Tagata Samoa

The Samoans are the indigenous Polynesian people of the Samoan Islands. Lapita pottery shards show that Austronesian voyagers reached the archipelago between roughly 1500 and 900 BCE; later migrations from Samoa and Tonga carried Polynesian settlers across the eastern Pacific. The earliest political centre was Manuʻa, ruled by the Tui Manuʻa.

Samoan society was organised through the faʻamatai, a graded system of chiefs traced in tradition to the warrior queen Nafanua and her successor Salamasina. The art of tattoo, the tatau with its male peʻa and female malu designs, has been practised for more than two thousand years. Rivalry and intermarriage linked Samoa with Fiji and Tonga.

European contact began when Jacob Roggeveen sighted the islands in 1722; Louis-Antoine de Bougainville followed in 1768 and called them the Navigator Islands. Whalers and missionaries later visited.