The ocean is everywhere when you stand in Pago Pago Harbor on a clear morning. The water is so blue it almost seems unreal, fishing boats are tied along the docks, and Tutuila’s green volcanic ridges rise behind the town in a way that gives the impression that the island was created to impress. It is the main reality of this location. It provides food, establishes the calendar, and bears the cultural significance that land could have in other communities.
Under the more general heading of Fa’asamoa, or the Samoan way, the relationship between Samoan communities and the ocean is not symbolic. In ways that are challenging to put into the language of resource management documents, it is operational and identity-forming. Before proceeding with the lease process, the federal government seems to have spent very little time interacting with that relationship in its preparation for the commercial leasing of mineral reserves on the seafloor of American Samoa.
The value is truly noteworthy, and the minerals are real. Cobalt-rich crusts and polymetallic nodules in the deep seafloor of American Samoa’s federal Outer Continental Manganese, cobalt, nickel, and rare earth elements are found in shelf waters. These elements are necessary for the production of electric vehicle batteries, wind turbine parts, and the larger energy shift that industrialized countries are pursuing. Although exact numbers vary depending on commodity prices and survey methods, estimates of the overall mineral value have reached trillions of dollars.
The strategic interest remains constant: American Samoa’s seabed is under U.S. federal control, while the United States imports most of these vital minerals, primarily through supply chains with substantial Chinese involvement. From the perspective of supply chain resilience, the calculation is simple. It appears far more complicated from the perspective of the 55,000 residents.
As early as August 2026, BOEM scheduled a commercial lease auction after completing area identification for American Samoa. Seabed mining had been prohibited by the authorities of the territory. The federal process continued notwithstanding the moratorium. The difference between what a territory’s government has stated it wants and what the federal agency is getting ready to do is a result of American Samoa’s unique legal and political position inside the United States.
The inhabitants are citizens of the United States. They do not have full constitutional protections as citizens of the United States. They are not represented in Congress with the ability to vote. This implies that no elected person answerable to the people most directly impacted may vote on federal legislation impacting their territory’s resources during its debate, amendment, and passage. In the talks that followed, Samoan community leaders have made a clear and frequent comparison to earlier historical instances of resource exploitation in areas where the people lacked political voice.
Leaders from the community and Indigenous peoples who were left out of the first talks have expressed their dissatisfaction in ways that go beyond simple procedural grievances. According to the Fa’asamoa paradigm, the ocean is not a resource zone that is awaiting distribution. For fishing, navigation, and the subsistence methods that link modern communities to their predecessors, it is a location with enduring human significance.
Since commercial deep-sea mining at this scale has never been done anywhere, environmental impact assessments are unable to fully predict how fishing grounds would be impacted by the disturbance plumes that deep-sea mining equipment produces, which extend hundreds of kilometers from extraction sites across the seafloor. An abstract ecology is not at peril. Families in Pago Pago and the surrounding communities use this approach to eat and preserve cultural traditions for future generations.
The timeline being applied to American Samoa’s seabed leasing appears to have been calibrated to the geopolitical urgency of securing domestic critical mineral supply, rather than to the pace at which truly inclusive consultation with the territory’s communities could occur, as one observes this process from the outside. Policymakers on the mainland seem to find it simpler to respond to the question of whether that urgency warrants the procedure than the people in Pago Pago Harbor who are witnessing it.
It’s still unclear if the August auction date will stand, if legal challenges will impede the proceedings, or if the moratorium issued by the government of American Samoa will have any real impact on a federal agency with its own jurisdiction and schedule. The minerals are present. There are communities. The question of whose decision this actually is remains genuinely unresolved.
