Word: samoan
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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There was always the chance that Sonny Bill Williams would be special. Old-timers remember his maternal grandfather, Bill Woolsey, as one of the toughest men to wear the New Zealand rugby league jersey. Williams, who's part Samoan, started playing at the age of eight for Auckland's Mt. Albert club and was soon turning heads with precocious displays of power and skill. He was in primary school when spotted by a scout working for the Australian National Rugby League club Canterbury, which brought him over to Sydney's southwest when he was 15. Three years later, Williams...
...10th Festival of Pacific Arts in Pago Pago during July and August. More than any other event, this festival (held every four years; the next will be in Honiara, Solomon Islands) has helped shape the region as an arc of creativity. "It's a positive thing," says Samoan - New Zealand hip-hop artist King Kapisi, "to have Pacific island communities meet up at one place and say, Listen, we're still here and giving respect to our heritage. Once you lose your culture, you don't know where you come from...
...Creative connectivity was the festival's theme. Some artists, like Samoan-New Zealander Graham Fletcher, found the similarities between cultures more striking than their differences. Sharing accommodation with Maori and Tongan artists in the New Zealand compound, "We spent all night talking, basically," Fletcher recalls. "It's amazing the connection between all of our languages and customs and everything. We're much closer than we think...
...self-discovery. Raised on Badu, Saibai and Thursday islands, this grandson of a pearl diver grew up with stories of how his grandmother's side of the family had migrated to Torres Strait from American Samoa; his grandfather's people originally came from Western Samoa. While his affinity with Samoan culture and language is hardly surprising - "I'm blending in really well" - there is still much to learn, he says: "So why did they move to Torres Strait and settle up there? It's one of the things I want to find out while I'm here...
...Samoan rapper King Kapisi would no doubt chime with these sentiments. For the King, a.k.a. Bill Urale, returning to the Pacific his family left to live in Wellington, New Zealand has brought mixed feelings. In the muscular rhythms of songs like Screams From Da Old Plantation, Urale presents Pacific culture as something to be contested, interrogated and recontextualized. "The thing I don't actually agree with," he says, "is how religion has become part of Samoa's culture. Personally, I think that culture and religion should be apart. Culture should be culture and religion should be religion. I'm just...