Wanda Ieremia-Allan has been awarded the Pacific Islander Visiting Fellowship from the University of Cambridge and will spend six weeks in Corpus Christie College this year to conduct archival research on the 184-year-old Samoan language newspaper,
O Le Sulu Samoa.
Mrs Ieremia-Allan used to deliver the newspaper to her village back in Samoa and was "honoured and flabbergasted" to now be working to understand its role in capturing Pacific perspectives over time.
"The Sulu was always around as a child, it was there in large stacks in my dad’s office, in the church, and in the baskets of food we had to deliver to elderly people.
"The papers would be delivered regularly to my dad’s office and I’d be jumping on the piles as a kid with my siblings," she said.
Mrs Ieremia-Allan was not the first to travel to Cambridge in her family, her father Reverend Elder Lale Ieremia was one of the first pacific tauira (students) to attend the the respected university in 1970 when he sat in the same public lecture theatre halls as King Charles.
Mrs Ieremia-Allan was looking forward to taking part in new Cambridge traditions.
She might tweak the dress code a little.
"I think there is some regalia involved so I better pack more than an ie lavalava, I might rock the jandals though, I will see," Mrs Ieremia-Allan said.
The O Le Sulu Samoa was the first home for many Pacific grassroots journalists, linguists, translators, critical thinkers, and writers.
In a difficult period of colonisation, it was the Sulu’s unique use of the Samoan language that gave the Pacific scholars a voice.
"For many, the newspaper is a refuge from the forced imposition of colonial languages of English and German, a resistance against surveilling European editors," she said.
It was important to Mrs Ieremia-Allan to see how Cambridge was looking after the Sulu and for her, it was a taonga that needed to be accessible to Samoan audiences so more people like her could engage with it.
