Historical Anthropology of Interracial Relationship in Colonial Oceania : Focused on Western Samoa under the New Zealand Administration

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The reason why a racial policy was important in a colony is because the administration was to divide and dominate the different inhabitants in the colony. They were not only those indigenous inhabitants, but those colonists, slaves, and indentured labourers who immigrated from outside of the colony. With limited personnel, the administration officials often had to maintain the public order. In the workplace, it was often observed that the work groups were organized based on the racial terms and, thus, racial order was maintained. In the case study of Western Samoa(present Independent State of Samoa), there were two different categories of the domestic statuses : Foreigners, Whites or Europeans ; and natives, besides Samoans, included Pacific Islanders in the vicinity. Each category had its own economic, political and living domain and did not share the other's. The biggest issue was how to locate many half-castes in between. While some half-castes succeeded their fathers' nationalities … More and led European way of living, others did not succeed anything from their fathers such as assets nor ability of speaking foreign language. The colonial governments, both German and New Zealand, allowed half-castes who passed the cultural examination such as reading test of English to register as foreigners(Europeans). And later, the New Zealand Government allowed half-castes under certain conditions to register as Samoans. In the last days of New Zealand administration, the domestic statuses did not necessarily go with the appearances of people and did not go together with nationalities at all. The racial hierarchy in a colony often happened to be an obstacle for a postcolonial society to achieve an independent unified nation, or sometimes to be a negative legacy for a postcolonial state. Nevertheless, it was not with the Western Samoan case and Western Samoa was successful in uniting two different statuses into one Western Samoan national identity. Probably the following factors peculiar to Western Samoa were effective : 1) Samoans were generous for mixed marriages and there were many half-castes of various kinds ; 2) Samoans had their own merits of their way of life in that they had access to the titles based on the chief system and traditional land tenure ; 3) and the Western Samoan independence was realized by the Samoan leaders and their own traditional political system. Less