traditional knowledge conference 2008 te tatau pounamu

The first question resurfaced, especially during the presentation of the Reverend Professor GodfreyOnah where he graphically and vividly described the traditional African belief regarding the spiritworld in a hierarchy of a supreme God, the divinity, the spirits and the ancestors. He said that manycultural groups in Africa had no cult of the supreme God, although all acts of worship were directed tothe supreme God but indirectly through the divinities, the good spirits and the ancestors. It reminded meof what I believe to have been the way the Samoans dealt with their gods. While Tagaloa wasacknowledged to be the supreme God, in practice it was the lesser spirits, the gods of the various dailyactivities―house building, boat building, fishing, bush cutting―and their tapu (ritual restrictions) thatthe Samoans had to deal with in their daily lives. In the traditional religion of Samoa, there was thefaataulaitu, dealer with the spirits, the medicine man who can give an explanation, prescribe a remedyfor illnesses and make known the causes for extraordinary happenings. There is no equivalent of thefaataulaitu in Christianity. So even the most apparently Christian of our Christians will seek out in timesof crises the so called fofo or massage practices, which is more than a massage, or the faipele, the carddealer, fortune teller. It is these practices which are still rampant today that originally raised for me thequestion regarding the state of the indigenous religion in Samoa.Like Etuale, I believe that Pacific traditional knowledges and our indigenous religious cultures havemuch to teach the world―the academic, religious and cultural world―about the human spirit and aboutits opportunities and designations.85