The role of the diaspora: malaga, vā, and contesting the financialization of customary land in Samoa

Abstract

ABSTRACT The settler colonial city has been described in relative isolation, detached from the global metropole, intent on internal enrichment through the deterritorialization of Indigenous people. This urban formation deploys familiar spatial techniques: legal borders, economic regions, and segregated enclaves. Yet for many Indigenous peoples, the relationship to land is not juridical, economic, nor socio-racial, it is genealogical. These genealogical ties to land extend the boundaries of settler-colonialism – and resistance to it – beyond the islands, across diasporic space. Decolonial Pacific studies describe a geography resistance to land reform among Indigenous and immigrant Pacific Islanders which exceeds and overspills the settler colonial city. Diasporic space – moving through and overspilling the settler colonial city – is the spatial context for understanding resistance to customary land reform in Samoa and the struggles of other Pacific Islanders against settler colonial processes of dispossession.