Bolts Magazine and High Country News have produced an excellent article detailing the ongoing situation in Alaska over the voting rights of American Samoans, their prosecution, and the nuances of the issue.
Pese wonders if much of this trouble might have been averted by simple public education. As a child growing up in American Samoa, he remembers being taught about righteous American wars and the basics of U.S. government structure; he vividly recalls a lesson on Gettysburg. But he doesn’t remember ever being taught in school about American Samoa itself—about its history and role in the broader American empire, about why people born everywhere else in the country are citizens by birthright.
“Everyone speaks Samoan over there, but the main subjects we all have to pass were English, writing, math, and history,” he told me. “In the history books we learned from, it has nothing to do with the U.S. territory.”
American Samoa became a U.S. territory in 1900, having been previously governed in a shared power agreement among the U.S., England, and Germany over what were previously united Samoan lands. After 1900, the islands were broken up into two separate entities: the current territory of American Samoa and what is now the independent nation of Samoa. The U.S. Navy secured deeds of cession from Samoan chiefs in a colonial governance structure that ensured U.S. government control but promised preservation of local customs, including the governing authority of traditional chiefs.
This was a period of major American expansion around the globe. Military and economic ambitions, blessed by the Monroe Doctrine, led the U.S. to explode into a global imperial power, snatching up islands all over the world at feverish pace for their natural resources and strategic positioning. At one point, the U.S. controlled, either formally or informally, American Samoa, Puerto Rico, Cuba, Guam, and The Philippines, among other territories and countless unincorporated islands.
American Samoa’s current status as a member of a democratic underclass was cemented starting in 1901 in a series of plainly racist U.S. Supreme Court rulings that stand to this day. The rulings together are known as the Insular Cases, which clarified that people living in U.S. territories, including American Samoa, were not entitled to the same constitutional protections as other Americans. The court called people living in the territories “alien races” and referred to colonial subjects as “savage tribes,” “uncivilized” and not practiced in “Anglo-Saxon principles.”
None of this was taught in school to Pese, nor to the many other American Samoans I met in Alaska. Pese said he didn’t know that other territories even existed until he was a teenager. He knew American Samoa was part of the U.S.—it’s in the name, after all—and it was instilled in him from a young age that he should be proud to be American. U.S. flags wave atop government buildings in American Samoa; July 4 and the NFL are as big, or bigger, there as in the mainland U.S.
Yet another reminder of the importance about education and awareness of the US unincorporated territories—since the lack of these can have exceedingly devastating consequences.
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