An Archive of Samoan Heritage

Anavatau started over twenty years ago as my personal blog - back when I was just discovering what it meant, to me, to be Samoan.

I was learning things and writing them down just to make sense of the world I'd grown up in. How many times had I sat through a family gathering - taule'ale'a running around shirtless, matai from each side of the room yelling lauga at each other - and understood none of it? I wrote to process the details and record answers to the countless questions I'd ask my family.

I started writing in public - blogging - because I knew I wasn't alone. So many of us in the diaspora want to belong to our culture in a more visceral way but feel disconnected - by distance, by language, by estrangement from the only people we knew who could have taught us. So I blogged, not just my observations, but my many opinions, too.

I wrote about matai titles, historical events, my favourite Samoan music, weird and wonderful Samoan words, customs and protocol.. and some of the comments were like, "Who died and made you the boss of Samoan words?" But most of them were like, "Someone offered me a matai and I had no idea what it meant. Now that I've read your post, I actually know how to respond."

It was the second kind of comment that changed things for me. People were referencing my posts, quoting me in their own writing. I'd taken an aganu'u class, a Samoan cultural studies course, with a renowned Samoan expert, Tofaeono Tanuvasa Tavale, and interviewed him for one of my posts. I knew I had real-world experience writing about my own Samoan life. But when people started relying on me, I needed more than my own experience. I needed to show my receipts.

So I started backing up my writing with scholarly resources - academic work produced by Samoans with much deeper knowledge than I had. The work of researchers like Unasa Leulu Felise Va'a was exactly what I was looking for. But finding and verifying sources in the days of only Google was exhausting. Snippets with questionable sources. Links that died two weeks after I published. Paywalls blocking resources that looked invaluable... and I learned later that many of those researchers didn't choose for their work to sit behind a paywall. That was just how academic publishing worked.

For someone who already takes ages to write anything (that's me), that whole layer of research friction was making it even harder to post anything.

So I had an idea. What if all the knowledge ever documented about Samoans - our culture, our history, our way of life, from inside our culture and from outside it - was in one easy-to-access place? What if that place was right here on anavatau.com?

It's taken a couple of years to build, in between my day job and responsibilities at home. But it's here. This is the Anavatau Heritage Archive.

I'm a semi-self-taught software engineer (which means I'm always building something, but I'm halfway through the degree), so I'm doing this project myself. The archive is still a baby - only about 30 resources so far - but it's growing. Each resource tells you whether it's freely accessible, behind a paywall, or a book you can buy. Each one has a summary so you know exactly what it covers before you click. It's searchable, it's organised by category and I'll keep the links and resources updated.

What I didn't expect is that contemporary researchers would gravitate toward this. A group of incredibly talented Samoan scholars in San Diego - people committed to helping the diaspora discover their gafa, their family genealogy - found out what I was building and wanted in. Their essays from the conference they ran will be published here. I had imagined the archive as mostly historical. But here was an opportunity to publish contemporary scholarship as it happens, through scholar voices, through people actively doing the work right now.

That has expanded the purpose of Anavatau in ways I'm genuinely excited about. You'll find the first of those essays from Georgina Salazar: a real piece of research, published here as part of the permanent record of the 2025 Intro to Samoan Genealogy Workshop Series.

If you're a researcher who needs a home for your work about Samoa and Samoan culture, get in touch. We'll publish and help promote your research to the people most impacted by it.

And if you just want to stay connected - sign up for the mailing list.

We've got lots more on the way.