9

Weaving a Pacific Narrative into Understanding Women’s Underrepresentation in Politics in Samoa

Mema Motusaga and Elise Howard

In 2021, after 35 years of political stability, Samoa¹ elected its first woman to serve as Prime Minister, the Honourable Afioga Fiamē Naomi Mata’afa. Alongside Mata’afa, six women are serving in Samoa’s Parliament, the highest number since independence, with only 21 women becoming an MP since 1962. Samoa is the first country in the Pacific which has actively sought to address women’s underrepresentation in politics through temporary special measures (TSMs). The TSMs operate as a safety net to ensure a minimum of 10 per cent of parliamentarians are women (Baker 2019). The 2021 elections were only the second national elections since the introduction of the TSMs and reignited significant public debate about women’s place in politics. After a 35-year uninterrupted reign by the Human Rights Protection Party, early election results hung in the balance, and the TSMs had the potential to alter a close election result.² Designed at a time of political stability, the quota system suddenly offered potential for political gain and led to the unusual sight of public protests about women’s representation. Events reached a pinnacle when Mata’afa was sworn in as first woman prime minister inside a tent outside the doors of a locked Parliament House (Motusaga 2021). While Mata’afa carried herself calmly throughout the controversy, it was clear by the end of 2021 that her patience had been tested. During a budget debate to secure funding for gender-based violence programs, Mata’afa called on opposition members to ‘stop politicising women’ (Feagaimaali’i 2021). Her comments highlighted the fact that, while Samoa has improved women’s representation in politics, efforts to promote women’s inclusion still have potential to be tokenistic and politicised.

A common refrain in Samoa is that there is no gender inequality, that ‘o Samoa ua uma ona tofi’ (‘Samoa’s stratification is very clear’) and men and women are equal based on inheritance. In Samoan culture, women hold the highest status, called saotamaitai, and are traditionally the wealth-producers, the main fundraisers and supporters of the church, well educated and economically active. Inherited brother–sister relationships based on complementary and relational power, known as the feagaiga or tamasa, are the evidence that Samoan women hold equal status to men. Yet, the gender equality narrative is a product of homogenised ideas about what constitutes Samoan culture or the fa’asamoa (‘the Samoan way’) when, in reality, culture is constantly shifting, contested and untidy (Merry 2003; Zetlin 2014). Gender relations are complex and vary in different spaces between different family relations and have been complicated by colonial and contemporary influences.

The requirement for all political candidates to take up a masculine matai (or ‘chiefly’) title is quite rightly regarded as the main barrier to women’s participation in politics, and a ‘cultural’ barrier at that (Meleisea et al. 2015). Taking up a matai title requires women to become more like men and compete for power to participate in politics rather than draw on women’s traditional and complementary sources of power. The problem with women’s underrepresentation in politics, then, lies not in ‘cultural barriers’ themselves, but in how selectively and incompletely aspects of culture have been transmitted through narratives and reified in the Samoan Constitution. We also argue that the perpetuation of the gender equality narrative and the source of this narrative, the feagaiga, are based on an incomplete story and constrain efforts to discuss, debate and promote women’s place in politics.

Studies of women’s participation in politics have favoured Western ontologies, particularly to consider how power can be claimed, controlled or divided through changes to electoral systems, improving women’s educational levels, strengthening women’s movements or endorsing frameworks such as the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW) (Viterna et al. 2008). This conceptualisation of power comes from a conflict perspective to analyse who has control and power in a given context (Slatter 2012; Brigg et al. 2019). Key concepts in Samoan culture, however, offer a different potential—for power to be conceived as complementary, relational and balanced due to feagaiga (‘complementary brother–sister relationships’) and tausi le vā (‘respectful and relational space’). These key cultural concepts are currently used to exclude rather than include women from political spaces.

Plate 9.1: The Samoan delegation to the Ending Violence Against Women and Girls Reflection Summit in Cancun, Mexico, 2022

Note: Left to right: Abby Erikson, Gutu Faasau, Mema Motusaga, Gabrielle Apelu and Fagalima Tuatagaloa.

Source: Mema Motusaga.

Plate 9.2: The Samoan community coming together to support gender equity at all levels

Note: Taken during the Ministry of Women, Community and Social Development’s 16 Days of Activism campaign that was held from 25 November to 10 December 2022.

Source: Mema Motusaga.

This chapter explores the contradictions between beliefs that there is no gender inequality in Samoa and the fact that women can be politicised and treated as tokens. We seek to reclaim women’s traditional sources of power to ensure their participation in politics, where women are not politicised or treated as tokens, as was seen in the recent election in Samoa, but rather valued and offered equal reverence to men. We explore the duality of unchanging narratives and constitutions alongside significant cultural shifts, to consider how this affects women’s participation in politics. We focus on the shift in the feagaiga relationship due to the arrival of missionaries from the 1830s in Samoa and the design of the Westminster system by colonial and matai actors. We take a view of culture as contested and dynamic, constructed by many factors: institutions, domestic and external actors, political arrangements, legal structures and historical trajectories (Merry 2003; Jolly 1992). This view requires us to consider ‘spaces of change, contestation and to analyse the links between power, practice and values’, and the interplay of institutional changes with gender roles and representation (Merry 2003: 71; Zetlin 2014). The chapter concludes by considering how to shift popular narratives by drawing on the concept of vā or relational, respectful and sacred space, to reconstruct political spaces to enable women’s participation. Given women’s underrepresentation is not unique to Samoa, the chapter will consider the implications for other locations, by floating the possibility of rethinking ontologies to re-story politics as a relational and respectful rather than combative site of power.

Re-storying: Our perspectives

Writing from the perspectives of a Samoan and a non-Indigenous Australian author, this chapter draws on the authors’ academic research, practitioner experiences and many conversations to develop shared understandings from insider and outsider perspectives. These conversations explored the entanglement of Indigenous, missionary and colonial influences that privileged some master narratives over others and reinforced women’s political underrepresentation today. The first author, Dr Mema Motusaga, holds a powerful position as the CEO of the Ministry of Women, Community and Social Development in Samoa and is a well-known advocate for women’s leadership and the prevention of violence against women. Samoa is a place where power, sourced through familial ties and status, comes with great obligations and actions, which reflect not just on individuals but also on extended families. The second author, Elise Howard, is a non-academic staff member at The Australian National University, an institution still working to dismantle its patriarchal and discriminatory structures. The two authors’ relationship started online in 2020 during Covid-19 lockdowns. At that time, Dr Motusaga had just published an article about gender quotas in Samoa and shared how, by putting herself out there, she was subject to much scrutiny and criticism within Samoa, as an insider commenting on her own country, especially when her ideas pushed gender boundaries. Elise naively expressed surprise at this and highlighted how the conversations in Canberra were so focused on decolonisation and questioning by others and herself as to whether she was ‘the right person’ as a white Australian woman to be doing research with Pacific women. Mema and Elise laughed together about how women are criticised and scrutinised, regardless of their insider or outsider status, not always by men, but many times by other women, too. We noticed how there are ways to discount our words through one justification or another. It is clear though that for Mema as an insider the stakes are higher. Mema suggested the way to overcome this was to collaborate, as together our voices could be stronger, so our working relationship was born with the intent to increase each other’s power. Our working relationship has since evolved into friendship, as we were able to visit each other post-Covid restrictions.

We draw on a counselling and social work practice known as ‘re-storying’. Re-storying has two stages. The first requires revisiting and deconstructing common narratives to understand how they create dominant beliefs and the consequences of those narratives. The second stage is to reframe narratives by drawing out new meanings from old stories, to identify beneficial pathways forward (White and Epston 1990). While re-storying is used as an individual therapy practice, the concept has been applied to decolonise the history curriculum (Ragoonaden et al. 2020), as a pedagogical practice (Clandinin and Connelly 2000) and in narrative inquiry (Ollerenshaw and Creswell 2002). We draw on this idea for the possibility of re-storying master narratives not just to derive new meanings, but also to reclaim the narratives that could contribute to the construction of gender-equal political spaces. Given relationality is strongly valued in Samoa, this will require much public deliberation and debate to contest and reframe shared narratives. In this context, we propose re-storying as a relational and respectful process of reclamation and restitution that celebrates story-holders as the experts with the power to revisit and reframe women as agentic political subjects.

Re-storying gender equality narratives

Narratives are politically important. Narratives construct gendered political subjects, shape individual and collective identities, reinforce common beliefs and limit notions of what is possible (Patterson and Monroe 1998). Narratives shift over time, are selective and can be used to justify the way things are done (Frederick 2013). Political leaders employ narratives of a universally accepted culture as a tool to build support and legitimacy, or for unifying diverse groups in nation-building (Merry 2003; Jolly 1992). Resisting outsider influence is a popular political strategy to build constituency support by demonstrating strength against threats to nationhood (Merry 2003). For example, initiatives to promote gender equality across the Pacific are often resisted as a Western threat to the Pacific way of life (Slatter 2012). This is regularly enforced through speech acts by leaders who reify culture in ways that privilege masculine power sources while ignoring the possibilities that culture offers for women’s empowerment. Narratives are a key means of transmitting knowledge and maintaining understanding of key cultural concepts in Samoa. Narratives also underpin approaches to improving women’s participation in politics that emphasise ‘cultural barriers’ as a problem.

As Zetlin (2014) has pointed out, while narratives that position culture as the key barrier to women’s political participation are widely shared, they can also be contested and can shift each time they are revisited. In Samoa, some key changes had political consequences for women, particularly the arrival of missionaries in the early 1800s and the shift in 1962 to independence from New Zealand administration, which had been in place since 1914. These periods led to significant transformations in women’s power, yet the master narrative that there is no gender inequality in Samoa largely remains. At the same time, neocolonial development actors have had much influence on gender policy in Samoa, often bringing models that butt up against rather than embrace key aspects of Samoan culture: Christian values and the fa’asamoa. For example, while the fa’asamoa and Christian values are part of the guiding principles in the national strategy on gender equality and are enshrined in the national Constitution,³ in 2018, the UN Human Rights Council identified the meaning that is ascribed to the Samoan way as the ‘root cause’ of gender inequality (OHCHR 2018: 18). In 2020, the CEDAW expert committee, in its review of Samoa, described the constitutional amendment to recognise Samoa as a Christian country as a ‘step backwards’ for human rights (OHCHR 2018: para. 20).

Narratives, linguistic practices and cosmologies can also construct gendered political spaces. In our discussion of space, we draw on Samoan concepts of vā (‘space’) and vā fealoai (‘spatial relations’) as the core of the fa’asamoa and key to determining who can be seen as a leader. Vā fealoai determines the way that individuals and groups can relate to one another and informs how language should be used to respect and confirm relations (Koya Vaka’uta 2017). Vā also dictates sociocultural roles and responsibilities, and the closer the vā, the greater are the responsibilities and obligations (Koya Vaka’uta 2017). Space can be physical but also intangible, spiritual and cosmological, meaning that space can be embodied, felt, believed and/or perceived. We also draw on the concept of gendered space employed in sociology, anthropology and feminist political ecology that centralises the role of space (whether human-constructed architecture or landscapes and natural environments) and the cultural rules (informal or formal) that create gendered boundaries around those spaces. Gendered spaces organise gender relations, particular ways of being a man or a woman and influence access to different resources and ‘socially valued’ knowledge (Phillips and Ilcan 2000; Rocheleau et al. 1996; Spain 1993: 137). In Samoa, women’s status and ways of operating are fluid and shift depending on their relations to others (Latai 2014). Women’s roles and status depend on whether they are wives or sisters, chiefly or untitled, and this dictates which spaces women and men may occupy in the fale (‘house’), aiga (‘extended family’) and fono (‘village council’) (Latai 2014). Missionaries sought to introduce distinctions between domestic (feminine) spaces and public (masculine) roles based on ideas of nuclear rather than extended families (Latai 2014). However, as the following sections illustrate, distinctions between feminine and masculine spaces have mainly been taken up in local and national-level governance.

The source of the equality narrative: The feagaiga

The feagaiga is the foundation of narratives in Samoa that there is no gender inequality. While feagaiga is often referred to as a covenant⁴ or sacred relationship between brother and sister, this is deeper than a reciprocal dyadic relationship and part of the fa’asamoa system of organising social life, underpinned by the belief that secular governance and action require moral or spiritual support (Latai 2015; Schoeffel 1995).

The fa’amatai, or chiefly system, and fa’asamoa established structures and processes that prescribe a way of life and being. The fa’asamoa helps each person know where they are positioned as a Samoan and how they should relate to one another (Fairbairn-Dunlop 1991; So’o 2008). Matai hold secular power (pule) and are responsible for governance and action, while tamatai or tamasa (‘sacred offspring’) hold and transmit spiritual power (mana) and are responsible for spiritual guidance or support (Fairbairn-Dunlop 1991; Latai 2014; Tagaloa 1997). The tamatai hold saotamaitai titles. These sacred spiritual powers were considered equal, offered equal opportunities for status enhancement (Fairbairn-Dunlop 1991) and underpinned the belief that women held high and sacred status and occupied an important place within the fa’asamoa.

Matai are also expected to mentor and encourage women to take up leadership positions within the community, including chiefly titles. Women who descend from matai lineages may take on the title of taupou (or ceremonial virgin), which is equivalent to the chiefly titles bestowed upon the brothers. These ascribed statuses come with assigned responsibilities, under which women, according to Tagaloa (1997), are known as the healers, teachers, priestesses, makers of wealth and peacemakers. In contrast, men are the sister’s protector, the decision-makers and the spokesperson for the family and are given responsibility for all the heavy duties such as cultivating the land, building and being warriors. While this is a complementary relation, an important distinction is that women’s power lies in spiritual and moral authority in contrast to the secular authority and action required of her brother (Schoeffel 1995).

Before missionary contact, brother–sister relationships could extend to all offspring of matai within a village, or ‘circle of chiefs made as one’ (Tcherkézoff 2015: 167), or beyond a village, due to polygamous practices designed to create powerful dynasties (Schoeffel 1995). Brothers must ensure that their sisters are fully satisfied with his service, because of the belief that the sister, as the sacred child, has the power to curse him if she is not pleased. Brothers must also refer to sisters for final approval before any decision is enacted (Latai 2014; Tagaloa 1997).

Polygamous practices were central to the feagaiga relationship and matai sources of power. Marriage to high-ranking virgins was used to establish alliances and maximise connections with genealogically well-established families (Schoeffel 1995). Missionaries regarded such practices as immoral and sought to improve women’s status through monogamous stable marriage and emphasised dutiful wifehood and domestic life. However, wives were the lowest status group within a village (Tcherkézoff 2015) and ceremonial rather than domestic roles were the key means for women to acquire status (Schoeffel 1995). In promoting monogamy and encouraging domesticity, missionaries effectively wiped out pathways for women to gain status through the feagaiga relationship. Missionaries, misunderstanding that women’s power came only through rank rather than also through gendered roles, emphasised women as wives, while Samoan culture had emphasised women as sisters.

In addition, the interpretation of feagaiga as a covenant led to the pastor replacing the sister as the closest spiritual connection to God, while the matai source of secular power remained unchanged (Schoeffel 1995). Early Bibles created by missionaries also referred to women as fafine (‘female’ or ‘wife’) rather than tamaitai (‘lady’) (Motusaga 2016). The distinction is important because tamaitai were thought to hold equal status to the matai, while fafine has several negative connotations. ‘Fafine’ refers to a woman who is either a wife from outside the village without chiefly lineage (and therefore low status) or no longer a virgin (and therefore a potential source of shame) (Tcherkézoff 2015). The term can therefore be used to deliver an insult, particularly to a high-ranking woman or a tamaitai (Schoeffel 1995; Tcherkézoff 2015). As a participant in Mema’s research explains:

[I]f you have a look at how the bible was translated the word ‘tamaitai’ was not used at all. The missionaries used the word ‘fafine’ all throughout the bible. Why? Because they didn’t want the word tamaitai to be kept because to the Samoans the use of the word tamaitai associates not only with the female’s responsibilities within the family and society but also promotes the status of the sister as feagaiga. (Motusaga 2016: 87)

Tamaitai may bear chiefly titles, however, they inherit the saotamaitai title, which is the equivalent of the chiefly title. While this is less established in contemporary times, tamaitai are still given greater status than outsider wives, undertake ceremonial duties and have obligations to their village and for maintaining founding titles (Tcherkézoff 2015).

In contemporary practices, the secular and spiritual power division has translated into women’s secondary status in decision-making. Matai councils or the fono at local levels have responsibility for community-level governance—a role now enshrined in the Constitution. Decision-making meetings are held by matai first, followed by consultations with the women’s council in the village (Motusaga 2016). In some locations, women reported that ‘this is how we have done it all along’ (Interview participant in Motusaga 2016). Yet, this practice is now more token than substantial and not reflective of the feagaiga relationship in which a brother is beholden to his sister’s decisions. Yet, pride in the equality narrative grounded in the value of feagaiga offers powerful perceptions that these practices are the substantive and the right way that things are done.

Political systems that require women to become more like men

The Samoan legislature is celebrated as a successful hybrid model of traditional Westminster governance (Meleisea et al. 2015; So’o 2008). A democratic unitary national legislature (the Fono) is complemented by local-level village councils (fono) comprising matai (‘chiefly’) titleholders, with political candidacy limited to matai titleholders only. Initially, suffrage was also limited to matai titleholders, however, a constitutional amendment in the leadup to the 1991 elections means that all Samoan citizens over the age of 21 may vote in national elections (So’o 2008).

The Samoan Constitution incorporates the matai system as a key element of governance while other aspects of ‘tradition’, particularly women’s spiritual power, are missing. In the leadup to independence from New Zealand administration in 1962, the constitutional design process was dominated by men. An executive committee on self-government, with advice from constitutional lawyers from Aotearoa New Zealand and Australia, drafted the Constitution, which was then endorsed by a 174-member constitutional convention comprising 159 matai titleholders and 15 European⁵ members (So’o 2008).

However, women played a part in endorsing the Constitution. In 1961, the Constitution was put to a vote in a national plebiscite conducted under UN supervision with universal suffrage and was endorsed by 83 per cent of voters (Meleisea et al. 2015; So’o 2008). The priority at that time, for women and men, was to preserve the fa’asamoa and to seek independence from outside influences (Meleiseā et al. 2015; So’o 2008). In addition, because Samoa is a relational culture that places great weight on spiritual as well as political forms of authority, this impacts who can make claims or who will want to claim to belong to state power structures (Kantola 2016). In this context, it is understandable that women voted in favour of a political system that preserved the fa’asamoa, yet restricted their own political rights (see Palmieri et al. 2023). This can also explain why many women lack the aspiration to participate in politics and instead celebrate their powers as the backbone of a church system that provides the alternative space for spiritual forms of authority (Motusaga 2016).

Analysis of gendered barriers to participation in politics in Samoa quite rightly places firm emphasis on the requirement for aspiring candidates to hold a matai or chiefly title as the key limitation on women (Meleisea et al. 2015). Women hold approximately 12 per cent of matai titles (Samoa Bureau of Statistics 2018) and, while the number is growing, some villages still prohibit or strongly discourage women from becoming matai (Haley et al. 2017; Baker 2018). Women are therefore regularly encouraged to take up matai titles to enter politics, yet this requires working through gendered notions of who is the right person to take up a matai title and who is the right person to serve. To secure political candidacy, matai must receive signed endorsement from the near-exclusively male fono about their service or monotaga to their village (Meleisea et al. 2015). To enter the space of the fono in the first place requires significant courage to push through gendered boundaries (Tuuau and Howard 2019). While many women have sought to improve their status with secular and political forms of authority through the matai titles, many have resisted this domain as being outside women’s interests and aspirations. Encouraging women to stand for politics therefore is not a simple matter of improving women’s political aspirations, but rather of understanding that there are deep ideological foundations to the distinctions between political, secular and spiritual service for families and communities.

Women taking up matai titles has gendered consequences. While women may take up matai titles and go on to gain political office, this requires them to forgo their spiritual and sacred status. The devaluing of women’s sacred forms of status and lack of integration into the political system mean that women must behave more like men and take on the masculine tasks of serving the family to become a political actor. The effect is that, by taking up matai, women are changing the meaning of the title by having some influence on the gendered space of politics. However, the greatest consequence is that the equivalent feminine title, the saotamaitai—a revered part of Samoan society—has been devalued in the realm of political institutions. This is a result of adopting a Westminster system without thoroughly investigating the gender context in Samoa.

While independence in Samoa is seen as a time when traditional customs were reconciled with introduced political institutions, notions of custom were entangled with missionary influences. Constitutional limits on political candidacy to matai titleholders only recognises the secular powers of the matai and reinforces their role as political authorities, yet there is no equivalent recognition for the saotamaitai titles for Samoan women. The Constitution was important in preserving the fa’asamao, but this occurred in an unbalanced way. Now, the problem remains that culture and gender roles are constantly shifting and being reinterpreted, yet the Constitution authorises this incomplete understanding of Samoan culture as ultimate and unchanging.

Entrenching masculine power by creating gendered political spaces

Space in the fono or meeting house is used deliberately as a means of enacting rank, hierarchy and power. Participants are seated according to their status, with high ranking at the front and low at the back (Keating and Duranti 2006). Lower-status matai are expected to serve their political apprenticeship at the back to learn the pathway to leadership and to ‘understand what it is like to be “in the back”’ (Huffer and So’o 2005: 318). Many women who hold matai titles are hesitant to enter the masculine space of the fono, yet this is the only pathway to becoming a national-level political subject.

Demonstrated mastery of the oratorical language in the fono is also a key means of enacting status or validating others’ rank (Holmes 1969; Milner 1961; Kruse Va’ai 2011). Given that Samoa is primarily an oral culture, speechmaking and deliberation are key elements of the system: ‘a matai is someone who knows how to speak the proper language, someone who is strong, someone who is not a follower, someone who is not just a yes person’ (Tuuau and Howard 2019: 6).

The ‘proper language’ is the oratorical language, a register used for speechmaking that can only be heard and learned within the masculine space of the fono, meaning most women, whether matai or not, will be unfamiliar with this language. Oratory is a masculine source of power and the knowledge and skill required to execute this language are ‘jealously guarded’ because of the level of power its usage can confer (Milner 1961). Oratorical language is used in the Parliament in opening and closing ceremonies and in formal speeches, and the honour of closing Parliament is only settled after deliberation on who may ‘take the honour of displaying their oratorical skills in addressing all of Samoa’ (Kruse Va’ai 2011: 60).

While the oratorical register is used in formal proceedings and is effectively a means of constructing both the national-level Fono and the local-level fono as gendered spaces, the Samoan term tala tau sua (‘men jesting’) is used to describe another style of communication in politics. The connotation of this term is that politics is dirty (Meleisea et al. 2015). Given the requirement for respect and taboo relationships between brother and sister or the feagaiga, concerns arise from women entering this space and experiencing disrespect from their brothers. For example:

I believe that women should not be in politics because of the brother and sister covenant. There is great emphasis in protecting the value and obligations of this relationship. The men believe that women are their feagaiga and when it comes to everyday political life there are times where [the] language used will go overboard and that is not appropriate when their sisters are in there, while they discuss taboo issues or when they swear for instance … So the men strongly feel that women should not be in politics. (Participant in Motusaga 2016: Interviewed 16 January 2013)

Linguistic practices, whether high-level oratorical displays or low-level jesting, in both the local-level fono and the national-level Fono are a significant constructor of gendered boundaries (Tuuau and Howard 2019) and underpin narratives that women have no place in politics, ultimately constructing politics as a gendered space. Ironically, the concept of vā or relational and respectful space that exists between people or between spaces excludes women from politics as a means of ‘protecting’ the feagaiga. We propose to change the emphasis by using vā to include rather than exclude women, by developing respectful political spaces.

Using vā to create gendered space, including through taboos, has been key to maintaining respectful relational spaces within and between families within a community, particularly through brother–sister relations (Koya Vaka’uta 2017). The feagaiga relationship is founded on the values of fa’aaloalo (‘respect’), vā (‘relational space between people’), vā fealoai (‘respectful space’), vā fesootai (‘connecting space’), vā fetufaai (‘sharing space’), vā tapuia (‘sacred space’) and vā fefaasoaai (‘consultative space’). These core values form the foundation of all matters for discussion of the welfare of the family. Vā (‘space’) is the core of the fa’asamoa and crucial in the everyday life of every individual, determining people’s actions and behaviour towards other people and the environment. Vā tames relations to keep peace and stability within Samoan families, villages and society as a whole. Vā establishes personal boundaries through several cultural values: fa’aaloalo (‘respect’), alofa (‘love’), lotofoai (‘giving heart’) and fa’autauta (‘carefulness’). All Samoans, from leaders to children, know and understand their place, their responsibilities and their roles in keeping society together (Motusaga 2016).

Vā is integral to respect in the feagaiga relationship, but it is also used to exclude women from politics through claims that politics perforce entails dirty talk or jesting. What would happen, then, if we re-story politics as a site of respect and relationality, where vā is integral to political practice? When we enable vā in all its forms, would this construct political spaces that can be inclusive of both women and men?

Re-storying from gendered to respectful spaces: Integrating vā in politics

So far, this chapter has addressed the first step of re-storying, to understand how the narrative that there is no gender inequality in Samoa has come about through the feagaiga. We have also considered the consequences of this narrative for the construction of politics as a gendered space. Dirty politics somehow preserves the fa’asamoa, while high linguistic practices render women as outsiders.

The second step to re-storying is to reframe narratives, to draw out new meanings from old stories and to identity the way forward. Narratives are difficult to shift, they reinforce perceptions that there is really no problem and, even if there is, this is the way that we have always done things. Yet, narratives can be contested. In Samoa’s oral culture, families hand down stories that can be reframed and retold. The gender equality narrative can be reframed to recognise, first, that women’s power has been changing because of missionisation, and second, that the Westminster system only incorporated masculine and secular forms of power. To move forward, we propose making use of the blurring between state, church and traditional means of authority by engaging with the concept of teu le vā to re-story politics as a safe and respectful, rather than dirty, space. Teu le vā means ensuring that, in any context, respectful and polite communication is adhered to by all. For example, when at an event where people of higher rank or status are present, it is deemed respectful to ensure they are treated in accordance with their nobility. The same can be said of the respectful relationship between a brother and sister or, in a nonfamilial context, males and females (Ponton 2018). Vā provides an opportunity to promote politics, governance and secular authority as a respectful and relational space.

At this point we turn to Australia and take inspiration from Aboriginal elder, academic and author Mary Graham and her colleagues, not to compare Aboriginal world views with Samoan ontologies, but because of their paradigm-shifting work that challenges all of us to consider the limitations of political science theory and analysis. Political science is biased towards colonial-settler logics that privilege the state and individuals, where political authority is claimed through land possession and material progress. Rights, power, authority, regulation, administration, service delivery and law are all based on a naturalised focus on the state and the individual. Political science takes for granted competitive power and conquest as the basis of sovereignty and its ensuing political relations (Brigg et al. 2019). Such a paradigm cannot simply incorporate Indigenous notions of ecological and sociopolitical ordering that include moral obligations to others⁶ through relations in space and place (Brigg et al. 2019). Finding a way for diverse world views to work alongside and in dialogue with each other therefore requires re-storying or ‘knowing and unknowing’ political science itself (Brigg et al. 2019: 425).

In Samoa the incorporation of the matai into the Westminster system to the exclusion of the saotamaitai titles has led to a system that introduces competition into what was once a complementary power relation. If we instead focus on cultural values and processes that enable relational power, what would a Pacific model for women’s participation in politics look like? If political power was understood and practised as relational (based on obligation) rather than competitive (based on conquest), what would this require us to change or reconsider? With conquest comes potential for retaliation and therefore insecurity and tactics to maintain power bases. With relationality comes regard for others, obligations, mutuality and practices to maintain respectful relationships (Brigg et al. 2021). Relationality also encompasses intergenerational and cosmological relations; those making decisions and acting are accountable not just to others in the here and now, but also to past and future generations and to animals, the planet and spiritual beings. These ontologies are likely to be what are needed to underpin politics on a planet facing significant climate challenges and intergenerational injustices.

There are risks, however, that this will be interpreted in simplistic ways, as just being more polite and respectful to one another. Instead, we must look at the foundations that shape politics to re-story language, governance, architectures and recognition in terms of relationality, to enable conflict to be navigated through dialogue and negotiation, through grounding in relations and accountability to others in the past, present and future, rather than through combat (Brigg and Graham 2020).

This requires shifting taken-for-granted notions such as balance of power to instead conceive of governance as ‘balanced sets of paired responsibilities’ of which no part of the balance intends to destroy another (Brigg and Graham 2020: para. 5). It requires re-storying who may be seen as a political actor (Graham 2014) by revisiting not just political but also spiritual authority, by reclaiming feminine spiritual power and requiring political actors to be relationally embedded within community and obligations to the planet, and to past, present and future generations (Brigg et al. 2021).

We can interpret this in the Samoan space to consider which practices, artefacts or other tools would enable vā or connections of obligation and responsibility to others in political spaces. What systems would enable respectful political orders that truly reflect the feagaiga relationship, in which brothers must please their sisters and seek their final authority and guidance on decisions? What legislative and political architectures would enable governance through paired rather than tiered sets of responsibilities? This requires an understanding of inclusion beyond direct and physical participation, to inclusion of past wisdom from elders, spiritual authority and the pleas of future generations.

Conclusion

In this chapter, we proposed re-storying to enable women’s political participation. Revisiting and reclaiming narratives that enable women’s substantive forms of power drawn from feminine sources, rather than requiring women to behave more like men, are important to cease normalising political institutions that legitimise only masculine and competitive sources of power. We also proposed that re-storying is a relational and respectful process of reclamation and restitution, which places story-holders as the experts with the power to revisit and reframe women as agentic political subjects. Rather than accepting that this is the way things have always been done, we propose asking why this is the way this has always been told? This implies that change requires public discussion and deliberation to unpack the past, to reconsider what worked well and to consider how power can be shared rather than protected, to propose meaningful pathways forward. This will require some confidence by story-holders to discard colonial mindsets and be open to reclaiming and redesigning political systems that truly reflect the fa’asamoa. Samoa’s political systems have long been entangled with missionary and colonial influences, and now gender equality initiatives are driven by neocolonial development actors. Snapping back to the past, therefore, is not a possibility. However, moving forward for new forms of governance that can meet contemporary challenges can draw on past systems to create future wisdoms.

This chapter demonstrates that women’s power sources are temporal, spatial and relational, and were reshaped in post-missionisation periods. The colonial shaping of political spaces valued masculine sources of status and power while maintaining a fundamental blindness to feminine forms of status and power, effectively sidelining women from the ‘political’ process. The next step is to revisit narratives and develop more popular understandings of how the gendered space is effectively excluding women from politics. Women’s participation will continue to be problematic within structures influenced by colonial and patriarchal values. By reclaiming women’s legitimate place as authorities, leaders and advisors who work through complementary power relationships with men, the question should be why are political spaces designed based on masculine sources of power and what do we lose when we exclude feminine power?

There is a need to redesign political systems to encompass the cultural values of both women and men. These models are already available to Samoans at the local level through the feagaiga relationship and could be trialled to influence change at the national level. There is also a need to challenge conceptions of power as combative rather than relational. Proposals for change could be actioned in the form of popular discussion and debates, policies, enabling access to funding, grants, improved outcomes and moral support towards adopting teu le vā methodologies. In addition, there is a need for partnerships with Pacific researchers as they are culturally competent to implement appropriate approaches for Pacific participants (Anae 2010; Mila-Schaaf 2006). Using Pacific methods and weaving Pacific narratives into the existing research and literature with recommended models that are informed by the reality of Pacific practices such as the Samoan model discussed in this chapter are highly recommended.

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1. 1 Samoa in this chapter refers to Western Samoa, which was first under German and then New Zealand administration.

2. 2 For the full story on the potential influence of the quota system on the outcome of the 2021 election, please see Motusaga (2021).

3. 3 See Constitution of the Independent State of Samoa: Preamble, p. 7, and Part 1, Clause 3: www.refworld.org/legal/legislation/natlegbod/1960/en/39855.

4. 4 Missionaries likened the feagaiga relationship to the term ‘covenant’ used in the Bible to describe taboos, processes or obligations that must be followed by two parties, yet this relationship was hierarchical and did not truly capture the meaning of the feagaiga relationship, which is based on complementary power (for more details, see Latai 2015; Schoeffel 1995).

5. 5 At that time a legal distinction existed between ‘native’ and ‘European’ (or ‘part-Samoan’) status, and enabled Samoans who were classified as Europeans with additional legal privileges in political status access to English-language schools and secondary education in Aotearoa New Zealand, but to enjoy such rights required forgoing the rights of a matai title (Meleisea et al. 1987).

6. 6 Note that relations to others include Country and non-human living or spiritual beings. For a short explanation, see Brigg and Graham (2020).