Amerika Sāmoa looking for a role

What to do with Washington’s South Pacific colony?

In 1899 the United States seized Tutuila for one reason only: Pago Pago harbour. It had no interest in the rest of Sāmoa, leaving that to Deutsches Kaiserreich - Germany - and Tonga, to the south, to Britain.

Pago Pago, while being deep and large, had its main virtue in location; halfway between California and Australia. As the Stars and Stripes were raised over its sunken caldera in 1900, the vision was of a strategic, Pacific dominating naval base modelled on Alfred Thayer Mahan’s Sea Power Doctrine.

Instead, eight years later, Pearl Harbour, 4200 kilometres north, became the epicentre of American naval power. Pago Pago was, mostly, forgotten; it was kept under a US flag on a deniability basis - no one else could have it.

And today, its 56,000 people languish with a status proclaiming them to be ‘nationals but not citizens of the United States.’ To rub that sense of nonentity in a little further, legally American Sāmoa is described in US law as ‘unorganised and unincorporated’ territory. 

USS Seattle at Pago Pago, 2 September 1925. These young women were members of Chief Mauga's party. Then-Commander Chester W. Nimitz, described them as follows: ‘Their costume consists of Navy neckerchiefs, tapa skirts and beads, and they dance with easy grace and absolute lack of self consciousness.’Photograph US History & Heritage Command

At just 199 square km, it has the land area of the Marshall Islands, and less than a quarter of that of Singapore. Its main business is StarKist, a small South Korean owned cannery, mostly serving Asian fishing boats exploiting American Sāmoa’s 390,000 sq km exclusive economic zone. A high percentage of American Sāmoa’s young serve in American forces.

As the Pacific region becomes a new centre of political intrigue, and summits are called and promises, albeit dubious, are made of millions of dollars, American Sāmoa seems curiously isolated. Its condition has struck the territory’s solitary non-voting delegate to the US House of Representatives, Amata Coleman Radewagen. She is the daughter of Peter Tali Coleman (1919-1997), the first popularly elected governor of American Sāmoa.

In September Amata spoke to the barely noticed Pacific Islands Conference of Leaders in Hawaii which her father had been a founding member of. In her speech she pitched herself as the voice of the Pacific in the US Congress. She said her father would have liked to join the Pacific Islands Forum when it was founded in 1971 but was barred by Washington. ‘Under our constitutional arrangements with the United States, we cannot have our own foreign policy.’ Amata says that is fine, and its status was reconfirmed in a recent constitutional convention.