Overturning insular cases causes collateral damage to American Samoans – it overturns their cultural traditions that are central to Samoan ways of life.

Stohr '22 [Kimberly Atkins; trial and appellate litigation attorney in Boston. Kimberly is a native of Michigan, and a graduate of Wayne State University, Boston University School of Law and Boston University College of Communication, and the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism.; "The (unheard) case of American Samoa"; 11-9-2022; published BostonGlobe; accessed 7-24-2023; https://www.bostonglobe.com/2022/11/09/opinion/unheard-case-american-samoa/; ror]

The concept that people born on U.S. soil are citizens from birth may seem simple and straightforward. For American Samoans, it is anything but.

When the U.S. Supreme Court declined in October to reconsider a series of early 20th century rulings referenced in Fitisemanu v. U.S., which denied full citizenship rights to residents of U.S. territories, it seemed outrageous to some. Those rulings were based mainly on racist assumptions about Black and Brown residents of the United States’ territorial acquisitions. And these residents have since been treated as separate and unequal.

“The fundamental issue of citizenship is already decided,” says American Samoan attorney Charles B. Ala’ilima. “The Constitution grants you citizenship.”

But others, including American Samoan leaders, fear upending those rulings could cause legal, political, and cultural collateral damage. Foisting U.S. citizenship on a community that hasn’t asked for it, they say, could threaten not only American Samoans’ right of self-determination but also their very way of life.

“There are American Samoans who don’t want to be citizens,” says Michael Williams, who represented the American Samoan government in urging the Supreme Court not to take up the challenge. “The sole question is: Who makes that decision?”

There is one point of agreement: The Insular Cases, the aforementioned series of Supreme Court rulings beginning in 1901 that affirmed the right of the federal government to deny residents in U.S. territories the same rights as people born in the 50 states — are indefensibly racist. In the first, Justice Henry Billings Brown, the infamous author of the “separate but equal” doctrine in Plessy v. Ferguson, wrote that territory residents may be so savage as to be ungovernable.

“If those possessions are inhabited by alien races, differing from us in religion, customs, laws, methods of taxation, and modes of thought, the administration of government and justice, according to Anglo-Saxon principles, may for a time be impossible,” Brown said.

Beyond that consensus is a complex debate about American Samoa being the only major U.S. territory that hasn’t been granted birthright citizenship by an act of U.S. Congress, and what — if anything — should be done about it.

Amata Coleman Radewagen, American Samoa’s U.S. House delegate, says the court’s decision to stay out of the debate is essential for “preserving our Fa’a Samoa” (the Samoan way).

“This result is of utmost importance to preserving the American Samoa we know with the continuation of family land and our matai heritage, which our ancestors very clearly did not intend to let go,” Radewagen says.

That tradition, in which land rights are granted to all American Samoan families as determined by a Samoan chief, or matai, is one of many that could be upended if the Insular Cases are overturned without clarity on their citizenship status. This right to land and other traditions are central to the American Samoan way of life, which is more valuable than American citizenship to some.