Our Story

Sio'ualofa! I'm Lilieni.

In the late 1970s, my uncle started a Samoan-language newspaper so Samoans in New Zealand could stay connected with news from home. It grew into a family business involving uncles and aunts in South Auckland and my grandparents, who contributed from Samoa. My mom and dad took over the paper's operations in 1990, and as soon as I was old enough, I was working there, too.

My job was to lay out the pages and type up handwritten articles our writers submitted in Samoan. Now, I had grown up in a Samoan-speaking household, so I thought I understood it pretty well. But when I read those stories and didn't recognise most of the words - because they were not spelled how I'd heard them all those years - I spotted large gaps in my Samoan-girl knowledge. 

Little by little, I began to understand the content in those articles, and it opened my mind. I learned about land and title disputes, how Samoa formally announces new matai, the protocols governing Samoan gatherings and lauga (oration), plus a whole lot of gossip-type, village-drama-type news. 

From this growing lens of Samoan understanding, I became more interested in the cultural rituals of my own family gatherings - all that fa'asamoa stuff - and to the surprise of my elders, I wanted to participate instead of just observe. Each experience taught me how intricately language is woven into the fabric of culture. Gagana Samoa is our history, our hierarchy, our governance and our ceremony. 

When I built our newspaper's first website, I included a bulletin board where site-visitors could leave messages. That's how I discovered thousands of other Samoans in the world trying to understand who were are as a people. 

I soon realised that I have a small advantage over many of my diaspora brothers and sisters. I live in a town with a high population of Samoans, so I am a little more immersed in our practiced culture. Through the newspaper, I grew up amongst Samoan knowledge-holders and archivists, who nurtured my curiosity and my own desire to document what I learned. 

So, almost 20 years ago, I started blogging. The newspaper website grew into a little social network called One Samoana, where I posted stories to share my Samoan experience. Other talented writers joined me in the blogging, exploring their own perspectives of our Samoan world. 

We read each other's stories, debated in the comments, and learned so much from each other. One lesson that challenged me most is that my Samoana - my Samoan experience - is not, and doesn't have to be, the same as yours. The way my family expresses our Samoan-ness will be slightly different from other families, and that's okay. We gather to celebrate our  shared ancestry and explore what we have in common through our rich Samoan heritage. 

Anavatau is the evolution of this effort.