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Oral Traditions, Cultural Significance of Storytelling, and Samoan Understandings of Place or Fanua

Oral tradition is at the heart of Indigenous cultures. Despite being central to Indigenous histories, oral sources and ancient stories have not been fully incorporated into scholarly understandings of land and “place,” which remain couched in economic terms and treated as abstractions in dominant theoretical conceptualizations. The rich oral tradition of Samoan storytelling, as heard in the tala le vavau (ancient stories, often translated as myths and legends) of Metotagivale and Alo, highlights the core cultural values that underscore fa’aSamoa (Samoan culture and ways of knowing) of fanua or place. I argue that Samoan Indigenous ways of understanding place can be synthesized with the phenomenology approach to contribute to a broader academic understanding of place and physical resources. In addition to the memories, emotions, and values that make places significant according to humanist and phenomenological perspectives, the language, proverbs, names, and placenames in Samoan oral traditions demonstrate Samoan relationships with place and ecological knowledge. The tala le vavau theoretically transmit and reinforce conservation ethics and ecological perspectives. The core of Indigenous Samoan ecological knowledge is the achievement of balance and the recognition of equivalence and complementarity of vā/social relations and tapu. Respect is key to maintaining balance, and we can achieve redemptive change by promoting storytelling in placebased curricula. A CULTUR AL PERSPECTIVE ON LAND starts with the proposition that there is no objective natural world for human beings; it is impossible for humans to think aculturally (Andrade 2008; Murton 1979; Struthers and McAlpine 2005). Terms such as “land” and “land tenure” are culturally defined and can only be understood within specific cultural contexts. Dominant Western discourses treat land and place as abstract concepts, so most geographical inquiries have been couched in empirical and positivist epistemological assumptions, and scholarly attention continues to be directed primarily at