The Not-Quite States of America

by Doug Mack

  A FRIEND of mine had put me in touch with a local man named John Wasko, who’d offered to show us around the Tutuila. One day, he drove up in a black Jeep and emerged looking for all the world like Joe Biden’s brother, with a saunter, aviator shades, and baggy jeans. He’d just turned seventy the previous week, described himself as “old but not a geezer,” and designed websites for a living. John was from the states and had come to American Samoa for a work assignment thirty years ago. He married a Samoan woman named Luaao, and they’d raised their two kids in the village of Nu’uuli.

  John drove west along Route 1, which runs the length of the island. Ocean waves lapped at broad reefs on one side of the road; the other side was a steep hill with palm trees and banana trees and leaves you could use as a bedsheet.

  We passed a small mall anchored by a Carl’s Jr., a first-run movie theater, many tailor shops (most run by Filipino immigrants, John said) and convenience stores (where the person behind the counter was typically Chinese), and countless churches. American Samoa has churches like Dublin has bars, ubiquitous and culture-defining. Capstone Church. House of Faith. First Samoan Pentecostal. Calvary Assembly of God. Lion of Judah. Lighthouse Assembly of God. Anchorage of the Soul Jesus Embassy. Harvest Vision Church. Sharing space with a convenience store was the South Pacific Presbyterian Theological Seminary and Medical Mission School. The first Christian missionary on the island was an Englishman named John Williams, who founded a hulking Gothic-in-the-tropics church in the village of Leone in 1832 and remains a revered figure. People notice if you don’t pray before eating, even at McDonald’s, John told us, and abortion is illegal in the territory. In the most devout villages, there’s a prayer time called Sa every night. Christianity is now as much a part of fa’asamoa as any legend Will told us.

  We pulled into John’s village, Nu’uuli, as he explained that, most of all, fa’asamoa is tied to the village itself, of which there are about fifty on Tutuila. There are virtually no fences around houses, and nearly all land is owned communally, by villages or extended families (called ’aigas)—of the territory’s seventy-six square miles, just one and a half are privately held. In the middle of the village was an open area with a large fale. A fale is a community center, a guesthouse for visitors, whatever you need it to be—even, we saw one day in Leone, an animal field-surgery center, where veterinarians in blue scrubs were spaying and neutering dogs sprawled on folding tables. Many homes had their own fales, which were sometimes freestanding and sometimes directly attached to a small cinder-block house, outside of which stood two or three cross-topped white concrete boxes: the graves of loved ones. Your village isn’t merely a set of geographic coordinates, John said, but the fundamental basis of who you are, even in the afterlife.

  After the American takeover, in April 1900, the territory was—like the USVI—initially under naval rule. The first naval governor, B. F. Tilley, recognized the importance of the land to fa’asamoa, and believed that Samoans “must be protected from the harmful elements” of the outside influences that had entered the islands, particularly their habit of taking Samoan land by deceit or violence. One of Tilley’s very first acts, less than two weeks after the Deeds of Cession were signed, was the Native Lands Ordinance, which forbade the sale of land to non-Samoans. That’s why there are no Westins or Club Meds here—they couldn’t buy the land even if an ’aiga wanted to sell it. Technically, American Samoa was never colonized, but the need for an ordinance shows that there was a tangible threat from outsiders, a de facto colonialism.

  We stopped at a convenience store for a snack of doughnuts filled with toasted coconut, chewy and greasy and deeply satisfying, and went to a lagoon-front park to eat, spilling crumbs on a picnic table while a dozen or so teenage boys played football in thigh-deep water, with much splashing and giddy yelling. John continued his American Samoa 101 spiel.

  Each village is run by matais, who gather in the central fale for their formal meeting, called the fono. (This is the basis for the name of the territorial legislature.) Village fonos are highly ritualized and use the objects I’d seen on the territorial quarter and in the clutch of the bald eagle on the flag, including the ’ava bowl, used for the sacred ’ava-drinking ceremony (the beverage is derived from kava leaves and has mildly sedative properties), and the fue whisk and to’oto’o staff, used by the talking chief, an orator/spokesperson for the high chief. The matais are the trustees of the land, the political leaders, the disseminators of information, the power brokers. The territorial legislature is bicameral, with the house elected by standard-issue direct democracy, while the senate consists of matais who have been elected by their peers, the other the village matais—regular citizens can neither serve in the senate nor participate in the selection of senators. The matais are even the law enforcement; it’s their oversight, and the close-knit nature of the communities, that makes this such a safe place.

  “I guess the police could come to my village,” John said, but there’s no need. American Samoa’s police don’t even carry guns. “The matais will take care of everything. Like, if you’re drunk in public, you might be fined a couple of pigs.”

  “And if you do something worse?” I asked.

  “Well, the matais will send their boys to talk to you, rough you up a bit, you know what I mean?” He chuckled softly. He took a bite of doughnut. “If it’s really bad, you’ll be kicked out of the village.” In other words: stripped of the biggest part of your identity.

  AMERICAN SAMOANS who oppose birthright citizenship argue, essentially, that it would bring the Constitution into greater power here and, as a consequence, certain long-standing cultural practices might be deemed unconstitutional. In other words, citizenship would be a slippery slope of court cases, leading to an existential threat to fa’asamoa. There are three things they single out:

  • The Native Land Ordinance (which would seem to be discriminatory and conflict with the Equal Protection Clause of the Constitution).

  • The matai-only senate (“No titles of nobility shall be granted by the United States,” says Article 1 of Constitution).

  • Sa, the roads-closed prayer time observed in some villages (arguably an establishment of religion and contrary to the mandated separation of church and state).

  “There’s a reason why the argument [against citizenship] is tenuous, and yet American Samoan opponents of citizenship do have concerns that need to be taken seriously,” Professor Ponsa told me.

  The anti-citizenship case was shaky, she said, because none of those constitutional concerns had anything to do with citizenship per se. They were separate issues, and should be treated as such—Ala’ilima’s case shouldn’t be judged based on the hypothetical possibility of inspiring future cases on indirectly related issues. Besides which, elsewhere in the United States, there was already legal precedent allowing practices very similar to those in question in American Samoa. For example, you can find similar land-ownership laws in Alaska, Hawaii, Guam, and the Northern Mariana Islands. This is also Ala’ilima’s argument: the case is about citizenship, period, and doesn’t expressly affect anything else. It would give American Samoans full access to employment and improve their ability to stand up for their rights and their traditional ways. It would be the government finally redressing its oppression of indigenous peoples—and it would give them a voice and a spotlight to make their concerns known.

  In addition, Neil Weare of the We the People Project told me, at the time of the American takeover in 1900, American Samoans expected that they would become citizens, and petitioned Congress to grant them citizenship several times over the next fifty years. A group of American congressmen and senators traveled to American Samoa in 1930 to prepare a report on the territory, and found not just broad support for citizenship but a general demand for it. One of the visiting senators was Hiram Bingham III (best known for an earlier career as an explorer, when he brought Machu Picchu to the world’s attention), who in 1946 recounted, for the New York Times, his commission’s recom
mendation that citizenship be granted to American Samoans, which led to two separate bills to do so. The U.S. Senate unanimously passed each but both then failed in the House of Representatives after lobbying from the Navy. “So the Samoans are still ‘subjects,’ but not ‘citizens’ of the United States,” Bingham said. “It is a blot on our record for fair dealing and democracy.” He called for no “further delay in doing justice.” But around this time, many of American Samoa’s leaders started to shift their views toward the positions that hold today.

  There’s some merit to the idea that birthright citizenship would nudge the Samoan-American balance, Professor Ponsa said. “When you’re that much closer to the U.S., it could encourage challenges and encourage courts to see things as unconstitutional.”

  For those who oppose citizenship, being American involves the freedom to move around the states, to serve in the military, to play football and eat McDonald’s, to have a free press—and to reject what you see as government imposition on your right to do your own damn thing. (Stubbornness may be the most American of traits.) Look, say citizenship foes, we understand the rights we’re giving up. But those rights actually aren’t so important to us, given that they’d come, inevitably, as a forced package deal with greater federal scrutiny of our island and our culture—and with ever-greater American cultural and political takeover. It will lead, inevitably, to further erosion if not willful eradication of our traditional ways. Just look at Hawaii.

  IN 1893, American business interests violently overthrew Queen Lili’uokalani, the ruler of the Kingdom of Hawaii, imprisoning her in her bedroom at ’Iolani Palace, and taking over the government. The Americans hoped that their nation would annex Hawaii, and in 1898 they got their wish. Said President McKinley: “We need Hawaii just as much and a good deal more than we did California. It is manifest destiny.” With this came land-grabs of the sort American Samoans fear, tearing apart communities and fulfilling a prediction made in 1837 by Native Hawaiian historian Davida Malo: “If a big wave comes in, large and unfamiliar fishes will come from the dark ocean, and when they see the small fishes of the shallows they will eat them up.” (Notably, Hawaiians were open to cultural evolution and many aspects of modernization. ’Iolani Palace had electricity before the White House.)

  Statehood wasn’t in the initial plans—Hawaii was merely a territory, a far-off one, full of seemingly inscrutable Polynesians. “It would indeed be profitable . . . to keep the United States forever a compact, continent Republic,” wrote Willis Fletcher Johnson in his 1903 book A Century of Expansion, which might as well be subtitled “And Here’s to a Century More!” Johnson lauded American leaders for not promising Hawaii statehood at the outset:

  That wise policy should be forever maintained. If so, the Hawaiian annexation will not prove unfruitful of at least one important and beneficent constitutional principle—the ability and right of this nation to acquire and to hold colonies, never intended for statehood, at any distance in any part of the world. That is a power which all other important nations possess and exercise at will.

  Of course, in 1959, Hawaii did get statehood. The republic was no longer compact and continental, but this had no ill effects on the union. Indeed, there was much interest and celebration back on the continent—Elvis sang “Hawaii, USA!,” Boys Life celebrated with a cover story, and James Michener published his best-selling novel about the fiftieth state. Hawaii boomed as a tourist destination, fueled by the all-things-Polynesian craze.

  And then, perhaps inevitably, came the fate that has befallen many tropical lands across the globe: “Developers, seeing dollars, began destroying exactly what Americans were seeking,” Sven A. Kirsten writes in Tiki Pop. “Beaches were bulldozed for high-rise resorts; cars raced feet from the sand on multilane highways.” In 1965, Look magazine ran a cover story on “Problems in Paradise,” with a swimsuit-clad model lying awkwardly in shallow water, not quite drowning, but not happy, either.

  Today, just 6 percent of Hawaii’s population is of Native Hawaiian ancestry (another 15 percent identify as part-Hawaiian). Their rites and rituals, though still practiced by some, are also the stuff of tourist shows. And in 1993 Congress passed a resolution “to offer an apology to Native Hawaiians on behalf of the United States for the overthrow of the Kingdom of Hawaii.” If all of that is not a warning sign, American Samoa’s citizenship opponents argue, then what is?

  If you dig deeper into the history books and cast your eyes fifteen hundred miles north of Tutuila, you’ll find another noteworthy case study in American governmental ineptitude and the vast unfairness of rights-granting. Palmyra Atoll, an uninhabited scattering of islets with less than five square miles of land, was annexed and incorporated into the United States along with Hawaii. But when Maui & Co. received a promotion to statehood, Palmyra was left in the purgatory of territoryhood, making it the sole insular possession that is incorporated. This means that, though Palmyra is a wildlife refuge with no legislature or courts and an official population of zero—aside from the occasional scientists who come to study its million-plus seabirds, the researchers flying in via an airstrip laid during World War II, when the atoll was a naval air station—it’s the only territory where the Constitution fully applies and is, in legal if not practical terms, a candidate for statehood.‡‡ By the letter of the law, it is Palmyra, not one of the inhabited territories, that is in the best position to nudge our flag’s star count to fifty-one.

  How does that make sense? Why would you want closer ties with a nation so maddening?

  DURING AMERICAN Samoa’s first few decades as a territory, the federal government’s attitude was essentially one of neglect, aside from military utility; the naval base at Pago Pago was a key refueling port during World War II.

  In 1961, Reader’s Digest published an article titled “Samoa: America’s Shame in the South Seas.” Writer Clarence Hall observed that although the United States had “been doling out billions to underdeveloped nations, we have let our only South Pacific possession sink to the level of a slum.” There’s some debate about whether Hall was paternalistically seeing traditional as impoverished, but the end result remained the same: Congress and President John F. Kennedy, embarrassed, authorized major funding for projects in the territory, including new schools, new roads, and a new airport terminal. A new television tower was built at the top of Mount Alava, bringing American pop culture—including football—into local homes, and an innovative educational television program into classrooms.To provide technicians easy access to the tower, a cable car was constructed, spanning the mouth of Pago Pago Harbor, and becoming a tourist attraction in its own right. American Samoa even got a taste of the space race—the command modules for Apollo 10, 12, 13, 14, and 17 all splashed down near Tutuila, and the astronauts were helicoptered to Pago Pago before heading back to the mainland United States. At the Jean P. Haydon Museum in Pago Pago, among the historic artifacts, is a display showing a few tiny lunar rocks.§§

  But space missions don’t end up near American Samoa anymore, and the educational television program ended in 1978. Two years later, during ceremonies marking Flag Day—the big local holiday, commemorating the April 17, 1900, handover of the islands to the United States—an Air Force plane doing a flyby of Pago Pago Harbor clipped the cable-car line, sending the plane and the cable crashing to earth, killing eight people. A memorial marker now stands near the lower end of the decades-closed cable-car line, where Maren and I poked around the old yellow cars, which were rusting and being consumed by the jungle, a symbol of a lost era.

  John lamented the current state of the island’s educational system and noted that the only higher-ed option on Tutuila is a community college. “They have good intentions,” he said, “but if you really care about education, you go off the island.” His kids had attended college in the states. One of John’s many projects was trying to start a university on Tutuila, focusing on environmental studies and nursing. He figured he needed about six hundred thousand dollars to get it going
and hoped to capitalize on the fact that, he said, Internet speeds on Tutuila were faster than on the mainland United States—a rare bright spot in the local infrastructure.

  The federal government’s general policy, John said, was “benign neglect.” Distant, not particularly trustworthy. Outside a building that looked like an Army barracks was a sign reading LYNDON B. JOHNSON TROPICAL MEDICAL CENTER; the territory’s primary medical facility, where John’s wife, Luaao, worked as a nurse. “It’s named for the last president to visit American Samoa,” John said with a sigh. “He came here in 1967.” (Vice President Dan Quayle came here in 1989 and gave a speech known for this infamously odd line: “You all look like happy campers to me. Happy campers you are, happy campers you have been, and, as far as I am concerned, happy campers you will always be.” That about sums up the federal government’s view of American Samoa.)

  Disaster relief is slow—in 2009, an earthquake triggered a tsunami, killing thirty-four people in American Samoa. Five years later, there were still leveled buildings by Pago Pago Harbor. I peered into one to find a rusting boat, picked up by the wave and dropped there. The same week as the tsunami, the territory lost two thousand jobs when one of the tuna canneries closed. Now there was one cannery, Starkist, with another in the works; tuna comprised 80 percent of the territory’s economy. The local government was the territory’s largest employer overall, and its finances were in free-fall—John told us that some employees couldn’t even get home loans because banks didn’t trust that they had a reliable paycheck coming in. The local unemployment rate was around 20 percent.

  And federal oversight was often lacking. At our hotel, we met a woman who investigated labor complaints for the U.S. Department of Labor. There was a huge backlog, since she was the first person from the department to come down here for years. Her original assignment was for a few weeks, but it had just been extended by four months.