The Pacific Insular Case of American Sāmoa

Kruse sets the stage by identifying the 1900 General Order by which the US Naval Department placed the Sāmoan Group under the control of the US Navy. The chapter addresses the Naval Administration’s introduction of American foreign property law concepts and values that apportion Sāmoan traditional lands thereby negatively impacting the fa’amātai and fa’asāmoa, twin keystones of the Sāmoan culture. Concentrating specifically on adverse land possession and individually owned land classifications that she asserts are incongruent with Sāmoan customary land tenure and culture. Kruse concludes these foreign property rights have split communal land holdings and the fa’asāmoa culture.

Kruse describes the symbiosis between the Sāmoan land tenure system, fa’amātai, and fa’asāmoa, keystones of Sāmoan culture. Kruse describes Sāmoan society prior to the coming of the papālagi, elucidates the centrality of communal land tenure under the traditional political structure to support the chiefly system and its distribution of resources and communal lands. Kruse conducts original quantitative collection of archival data to examine the mātai registration system in comparison to the land tenure holdings in American Sāmoa. The chapter studies the legal and political history of American Sāmoa, situating the economic and geopolitical significance of Pago Pago’s harbor.

Kruse examines the acquisition of lands from the late eighteenth century, situating “The Northwest” Territory as the blueprint of acquiring land possessions by annexation. The Northwest Territory became the common property of the United States. Kruse outlines how the early land acquisition experiments in power, control, hegemony, and conquest in the interest to fulfilling the American ideal of democracy and freedom became the blueprint for spreading American ideology and its expansionist propaganda. Kruse argues the military brass pursued Tutuila for its strategic location and sheltered harbor in the Pacific. The chapter details the Tripartite Convention of 1899 and the Treaty of Berlin where European and American countries balkanized the Sāmoan archipelago.

Kruse probes the historical and constitutional foray of America’s sphere of influence at the turn of the twentieth century as the national debate seethed over what was or was not desirable possessions. The chapter’s trajectory begins with the 1900 presidential election that was turned into a referendum on colonialism while the expansionists expounded on the duty and moral obligation of America to civilize and govern alien “backward races.” Kruse examines the 1890s US Supreme Court justices’ articles in the Harvard Law Review that provided the terminology appropriated by the US Congress to create the framework for two separate legal classifications of US territories: incorporated and unincorporated. Kruse unfolds how the unincorporated and incorporated status shields American Sāmoa to operate customary practices of nobility and alienation of lands to non-American Sāmoans. The US Supreme Court concocted a matrix of individualized laws, termed the “Insular Cases,” had no discernible consistent legal foundation.

Kruse examines German Sāmoa’s Supreme Court and Land Commission decisions that found land claim cases were difficult to adjudicate without written land deeds or surveys. The Supreme Court created land classifications that segmented and converted customary lands; Kruse contends the Supreme Court interpreted custom to create a legal status of “rightful owner” by extending social and political parameters of mātai pule. The chapter details how by the 1890s, the diminishing rights of the mātai over the conveyance or transfer of lands, coupled with the new system of land classifications, led to the splitting of communal lands. Kruse argues that the German Sāmoa court decisions were readily accepted by American Sāmoa’s Naval court, legitimizing individual land rights. Detailing the intention of the Naval Court to legitimize adverse land possession that they believed would civilize and stabilize land titles and that also included laws to force plantation cultivation to pay copra taxes.

This chapter will identify the political and legal relationships with other territories, affiliated, and compact states to analyze political routes that could expand American Sāmoa’s self-autonomy and preserve communal land tenure while upholding Sāmoan culture. Kruse analyzes alternative political arrangements due to the fear of American Sāmoans that if automatic citizenship is applied in American Sāmoa the federal courts will mandate that the full Constitution be applied in the territory and would invalidate the local Constitution’s express protections of nobility and alienation of land to non-American Sāmoans.