Acknowledgements
and Editors’ Notes

 

Books like this don’t come together without the resources, hands-on work and tapua’iga (prayerful support) of a lot of people. Together with their Highnesses, Afioga Tui Atua Tupua Tamasese Ta’isi Efi and Masiofo Filifilia Imo Tamasese, the editorial team wishes to acknowledge all our families and friends who have contributed to the coming to life of this book – from the time of the 2010 Vailele Retreat that began this project through to the preparation of the final manuscript.

We acknowledge the contribution of all who attended and participated in the 2010 Vailele Retreat. We are grateful to all our chapter contributors for agreeing to be part of this collection, and to Auckland University Press (AUP) and Victoria University Press (VUP) for permission to republish the poems. Our deepest gratitude to Monsignor Professor Dr Theophilus Okere for accepting our invitation to write the foreword for this book.

We also acknowledge the work of our cover design team (Wendy Percival and Galumalemana Steven Percival of Tiapapata Art Centre, and Sam Bunny of Huia Publishers) and His Highness Tui Atua and Brian Morris for their contributions to designing the final cover and writing the accompanying narrative explaining its key message and motifs.

We acknowledge Rev. Iosefa Tiata for his time and thoughts during the early discussions on Tui Atua’s original essay and the retreat; Professor Alison Jones and Dr Patricia O’Brien for their much-valued editorial support; and Fabiefara Filo Masoe, Lotoata Shelagh Salote Saumaleula Lote and Kathleen Ata Samu for their tireless assistance in getting the references and translations checked.

We acknowledge all the staff of the Samoa Head of State Office for their administrative support.

We are grateful to the Samoa Cultural Restoration Committee and the Samoa Gaualofa Charitable Trust for the generous grants to help pay for much-needed research support early in the project. These grants ensured we were able to keep the price of the book affordable.

Lastly, we are grateful to Huia Publishers for seeing potential in this project, for their warmth, patience, mana and professional excellence while working together, and their willingness to publish the Samoa Gaualofa Charitable Trust logo alongside Huia’s own on the back cover. The gesture is deeply symbolic.

***

This book adopts the Samoan spelling conventions of the early missionary and linguist Reverend George Pratt, unless quoted directly from elsewhere, in his Grammar and Dictionary of Samoan–English, English–Samoan. A short glossary of Samoan terms is provided in the text. Only Samoan terms used by the prose essayists (not the poems) are included in the glossary and only if it was considered necessary to expand on the gloss provided by that author or if the term was of such significance that including it in the glossary would help the non-Samoan reader. His Highness Tui Atua provided invaluable advice on the wording of the glossary definitions, and especially for those terms not found in Reverend George Pratt’s dictionary.

Where it was considered necessary non-English, non-Samoan terms or phrases used by prose essayists are given a brief definition or gloss in-text.

Within this collection, some authors have used diacritic marks and glottal stops, and others have not. Except where the use differs from Pratt, we have left these decisions up to the respective authors.

Unless authors have italicised indigenous Pacific words for emphasis, no indigenous Pacific word is italicised in this book. This is to make the point that these indigenous Pacific terms are used today as a normal part of contemporary Pacific speech and writing.

Because of the creative nature of poems and the fact that all are republications from elsewhere, the spelling conventions used in the originals have been kept.

Readers will also notice that author names may vary slightly between chapters and the biographical notes and elsewhere. This is mainly where the author has a Samoan matai or tāupou title and the author has decided to use their title in one place but not the other.

Readers are encouraged to read the book chronologically, beginning in particular with chapter one, which is the essay that all other essays make reference to.

This book adopts the style of the Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association, Sixth Edition, to reference written sources. There is no in-text referencing, full citations are provided in footnotes, and the abbreviated term “ibid” (meaning in the same place) is used to refer to the work cited in the preceding footnote.