Quote by Sia Figiel: “We are not the brown girls the missionaries warned you about.”

Colonial and missionary narratives often painted Pacific Islander women as dangerous, immoral, or in need of saving. This line reclaims identity directly — it says those stories were never true, and Pacific women refuse to be defined by the fearful imaginations of outsiders who arrived to control them.

Figiel published Where We Once Belonged in 1996 as Pacific literature was gaining international recognition. The 1990s saw a generation of Pacific women writers challenging both colonial representations of island life and patriarchal traditions within their own communities, asserting complex, modern identities on their own terms.

Samoan novelist and poet whose debut novel Where We Once Belonged won the Commonwealth Writers' Prize for the South East Asia and South Pacific region in 1997. Her work explores the lives of young Samoan women navigating tradition, sexuality, and colonial legacies. She is one of the most prominent Pacific women's voices in literature.