Quote by Albert Wendt: “We belong to the land. We are of the land.”

There is a difference between owning land and belonging to it. This is a Pacific and Indigenous way of seeing the world — people do not possess the earth, they are part of it. It challenges the Western idea of land as property and replaces it with kinship.

Wendt wrote in the mid-1970s as Pacific island nations were gaining or consolidating independence — Samoa had become the first Pacific nation to gain independence in 1962. Writers across the region were working to articulate indigenous identity in the wake of colonial rule and Western cultural dominance.

Samoan novelist, poet, and academic considered one of the founders of modern Pacific literature. His 1973 novel Sons for the Return Home was a landmark in Pacific fiction. He has taught at the University of Auckland and the University of Hawaiʻi and has championed indigenous Pacific artistic expression throughout his career.