Samoans have a lot of experience with palagi, which literally means “people from the sky.” Many outsiders have left their mark over the last four centuries, including whalers, missionaries, black-birders, planters, colonizers, the U.S. military, loggers, development experts and tourists.

Since the first missionaries arrived in 1830, Christianity has thrived. Pre-Christian Samoan cosmology had plenty of fire and brimstone, and the Christian creation story, similar enough to the local Samoan story, was accepted quickly throughout the Samoan Islands. In the 21st century, Christianity is part of the essential glue that holds Samoan society together from village to town to city.

Samoa occupied a central role in the American imagination after Margaret Mead’s Coming of Age in Samoa made the best seller list in the 1930s, painting a vivid (and later contested) picture of an island society where free love and community harmony went hand-in-hand. Americans were fascinated with all things South Pacific. Today, most people in the U.S. don’t often think about the islands, except as destinations for vacations or the sites of celebrity weddings, and yet American ideas, desires and culture have played active roles in shaping life in contemporary Samoa.

Samoans, like many indigenous peoples, are integrating capitalist culture while attempting to hold their customs close. They stand at a tenuous place in their development, facing questions of identity, assimilation and change, as well as ever-shifting definitions of paradise.