The scheduled time to go to the ferry for the overnight ferry to American Samoa was something like 6pm. I was originally going to drive there and leave our rental in the parking lot. Leota didn't feel comfortable leaving us to our own devices nor with us leaving our car in the lot, so he volunteered to drive us there and keep watch over our car at his house. He didn't think we needed to be there at 5, as I suggested, to ensure we weren't late. He said we could be there at 8pm and be fine. He didn't think the ferry would leave before 10 or 11pm. I was naïve, and Leota would turn out to have been optimistic.

When we told people we were taking the ferry to American Samoa, we got a variety of reactions. Some were impressed by our mettle; ours warned us of the weather and conditions. Many Samoans have never taken the ferry to American Samoa. I think it is a bit of a status thing to take the flight over the ferry, but it is also a time and comfort thing. The financial savings are not worth the trouble, and we would've paid more to avoid it if we could have.

he wait for the ferry while they loaded took several hours in a crush of humanity. No one seemed to know how the loading worked, so everyone kind of crowded in, us included. We crowded near the front until someone finally told us how to read our ticket, and we realized we would be loading among the last groups, so we got out of the way and sat down.

Families were stocking up on food for the trip, buying meals from vendors at the station. We should have done the same. At any rate, we finally boarded around 8:30 or 9. We initially thought we'd have to sit on the floor of the cafeteria, but we ultimately found seats. Josh had been worried about getting seasick and purchased Dramamine from a pharmacy in Apia.

We took the meds and slumped in our seats. Grant went wandering. I think I woke up before we even left and eventually got down on the floor with everyone else to try to sleep. The storm kicked up before we left and buffeted us all the way there. The boat continually went up and slammed down, up and slam down. It was jarring and relentless, but I never felt unsafe inside the cabin. The boat never tipped side-to-side. Just the steady up and SLAM.

I thought the only entrance to our cabin was the one on the far side of the room, as people kept climbing over sleepers throughout the night to reach it. But it turned out there was another door right behind us that just wasn't being used, except by Grant, who found it eventually during his wanderings. Josh and I didn't leave the cabin we were in, trying to stay settled, not vomit, and get some sleep.

I did in fact sleep on the floor most of night, nodding in and out of consciousness. Most of what I know that went on comes from Grant and Josh. People were laying over every available floor space, so I had no compunction about sticking out into the aisle. My main memory is of being stepped over repeatedly throughout the night. I heard the coughing, but I didn't realize it was seasick vomiting. Apparently, a guy behind us was just throwing up on the floor in front of him as he lay trying to sleep.

Grant spent the night wandering the ship and surfing the storm up top with a bunch of Samoan guys he befriended. He was sopping wet when he finally came down.

Because Samoa is now at the beginning of the day and American Samoa at the end, the trip lasted about 6 hours, and we landed the morning of the day we'd left. Very confusing. I am time-zone challenged under the best of circumstances--this was breaking my brain a bit.

I had made reservations for us at Sadie's By the Seashore, one of two decent hotels in American Samoa. I tried to book the Tradewinds, the other decent hotel, which is near the Olaga offices in American Samoa, but they were booked up. Sadie's had vacancies, and was right next to the ferry terminal, so we were set.

​When we walked out, I looked around and thought I knew where we were. We'd go to the right, and Sadie's should be right there. We walked for about 15 minutes, and I said, "wouldn't it be funny if we walked the wrong direction?" We had a running joke of some sort, so we kept walking, but after another 15 minutes, I questioned my own impeccable sense of direction and asked a guy coming out of a store. He pointed the direction we were walking, so we thanked him and kept walking. After nearly an hour, we reached the tuna canneries, which I knew were well beyond our destination. I flagged down a cab, who gave us a ride to Sadie's for $10. It was all the way back around Pago Pago Harbor from where we'd come, just a few steps to the left of the ferry. He was a retired Filipino-Samoan schoolteacher, born and raised in Samoa. I didn't have the bandwidth to chat, but Josh and Grant kept up the banter for us. Grant was fading however.

We got ourselves checked into Sadie's early and crashed out in our room. We'd tried to reach our families back home to let them know we were safe, after ominously texting "taking the ferry in a storm" before an extended radio silence. However, we were too fried to move immediately and crashed out in our room for a few hours. Then we got up, had some food, drank some Cokes over ice that would later give us serious traveler diarrhea, and sent out emails to try to make arrangements for Friday.

I reached out to Joe Ioane from Off Da Rock Tattoos, who was our main collaborator and data collection site back in 2017. I'd had to leave a week early that summer due to a family emergency and did not say goodbye properly.  I also got in touch with Joshua Naseri, who runs the Olaga programs in American Samoa and made arrangements to meet for a happy hour beer or three tomorrow.

We were at lunch in the restaurant at Sadie's when I see someone familiar. I keep looking and keep looking. I finally decide that it's Leuila Ioane, Joe's wife, and the person with his back to us therefore is probably Joe. I'd told him in my message that we were staying at Sadie's, and he'd responded, so if he was here, wouldn't he look us up? Apparently not. I finally went up to them, and indeed it was.

Joe and Uila are a powerhouse couple. They're both Army Reserve, fitness buffs, and driven entrepreneurs. When we were there in 2017, Joe was building a workshop attached to the tattoo studio for Off Da Rock Fashions, Uila's business. She designed cloths, and they had a team of seamstresses making them. I have two great handpainted ties. Joe and Uila and their kids (four now, two more since last time) all look like rock stars modeling her designs.

Anyway, I ask Joe if he can recommend a rental agency, as I'd decided we really did need a car and was about to go try to rent one. Instead, Joe offered to rent me one of his extra cars for a flat rate if I could drive manual. I definitely prefer island cars from friends when I can get them. Cuts right through the bullshit, and I trust Joe. Unfortunately, neither Josh nor Grant had any experience with stick shifts, so I would end up doing all the driving.

After lunch, we jumped into the back of Joe's truck and accompanied him on errands until he got back to his neighborhood in Ottoville. He hooked us up with the car, and I gave Josh and Grant a brief tour of Leone until we realized Grant was flagging. So we went back to Sadie's. Grant took a nap, and Josh and I went to meet Joshua Naseri in the restaurant.

We had a few beers with Josh and told him about our project in person. I'd been emailing back and forth, but this was the first time we got to meet in person, and the project is much easier to explain in person. Furthermore, he was really intrigued by the methods. His team would be able to try out data collection over the weekend, then we'd debrief on Monday and go from there.

We were thrilled. The Olaga team were locals, so they'd be able to collect data much more easily than we could.

One of the adjustments that we'd all agree should be made it that we'd pay more in American Samoa. I don't think I've mentioned the payment, but it was made very clear at the beginning of our data collection that anything but cash would be seen as colonial and paternalistic. In Samoa, we were paying $25 tala per participant for pile sorts, which seemed like a reasonable amount to our collaborators and participants. Given the exchange rate, that would be around $9.33 USD, which is both a ridiculous amount and too low for participant reimbursement. We ended up paying $25 USD in American Samoa because it felt equivalent to people, even though it wasn't and everyone acknowledged it. Weird.

Time to convalesce and watch Women's World Cup Soccer, which was being played in New Zealand and Australia, so near our current time zone. Josh and I are sports fans and looked forward to having something to watch when we weren't out and about.

Grant was still sleeping and would be down and out for most of the next two days with a fever. I was paying for that ice non-stop all day. Good times.

During our first week of the field season, we started on Saturday by meeting our housemates. The giant spider on the rim of the toilet wasn't nearly as startling as the giant centipede among the dirty dishes in the kitchen sink. I didn't have my glasses on when I got up to make coffee and thought it was an eel at first. Why an eel in the sink? I had no idea what it was and hadn't seen the size of the centipedes yet, but I ultimately recognized it as one of the main motifs in the pe'a tatau I'm studying!

Sunday is the Lord's day in Samoa, and everything is closed for the most part. Apia is a city, so it's a bit different there, but there are many villages in Samoa where even driving through on Sunday would be unwelcome because of the requirement to rest and attend to village and church duties. We took the opportunity to drive around Upolu a bit so Grant could see the sites. We stopped by the waterfall off the Cross-Island, then cruised around the east end of the island, noting the burning of plant trash taking place in every village around 5. We capped the day with a nice meal of something Grant made from this and that. It was nice to have multiple cooks in the apartment for the field season.

​We met a new collaborator during the week. Through my visit back in March, arrangements had been made for Leota Sanele to be our research assistant, interpreter, and cultural liaison. Leota is a tulafale (talking chief) from Savai'i, as well as a linguist in the Centre for Samoan Studies at NUS. In fact, Leota is his chief title, which becomes one's first name upon initiation. Leota is talking chief for the Centre for Samoan Studies and NUS as well, as we discover in a few weeks. More about him later, but the match for this project could not have been better. Together with Leota and Bernie, we revised the freelisting protocol for Samoa and made plans for data collection. Bernie would collect data on campus, Leota would collect data in Savai'i, Grant and I would travel around Upolu and recruit people, and Josh Naseri and the Olaga Project would collect data in Tutuila. 

Once we had the protocol set and paperwork revised (consent document in English and Samoan, data collection sheet in both languages), Grant Pethel (UA undergraduate research assistant) and I went around Apia looking for people to participate in the first step in the project. I began this last summer in Hawaii, when we couldn't travel to Samoa because of COVID-19. The objective was to ask people to write down all the terms that come to mind when thinking of a typical Samoan. We do this among our target group (Samoans in Samoa and the diaspora). In Hawaii, we just asked the questions verbally and gave participants tablets of notebook paper to write down terms. However, in Hawaii it was difficult to identify Samoans from other Polynesian people without weird/awkward profiling. Instead, we went to convenience stores in the known Samoan neighborhoods, to the Samoa Island at the Polynesian Cultural Center and to BYU Hawaii campus.

​Since all the terms we collected in Hawaii are from the Samoan diaspora, we repeated this activity on Upolu and Savai'i (Samoa) and Tutuila (American Samoa). I had planned the same activity in the Manu'a Islands of American Samoa as well, but we did not have time to travel there on this trip. Despite being in the Samoan Islands for 6 weeks, travel among the islands is difficult because of the limited boat and plane options and the advance planning needed to travel among them. Nonetheless, it was apparent that the terms from Samoans who had never been to Samoa were wildly different from Samoans who visited regularly or had migrated from Samoa.

d​Grant and I were most successful at the bus station and around the Cultural Arts Village, both of which are in downtown Apia. The bus station was great because there are hundreds of people waiting for dozens of busses to take them home to various parts of the island. The Cultural Arts Village was great because I have worked there before and know many of the people around there.

We were less successful when we traveled around the island. There was one day when we saw groups of people watching rugby at a school, and we probably could have recruited several people there. However, we were exhausted by that point and couldn't must the energy for another cold approach. I thought we could stop at stores along the way and at a few of the tourist stops around the island, but there were very few people at any of the stores. Furthermore, those people were working, and it seemed rude to impose on them when working (though maybe that was naïve of us). There were many people at their homes in the villages and sitting on church stoops, but without a local Samoan person to advise, I wasn't sure it would be appropriate to approach people in their yards in the villages. Usually, village-based work entails meeting with matai (chiefs) and/or faifeau (minister), which we had not done.

As a last ditch effort, we went to To Sua Trench, which is a collapsed lava tube that is used as a swimming hole and gussied up to make some money off tourists. Again, the only locals were working, so paid our money and went in, but with no one seemingly free to interview, we went swimming in the hole and checked out the other tourist-friendly features. Too bad we didn't have our masks and fins with us though because swimming in the lava tube was way cool, and I would have liked to dive down and explore more.

​By the end of the week, our team had collected terms in Upolu and Savai'i and a few from American Samoa. We finished the American Samoa sample as we transitioned to the next stage and had to go back and confirm some assumptions made because of time constraints. When we had the opportunity to travel to Savai'i the weekend after Leota collected the terms, it would be our only chance to conduct the next phase of research, so we had to proceed even though we had not yet confirmed saturation in Tutuila. Fortunately, when we received more data from Tutuila, there were no new terms that were mentioned with enough frequency to have made it to the next round (the pile-sorting activity, which I'll explain in a future post).

The terms collected at our various sites each had some distinctive terms, making the objective of saturation problematic. The concept of saturation means that eventually additional interviews don't elicit new terms. However, by including the diaspora as part of our target group, we realized saturation was impossible, as every place that Samoans live (e.g., Samoa, American Samoa, Hawaii, New Zealand, mainland US, etc.) has a few new terms. Saturation among native Samoans in the Samoan Islands, on the other hand, was reached pretty quickly, and there was considerable overlap in the terms people provided us, as opposed to the list of terms we gave them to choose from.

In Samoa we collected the "free lists" differently. My collaborators were concerned that asking Samoans to simply write down terms associated with typical Samoanness would be difficult for a number of reasons. Bernie was born in Samoa but raised in New Zealand, and she understands both the Western and the Samoan mind. She could do this method in New Zealand as I did in Hawaii but not in Samoa. Leota was born and raised in Samoa and has only traveled out of Samoa once, to visit family in New Zealand; and he agreed completely with Bernie. The issues were language and custom. For Samoans, writing is not a custom, considering they were a preliterate society until ~200 years ago. They do not see the point in writing about their culture when they live it daily. Moreover, Samoans main ethos (and this came out of our research and from Bernie and Leota) is hospitality, so they are generally eager to please. Thus, they are also likely seek to write what think researchers are looking for and not much else.

Instead, we gave them a partial list of terms that typifies Samoans according to the literature from which to choose. We drew on previous research by Dr. Samau, as well as unpublished work by Leota Sanele. Both have explored similar topics in their work, making these terms theoretically and culturally relevant. We compiled a short list of terms and added several blank lines after the list. We asked participants to circle each term they identify with typical Samoanness and to write down at least six additional terms not on our list. The lists were translated by Leota and checked by Bernie, and bilingual participants indicated to us that the consent and survey made sense to them in both languages.

All good stuff, right?