gone to court twice, and both times it ended where it began. In Tuaua v. United States, filed in 2012, the Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia held in June 2015 that the Fourteenth Amendment's citizenship guarantee did not reach unincorporated territories, and the Supreme Court declined to review it a year later. In December 2019 a federal district judge ruled in Fitisemanu v. United States that people born in American Samoa are citizens by birth; the Tenth Circuit reversed him. On 20 July 2021 the Fono unanimously passed a resolution supporting the reversal. The American Civil Liberties Union filed a brief urging the Supreme Court to take the case and overrule the Insular Cases, which it describes as grounded in white supremacy. The Court declined in October 2022.

How a tsunami and a cannery closure arrived together

On 29 September 2009 an earthquake on the Kermadec-Tonga subduction zone, about 190 kilometres from the islands, sent waves of 4.6 to 6 metres up to 1.6 kilometres inland on Tutuila. Its magnitude is given as 8.1 in the Wikipedia account and 8.3 by Britannica. Pago Pago was inundated, the Satala power plant was knocked out and the national park's visitor centre destroyed. The Guardian's count on 2 October 2009 put the dead in American Samoa at 31.

The same year the territory lost one of its two canneries. Congress's Fair Minimum Wage Act of 2007 had set American Samoa's wages rising toward the federal rate, and Samoa Packing, the Chicken of the Sea plant, closed in 2009 and laid off 2,041 workers, naming foreign competition as the main reason and the wage increases as a factor. StarKist began cutting jobs in August 2010. The Government Accountability Office later calculated that real output fell 18.2% between 2007 and 2017. It reported in 2020 that StarKist Samoa, the one cannery left, faced financial difficulty, and that the territory's minimum wages were scheduled to reach the federal level only in 2036.