Transcript
Courtney Sina Meredith is a Pacific storyteller and a proud feminist.
"I really claimed it and I look back and I've always been a feminist. I was raised to believe that women should have an equal voice and I think as time goes on though, it gets harder and harder to reach the benchmark that we all believe a true feminist is."
She's also a young Samoan writer who loves and values her cultural roots.
Her earliest memory was of her grandmother giving up her job at a denim factory to look after her as a child.
"This is my earliest understanding of the Samoan culture. That it is collective that it is about sacrifice but it is also about great vision. The fact that I am sitting here with you today, it really is manifesting my pa's vision from a few generations back now. So I see the Samoan culture as being an abundance of love and coming from a place where we work together."
Ms Meredith has published a collection of short stories called Tales of the Taniwha that draw inspiration from her own life.
"I wanted so much to create a book that felt as though it represented life as I was actually living it. It wasn't completely resolved and a little bit messy, a little bit raw, a little bit rough. And so when I went through all the final edits that I had, I was looking for texture."
Samoan born Sonny Natanielu got his tatau, a Samoan tattoo for men, in Samoa five years ago (2012) and the tatau is a language of its own.
"Everything on the tatau means something - the motifs, the structure, eveything about the tatau means something and it anchors you to a history and a past and for me kind of knowing that your roots go down that deep kind of makes me feel bulletproof."
Mr Natanielu says growing up in New Zealand was tough and so being Samoan has been a journey of acceptance and discovery for him.
"Especially when I think back now, to my shame, I was embarrassed to be brown to the point where I remember at 15 years old in the Fourth Form, I wanted to scrub the brown off my skin."
He says Samoan language is the most important signifier of identity but people also connect to customs and traditions.
"But with our culture we store our knowledge in song, in dance, in chant, in the trees and in the forest, on the ocean and in the skies. So when you want to engage with that knowledge, you sing, you dance, you read the stories that's in the forest to do with medicine, you navigate the ocean, you read the stars. And so you may not have the language linguistically to connect with people but there are other ways to connect with our customs and culture - especially the oral traditions."
Sonny Natanielu says even if people don't have the Samoan language, there are many other ways to engage with its culture and traditions.
