by Lana Lopesi, Assistant Professor, Department of Indigenous, Race, and Ethnic Studies

Two years ago, I moved from Aotearoa, New Zealand, to take up my current role as an assistant professor in the Department of Indigenous, Race, and Ethnic Studies. When we first made the move, the key word was “adjust,” and the mission was to adjust to a new country and to a new academic context, while carving out my own space here. Now that Kalapuya Ilihi is growing in familiarity, I have delved into new research projects, including one tentatively titled “Care: Samoan Feminism, Care Work, and Immaterial Labor.” This project is interested in Samoan womanhood and Samoan intersectionality as it relates to notions of care and care work within diasporic contexts. 

The Samoan archipelago is a group of islands in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, which are today separated into the independent nation of Sāmoa and the US territory American Sāmoa. In Indigenous Samoan culture, fa’a Sāmoa is what we call the Samoan way, and it describes the multiple ways of thinking and being that make up Samoan customs. In fa’a Sāmoa, culturally coded notions of care, service, and collectivism are foundational to life. It is understood that the individual only exists in relation to the collective, and leadership takes the form of service. However, what happens when these cultural values are moved out of context and relocated to diasporic homes like the United States, New Zealand, or Australia? Working through this question, “Care” pairs thinking about the cultural value placed on care alongside the significant levels of care work undertaken by Samoan women in diasporic communities where we see Samoans overwhelmingly entering care and service industries. These industries, while often devalued socially and undervalued financially, are simultaneously vital for the maintenance of society. It is the work that no one wants to do, yet it needs to be done. 

Care work and Samoan as well as other Pacific Islander women have a long history, spanning back to the active labor recruitment that occurred in Sāmoa and the wider Pacific in the early 20th century, when women were moved to cosmopolitan centers to work as cleaners, carers, and “house girls.” Today the legacy of Pacific care work is visible in places like New Zealand, which hosts significant Pacific populations. There, Pacific women (of whom Samoan women are the majority) are 81 percent more likely to engage in unpaid work like childcare, household work, cooking, and caring for an ill or disabled family member, compared to the rest of the population. Further, even within paid employment Pacific women are most likely to work as carers and aides. Despite the profound contribution of Samoan woman to care for wider society, they remain significantly underremunerated and undervalued. This is evidenced in gendered and racialized wage disparities, with Pacific women in New Zealand earning 75 cents and, in the US, Samoan women earning 60 cents for every dollar earned by their white male counterparts.

With support from a grant from CSWS, I was able to take a course release this past Spring term to focus on turning the research and thinking behind “Care” into a creative non-fiction manuscript. Using the form of creative non-fiction enables different approaches to these ideas of care, combining academic research, theory, and personal experiences. Within the manuscript, I weave research of Samoan care work and Indigenous notions of care with my own experiences as a Samoan woman academic thinking through teaching as a kind of care work dependent on an ethics of care. This is an approach to writing that I first experimented with when writing Bloody Woman, a creative non-fiction essay collection published in 2021, which explored issues of Samoan womanhood through an autotheoretical approach moving across and between genres. This approach is experimental and joyful personally, but more importantly is more accessible to support engagement from a wider range of interested readers who might not pick up a typical academic monograph.   

While I was able to make good progress on the manuscript, through the process I also felt a keen need for a thought partner, and to practice the collectivism so core to fa’a Sāmoa. So, with sociologist and Samoan feminist scholar Moeata Keil at the University of Auckland, I co-authored two forthcoming articles in this area. The first, “From the F-word to a Samoan Feminism: Cultivating Samoan Feminist Thought,” argues for the need to develop Samoan feminist thought, which is as much a development of new thinking as it is a return to and restoration of Samoan feminist thought already in existence within Indigenous Samoan cosmologies. The second, “Promiscuous Possibilities: Regenerating a Decolonial Genealogy of Samoan Reproduction,” makes the argument that under colonialism and capitalism, Samoan women are disciplined into good reproductive laborers who reproduce the moral family and also wider society. This paper looks to Indigenous feminist discourse of regeneration to place Samoan reproductive labor outside of capitalism and within Indigenous feminist genealogies of world-building, asking what other promiscuous possibilities are available for Samoan regeneration.  

It has been a productive term of thinking and writing that I cannot wait to share with you all. I am hugely grateful to CSWS for seeing value in this work and for the gift of time to put pen to paper. This support is itself a form of care. Fa’afetai tele lava.

— Lana Lopesi received a 2023 CSWS Faculty Research Grant for this project.