The 10th Festival of Pacific Arts: Pago Pago, American ... - PREL

The 10th Festival of Pacific Arts:
Pago Pago, American Samoa
By Lori Phillips, EdD
There are a few things you
need to do once in your
life ... and attending the
Festival of Pacific Arts is
one of them.
Every 4 years, the Pacific peoples
come together to share and exchange
cultural traditions, performances, and
visual arts. This summer, July 20th
through August 2nd, American Samoa
will host close to 8,000 people who
both participate in or attend the festivities.
The festival was conceived by
the Conference of the South Pacific
Commission (now Secretariat of the
Pacific Community [SPC]) in 1972.
Twenty-seven Pacific island countries
and territories currently participate,
and the number of participants has
increased to more than 2,000. They
are American Samoa, Australia, the
Commonwealth of the Northern
Mariana Islands, the Cook Islands,
Easter Island, the Federated States
of Micronesia, the islands of Fiji,
18 Pacific Resources for Education and Learning
CURRENTS
Photo by Kaira Resch
French Polynesia, Guam, Hawai‘i,
Kiribati, Nauru, New Caledonia, New
Zealand, Niue, Norfolk Island, Papua
New Guinea, the Pitcairn Islands,
the Republic of the Marshall Islands,
the Republic of Palau, Samoa, the
Solomon Islands, Tokelau, Tonga,
Tuvalu, Vanuatu, and Wallis and
Futuna.
The festival is recognized as an
international cultural event, and is the
largest gathering of Pacific peoples in
the region. The 10-day festival focuses
on traditional customary practices,
including storytelling, visual arts,
dance, music, healing arts, fashion
design, and canoe and house building.
It grew out of the desire to create
an opportunity for the peoples of the
region to share their cultures and
establish deeper understanding and
friendship between countries.
Photo by Carolyn Yacoe

In accordance with Pacific and
festival tradition, participants are the
organizing country’s guests from the
day of their arrival. The host country
bears the cost of local travel, accommodations,
meals, and other forms
of hospitality for the visiting participants.
Entry to all artistic events is
free to the public.
The council recognizes that
each of the 27 nations of the Pacific
desires to celebrate their unique
indigenous cultures by hosting the
festival. Therefore, they support this
through a process of regional rotation.
Preference is given to those countries
that have not yet been hosts. To be
selected as part of an island’s delegation
to the festival is a great honor.
The festivals have no competitions,
and performers do not seek to compete
with one another.
Visits by Pacific Islanders from
one island to another have always been
important occasions. Trade; social
visits; and exchanges of dance, music,
food, and crafts have served as opportunities
for Islanders to learn from
one another, and have assisted in the
dynamic transformation of cultures.
Today, the Festival of Pacific Arts
helps maintain a sense of “Pacificness”
among island communities—awareness
that, although a group of
people may reside on tiny atolls far
from island neighbors, they are part
CURRENTS
of a greater Pacific-wide culture.
Recognition of a common Pacific identity
can be a strong motivating force
for individual communities to revive
and cherish their own traditional
forms of cultural expression. Today,
the festival is the principal platform
for collective participation in expressions
of traditional and contemporary
culture in the Pacific region.
Photographs included here are
from my scrapbook of the 9th Festival
of Pacific Arts in 2004 held in the
Republic of Palau.
Lori Phillips, EdD, Director, Pacific Center
for the Arts and Humanities in Education,
PREL, may be contacted at phillipl@prel.
org.
PACIFIC EDUCATOR SPRING 2008 1
Photos on this page by Carolyn Yacoe