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by eesmith 1470 days ago
The law which extended American sovereignty to include American Samoa also said that normal American land laws do not apply. https://archive.org/details/modernsamoaitsgo00kees/page/266/...

Thus, in American Samoa, there are restrictions on what non-Samoans can do with land. https://asbar.org/code-annotated/37-0204-restrictions-on-ali... .

This sort of discrimination is illegal in the rest of the US, and allowed because of the insular laws.

If the insular laws are found unconstitutional, then those restriction on alienation of land are illegal. Which means we'll be breaking (yet again) an agreement we made with indigenous people.

The article mentions the American nationals on American Samoa who want American citizenship. While (as I understand it), others in American Samoa want to preserve their traditional landownership practices, instead of letting wealth decide, and don't want this to change.

1 comments

Yeah, that all sounds like bullshit.

I recently found out in some Native American areas of the USA you aren't even required to pull over or anything if you're not literally in the tribe.

That seems... insane. Like you're gonna drive through the equivalent of a township or county, speed (or worse) and just go fuck you, call the state police?

People are really rude, they misunderstand on purpose, then they cry that the world is chaotic.

Until very recently, they couldn't even arrest you for rape on the reservation if you weren't a member of the tribe... only the FBI had jurisdiction and it often wasn't a big enough fish to fry for them to bother.

https://indianlaw.org/safewomen/law-was-meant-let-american-i...

I know. I was avoiding specifics.