The Pacific Insular Case of American Sāmoa

Download or read book The Pacific Insular Case of American Sāmoa written by Line-Noue Memea Kruse and published by Palgrave Macmillan. This book was released on 2019-06-04 with total page 211 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is a researched study of land issues in American Sāmoa 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 Sāmoa and Western notions of individual private ownership. It also highlights how unusual the status of American Sāmoa 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 Sāmoa into the vernacular of Americanization projects.