American Samoa holds a distinction shared by almost no other place on Earth: 96% of its land cannot be bought, sold, or mortgaged. It belongs to extended families, and it has belonged to those same families for roughly 3,000 years. The United States government, corporations, and even the people living there are bound by a system that puts communal ownership above private property. The territory sits 2,600 miles south of Hawaii, a cluster of volcanic islands totaling just 76 square miles.
It has no significant mineral wealth, no navigable rivers, and no economy that has not repeatedly teetered on collapse. Yet generation after generation of its people have chosen to stay, and they have fought some of the most consequential legal battles in American territorial history to keep the land in family hands. This is also the story of one of the strangest legal categories in the modern world. People born in American Samoa are not American citizens.
They are American nationals, a status that exists almost nowhere else. They serve in the US military at the highest per capita rate in the nation, die in American wars, and cannot vote for the president who sends them into combat. Their passports explicitly state that they are not citizens. The roots of this arrangement stretch back three millennia.
Around 1000 BC, seafarers from the Lapita culture, among the greatest open-ocean navigators in history, landed on the shores of what is now Tutuila. They arrived in double-hulled canoes carrying pigs, dogs, chickens, and the seeds of a civilization. Archaeological fragments of their distinctive stamped pottery have been found on Tutuila and in the Manu’a Islands, dating back roughly 3,000 years. What they found was not an easy paradise.
Tutuila is only 19 miles long, with almost no flat land. Its interior is a tangle of volcanic ridges choked with rainforest. The soil is thin, and there are no rivers. Survival depended on mastery of the reef, the ocean, and the rhythms of the seasons.
Over the centuries, these islanders built one of the most complex and enduring social systems on Earth, known as fa’aSamoa, the Samoan way. At the center of this system is the ‘aiga, the extended family, bound by blood, marriage, and adoption. Each ‘aiga is led by a matai, a chief chosen by family consensus, who acts not as a king but as a trustee of communal land. The village council, known as the fon o, holds absolute authority at the village level, governing behavior, resolving disputes, and controlling land use.
This is not a decorative tradition for tourists; it functions as a parallel government alongside the American-style territorial legislature. The deepest principle is the land itself. In Samoan thinking, land is not property; it is identity. A family’s title, name, and standing in the village trace back to the land their ancestors cultivated.
Lose the land, and you lose your name. So the system was built to ensure land cannot be sold beyond the family. Today, 96% of all land in American Samoa is communal, a decision repeated over 3,000 years that land is not for sale. Far to the east lies the Manu’a Islands group, the ancient spiritual center of Polynesia.
For centuries, the Tui Manu’a, the paramount chief, presided over an oceanic confederacy stretching across Fiji, Tonga, and the Cook Islands. According to Samoan oral traditions, the first Tui Manu’a was the son of the supreme god Tagaloa. The power eventually shifted with the rise of the Tu’i Tonga empire, but the title survived into the modern era. Today, the Manu’a group holds barely 1,400 people, and the once-revered title sits unclaimed.
The harbor changed everything. Pago Pago Harbor, one of the deepest natural harbors in the Pacific, was formed when the wall of an ancient shield volcano collapsed and the sea flooded the crater. Sheltered by volcanic ridges and deep enough for the largest ships, it drew European attention early. Whalers and missionaries arrived in the 1830s, but it was the age of steam that made the harbor strategically priceless.
In 1872, a high chief named Ma Manuma met with US Navy Commander Richard Meade and granted exclusive rights to the harbor in exchange for friendship and protection. In 1878, the United States ratified a formal treaty with the Kingdom of Samoa. By the end of the century, Germany, Britain, and the United States were all jockeying for control of the islands. A catastrophic typhoon in 1889 sank six of seven warships in Apia Harbor and killed over 200 sailors, shocking the powers into negotiation.
Ten years later, they signed a tripartite agreement: Germany took the western islands, and the United States took Tutuila, Aunu’u, and the Manu’a group. The chiefs of Tutuila formally ceded their islands in 1900, and the US Navy took over. The Tui Manu’a, Elisala, held out. After pressure, including the so-called trial of the Ipu conducted on an American warship, he signed a deed of cession in 1904.
The understanding was that the title would die with him. He died in 1909. Though descendants later named a successor in 1924, the American governor refused to recognize it, citing the US Constitution. Officially, there is no Tui Manu’a.
The Navy administered American Samoa for the next half century, treating it more like a military installation than a colony. Then came December 7, 1941, and Pearl Harbor. American Samoa suddenly sat astride critical shipping lanes between Hawaii and New Zealand. Marines arrived, coastal defenses were built, and a Japanese submarine shelled the naval station.
At its peak, the American Samoa Defense Group was one of the largest in the Pacific theater, on islands whose total land area is smaller than Washington, DC. The war fundamentally changed Pago Pago. Thousands of servicemen rotated through, bringing American goods, music, and money. It was the islands’ first real contact with the American economy at scale.
But by 1951, the strategic value evaporated. Under Executive Order 10264, administration transferred from the Navy to the Department of the Interior. The base closed, and the largest employer on the island vanished overnight. The economy found a replacement in the sea.
The waters around American Samoa hold some of the richest tuna grounds in the Pacific, and Pago Pago Harbor was deep enough for any fishing vessel. The first canning attempt was modest and struggled. But a critical advantage emerged: as a US territory, American Samoa’s exports entered the American market duty-free. Canned tuna processed in Pago Pago paid no tariff.
In 1953, a regulation change allowed foreign-flagged vessels to unload fish directly in Pago Pago. The floodgates opened. Van Camp Seafood Company set up operations, and in 1963, StarKist opened a second cannery alongside it. By the 1990s, Pago Pago was the fourth-largest tuna processor in the world, and the StarKist facility was called the largest tuna cannery on the planet.
At their peak, the two plants employed roughly 4,500 workers in a territory of about 55,000 people. The industry was built on a narrow margin. American Samoa had its own minimum wage, set below the mainland’s, and that gap kept the canneries profitable. In 1998, when the federal minimum wage was $5.
15 an hour, American Samoa’s was $3. 17. It was not a large difference, but it was the entire margin separating Pago Pago from Thailand or Ecuador. By 2001, virtually all American tuna canning had relocated to this one remote island chain.
The canneries transformed the territory. They drew migrant workers from independent Samoa and Tonga, created the first large-scale cash economy, and mingled with fa’alavelave, the ceremonial obligations of Samoan culture. Funerals, weddings, and title ceremonies sometimes cost thousands of dollars, and families on cannery wages were expected to contribute heavily. The ancient system of reciprocity merged with modern wage labor.
Meanwhile, a legal classification was quietly solidifying. In 2013, a group of American Samoans filed a federal lawsuit arguing for birthright citizenship under the 14th Amendment. A district court ruled in their favor, but an appeals court reversed, saying in 2015 that granting citizenship to American Samoans would be “impractical and anomalous. ” A similar case in the 10th Circuit reached the same conclusion in 2021.
Here is where the story takes its most unexpected turn. The government of American Samoa has repeatedly argued against birthright citizenship for its own people. The reasoning is not a rejection of their people but a fear of what citizenship might do to the land. If American Samoa were fully incorporated, the full weight of the Constitution would apply, including the equal protection clause.
That clause, officials fear, could be used to challenge laws restricting land ownership to people of Samoan ancestry. Those laws are the walls around the communal land system. If they fall, the argument goes, outside developers could buy Samoan land. If the land goes, the matai system goes.
If the matai system goes, there is no Samoa. This paradox sits at the heart of the territory. The communal land system keeps the culture alive, but it also keeps the economy struggling. Land cannot be mortgaged or used as collateral, so private enterprise barely exists.
Federal funding fills the gap, accounting for over 60% of government revenue. The median household income is around $22,000, less than half the national figure. Unemployment has hovered above 20%. The cost of preservation is also measured in human lives.
American Samoa has the highest rate of military enlistment of any US state or territory. Roughly 166 residents enlist annually from a population under 47,000. Casualty rates in Iraq and Afghanistan have been reported at roughly seven times the national average. There is a saying on the island: there are only two ways off the rock—join the military or make it to the NFL.
The football pipeline is remarkable. According to the Wall Street Journal, a Samoan male is 56 times more likely to play in the NFL than a non-Samoan American. At various points, roughly 3% of the NFL has been Samoan, from a community that is a fraction of a fraction of the American population. College scouts call the territory “Football Island.
” The reasons are debated, but the cultural valorization of physical strength and discipline, combined with limited economic options, makes football one of the few paths to prosperity. The 2007 federal legislation to raise American Samoa’s minimum wage toward the mainland level triggered an economic earthquake. The canneries had stayed for one reason: cheap labor. When Congress started closing the gap, the math stopped working.
Chicken of the Sea shut down in 2009, costing roughly 2,000 jobs. The operation moved to Thailand and to Lyons, Georgia. StarKist dropped plans to build a new production line that would have created 300 jobs. That same year, Nature delivered its own blow.
On September 29, 2009, an 8. 0 magnitude earthquake struck south of Tutuila. Four tsunami waves, 15 to 20 feet high, roared ashore, reaching a mile inland in Pago Pago. Thirty-four people died in American Samoa, and more than 189 died across the broader region.
Two hundred homes and businesses were destroyed. The airport runway was buried under wreckage, and for hours the territory was cut off from the world. President Obama declared a major disaster. The years that followed were grim.
Between 2007 and 2018, cannery employment fell by 45%. In 2015, a scandal broke when the three major tuna companies were caught fixing prices. StarKist and Bumble Bee pleaded guilty and paid fines totaling $125 million. The CEO of Bumble Bee was sentenced to prison.
By the 2020s, StarKist was the only remaining cannery, still the largest private employer, but owned by a South Korean conglomerate and a shadow of its former scale. The territory’s real GDP in 2012 was 7. 5% lower than in 2002. Federal tsunami reconstruction money temporarily propped up the economy, but once it dried up, the underlying decline resumed.
The Rainmaker Hotel, the territory’s only proper hotel, fell into debt, lost its electricity, and became a symbol of ambitions the economy could not sustain. Yet the people stay. The population is still roughly 90% indigenous Samoan, a figure no other US territory approaches. The communal land system is intact.
The fono still meets. Matai are still chosen by consensus. Sunday is still sacred. Funerals can last a week, drawing relatives home from California, Hawaii, and military bases worldwide.
These obligations are the gravitational pull that keeps the ‘aiga together across oceans. From the air, American Samoa is almost invisible, a few green specks in an ocean covering a third of the planet. The clouds stack over the mountains, and the rain begins again the way it has always begun, falling on the harbor, on the cannery roof, on the fale where the matai sits, on the ground that cannot be sold.