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- The Reverend. Professor Dr Uili Feleterika Nokise
Reverend Professor Dr Uili Fele Nokise explores spirituality – a value that binds together all other values – and its significance to Samoans. He explains the importance of relationships, with both people and the environment. He calls for efforts to bring a common understanding of things, such as how the home and school environments can complement each other and how we express care for each other.
Transcript
Transcript
My name is Uili Feleterika Nokise. I am the minister of the Newtown Pacific Island Presbyterian Church here in Wellington. Wellington for me is hometown. I left Samoa, November 1960, and I have been living in Wellington all my life, except some years that I spent overseas in education and working in Fiji for the last 20 years at The Pacific Theological College in Suva.
One of the most important values to Samoan people, is their spirituality. It's a kind of a value that binds all the other values together. You can have, a Samoan can have all the things they want or need in the world, but if their spirits are not in peace and not at peace, there is a lot of trauma. There is no peace being felt within the life of a person or within a family. And the reason why one spirit needs to be in harmony and/or in balance with things is to do with the fact that Samoans place great importance on relationships. It's not just relationships with people. We have been brought up in our traditional religious beliefs of relating to everything in life. The importance of relating to the environment, for instance. Our whole spirituality binds this idea together. For example, if we want to use the forest, use trees from the forest, for instance, we don't just go in and cut trees down. There are rituals that our ancestors have given to us to perform for two reasons. First, to ask permission from the forest for the use of trees to build canoes, build houses, or whatever we want to use trees for. And secondly, to apologise for this, and this is a recognition, that the forest, the trees have spirits. They don't just you know, exist. Same thing when we go fishing, there are rituals we do to the sea to ask the sea permission, to take some of the bounty of fish from the water and all this, you know. So when we have this relationship in accordance with people, it becomes very clear to us that there are a lot of other values attached to this. Like respect, we are brought up to respect our elders. Not necessarily because our elders are better than other people, but the fact that we have this belief that they came first to the world before us younger ones. And so they always seem to know more about the world and whatever the world is. Now, this relationship amongst things and people with things is the essential part of this spirit, spirituality that our people believe in.
I find that this is something that seems to be eroding rapidly in the context of living away from our own island home environment. It's not, I'm not blaming the Western world or different society, or what, it's just the way things are. But if we lose this and let me put this in the context of New Zealand, if our young people lose this sense of being related to everything in life, for whatever reasons, then there's real problems with identity comes up. Real issue of identity begins to come up because you see it's through this that we express things about life and in life. It's through this awareness that there is a spiritual dimension of our lives that is equally, if not more important, than all the other things we have in life. Of course, we need to have knowledge. We go to school, we appreciate having to get, you know, graduate from high school, colleges, university, the importance of knowledge, no one disputes that, but for us, what ties us to our history, ties us to our land, ties us to who we are or part of who we are. It's this spiritual dimension of life. Perhaps it's not, perhaps it's possible to make a generalisation. And I think for many of our Pacific Island students, the home environment is an entirely different environment at school. And often the school environment can be seen as an escape because of the very strict boundaries at home. And then you go to school, you have boundary at school, but it's like a bit more relaxed. So to me, there needs to be a conversation by those who are involved in this to look at how the two can complement each other.
There are general things about Pacific Island families that we can use. For instance, I take a concept like freedom, for instance, how much freedom do the, do our children in our Pacific Island home have? And it will be a very interesting survey to do that. And then you say, apply exactly the same thing, how much of this do you actually sense available at school? And you find the behaviour of the children tends to not only change but tends to become amplified when they go to school in a positive way. They can do what they want. They can, they can what and what and what.
Now to me, if we take what I said right at the beginning about the importance of honesty, or it's just an example of a value, how is that understood at home, and what, how does, do our family understand? You know, sometime our, our children are being very honest at home, but mum and dad don't want to believe them. They don't hear them, even though the child is saying, "Dad, that's true, it's true what I'm saying." And then they go to school, how is this honesty portrayed from the teacher to them? Is it part of the setup or not? Is it important or not? Or does it exist? And so to me, if the environment should be encouraged to support, to support the child, and that can only happen if they have a good look at what's at stake, what are the principles? What are the values at stake? You see, it seems to me that there should be efforts to try and bring a common understanding of things. Now, I'm not sure if schools have developed that with our Pacific community or the school just sort of come down with their own understanding of this and this and this. And then you see the kids get that. Cause I grew up in that environment. I mean, all of us have in some ways, and then we'd go home and it's, it's like an opposite thing comes from home. And then we are left to ourselves to try and figure out how are we going to survive in this sort of two worlds that we're in. All the best to everybody try and survive.
And I think the time has come that, I think the time has come for some kind of effort to create a common understanding of things. For example, how do we express care for each other? How do we express that? And what are the things that are involved with, and we will find that what we're doing is without saying to the student, what we are actually entering a very spiritual part of our life. We don't have to say, okay, we are in a spiritual class, everybody now, you know. No, but once we go into these kind of moral things in a very simple, but very important, we're into that kind of world, because that's the kind of world that, that gives us peace. And if it's not looked at, nothing in this world will, will bring that, nothing.