The Samoan Cause: Colonialism, Culture, and the Rule of Law.

Abstract

Most scholars of U.S. empire are confounded by American Samoa and often conceptualize the territory as an exceptional and benevolent site of colonial practice. This dissertation is an examination of the many Samoan causes activated through encounters with the American project. The Samoan Cause examines the intersections of Samoan indigenous politics with American settler and military colonial practices, specifically enlarging upon theories of intimacy, raciality, and colonial legality. Overall, I contend that American colonialism in Samoa created a unique and fraught legal reality emphasizing the preservation of indigenous cultural and land rights. More specifically, The Samoan Cause makes four main interventions. First, I trace the formation of the Sāmoan territory of the United States as both a discursive and physical event. Furthermore, in studying legal conflict I write against the dominant historiography, which has portrayed American relations as indirect and benevolent. Second, complementing, but also departing from scholarship of American empire, I argue that native policies of cultural preservation in Samoa operated as a defense against settler colonialism and of indigenous arrest. Over half a century of martial rule in American Samoa was justified to ensure the survival of Samoan people and culture under perceived threat from the fatal impact of settler colonialism. Third, I have coined the term “Polynesian Primitivism” to explain the ways a hegemonic project of knowledge, science, and culture continues to be mapped upon bodies and islands in Oceania. Fourth, The Samoan Cause examines colonial encounters tending closely to feminist analysis and indigenous experiences to critique U.S. imperial practice and thought. In order to do so, this dissertation employs interdisciplinary methodologies to analyze a range of sources from legal cases, cultural representations, to government archives across the mid-nineteenth century to the present.