Transcript
DAMON SALESA: What I intended to do was to bring together this conference a group of Samoan historians thinking about the kind of histories that haven't really been given much attention in Samoa. Everyone will know about the Mau, everyone will know about the Dawn Raids, and then Samoans have also placed a lot of emphasis on The Church, but pretty much outside of that there's lots of things that haven't received any attention. So I organised this conference with the kind of provocation of asking people to consider other things and that was kind of the big point behind it.
DOMINIC GODFREY: You've been working on this for quite sometime really haven't you? This has been at the back of your mind...
DS: I think in 2000 I began thinking about this project. Since I've been back in New Zealand since 2012 it's really been at the forefront. What can we add to our knowledge about Samoa and which will help us make sense of Samoa today, and I think because people were looking at those kinds of things - unusual things, ordinary things, social change - there was a lot in those histories that came out. You can see resonance in the present. So for instance, we had a session on the family in Samoa, and there's never really been a good historical exploration of that and that included everything from the kinds of domestic violence we see within families, thinking through kinds of the cultural relationships and how they've changed between men and women. Looking at women's histories as well, for instance women's committees and how they've changed over the last hundred years.
DG: And that change has been fairly significant in the last hundred years hasn't it?
DS: It's been enormous. It's one of the things where Samoans kind of assume that Samoans today in some way are pretty much like they used to be, even though they live in a really different context.
DG: Yeah Fa'a Samoa being a fairly static thing but it's not.
DS: Yeah. I mean my piece which I was hoping would show new things come to Samoa and they change Samoans but they don't change the fact that they are Samoan. For instance, I did a history of the arrival of electricity and the telephone, two things that Samoans don't really think about but which utterly transformed the way Samoa worked. They changed the orientations, they changed what's possible. We brought out a range of scholars, we brought scholars from Australia, some from America, from around New Zealand and then particularly we brought a big group of scholars from Samoa and so I think this is probably the largest Samoa history conference to happen outside of Samoa.
DG: So what are the next steps for you at this point?
DS: So we've got a bunch of next steps. One of them is, we're going to release most of the talks online in video form. We've got some pretty high quality recordings of them. We're going to release it in a form which is actually targeting schools and just an interested audience, not an academic audience. That's going to be through a free e-book which will probably be released early next year, and then there will also be, at some time in the future, a traditional academic volume attached to the conference.
