The Not-Quite States of America

by Doug Mack

  When the government did pay attention, there were still issues. One evening in Tutuila, I met with Charles Ala’ilima’s sister, Marie Alailima (the two spell their last names slightly differently), who is also a lawyer, who told me that many federal agencies were culturally tone-deaf. In 2014, the Western Pacific Regional Fishery Management Council sought public input on a proposal to change the area in which long-line fishing vessels could harvest their catch. They had been restricted to operating at least fifty miles offshore, but the council proposed to reduce this restricted area to twelve miles. Many matais, Marie said, believed this went against U.S. promises to protect the marine waters and resources for native Samoans, and would also introduce harmful competition to village fishermen who operated smaller vessels known as alias. The council held a public hearing at Sadie’s by the Sea, announcing the event in the federal register and local media. But they didn’t take their message where it needed to go: to the villages, including those on the Manu’a Islands, for whom travel to Tutuila would be cost-prohibitive. More than fifty matais issued a joint statement asking the council to hold further public hearings in the local communities—including those on the other islands—and in the Samoan language, to better inform the local population of the proposal. “You cannot just come and assume that your system is their system,” Marie said, but the council ignored the matais’ request and, as Marie put it, “denied American Samoans meaningful due process.”

  It’s the locally based organizations that are most effective, John [Wasko] told us, particularly when it comes to conservation. He took us to the small Pago Pago office of the Community Fisheries Management Program to meet a young biologist named Tepora Toliniu Lavatai. She was casual in a gray hoodie and jeans, and her passion for her work was infectious, even when she lost me with the scientific details—a page of my notebook says, “Belt Transects???” The program included meticulous monitoring of the reefs, she said, but a big part of her work was simply maintaining relationships. “We try to visit each village once a month. It’s nothing formal; it’s like stopping by your aunt’s house: ‘Hi, Auntie, how’s it going?’ And you have to go to the church if you want to really reach people.”

  WE WORRY about the land, everyone told me, even those who supported citizenship. This land is who we are. We don’t want a Westin, we don’t want Club Med—that would ruin it. Protecting the land means protecting the culture. Even the National Park of American Samoa, established in 1988, is actually owned by the local ’aigas; the park has a yearly lease. Unique among all national parks, it has a homestay program, allowing visitors to spend the night with the local families and see their everyday lives: tending their stands of taro, holding traditional ceremonies, checking their email.

  We took a few different hikes with John, one up the hillside above the mouth of the harbor, to see the giant guns installed during World War II, and another to see the southernmost point of the island, which, though it’s not advertised or marked as such, is also the southernmost point in the United States (aside from uninhabited Rose Atoll, an outlying area of American Samoa). The second hike took us through ’aiga land, and John got permission to pass from the local family sitting in their fale, chatting with them in Samoan, telling them what village he was from, and going through the list of any potential mutual acquaintances, the local way of making connections and smoothing interactions. He nodded at me and Maren and said with a chuckle, “Palagi”—outsiders, white people. “Welcome,” one of the women said with a warm laugh.

  There was one particular hike that John wanted to take with us as a seventieth birthday gift to himself: the Mount Alava Adventure Trail.

  “Sounds great,” we said, though we had some second thoughts when he showed us the route on a map—it traced the ridgelines above the harbor, winding along jungle paths up to the summit where the cable car once led. Still, we were game. And so, one morning, we stopped at a convenience store to stock up on oranges and bottles of water (“This is one place where Fiji is the cheap brand, because we’re so close,” John said), our pile of purchases eliciting a perplexed smile from the young Chinese clerk. Then we took a bus up a hill so steep I swear I heard a roller coaster ratcheting below us. We lurched over a pass and the road briefly leveled out near a fale and a small interpretive sign.

  “This is us,” John announced.

  I’ve visited my share of national parks, and I know generally what to expect: RV parking and gift shops and graded trails leading straight to the key scenic overlooks. The allure of the frontiersman meets the reality of the mall-shopper, in that grand American tradition. (Let’s not forget that when Henry David Thoreau holed up at Walden Pond, a defining act of American Escape to the Wilderness, he was actually only a mile from the town of Concord, his mom did his laundry, and he was a frequent dinner guest at neighbor Ralph Waldo Emerson’s house, where he “scandalize[d] the women of the house with his talk of the sexual habits of various animals.”)

  But this was not most national parks. I couldn’t even figure out where the trailhead was. All I saw was a tangle of trees on either side of the road.

  “Over there,” John said, pointing to a mud-covered incline embedded with thick concrete slabs every two feet or so, like a boot-camp obstacle course. A rope dangled down the middle, stippled green with moss and mold. Next to it was a reassuringly familiar sign, a white-print backpacker icon against a brown background—standard-issue national park. John raced ahead.

  “Definitely not a geezer,” Maren said, as we struggled to keep up. She added brightly, “If we die out here, at least we’ll be together.”

  The trail, such as it was, twisted and turned with the muddy topography, shimmied around massive roots, high-stepped up more of those quasi-ladders, following the ragtag choreography of Mother Nature. And after half an hour, it disappeared.

  John plunged into the bush, out of sight. We heard him stumble, followed by a yelp that unfurled into a scream of existential fear. “WaaAAAAAAAUGH!”

  Maren and I exchanged bug-eyed looks. I knew that scream. That was a Hollywood scream, a beloved-sidekick-dying-in-a-sudden-and-dramatic-fashion scream. We’d gone hiking with a seventy-year-old—why did he think this was a good idea? Why did we?

  “Shit, shit, shit,” I said, looking at my ever-practical wife for deeper insight.

  “Shit,” she said.

  The bushes rustled and I heard a grunt and then a shout of glee: “Found the trail!” We spotted John peeking down at us from atop a steep, muddy slope, his face framed by a downed tree trunk, his expression elated and mischievous.

  The hike that followed turned out to be nearly six hours up and down a seemingly endless series of peaks, traversing muddy and sometimes wholly overgrown paths, including more than fifty ladders. By the time we were halfway through, my legs were caked with mud, every muscle burned, and I felt a giddiness I hadn’t felt since I was a kid, a sense of unalloyed, carefree fun. Maren and I took turns giving each other the thumbs-up. We had the trails to ourselves—there were zero other hikers—and there was a certain summer-camp vibe, especially when John started telling us creepy stories, like the time he hired a Fijian witch doctor (for “ten bucks, a pack of Kools, and a bag of kava”) to put a curse on a neighbor who’d been annoying him.

  “Another time,” he said, “I was hiking up a mountain in Manu’a by myself.” It was supposed to be a day hike but he realized he wasn’t going to make it down before dark, so he lay down to sleep in a clearing. He woke up with the sunrise, “and sitting right there next to me were an orange and a bottle of water. They just appeared, you know what I mean? No one knew I was up there. Must have been an aitu”—a trickster spirit. He cackled, and Maren and I humored him with a smile.

  Back in the lower elevation, the trees had been banyans and leafy hardwoods; now it was moss-draped cloud forest, with an appropriately eerie mist and the occasional flicker of a chilly breeze. The trail got wider, and ahead I could see a sawed-off branch jutting partway into the path. As we got close
r, I noticed that it had a mold-covered baseball cap perched on the end. It was so grimy, it must’ve been here for years and—

  Oh, shit.

  It said MACK on it. The trucking company logo, but still: MACK. My not-that-common last name. Way up here. My heart raced and I hoped John wouldn’t notice. He cackled. “See? It’s from an aitu!”

  I looked at it for a few moments, honestly thinking it might be a fatigue-induced hallucination.

  “Don’t touch it!” John said, still laughing, though I could tell he really meant it. “You don’t want to chance anything. Leave it here.”

  Not to worry, I assured him, already striding away.

  An hour or so later, we came to a small clearing with two benches hewn from thick logs. My legs ached and the benches were transforming into pillow-top mattresses before my eyes. And then I stopped in my tracks. It was not just a clearing but a vista.

  Directly below us, the lush hills eased down to the isolated village of Vatia, its fales and churches snug against a cozy bay where waves crashed along the reef and glided calmly to shore.

  My feet were stuck, my brain transfixed. And it wasn’t just the combination of ocean plus jungle plus mountains plus village, rare and enrapturing as that is, but something about the specific arrangement of it all. The far side of the bay was formed by a narrow peninsula, a serrated edge of hills that undulated before dropping sheer into the ocean. There was a short gap of open water before the rock rose again, four hundred feet straight up and then tapering away. With its curves and scaly eminences, it looked for all the world like a massive dragon’s tail arching into the Pacific.¶¶

  When I’d talked to Marie Alailima, she ended our conversation with a few tourist tips, first and foremost, “Go to Vatia. It’s just breathtaking.”

  Literally, it turned out.

  I looked at John. He was sweating but grinning. His shirt read: YOU ONLY LIVE ONCE.

  WE RODE the bus back into town, and as we walked to John’s car, we heard a loud clanging noise. We looked up the road to see a man in a blue lavalava hitting a metal bar against an air compression tank while a trio of kids nearby plugged their ears, and more men in blue lavalavas stood along the side of the road. Their job, John said, was to prevent anyone from driving or even walking in the village during Sa—they were the literal keepers of the peace.

  It’s something you read about in the guidebooks: Respect Sa, don’t walk through the villages. Over dinner at a Chinese restaurant, I mentioned this to John and he laughed. “The idea is that you’re supposed to be praying. And I suppose there might be two grandmas who do that. But mostly it means just turn down the TV a little bit. And these guys out on the road aren’t always out here, so it’s not entirely consistent.

  “I bet you also read that you’re not supposed to keep your feet out when you sit down in a fale,” John added as he tucked into his seafood soup, a massive crab leg projecting out of the bowl.

  “Yeah, we did see that,” Maren said. In a national park brochure and Lonely Planet and several other places.

  “Well . . .” John said. “Have you seen a lot of people sitting down in fales? Or have you seen tables and chairs?”

  We thought for a moment. “Tables and chairs,” Maren said.

  “Exactly.”

  “And you’re not supposed to eat food while walking through a village, right? But there’s a guy with a bag of chips in one hand and a Pepsi in the other. And a lot of these guys coming back after decades in the military are so used to life in the states or on base. They build houses surrounded by fences.”

  Is this erosion or simply evolution of a culture? In every conversation, at every sight, I’d gone back and forth in my mind. Up on the trail, I’d thought, Save it all! Put this whole place under a dome and keep it as it is! At Evalani’s, it was, Cultures change! We all adapt! Better living through tacos and tiki drinks!

  Countless outside observers—among them anthropologist Margaret Mead, whose book Coming of Age in Samoa grew out of her fieldwork in the Manu’a Islands—have marveled at the adaptability and elasticity of Samoan culture. When the missionaries arrived, Samoans picked and chose which Christian dictates to follow—fa’asamoa was flexible and could be compartmentalized, so it followed that the same must be true of the newcomers’ worldviews. Per missionary command, out went the leaf skirts and bare tops, in came the long, modest dresses that are common today (along with lavalavas and shorts, jeans, and T-shirts). Keeping the Sabbath remains important, and Sa. But other Samoan traditions persevered, like the ’ava ceremonies and dancing. There’s also the fa’afafine (“way of the woman”), Samoa’s “third gender,” born male but identifying as female, here not just accepted but celebrated as an important part of the culture, even if it seems an unlikely fit for an evangelical Christian environment.

  I asked Charles Ala’ilima about the cultural picking-and-choosing and he said, with a laugh, “Well, they do say that the true sign of intelligence is to hold two mutually exclusive concepts in your mind . . .”

  He added, though, that this was one of the key points of his argument for birthright citizenship. Fa’asamoa had proven remarkably flexible and resilient—accommodating Christianity, Americanization, changing diets, workdays spent in offices and canneries. If it could survive all this time, surely citizenship wouldn’t be the end of it.

  BACK AT the restaurant in Pago Pago, John introduced us to the owner, a beaming Chinese woman in a black-and-white-striped dress. She had married a Portuguese fishing-boat captain she’d met here, John said, and she had the freshest seafood in town. John had recently begun taking Chinese language lessons so he could communicate with this growing immigrant community.

  “It’s the twenty-year plan,” he said. You emigrate here from China, because the territory runs its own immigration with no federal oversight, and it’s easier to get in. You save up money, have a family. Your kids are born U.S. nationals, which allows them to travel to the states—and eventually they do just that, going off to college and settling on the mainland, with their parents right behind. But none of them have the full rights of citizenship.

  Here was a twist to the citizenship issue, something that hadn’t occurred to me before: its impact on non-Samoans.

  Citizenship opponents typically framed the issue in terms of Americanization versus indigenous traditions, but American Samoa isn’t exclusively American or Samoan. The territories are no more culturally static than the states. They may be reminders of a different era in American history—the Imperial Moment, the Age of Empire—but they’re always evolving, situated as they are on the front lines of globalization, closer to other countries than to the United States and abuzz with competing cultural influences.

  It’s a key point, one that the overarching debates about territorial policy often ignore. The Insular Cases intentionally shut out people of “alien races”; now, Charles Ala’ilima said, some American Samoans were using the rulings to discriminate against immigrants from China and the Philippines. Even if the Insular Cases did help protect some Samoan traditions, their legal consequences affected everyone in the territory—a blanket geographic approach to a cultural concern, the widely cast net going far beyond Samoans fending off Hawaii-style development interests.

  In fact, Charles Ala’ilma asserted, some matais have set up “an exploitive system,” bringing in foreign laborers to work in stores and other businesses they run, knowing that immigration and labor department oversights are lax. He called it “an abusive local alien sponsorship program which promotes something very much like indentured servitude upon foreigners working in the territory.” One day in Pago Pago, I bought a newspaper and found a front-page headline reading “Over 2,400 illegal aliens register for amnesty campaign.” The largest human trafficking case in United States history was in American Samoa, at a garment factory that operated from 1998 to 2001. The owner, a South Korean businessman named Kil Soo Lee, was sentenced to forty years in prison in 2005, after being convicted of luring about thr
ee hundred women from China and Vietnam to work in his factory (after charging them up to $8,000 for the privilege) and holding them against their will in atrocious conditions, documented in a Seattle Post-Intelligencer report titled “Made in Misery.” In 2010, during investigations of another human trafficking case, local and federal officials raided American Samoa’s own Office of Immigration, which was suspected of aiding traffickers in illegally bringing hundreds of people from China, the Philippines, and South Korea to the territory, according to the search warrant. American Samoa didn’t even have a law against human trafficking until March 2014. “With citizenship, you’d get the [federal] immigration authorities down here,” Charles Ala’ilima told me.

  Beyond the issue of immigration, it’s worth examining the underlying motives of some matais’ opposition to citizenship for the simple fact that the current power structure, which they argue is embedded in fa’asamoa, places them squarely at the top. They may be genuinely concerned about broader issues of fa’asamoa, but any cracks in that foundation would likely affect their own status. And why would they advocate for that?

  The Insular Cases have always been about maintaining power and cultural imbalance; it just turns out that this functions in more ways than one.

  WE STILL wanted a taste of sunny-isle stereotypes. No flame-twirlers or hula-dancing; just a little hut on the beach to ourselves and maybe an umbrella drink or two. A pod of semi-domesticated whales would be ideal, but not mandatory. Of course, there was no way such a thing actually existed.

  Sure it does, John said. “Let’s call Tisa. She’s a friend.”

  One afternoon, he dropped us off at Tisa’s Barefoot Bar, built on a deck above a powdery beach, with railings and beams hewn from driftwood, orange life rings and glass floats hanging from rafters, and a scattering of hand-painted signs. It was all salvaged by Tisa and her boyfriend, who goes by the name Candyman, from their private cove, and formed a knowingly Don the Beachcomber aesthetic. In addition to the sporadically open bar and restaurant, Tisa had two small A-frame fales she rented out, each with a thatch roof and a tiny veranda jutting over the high-tide mark.