Le Api | The Notebook
A collection of thoughts and stories – mostly from a Hamo Geek Girl – exploring the language and culture of Samoan people.
Matai is the Samoan word for leader, or chief, or even (in the poetic sense) father. Samoan society is organized by family, and each family has its own matai titles, which are connected to certain districts, villages and plots of family land. And that was the short...
You may have noticed. Many Samoan families have a preference for arranging their living rooms in a large, inward-facing oblong or oval formation, with the backs of all the couches and armchairs pushed up against the walls. If you know anything about life in Samoa, you...
The heartbeat of Samoan culture is love and respect, or fa'aaloalo. How we greet people is a very public demonstration of this respect. Like a lot of languages, we have informal greetings for our peers and friends and then formal greetings for people we don't know as...
A few years ago I told you about my grandfather's api (notebook) full of alagaupu that I wanted to study and really understand. I was going to look at twelve of those proverbs, consult with the Samoan cultural experts in my life then share with you what I had learned....
![Matai – How to become a Samoan Chief [Part 2]](https://i0.wp.com/1samoana.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/08/1samoana1.jpg?resize=400%2C250&ssl=1)
This is the second part of our series on The Path to Becoming a Samoan Chief. Please read Part 1 first, if you haven't already. Part 1 gives you a bit of background - where do matai titles come from? Who decides how your family's titles are distributed? How do you...
We've all seen it. You're Googling something to do with Samoa and you see from the search results that others have been asking questions about Samoan people, too - but they're really basic questions that you thought everybody knew the answers to by now. Surely! But...
In general, the Samoan attitude towards aging is pretty similar to other cultures. To us, old age is wisdom and accomplishment. It's a time to sit back and enjoy the spoils of life. But how do younger Samoans treat our elders? Samoan culture emphasizes alofa (love)...
I love the Samoan culture the way I love my family: I would protect and defend it with my life I don't always agree with it and sometimes we fight One aspect of our culture I always seem to be in the ring with is our matai system, or fa'amatai. On the one hand,...
Fa'alupega is often the first building block of a Samoan lauga (speech). When addressing a gathering of people, it is custom for the speaker to acknowledge all the other matai in the room, to greet each of them not just by title name, but with an acknowledgement of...
I was back of house at the Melbourne Museum, browsing their hidden Pasifika collection, when I first saw one of these. This is Samoan? I asked. Yes, came the reply... and apparently, when a group of Samoan community elders visited a few weeks earlier, they gasped and...
Samoans seem to be very body-part-conscious. You might call it modest or reserved maybe, but all my training in 'behaving so my mom, aunts and older cousins don't give me the evils' seemed to have a lot to do with how I positioned my body in specific situations. Now...
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