American Samoa's culture: faʻa Samoa, kept in law and in the Samoan language

What faʻa Samoa asks of a family

The unit of Samoan life is the ʻaiga, the extended family, which takes in relatives by blood and by marriage or adoption and can reach across villages and islands. At its head is a matai, chosen by consensus within the family, who holds its titles and its property in trust. NOAA's marine sanctuary, which works with the villages, lists what faʻa Samoa consists of: ʻaiga, tautala Samoa (the language), gafa (genealogy), lotu (church) and faʻalavelave, the ceremonial and family obligations a household owes.

Respect, faʻaaloalo, runs through all of it. The National Park Service, whose park sits on leased village land, describes elders as the keepers of family knowledge and central to decisions, and the village as a place where fishing and farming are done together and resources are shared. Faʻa Samoa extends to posture and movement. A person says tulou when passing in front of someone seated, and eating or drinking while walking through a village is treated as disrespectful. Hosts answer for their guests and can be fined by the village authorities for a guest's breach of custom.

Most villages keep a short period of prayer in the early evening, called the sa, announced by a bell or a conch shell, during which travellers should not stop in the village. Appointed guardians, the aumaga, may stand by the road to see that the curfew is kept.

The territory's constitution makes it government policy "to protect persons of Samoan ancestry against alienation of their lands and the destruction of the Samoan way of life and language," and it names "traditional Samoan family organization" among the things legislation may protect. More than 90% of the land is held communally by families, and it cannot pass to anyone outside them.

How the Samoan language holds its ground

Samoan and English are both official, and the 2020 census shows which one is spoken at home.

Outside Samoan language and culture classes, instruction in public schools is in English. Britannica describes a population heavily influenced by television, music and food from the United States, with faʻa Samoa preserved alongside, and most American Samoans are bilingual. School is compulsory from 6 to 18. Higher education on the islands means American Samoa Community College, founded in 1970 on Tutuila, and university study usually means Hawaii or the mainland.

Samoan itself has two registers that matter socially. The alphabet has 14 letters, plus H, K and R for loanwords, and the glottal stop is written with the ʻokina. In casual speech among equals a t is often pronounced k, so tautala, to speak, becomes kaukala. The other register is formal: a dignified vocabulary, gagana faʻaaloalo, used in oratory and ceremony and when speaking to elders or to people of rank. Different words apply to the body and belongings of a chief than to those of an untitled person. The orators who command that vocabulary are the tulāfale, the talking chiefs.

Manuʻa keeps its own sound. Its people traditionally spoke with a t between a light aspirated t and a soft d, and in Samoan oratory Manuʻa is where Samoan and Polynesian culture begins.

Who holds a title and what it is worth

A title is bestowed at a ceremony, and the ʻava ceremony comes first. It is the central ritual of Samoan ceremony and precedes every important occasion, the bestowal of titles among them, with its protocol set down gesture by gesture. ʻAva, the drink made from the kava plant, is prepared by the aumaga in a tanoa, a round wooden bowl supported on many short legs, and brought to each participant with set gestures and phrases. The same ceremony opens every important occasion.

The National Park Service describes the ʻie tōga, fine mats, as the goods of weddings, funerals and the bestowing of chiefly titles. In ritual exchange women give fine mats and siapo, bark cloth beaten from mulberry bark and painted with brown natural dye in patterns of plants, shells, fish, turtles and hibiscus; men give woodwork and red feathers.

The formal presentation of gifts, the faʻaaloaloga, follows a fixed order at weddings, title installations, funerals and the opening of a house or church. Religious representatives receive first, then chiefs in order of rank. A standard presentation, the sua, combines a drink with money in it, a tray of food and a box of corned beef or chicken, and then fine mats, the largest of which run 25 to 30 metres long.

Canned food has entered that exchange by its own route. Pisupo, named after pea soup, one of the first canned foods on the islands in the nineteenth century, is now the word for canned corned beef, which is given as a gift at weddings and birthdays.

What the body and dress carry

Men and women are both tattooed. A man's tattoo, the soga'imiki, covers the lower body and upper legs in dense geometric patterns and is applied without anaesthetic; a woman's is the malu.

Everyday dress is the lavalava, a wrapped cloth worn by men and women, with a T-shirt and sandals. Women's formal dress is the puletasi, a matching skirt and tunic in Samoan designs. Men's lavalava for official uniforms tend to be plain. For ceremony there is the tuiga, a headdress of feathers and shells on a base of human hair, once reserved for a high chief's son or daughter.

Dances follow status as well. The siva is the female dance of slow hands and feet. The sasa is danced seated, to a drum. Men perform the faʻataupati, the slap dance, in a group without music. The taualuga closes a celebration and is danced by a chief's son, the manaia, or daughter, the taupou, in fine mats and red feathers. The National Park Service features the siva and the taupou's headdress among the images it uses to introduce the islands' people.

Samoan society also recognises the faʻafafine, people assigned male at birth who take a feminine gender role, though some churches and traditional leaders do not accept them. A society of faʻafafine is based in Pago Pago, and the player Jaiyah Saelua was on the field for American Samoa's first World Cup qualifying win.

How the fale and the legends mark a place

The house form most associated with faʻa Samoa is the fale, an open house with no walls, where as many as 20 people may sleep on the floor and where the family sits and talks during the day. NOAA's sanctuary poster sets the fale beside the ʻava bowl and the fautasi, the long rowing boat, as the three objects of Samoan life it chose to draw. The form has been taken into public building too. The Fono's second home in Fagatogo, opened in 1973, was a beehive-shaped complex modelled on the fale; it was demolished in 2017.

A child may be named for a trait, such as Malosi, strong, or Vave, fast; for a religious phrase; for an event; or for an object, and Tala, the dollar, is one. Traditional medicine, massage with plant leaves, is often tried before hospital medicine.

At Vaitogi on Tutuila, a legend tells of an old blind woman and her granddaughter who leapt from the cliff in hunger and became a shark and a turtle. Villagers still perform a chant there meant to call the two animals to the surface, and the National Park Service has recorded visitors' surprise when one of them appears. In the national park's forest the flying fox is held to be the forest's guardian.

What goes into the Sunday umu

Sunday is a day of rest, and families gather for an afternoon meal cooked in the umu, the traditional oven. Elders eat first, then the younger members, then the children. The umu can hold a whole pig, crayfish, fresh seaweed, taro and breadfruit, and luʻau, coconut cream wrapped in taro leaves and baked until the whole parcel can be eaten. Coconut runs through the cooking. Cocoa, koko, is grown and drunk and cooked into koko alaisa, cocoa rice.

Farming for the family table still supplies much of it, and Britannica records that local production nearly meets the territory's own needs: taro, bananas, breadfruit, coconuts and yams, grown in family gardens.

Where the churches fit

The London Missionary Society arrived in 1830, and Christianity became part of faʻa Samoa as missionaries matched their teaching to Samoan respect for elders. The Pew Research Center counts 98.3% of the population as Christian: 59.5% Protestant, 19.7% Catholic and 19.2% other Christian. The Congregational Christian Church in American Samoa is the main Protestant church.

Later arrivals have grown. Seventh-day Adventists came in 1895 and were followed by Pentecostal churches, the Nazarenes, Jehovah's Witnesses and the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, which claimed 16,512 members in April 2023. The Catholic Diocese of Samoa-Pago Pago was created in 1982 and has its cathedral in Tafuna. Church comes first in the ceremonial order as well: in a faʻaaloaloga the religious representatives are presented to before the chiefs.

Why football became the territory's game

The two Samoas share a language and a people, and the territory guards the name: when Western Samoa renamed itself Samoa in 1997, American Samoa protested that the change diminished its own Samoan identity, and many American Samoans still say Western Samoa. The name itself is usually explained as "holy centre," from sa and moa. The two follow different sports. Independent Samoa took rugby and cricket from New Zealand; American Samoa, whose emigrants mostly go to Hawaii and the mainland, took American football and baseball. Rugby had been played since 1924 and was overshadowed by football from the 1970s.

The result is visible in the National Football League. As of 2010 thirty ethnic Samoans, all from American Samoa, were playing in it, with more than 200 in Division I college football, and estimates put a Samoan man's chance of reaching the league at 40 to 56 times that of other Americans. At the 2016 Republican National Convention the territory's delegation described it as "the greatest exporter of NFL players."

In association football the men's team lost 31 to 0 to Australia in a World Cup qualifier on 11 April 2001, then beat Tonga 2 to 1 on 22 November 2011 for its first World Cup qualifying win, with Saelua in the side. The campaign became the 2014 documentary Next Goal Wins and a 2023 feature film.

The outside world has written about Samoan culture for a century. Margaret Mead arrived in American Samoa on 17 August 1924 for the fieldwork behind Coming of Age in Samoa, published in 1928 and argued over ever since, and a stop in Pago Pago by Somerset Maugham produced the story "Rain." Samoans mark their own occasions on their own dates: Flag Day on 17 April celebrates the day of the Tutuila cession in 1900 and the first raising of the territory's own flag in 1960.