Abstract
In December 1839, the London Missionary Society (LMS) launched Samoa’s first newspaper, O le Sulu Samoa (Sulu) from the village of Falelatai, Samoa. Written in the Gagana Samoa (Samoan language), the monthly periodical was compiled and printed by a community of Indigenous Pacific and European writers and printers associated with the LMS Samoa church. Its readership proudly claimed the Sulu as one of the earliest Pacific newspapers, despite its magazine format, and although ideological, cultural, linguistic and gendered tensions were rife, Indigenous Pacific writers drew on their literary histories to express themselves in new textual ways. This decolonial reimagining of the Sulu therefore conceives the Sulu archive as a historical record, a repository, a contact zone, a lifeline, a living document and a harbinger. It is also, simultaneously, an entangled agent of British imperial power, and a champion of Indigenous voices that refutes that power. This Pacific Studies thesis advocates for a Samoan and Pacific historiography that is responsive to Samoan and Pacific subjectivities. It does this by shining a light on the writing of Indigenous Pacific writers and mobilises multiple decolonial reading strategies as highly productive modes of Indigenous Samoan knowledge production and historical recall.
Chapter One introduces the Sulu newspaper, the research objectives and the cultural, historical and literary contexts. From Chapter Two onwards, each chapter demonstrates different ways to engage Indigenous Pacific language archives by using a Samoan method as the central approach, or in combination with another, to engage the Sulu archive. Chapter Two applies Ann Stoler’s (2008) Reading along the Archival Grain to decolonise the Sulu archive; this process renders the Sulu collection from an entangled colonial archive to an expansive Aiga - family of Indigenous Pacific texts. The chapter historizes the theft of church records and advocates for the return of stolen church records. Chapter Three uses the Gagana Samoa as a philosophical paradigm and a method of analysis. It traces the epistemic tensions of representing the Gagana Samoa in textual form and its implications for contemporary Indigenous research. Chapter Four traces the Lupe Faalele transnational movement of the Sulu as a message and a messenger. It traces the routes taken by the newspaper and its writers and applies Benedict Anderson’s idea of ‘imagined communities (2006) to understand its role in fostering communities. Chapter Five reframes the Sulu archive as a family map by applying Aboriginal poet and scholar Natalie Harkin’s ‘Archival-Poetics’ remapping (2014) and Upolu Lumā Vaai’s (2015) Faitau Faausuga reading method. In this fifth chapter, I centre my Great-grandmother Faleū Tuigamala as an instrumental figure in local and transnational LMS Samoa work. I do this by engaging with the Sulu writing of family members to draw attention to the integral yet visibly marginal role of the Au Tapua’i – the support network, whose unreported activities are very much central to evangelical mission, including the production of the newspaper itself. Chapter Six is a mixed media travelogue that traces tulagavae (footsteps) of Sulu writers and LMS Samoa people who travelled through London. The diarised writing style mirrors that of travel writers in the Sulu, engaging a self-reflective positionality that thinks with one’s feet. This chapter follows Tuaopepe Albert Wendt’s “Art of Remembering” (1987, p.7) approach which includes critical and creative strands of historical recall. Ultimately, this thesis is a rallying call to reclaim, recover and reengage our Pacific Indigenous literature.