Samoan Quotes

Pardon me, is this some kind of social experiment? You want me to get a hundred and forty-four Samoans and cram them into your cabin with a case of whiskey?

We need a bigger gun.” “We need a shower,” Raphael said. “Gun first. Shower later.” Ten minutes later I walked into the Order’s office. A group of knights standing in the hallway turned at my approach: Mauro, the huge Samoan knight; Tobias, as usual dapper; and Gene, the seasoned former Georgia Bureau of Investigations detective. They looked at me. The conversation died. My clothes were torn and bloody. Soot stained my skin. My hair stuck out in clumps caked with dirt and blood. The reek of a dead cat emanated from me in a foul cloud. I walked past them into the armory, opened the glass case, took Boom Baby out, grabbed a box of Silver Hawk cartridges, and walked out. Nobody said a thing.

Is heaven also made in Taiwan? And does Jesus really know how to speak Samoan?

I wondered if maybe this kind of thing happened all the time in Vegas -- cars full of late-arriving passengers screeching desperately across the runway, dropping off wild eyed Samoans clutching mysterious canvas bags who would sprint onto planes at the last possible second and then roar off into the sunrise.

MISSIONARY: Look at you! You’re just wasting your life away, lying around like that. SAMOAN: Why? What do you think I should be doing? MISSIONARY: Well, there are plenty of coconuts all around here. Why not dry some copra and sell it? SAMOAN: And why would I want to do that? MISSIONARY: You could make a lot of money. And with the money you make, you could get a drying machine, and dry copra faster, and make even more money. SAMOAN: Okay. And why would I want to do that? MISSIONARY: Well, you’d be rich. You could buy land, plant more trees, expand operations. At that point, you wouldn’t even have to do the physical work anymore, you could just hire a bunch of other people to do it for you. SAMOAN: Okay. And why would I want to do that? MISSIONARY: Well, eventually, with all that copra, land, machines, employees, with all that money—you could retire a very rich man. And then you wouldn’t have to do anything. You could just lie on the beach all day.

Pacific Islanders. The culture, history, and voices of people of Hawaiian, Guamanian, Tongan, Fijian, Samoan, and Marshallese descent, and more, are largely invisible to greater American society and culture, and the needs of Pacific Islanders are often left out of discussions on the needs of Asian Americans.

to catch his breath again, he merely said ‘gun’, and it was then that I took note of the stain on the drooping folds of the pareu wrapped around his waist. In the moonlight, it had at first appeared to be dirt or perhaps red wine—though the Samoans have no taste for wine—but its crust and gleam now revealed it to be dried blood. A sight that you and I, my friend, know all too well.

Is there anywhere else to sleep tonight... Anywhere?' I pleaded. There's Mei's office, but you'll have to sleep on the floor I'm afraid.' Mei was one of the Ward 9D dietitians. 'I'll sleep on the floor any day. I'm used to it back in the Islands,' I laughed tiredly. I settled down on the floor. The three rugs I had brought to cushion my back worked surprisingly well. It was almost more comfortable than the thin mats on the cold concrete floors of the fales in Samoa. The idea of sleeping in someone's office was the best idea I had had all year. I decided that I would keep this secret to myself.

If you go to an “Asian American and Pacific Islander” event, you’re not going to see Samoans, you’re not going to see Tongans, you’re not going to see Māori. We’re half of the acronym, but not even close to half the representation. The Indigenous story is always washed away by the immigrant story. Americans are proud to say that “we’re a nation of immigrants,” but that’s also saying “f*ck the Indigenous people.” We’re proud to be mixed in Hawaii, but we need to acknowledge that that comes at the price of Indigenous people. We can support each other, but there’s a difference between inclusion and erasure.

I do have a handful of allies who will relink some of my old programs to the network once it is restored – some Samoans on Pacifica, Han Fei-tzu on Path, the Abo university on Outback.

For those still looking for a real-world example of how a minimum wage destroys jobs, there is no better example than American Samoa. In 2007 the U.S. Congress applied the federal minimum wage to Samoa, a U.S. territory. The increases walloped the Samoan economy, with the unemployed rate soaring to 30 percent and inflation hitting double digits. Its largest employer, Chicken of the Sea, shut down its Samoan canning operation completely in 2009, laying off 2,041 employees. The island’s second largest employer, StarKist, laid off 400 workers the following year with plans to lay off 400 more.

her ear. She was stick-thin and pretty, with a loose pink top that let her breasts sway and rose-colored tight pants, but other than her Vegas body, she wasn’t making any effort to look glamorous. Her brown hair hung limply to her shoulders in a mess of curls. She hadn’t put on makeup or jewelry, except for a gold bracelet that she twisted nervously around her wrist with her other hand. The whites of her eyes were lined with red. Amanda began to approach her but found her way blocked by a giant Samoan in a Hawaiian shirt, obviously a bodyguard. She discreetly flashed her badge. The man asked if she could wait, then lumbered over to Tierney and whispered in her ear. The girl studied Amanda, murmured something to the Samoan, and went back to her phone call. “Mrs. Dargon wonders if she could talk to you in her limo,” the bodyguard told Amanda. “It’s waiting outside. There’s a picture of Mr. Dargon on the door.” Amanda shrugged. “Okay.” She found the limo without any problem. Samoa had obviously radioed to the driver, who was waiting for her with the door open. He was in his sixties, and he tipped his black hat to Amanda as she got in. “There’s champagne if you’d like,” he told her. “We have muffins, too, but don’t take the blueberry oatmeal muffin. That’s Mrs. Dargon’s favorite.” Amanda smiled. “She

Ua le seʻi seu faʻaʻalo.

When they hear the term “anthropology,” they think of Margaret Mead and her sexually liberated Samoans, or Jane Goodall and her colony of chimps, not physical anthropologists and their calipers and bones.

Asians are still a small minority—14.5 million (including about one million identified as part Asian) or 4.7 percent of the population—but their impact is vastly disproportionate to their numbers. Forty-four percent of Asian-American adults have a college degree or higher, as opposed to 24 percent of the general population. Asian men have median earnings 10 percent higher than non Asian men, and that of Asian women is 15 percent higher than non-Asian women. Forty-five percent of Asians are employed in professional or management jobs as opposed to 34 percent for the country as a whole, and the figure is no less than 60 percent for Asian Indians. The Information Technology Association of America estimates that in the high-tech workforce Asians are represented at three times their proportion of the population. Asians are more likely than the American average to own homes rather than be renters. These successes are especially remarkable because no fewer than 69 percent of Asians are foreign-born, and immigrant groups have traditionally taken several generations to reach their full economic potential. Asians are vastly overrepresented at the best American universities. Although less than 5 percent of the population they account for the following percentages of the students at these universities: Harvard: 17 percent, Yale: 13 percent, Princeton: 12 percent, Columbia: 14 percent, Stanford: 25 percent. In California, the state with the largest number of Asians, they made up 14 percent of the 2005 high school graduating class but 42 percent of the freshmen on the campuses of the University of California system. At Berkeley, the most selective of all the campuses, the 2005 freshman class was an astonishing 48 percent Asian. Asians are also the least likely of any racial or ethnic group to commit crimes. In every category, whether violent crime, white-collar crime, alcohol, or sex offenses, they are arrested at about one-quarter to one-third the rate of whites, who are the next most law-abiding group. It would be a mistake, however, to paint all Asians with the same brush, as different nationalities can have distinctive profiles. For example, 40 percent of the manicurists in the United States are of Vietnamese origin and half the motel rooms in the country are owned by Asian Indians. Chinese (24 percent of all Asians) and Indians (16 percent), are extremely successful, as are Japanese and Koreans. Filipinos (18 percent) are somewhat less so, while the Hmong face considerable difficulties. Hmong earn 30 percent less than the national average, and 60 percent drop out of high school. In the Seattle public schools, 80 percent of Japanese-American students passed Washington state’s standardized math test for 10th-graders—the highest pass rate for any ethnic group. The group with the lowest pass rate—14 percent—was another “Asian/Pacific Islanders” category: Samoans. On the whole, Asians have a well-deserved reputation for high achievement.

In a story from Manihiki, the hero Maui brings back fire from Havaiki; in tales from the Marquesas, men follow their dead wives to Hawaiki or travel there in search of lost sons. A homeland and a source, it is both a paradisal land of plenty and, like Te Pō, a land of spirits and of generations waiting to be born. In most stories, Hawaiki is described as lying somewhere in the west—the direction associated in Polynesia with the passage of the dead to their last resting place—though sometimes it is said to be in the east or in the sky, or even underground. But there are also a number of real islands in the Pacific that go by the name of Hawaiki (or one of its cognates), most obviously the Big Island of Hawai‘i and the Samoan island of Savai‘i, but also the island of Ra‘iatea, in the Society Islands, which was formerly known as Havai‘i.

This idea of two distinct varieties of people (which quickly hardened into a Polynesian/Melanesian divide) turns what is, in fact, a spectrum of skin tones and peoples across the Pacific into a more or less binary division between black and white. With this binary came a tangle of other ideas about morality, intelligence, temperament, beauty, social and political complexity, even depth of time. Melanesians were routinely described by Europeans as not just dark-skinned, but “primitive” in their political, economic, and social structures. In eighteenth- and nineteenth-century accounts, they are depicted as small, dark, and mistrustful, the women “ill-favoured” and “ugly,” the men “despotic” and cruel. Banded together in small, autonomous groups, they appeared to Europeans to lack any form of law, government, or organized religion and compared unfavorably with their larger, fairer-skinned, more hierarchical neighbors the Polynesians, differing from them, in one unforgettable formulation, “as the wolf from the dog.” The term “Melanesian” had thus long served in European discourse as a marker for otherness and inferiority, and in the racially charged climate of the early twentieth century, Te Rangi Hiroa could hardly fail to be aware of this. When the anatomist J. H. Scott (the probable author of the Otago Medical School notice offering to buy Māori skeletons) asserted, “We know the Maoris to be . . . the result of the mingling of a Polynesian and a Melanesian strain,” or when Sullivan argued for a “Melanesian element” in his Tongan or Samoan data sets, Te Rangi Hiroa would certainly have recognized the subtext. And in his own early somatological studies, which were written explicitly with the work of these other men in mind, you can see him struggling with the problem.

Food is the primal symbol of social worth. Whom a society values, it feeds well. The piled plate, the choicest cut, say: We think you’re worth this much of the tribe’s resources. Samoan women, who are held in high esteem, exaggerate how much they eat on feast days. Publicly apportioning food is about determining power relations, and sharing it is about cementing social equality: When men break bread together, or toast the queen, or slaughter for one another the fatted calf, they’ve become equals and then allies. The word companion comes from the Latin for “with” and “bread”—those who break bread together. But under the beauty myth, now that all women’s eating is a public issue, our portions testify to and reinforce our sense of social inferiority. If women cannot eat the same food as men, we cannot experience equal status in the community. As long as women are asked to bring a selfdenying mentality to the communal table, it will never be round, men and women seated together; but the same traditional hierarchical dais, with a folding table for women at the foot.

No matter how far you go in life, never forget where you came from. You can't change who you are.

Blessed is the moon; it goes but it comes back.

Blessed is the moon; it goes but it comes back again.

Freedom runs faster than a Samoan cop that’s been paid to run. Freedom always run faster.

The significance of the dance in the education and socialisation of Samoan children is two-fold. In the first place it effectively offsets the rigorous subordination in which children are habitually kept. Here the admonitions of the elders change from "Sit down and keep still!" to "Stand up and dance!" The children are actually the centre of the group instead of its barely tolerated fringes.

Many of the very ancient accounts of Polynesian peoples were much alike. This indicates that they were common to the Polynesians before they separated and spread to their various islands. The Polynesian people—the Hawaiians, Tahitians, Samoans, Tongans, Marquesans, and Maori, to name the major people groups—are very close “cousins.

Also connected to this fall of the first man and woman was an animal called the Mo‘opeloa. Mo‘opeloa means The Serpent of Lies or Flattery (Mo‘o - serpent, lizard or reptile and pelo - to flatter, tell tall tales or lie). Mo‘o not only means lizard in Samoan but can mean envy.19 This crafty and lying reptile was also known as Ilioha. A part of this chant says, “The Ilioha, mischief-maker, stands on the land; He has caught the chief Kū-Honua, and Polo-Haina, the woman, the tabu chiefs of Kāne…

In the Bible, Abraham is called by God from the district of Ur in Chaldea, which is at the base of the Uratu Mountains, to move south into a new country. (The district of Ur is not to be confused with the city of Ur which was south of the promised land.) In Genesis 17:10, he is commanded by God to institute circumcision as a sign of his covenant with God. In Genesis 16, he sires a son by his slave woman Hagar called Ishmael. In Genesis 21, he sires another son by Sarah, his wife, called Isaac. In Genesis 22, Abraham passed a test of obedience to the Lord because he was willing to sacrifice his son Isaac. In the Hawaiian tradition, there is a man called Lua-Nu‘u (Nu‘u-Lua in the Samoan1), or “the second Nu‘u.” The Hawaiian legends add that he left his native homeland and moved a great distance until he reached a place called Honua-ilalo, the Southern Country. By the command of his god, Lua-Nu‘u introduced circumcision to be practiced among all his descendants. Lua-Nu‘u sired a son by his slave woman, Ahu, called Kū-Nawao (The descendants of Kū-Nawao, the Nawao people, were called the wild people) and a son, Kalani-mene-hune, by his chiefess wife Mee-haku-lani or Mee-Hiwa. He is also ordered by his god, Kāne, to go up on a mountain and perform a sacrifice.

Aloha is also a very interesting word. When broken down to its root words, aloha is: 1. Alo - The meaning of many words change over time, to find the following meanings for alo, we must go back to the ancient Samoan language (remember, the Hawaiians were also once the ancient Samoans). There were two languages in ancient Samoa, the common language and the high (chiefly/priestly) language. In the first Samoan - English dictionary, printed in 1862, alo is a chief’s child. A chief’s child was considered to be divine because the chiefs were considered to be divine.59 In the sacred high language of ancient Samoa, alo meant the son of God.60 2. Ha - breath, spirit, or life Hence, aloha means - the life or the spirit of the divine son of God. This then embodies the three parts of the One True God: the Father, Son and Holy Spirit, the One True God who created all things with his word and breathed life into all living things. To speak the word aloha to someone, then, is to say, “The spirit of the One True God be with you.” This explains why aloha is used to greet someone and to say farewell also; it is a blessing. This is the same way the Hebrews use the word, Shalom, which means divine peace. To greet someone with “Shalom” means, “The Peace of God be with you.

She had never lived in a place so white. She had been the only black girl before -in restaurants, in advanced-placement classes- but even then, she was surrounded by Filipinos and Samoans and Mexicans. Now she looked out into lecture halls filled with white kids from rural Michigan towns; in discussion sections, she listened to white classmates champion the diversity of their school, how progressive and accepting it was, and maybe if you had come from some farm town, it seemed that way. She felt the sly type of racism here, longer waits for tables, white girls who expected her to walk on the slushy part of the sidewalk, a drunk boy outside a salsa club yelling that she was pretty for a black girl. In a way, subtle racism was worse because it made you feel crazy. You were always left wonderings, was that actually racist? Had you just imagined it?

Thankfully, she can’t see me roll my eyes. “I’m half Italian. He’s half Samoan.” “But they’re practically the same, aren’t they? They’re like next door neighbors.” Wyatt helplessly chuckles. “What?” “Italy and Samonily.” Her comment furrows my brow in confusion. Nate cautiously questions, “You mean Sicily?” Nadia promptly nods and gives him a playful point. “Right! That’s where Samoans are from!

They used to play high school football together. CJ, a burly Samoan with long, curly hair, had been a decent nose tackle and earned a few letters from Division III schools, nothing like the recruitment packets and personal visits Luke had received. Still, they’d both ended up here, in an alley that smelled like wet garbage and sea air and cat piss.

In 1999, a bunch of researchers published a study of about 1,600 adults examined in order to come up with equations to estimate kidney function. Just plug in the patient’s creatinine, age (because adults tend to lose muscle mass as we get older), and gender (because men tend to have more muscle mass than women), and voila!—an estimate of kidney function. Most laboratories can do this for us now. A rising creatinine level in the blood means the kidneys are not able to pee creatinine out as well as they used to, so the person’s estimated kidney function is lower. But wait—if the patient is Black, the study determined that you have to multiply by 1.2 to get a more accurate estimate. This finding was attributed to Blacks in the study having higher muscle mass than Whites and, therefore, higher amounts of creatinine in their bodies. Laboratories report the eGFR, and just below it, the eGFR if Black. Of course one of the problems with generalizations is that they aren’t always true. In medicine, in particular, they make us lazy and we often accept them without question—especially when they are in line with our underlying assumptions and beliefs. Like the belief that Black and African are inherently different from White and European at a DNA level, a belief that dates back to the days when American researchers were measuring Black-White differences in skull size to prove Black inferiority and justify slavery. But I wonder how often health-care providers make the mental adjustment that the “race adjustment” is really a proxy for muscle mass rather than just focusing on the race of the person in front of them when they are assessing lab results. I wonder if the person in front of them were a White male bodybuilder how many would tell him the race-adjusted estimate of kidney function, or a skinny Black woman the non-race-adjusted estimate. Then too I wonder how many health-care practitioners realize that equations derived from the original study of 1,600 people only included about 200 Blacks—and no American Samoans, no Hispanics, no Asians. These groups have very different body frames, but all are simply “not Black” in our equations. The implication, then, is that only Black people are different. This shortcut has the potential for a significant negative impact on Black patients who happen to not have a high muscle mass. Patients like Book of Eli. When the non-race-adjusted eGFR is 20 (when a person can be placed on the waiting list), the race-adjusted value is closer to 25. Just as the difference between eGFRs of 20 and 10 can be several years for many patients, so can the difference between 25 and 20. Years of accruing time on the kidney transplant waiting list when thirteen people on the waiting list die every day waiting for a kidney.

Thou art fearfully and wonderfully made.” The darkness in her eyes dimmed at his words, and a smile chased away the shadows. “That’s my favourite scripture and the inspiration for my key work–” “In your Ragged Soul exhibition at the end of your final year at the academy. Yes, I know.

...and even though I wasn’t listening, wasn’t searching for it – it spoke to me. I felt it come alive under my hands. My first sculpture almost made itself. I moved on to working with stone, wood. And every time, it felt right. Y’know? It felt like–” “Home. It felt like home,” said Keahi.

Only the snake will look at its killer.

As we started to turn and walk out, the big and easy Samoan reached over and touched Henry's shoulder, the arm attached having powered the biker's head into the drywall of the Rapid City Regional Hospital. "I know you?" The Bear smiled the one-crease-at-the-corner-of-his-mouth smile. "Momentarily.

Vāve mai i le fāle, my mother said vehemently. Hurry home. She took a drag from a cigarette and walked towards the sewing machine. Her workplace and altar of worship. Before she sat down, she picked up a pair of scissors and pointed them towards me. Ma fa`apāku i luga lē gā ulu. Kāo ia, fa`akogu so`o. And how many times do I need to tell you to wrap your hair up in a bun before you leave this house? I could just bake you in an oven!

There was a flap in Fremont, California, about how to celebrate the Fourth. The city put up American flags, to be sure, but vice mayor Steven Cho thought this was not inclusive enough, so the American flag shared honors with flags from 25 other countries, including Qatar and Mongolia. San Francisco celebrates diversity with cash. In 1999, the Cinco de Mayo Carnival and Parade got $162,500, the Japanese Cherry Blossom Parade got $40,000, the American Indian Festival got $27,000, Martin Luther King Day got $21,000, Juneteenth got $13,000, Samoan Flag Day got $12,000, and the Min Sok Korean Festival got $7,500. Veterans were angry to be fobbed off with only $1,000 for Veterans Day.

Increasingly, a ‘racist’ is someone who dares to even notice general patterns of difference among groups of different continental origins. I stress the terms ‘general patterns’ and ‘different continental origins’ because a semantic trick some people play is to insist that no race is ‘pure’ and therefore race is a meaningless term, but I’ve never suggested this ‘purity’ concept and I’m not sure that anyone has. To deny that Kenyans are generally better long-distance runners than Samoans, or that Japanese students consistently score higher than Australian aborigines on intelligence tests, or that Germans have contributed more to science than Guatemalans, is to deny reality.