The Pacific Insular Case of American Samoa: Land Rights and Law in Unincorporated US Territories

This book is a researched study of land issues in American Samoa that analyzes the impact of U.S. colonialism and empire building in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Carefully tracing changes in land laws up to the present, this volume also draws on a careful examination of legal traditions, administrative decisions, court cases and rising tensions between indigenous customary land tenure practices in American Samoa and Western notions of individual private ownership. It also highlights how unusual the status of American Samoa is in its relationship with the U.S., namely as the only “unincorporated” and “unorganized” overseas territory, and aims to expand the U.S. empire-building scholarship to include and recognize American Samoa into the vernacular of Americanization projects.