For over a hundred years since the chiefs (matai) of Tutuila and Manu'a signed the deeds of cession that submitted the islands to United States' sovereignty, the question of how to reap the benefits of association while maintaining indigenous customs has been an issue for American Samoans. Taking the phenomenon of American football as a crucial strand of development on the island since the 1960s, this dissertation traces its establishment and evolution on the island of Tutuila over the past fifty years, investigating how it has become a significant path of transnational movement, and a source of social mobility, status and prestige. In a local political economy in which rapid population growth and limited economic opportunity induce continuous migration to the United States, football represents a relatively new form of labor and transnational movement for many Samoans. I draw on my ethnographic research to show the many dimensions of this experience and to trace the forms of capital players seek through football success. I argue that for many Samoan players the transformation of subjectivity and the body in accumulation of what I call "gridiron capital" is crucial to their success in the football context, but their connection to family and community provides other measures of worth that allow them to resist further commodification driven by the capitalist logic that permeates the sport. I argue that transnational movements and access to alternative sources of status and prestige such as those associated with football success, have precipitated important shifts in the constituent concepts and recognized indigenous practices of tautua and the fa'amatai over time. In some ways football success, like many other foreign imports before it, is both reincorporated by the powerful logic of the fa'asamoa and the matai system, and serves to undermine existing social hierarchies and the relations of power that structure them. I suggest that one result of the growth of particular kinds of gendered institutions in American Samoa (especially the military, government, and sport) has been the elevation of embodiments and iconographies of male authority and prestige that have narrowed the field of possibility for gendered social relations.