Drawing on a vertical case study of gender, sport, and education in the Pacific Island nation of Sāmoa, the study illuminates how a healthy islands through sport (HITS) policy world centered around using sport to create healthier bodies for a thriving nation is discursively created in inter/national policy but effectively separate and detached from the gendered logics guiding already existing translocal practices of sport for development. The resulting talanoa illustrates how vital it is for feagaiga to be reinstated within ourselves as a genuine and lived practice that ensures the safety and wellbeing of everybody within each sacred covenant made.Īt the core of this dissertation is a critical examination of the disjuncture between the policy and practice of sport for development.
The aim of this research is to bring transparency to the evolving dynamics of feagaiga and how it has impacted on the safety and wellbeing of our Samoan people in the past, the present and moving forward into the future. This exegesis shares the stories of feagaiga from the lived experiences of a group of our Samoan sisters, who reside both back home in Samoa and here in our adopted home of Aotearoa, New Zealand. The rippling effects of the break-down of feagaiga over generations, for many, has manifested itself in the rising incidents of family and sexual violence in our Samoan communities. The sacred brother-sister indigenous covenant has undergone a significant change since the arrival of the palagi missionaries in Samoa, 1830, when this sacred covenant was taken from the brother-sister and transferred to the church minister-village, effectively devaluing the worth of the sister in the indigenous feagaiga. Feagaiga: the sacred brother-sister covenant, is an indigenous belief and practice that ensured the invaluable and sacred status of the sister within the aiga and social construct of the village.
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