Our Story

Sio'ualofa!

I'm Lillian Arp, a Samoan-born writer and digital systems builder who publishes under 'Lilieni' because that's what my grandmother called me.

In the late 1970s, my uncle - my mother's brother and the sa'o of our aiga - started a Samoan-language newspaper so Samoans in New Zealand could stay connected with news from home.

It grew into a family business involving my uncles and aunts in South Auckland and my grandparents, who contributed from Samoa. When we moved to New Zealand in 1990, my mom and dad took over the paper's operations, 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 that our writers would submit in Samoan.

Now see, I had grown up in a Samoan-speaking household, so I thought I understood the language pretty well. But when I read those stories and didn't recognise so many of the words - mostly because they were not spelled how I'd heard them all those years - I spotted large gaps in my Samoan-girl knowledge. 

When I eventually began to understand the content in those articles, it opened my mind. I learned about land and title disputes, how Samoa formally recognizes new matai, the protocols governing Samoan gatherings, how powerful lauga (oration) can be 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 sua I helped to ka'i, each ie koga I had to wave around and kiususu for, each keukusi I brandished over my head... each experience taught me how intricately language is woven into the fabric of culture. Gagana Samoa really 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, like me, to discover our shared heritage and understand who we 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 documenting their lives, 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 understanding and perspective of the Samoan culture - is not, and doesn't have to be, the same as yours. The way my Samoan family makes panipopo or celebrates a saofa'i might be different from how your Samoan family rolls... and that's okay.

That we still gather together, e pei o le fuifuiga o lupe, that we continue to share our Samoan stories, that we preserve our Samoan experience of the world for generations to come is what matters.

This the purpose of Anavatau.