Academic awarded grant to research 200-years of Samoa's history

Transcript

An Auckland University academic has been awarded funding to research a key period of Samoa's history, from 1800 to 2000.

Associate Professor of the Centre for Pacific Studies, Damon Salesa, will use his Marsden Grant to explore what he calls the transformation of everyday life in Samoa.

He told Amelia Langford that Samoa's history has tended to be written from the colonisers' perspective, not that of the local people.

DAMON SALESA: What's happened in the past is most of the histories of Samoa have concentrated on colonialism and chiefly politics. So what I'm hoping to do with this grant is broaden that out, so many of the things that are really interesting and fundamental to Samoan life, like changes in technology, changes in environment and food, many of those things, we don't really know as much about those things as we should. So it's partly about broadening and deepening our understanding of what I'm calling 'ordinary life in Samoa'. So although Samoa was highly connected to other parts of the Pacific, it was quite removed from Europe and North America. So this period I'm looking at from 1800 to 2000 was a period when relatively rapid change was happening. If you think of things like the arrival of horses and cattle, the arrival of new crops.

AMELIA LANGFORD: So it's really going to cover quite a bit.

DS: A lot of it is about asking question of these sources that in some respects people haven't thought were interesting questions. (Laughs) Asking questions, for instance, about what happens when we get these intensive agricultural changes in Samoa. Historians typically haven't been very interested in that. Asking, for instance, how the life of Samoan children changed. We went from a very different notion of Samoan childhood in 1800, which was very family and village based, to a notion of Samoan childhood in the 20th century which was built around education and literacy, where you listened to the radio and you read foreign books and you learnt English. That big change is something that I think is really important for us to easily understand.

AL: So this will be invaluable for future generations, won't it?

DS:That is the plan. And one of the things about standard history, those political histories, is that they tend to age very rapidly. I often say every generation writes its own history. And it's fine for the US and New Zealand, even, because there's so many historians at work. But I think for Samoa the plan here is to build a history that will speak to multiple generations, and then allow historians to go and work on whatever they want and have something that stable and built to last, at least for a little while.

Damon Salesa says the grant will also fund an international conference and the digitisation of key Samoan archives.