American Exceptionalism in American Samoa

Authors

• Karen Armstrong Bournemouth University

DOI: https://doi.org/10.30676/jfas.v33i2.116437

Abstract

American Samoa has been a territory of the United States for 108 years. For fifty ears of this period, American Samoa was administered by the U.S. Navy. The
policies of the naval administration established practices of militarization—that is, integrating the military and its values into the lives of the locals—that continue today. Significant numbers of American Samoans serve in the various branches of the U.S. military; Samoans participate in, and support, the ‘incoherent empire’ of the United States. The ideology of ‘American exceptionalism’—the incorporation of democracy, freedom and human rights as features purportedly distinguishing U.S. imperialist practice from its colonizing forebears—was never effectively part of the administration of American Samoa. Nevertheless, when debating their future political status, Samoans choose to keep the present political arrangement as long as they can control their land and titles system and practice faʻaSamoa, the Samoan way.