Read Ebook {PDF EPUB} Nafanua Saving the Samoan Rain Forest by Paul Alan Cox Nafanua: Saving the Samoan Rain Forest by Paul Alan Cox. The Girl in the Moon Circle by Sia Figiel. Recommended retail price $15. Here�s what the blurb for the book says: The Girl in the Moon Circle , like the cover drawing, shows Samoan life through the eyes of a ten-year-old girl called Samoana. Though young, Samoana is perceptive, not much escapes her analysis. She tells us about school, church, friends, family violence, having refrigerators and television for the first time, Chunky cat food, a Made-in-Taiwan Jesus, pay day, cricket, crushes on boys, incest, legends and many other things. Her observations offer a compelling look at Samoan society. Often fiction allows authors to tell truths that otherwise would be too painful; Sia Figiel is uninhibited. Her prose, in English and Samoan, hurtles readers toward the end of the book. Sia Figiel, herself, has mesmerized audiences around the Pacific Islands with readings from The Girl in the Moon Circle. Here�s what Paddy and Kat have to say: "This is a stunning �must have� piece of autobiographical fiction. Of all the books we have to offer this is one of the most moving, funny and provocative. Put this one on your shopping list". Soft cover, 134 pages. Governance in Samoa edited by Elise Huffer and Asofou So'o. Published by Institute of Pacific Studies. ISBN 982020156X. Recommended retail price $34. 'Governance' was recently introduced into development terminology by the World Bank and has been popularly adopted by international aid donors in the Pacific. Governance agendas have been criticised for offering trendy and pre-ordained programs that fail to address the complexities of particular local situations. This book details how governance programs have affected some local institutions and practices in Samoa and provides practical ways for more efficiently tailoring future programs to the development needs of the country. Empirical case studies are provided on issues of nascent civil society, problems of urban management, non-government organizations working in the area of women's health, relationships between the national government and villages, and the subversion of custom and constitutional processes to personal political ambitions. The book contributes to an understanding of how to enhance the efficient accountable management of Samoa's economic, political, social and cultural resources for the benefit of all its citizens. Soft cover, 222 pages. Published in 2000. Islands of Samoa. Map by James Bier. Recommended retail price $3.95. Described as "Comprehensive reference and travel maps of both American and Western Samoa for resident and visitor. An accurate guide to the Heart of Polynesia." One side covers Western Samoa while the reverse depicts American Samoa (Most Samoans don't recognize the distinction). Lagaga: A Short History of Western Samoa by Malama Meleisea et al. Recommended retail price $15. Edited by Malama Meleisea and Penny Schoeffel Meleisea, Lagaga covers Samoan history from early Polynesian arrival through the missionary era, independence in 1962 and the first two decades of the State of Western Samoa. Ably discussed by Malama and twelve others, Lagaga , first published in 1987, has continued to be popular with reprintings in 1989, 1991 and 1994. Soft cover, 225 pages. Nafanua: Saving the Samoan Rain Forest by Paul Alan Cox. Published by W.H. Freeman and Company. ISBN 07167-3116-9. Recommended retail price $23.95. It is with enormous pleasure that we offer this book. I (Paddy) am lucky enough to count Paul Cox amongst my circle of friends. Paul is an extraordinary man who cares passionately about the world and its people. I have seen Paul bent almost double looking at sea grasses and watched him looking for pollinators of Fiji's enigmatic Degeneria tree. I've experienced Paul's wonderful hospitality and been luck enough to reciprocate on a few rare occasions. But more to the point I've visited the Falealupo Rain Forest and seen at first hand the extraordinary things Paul and the villagers have achieved. This book is Paul's amazing story . what follows is the dust jacket blurb, which, better than most, I've reproduced word for word. Prompted by his mother's death from breast cancer, ethnobotanist Paul Alan Cox traveled with his family to a remote Samoan village at the edge of a rain forest to search for new leads in treating the disease. Working closely with both native healers and the U.S. National Cancer Institute in an analysis of traditional rain-forest remedies, Cox discovered a promising new plant-derived drug, prostratin, for a different, but equally serious malady: AIDS. The promise of this new drug lead was soon overshadowed, however, by news that a logging company had started to destroy the 30,000-acre rain forest where Cox first collected the plant that yielded prostratin. It was then that the village elders began to instruct Cox in the legends of Nafanua, the Samoan goddess who in ancient times freed the people from oppression and taught them to protect the rain forest. Collaborating with the village elders eager to preserve the spirit of Nafanua's teachings. Cox launched an international campaign to stop the logging of the Falealupo Rain Forest. In Nafanua, he tells the moving story of those efforts, and his involvement in related campaigns to create a U. S. National Park in American Samoa and to place Samoa's endangered flying foxes under international protection. Cox's conservation efforts, however, were ultimately followed by a devastating series of events that threatened the lives of himself, his family, the villagers, and everything they had worked for. In this exciting and beautifully written account set amongst the lush forests and picture-perfect villages of Samoa, Paul paints an intriguing portrait of a society that is neither primitive nor industrial, where traditional chiefs struggle to protect ancient beliefs against modern economic demands and the pull of Western culture. Nafanua explores the profound influence of Western colonialism and discusses the impact of historic misperceptions of the South Seas on appreciation of the dignity of its peoples. A striking story of scientific and personal discovery, Nafanua is a testament to the power of nature to both heal and destroy�and to the equally powerful human capacity for faith and perseverance against seemingly impossible odds. Hard cover, 238 pages. First published in 1997. Plants in Samoan Culture: The Ethnobotany of Samoa by Art Whistler. Published by Isle Botanica. ISBN 0964542668. Recommended retail price $27.50. The loss of traditional plant lore and traditional plants has prompted the author to write Plants in Samoan Culture. However, a question has been brought up several times – how can a palagi (foreigner), write a book about Samoan plants? It is an unfortunate fact that nearly all the written ethnobotanical information about Polynesian cultures, and specifically, Samoan culture, is written by foreign scientists rather than by local sources. Although not brought up in Samoa, Dr. Whistler has some advantages, such as; he is a botanist, he likes to write books, and he has a fascination for Samoan rainforests and their plants. He hopes that in some way the publication of this book, and the information it contains may be of interest to others who share his love of plants, and that it may serve to stimulate others who are awaiting the call, so that they may help reverse the trend towards the loss of traditional plant lore and the loss of the biodiversity of traditional plants that call Samoa their home. Soft cover, 234 pages. Published in 2004. Pouliuli by Albert Wendt. Published by University of Hawai'i Press. ISBN 0-8248-0728-6. Recommended retail price $12.00. Early on a drizzly Saturday morning Faleasa Osovae - the seventy-six year-old titled head of the Aiga Falease, faithful husband of a devoted Felefele, stern but generous father of seven sons and five obedient daughters, and the most respected alii in the village of Malalua - woke with a strange bitter taste in his mouth to find . that everything and everybody . that till then had given meaning to his existence, now filled him, with an almost unbearable feeling of revulsion . _And so begins an extraordinary reading experience! "Few novelists of the Pacific islands could be less derivative in terms of the real vision into the life and character of non-Western society. Even fewer novels, Western or Third World, can reach the strength and artistic power of Pouliuli." --World Literature Today. Soft cover, 152 pages. Published in 1980. Rainforest Trees of Samoa: A guide to the common lowland and foothill forest trees of the Samoan Archipelago by Art Whistler. ISBN 0964542641. Published by Isle Botanica. Recommended retail price $27.50. The title pretty much says it all. As with other books by Art Whistler this is competently written and expertly illustrated with the author's own photographs. Dr Whistler has spent years studying the Samoan forest and is the acknowledged expert on the subject. Soft cover, 210 pages. Published in 2004. Samoa by Dorinda Talbot and Deanna Swaney. Recommended retail price $14.95. Samoa is a fabulous destination for the traveler who wants the �real� Polynesia. The real Polynesia since it has been Christianized that is. This Lonely Planet guide approaches Samoa with the same thoroughness and attention to detail as the others in the series. Replete with maps and color photos it is highly recommended. Paddy has lived and worked in Western Samoa for nearly three months and can attest to the accuracy of this guide. Soft cover, 193 pages. Samoa: A Hundred Years Ago and Long Before by George Tucker. Recommended retail price $15. First printed in London in 1884 this is a reprint of a missionary�s views of Samoa in the 19th century. George Turner discusses origins, religion, wars, aging, food liquors, clothing, amusements, diseases, celebrations, houses, canoes, government and a host of other aspects of Samoa. Ever popular, this work has been reprinted in 1984, 1986, 1990, 1992. Soft cover, 266 pages. Samoans in Fiji by Morgan Tuimaleali’ifano. ISBN 9820203171. Published by the Institute of Pacific Studies. Recommended retail price $14 . Islanders of Samoan ancestry living in Fiji belong more to Fiji than to Samoa. They think of Fiji and its many cultures as home. But as a mixed-race minority, this is not always easy. Their status and options both at home and abroad are the focus of this book. Their future, and that of many other ‘expatriate’ Islander communities in the South Pacific nations, is important, and likely to become more so as Pacific Islands set out into new forms of association. The author, scion of one of Samoa’s great chiefly lines, has since 1985, taught Pacific Studies at the University of the South Pacific. He is married to Eileen Tuimaleali’ifano, a Fiji citizen of multi-ethnic ancestry, and USP’s Co-ordinator of Extension Studies. Their children are typical of the ‘fruit-salad’ people about whom the book is written – a fact which lends not only authority to the study, but also a sense of immediacy and interest. Soft cover, 247 pages. Published in 1990. Samoa's Rain Forest Savior - Looking for a cure for breast cancer, Paul Cox harnessed the wisdom of women in the forest he loved and discovered a promising anti-hiv compound instead. Light filters through the leafy canopy, and everywhere there is the cooing of fruit pigeons, the whisper of honeycreeper wings. Shadows and iridescence flicker on the mossy forest floor as if seen through a Gothic cathedral's rose window. Long, twisted cables of lianas and broad branches of banyan trees covered with silvery lily leaves and rare orchids shade the understory where giant tree ferns, heliconias, and seeded bananas compete for space. It is within the Falealupo rain forest on the remote Samoan island of Savaii, the largest island in Polynesia outside of Hawaii and New Zealand, that native healer Epenesa Mauigoa introduced Paul Cox to the mamala tree (Homolanthus nutans). For generations, she and other Samoan healers had used a water infusion of its bark to treat hepatitis and intestinal complaints. Ultimately this discovery led to a promising anti-HIV compound called Prostratin, isolated by a team at the National Cancer Institute (NCI) in 1989 and patented as an antiviral remedy. NCI requires that any firm wishing to develop the drug negotiate directly with the Samoan government for a fair and equitable return of benefits. On December 13, 2001, the AIDS Research Alliance of America (ARA), a nonprofit organization that helped speed to market eight of the current eleven anti-AIDS drugs, acquired the license from NCI and announced a landmark agreement to return 20 percent of any commercial revenues from this experimental but promising compound to the people of Samoa. "Signing this agreement for the Samoans has made me very, very happy," says Cox. "I gave my word to these people that I would protect their financial interests, so it was a great thing for me to go back to the village and say I kept my word. And I was so touched by their response. They want to return a portion of their share for conservation work in other villages." A world-renowned ethnobotanist and executive director of the National Tropical Botanical Garden on Kauai, Cox first traveled to Samoa in 1973 at the age of nineteen for two years as a Mormon missionary. After completing graduate school at Harvard in 1981, he received a five-year National Science Foundation Award that allowed him to pursue any course of study he wished. He packed up his wife and four children and returned to Savaii, the least developed of the ten volcanic islands in the Samoan archipelago, a location as remote as possible from Western influences. Here Cox began his research into the medicinal uses of native plants in hopes of finding a cure for breast cancer, the disease that took his mother's life. "I see ethnobotany--the study of the relationship between people and plants--as the key to the preservation of this vast collection of species as well as a pathway to halting many diseases," Cox says after nearly thirty years of research in the field. Cox and Michael Balick, his colleague and coauthor of an internationally acclaimed book on ethnobotany, Plants, People, and Culture, share a similar philosophy. "Paul has caused us to think about the value of indigenous knowledge in today's world through his work on medicinal plants and natural products research, his work on the loss of traditional knowledge and loss of linguistic knowledge about traditional varieties of plants such as breadfruit," says Balick. "He has educated a generation of students in the joys, the challenges, the pitfalls, and the benefits of devoting yourself to the career of ethnobotany." Descended from a long line of conservationists, Cox came by his interest in plants naturally. His great-grandfather was an early advocate of Arbor Day, and his grandfather created fish hatcheries and wildlife reserves in Utah. His father was a park superintendent and his mother a fisheries biologist. When other boys his age were playing baseball, Cox was building greenhouses and collecting unusual carnivorous plants. He graduated from Brigham Young University with a degree in botany in 1976, a master's in ecology from the University of Wales in 1978, and a doctorate in biology from Harvard in 1981. Since then he has accumulated dozens of honors and awards--everything from Best Overall Teacher at Brigham Young University to Time's Hero of Medicine to the 1997 Goldman Environmental Prize, a prestigious conservation award referred to as the "Nobel Prize of the environment." He has published countless articles and several books and been featured in two films. But more importantly, Cox has helped save a Samoan rain forest, protect endangered Samoan flying foxes, and establish the nation's newest national park. The youngest of three children, Cox was especially close to his mother, and her death in 1984 affected him deeply. "When my mom died, I actually considered going back to medical school because I really wanted to do what I could to fight breast cancer," he says. "Then I thought that perhaps I should leverage what I already know: perhaps there was a rain forest plant that could help." Cox and his family lived for a year in an open-sided, thatch-roofed fale (hut) without water and electricity in the remote village of Falealupo in a region where the average annual per capita income is $100. They ate baked bananas, reef fish, roasted pork, and breadfruit; slept on mats on the floor; and dressed in the traditional lavalava, the wraparound skirt worn by both men and women. They survived a 1990 hurricane that destroyed their village. To save his five years' worth of field research, Cox admits he foolishly swam back to their house through the waves to retrieve his notebooks and laptop computer. As time went on, Cox was more convinced than ever that he'd chosen the perfect place to study medicinal plants. Rain forests are home to 50 percent of the world's 265,000 flowering plant species, and only half of 1 percent of them have been analyzed for medicinal purposes. "The flora of Samoa has a greater percentage of endemic plant species than anywhere else in the world save Hawaii, and nearly a third of the species of the Samoan rain forest are found nowhere else in the world," he writes in Nafanua: Saving the Samoan Rain Forest. "Samoan healing is a tradition of considerable antiquity," says Cox. "Most Samoan herbalists are women whose knowledge has been acquired from their mothers or grandmothers. In this matrilineal knowledge system, the healers receive little cultural recognition for their services and provide care without expectation of material reward. Yet their knowledge is remarkable: some healers use up to one hundred different plant species in their formulations and can recognize over two hundred species by name." Cox sat at the feet of these women, documenting their words with his tape recorder. Every evening he transcribed his notes in Samoan into his laptop computer powered by solar panels and printed them out. The next day he would read them back to the healer in her own language so she could correct him. Cox follows in the footsteps of early Swedish naturalist Carolus Linnaeus and Harvard scientist Richard Schultes in his approach to ethnobotanical research. Because he had learned to speak and write the complex Samoan language from a village chief, Cox was better prepared than most to learn about the remote island's plants. This linguistic skill enabled him to communicate with native healers like Epenesa Maugiosa and Pela Lilo and to establish a deep rapport with the people in the village. Gaugau Tavana, director of education at the National Tropical Botanical Garden, was born and raised on Savaii; he has observed Cox's interaction with his people over the years. "Paul's approach is based on his deep understanding and love for the people he works with," says Tavana. "He speaks the chief language eloquently and practices the culture of the Samoan people, not only in what he does but also within his heart. He works well at the grassroots level, lives, eats, and sleeps with the people and shares their stories. He values the expertise of indigenous people and considers himself a student learning from them." Cox was so struck by Samoan healer Maugiosa's claim that mamala could treat hepatitis that he pursued his research into that plant with healer Pela Lilo in Falealupo. When he asked her to explain her use of the small tree with shiny, spade-shaped leaves that grows along the edges of the rain forest, Lilo gave him similar information. So he prepared voucher specimens of mamala in much the same way botanists have been preserving them since Captain Cook's era, using a wooden plant press and blotter paper. He also chopped up bark and stem wood and packed them in an aluminum Sigg bottle, which he filled with 75 percent ethanol. Since Samoan healers use only fresh material, Cox was afraid some healing properties might be lost on drying the plant parts. "Together with a number of other plants, I sent this to my collaborators at NCI," says Cox, "and I was just thrilled when they found that it was active against HIV, even though when I went to Samoa I was looking for anticancer plants." Although much of his research comes from the South Pacific, Cox also studies with Saami healers above the Arctic Circle in Lapland through his position as King Gustaf XVI Professor of Environmental Science at the Swedish Agricultural University in Uppsala, Sweden. Altogether Cox and his colleagues at the University in Uppsala have analyzed seventy- four Samoan plant samples for pharmacological activity, and eight-six percent of them exhibit intense activity. Five are currently in various stages of drug development. Samoa's isolation increases the vulnerability of its forest, and the fact that its plants have evolved in the absence of predators and natural protections like thorns makes them absolutely defenseless against attack. In 1988, Cox learned that Samoan islanders were forced to lease the Falealupo rain forest to loggers to raise $85,000 to finance construction of a government-mandated school. "As I witnessed the destruction of the forest," says Cox, "I felt as if I were again watching my mother die. Never before, except at her death, had I felt so small, helpless, insignificant, inconsequential. Once again I felt awash in despair." Ever a man of action, Cox determined to do everything in his power to halt the logging of the last lowland rain forest in Samoa. He met with village chiefs and offered to mortgage his own home to raise the money. After reaching consensus on a plan of action, he appealed for help to Utah businessmen Rex Maughan and Ken Murdock, who had also served as Mormon missionaries to Samoa. They agreed to help pay off the debt, provided the villagers promised to protect the rain forest for fifty years. A meeting with thirty-eight chiefs formalized their understanding in what Cox hopes will be a precedent-setting document. The Falealupo Covenant calls for the village to receive 33 percent of any proceeds of any drug Cox discovers from plants in its forest. True to his word, Cox encouraged ARA to return 6.7 percent of its revenues (33 percent of the total 20 percent Samoan return) to Falealupo village. The alliance agreed. In the course of his fieldwork in Samoa, Cox learned that the population of flying foxes (Pteropus samoensis) was in serious decline. Since he'd done his doctoral studies on flying fox pollination, he knew these animals were a major pollinator of the islands' rain forests. Commercial hunters armed with semiautomatic shotguns were killing the graceful creatures by the hundreds and air-freighting them to Guam, where they sold for $35 apiece as a luxury food item. He filed a petition to place the Samoan flying fox on the endangered species list. It was this concern for flying foxes that led to Cox's campaign to establish a Samoan national park. Continuing to use his uncanny ability to forge partnerships and build consensus, Cox inspired two firms, Nature's Way and Nu Skin International, to match his share of the $75,000 Goldman Environmental Prize if he donated it to conservation. Together they created a $112,000 endowment for the Falealupo Rain Forest Preserve administered by the Seacology Foundation, a nonprofit, nongovernmental organization Cox founded with the mission of helping to save the world, one island village at a time. Nu Skin, a Utah-based company that has used a compound from a Samoan plant in a foot cream, even donated $75,000 to build an aerial walkway one hundred feet above the forest, the proceeds of which fund the village retirement scheme. "The walkway, used by tourists to view the rain forest canopy, is generating nearly $1,500 a month for the village, which retains all its proceeds," says Cox. "This is the first time Samoans have been able to make money from the forest without cutting it down." A combination of intellectual curiosity, respect for the knowledge of other cultures, and his mother's memory drives Cox to continue his quest for a cure for cancer among indigenous plants. He is well aware of the fact that one-quarter of the prescription drugs dispensed in the United States for the past two decades were derived from flowering plants, medications such as the heart drug digitalis from foxglove and the cancer medicine vincristine from rosy periwinkle. Many of these plants came from the rapidly vanishing flora of the world's tropical rain forests. Prostratin's future is still uncertain, since only five of five thousand compounds that survive clinical testing make it to human testing and usually only one of these five will be approved. Still, Dr. Gordon Cragg, chief of the Natural Products Branch of the NCI, says the compound looks promising. "Prostratin seems to be able to flush the latent HIV virus out of hiding," says Cragg, "and if that effect also can be observed in human patients, it can be quite a valuable addition to the method of treatment." Meanwhile, Prostratin is less than a year away from human trials at ARA. If all goes well, ARA hopes to partner with a pharmaceutical company to develop the drug. "What we'd like to do with this Samoan agreement is set a precedent for the industry in dealing with indigenous cultures and medicine," says ARA Executive Director Irl Barefield. Though Cox's oratorical skills attracted the attention of Samoan chiefs, his compassion and empathy demonstrated in personal sacrifice led them to name him Nafanua after an ancient protective goddess who championed conservation. Cox takes his title seriously, returning to Samoa once or twice a year to make sure all is well. Through his research he hopes to debunk the myth that ethnobotanical research is intrinsically exploitive of indigenous peoples. "Countries that neither train their own ethnobotanists nor allow foreign ethnobotanists to do research are in effect guaranteeing that most of their traditional knowledge and much of their biodiversity will vanish before ever being documented," he says. "I am most grateful that the indigenous people I work with have accepted me, and I deeply value my associations with them. Their knowledge systems contain much of worth and beauty, and if their cultures disappear, the world will be far poorer for it."n. For more information: Nafanua: Saving the Samoan Rain Forest, Paul Alan Cox, W.H. Freeman & Co., New York, 1997. Margaret A. Haapoja is a Minnesota freelance writer who vacations on the island of Kauai every winter. The garden columnist for the Duluth News-Tribune, she often writes about tropical gardens. Tag: Rainforest Remedies. Nafanua: Saving the Samoan Rain Forest (Samoa) by Paul Alan Cox. If you say it just right, the island of Savaii rhymes with Hawaii. That’s because the ancient Samoans were thought to have colonized a lot of Polynesia and Melanesia – and they never forgot their home island. Or their underwater goddess, Nafanua. And they kept giving things similar names. Kind of like New Boston or New Amsterdam. Scientists know that developing in geographic isolation is a mixed blessing. On the wonderful side, it causes unique birds and animals to thrive, like the rare Samoan flying fox. And isolation from most predators caused the Samoan rainforest to evolve without protective biology – the author says humans could walk through the rainforest barefoot . But a huge problem with isolation is when that protective shielding goes away – when the Native Americans were rediscovered by the rest of humanity, they were wiped out by diseases they had been shielded from for thousands of years, for example. It was no different for the Samoans when they were colonized in the late 1800s. Samoan Flying Fox…a cool fruit bat which pollinates the rainforest. I don’t like change. I especially hate extinction. Like Paul Alan Cox, I was horrified to read that the rainforest near Falealupo village was about to be logged to death. That the American Fish & Game service was corrupted by Big Business into deliberately hampering efforts to save the endangered Samoan flying fox. (First they told Dr. Cox the species did not exist; then they counted hundreds of another species and informed him that there was no danger.) And I was distressed that the unique Samoan human culture would be dying as well. It was deeply gratifying that Dr. Cox saved the rainforest by putting up his own money to fund the village school, so they wouldn’t have to get the money from logging. He later went on to found Seacology to save some of the world’s ocean ecosystems. Community. While I am grateful to live in a rich country like America, bits of Samoan life do sound like paradise to me. Living close to the ocean. The lack of polluting, stressful technology and machines. The slowness of time, the close-up beauty and peace. And the sense of community and connectedness that we in the West have either lost or never had. In Samoa, while you may have to work your guts out subsistence farming or subsistence fishing, you are never alone. The smallest unit of consciousness in Samoa is a village, Dr. Cox explains: A man accidentally runs over and kills a small boy from a different village. His entire town makes themselves responsible to the grieving father. At sunrise the next day, there they are, 60 chiefs and other men from the driver’s village, sitting across the road in front of the father’s hut. They will not move until the other village forgives their village for the offense. Each man takes it in turn to rise and embrace the father, telling him how personally sorry they are, and giving gifts of money, pigs, and other items that can only be a sacrifice for such poor people. This seems very sensible and very healing to me. As well as Confucian in its insistence on order, ritual, and right action for societal harmony. Dr. Cox and the villagers are all sympathetic characters. Cox is fluent in Samoan, having learned it previously as a young LDS missionary to the islands. He and his family fit into village society as well as they can, much unlike a doctor friend who comes to visit. This small anecdote is the most shocking in the book and only reinforced my personal belief that Western medical practitioners are by inclination and training, too arrogant, too disrespectful, too impatient and too dismissive of anything they weren’t taught in school. Dr. Cox and his family even survive the worst earthquake (8.1) and tsunami in the island’s recorded history, right along with their Samoan friends and neighbors. Confusing Country Names. Throughout the book I thought I was reading about American Samoa, because the author is American, and he was in Samoa. To make matters more confusing, Dr. Cox is listed on Wikipedia as having established the 50th National US Park – in American Samoa . But Falealupo village is in Independent Samoa. This made my head hurt. How about if the US just gives Samoa back to the people it belongs to? Meanwhile, let’s clear up some confusion as best we can. Falealupo village Island of Savaii Independent State of Samoa the setting for this book. These 10 islands are in the western part of the Samoan island chain – four inhabited and six not inhabited. Known as “German Samoa” up until the Germans lost World War 1, they were then known as “Western Samoa” and controlled by New Zealand until winning independence in 1962. They joined the UN in 1976. Savaii island currently has about 43,000 people living there while Upolu island has about 150,000. American Samoa NOT the setting for this book. These 5 islands and 2 coral atolls in the EASTERN part of the island chain have a unique (and in my opinion, horribly unjust) status. About 50,000 people live there. Active American interference as late as the 1930s suppressed a Mau independence movement here like the one that succeeded in the western part of the islands. About the same time as we overthrew the Kingdom of Hawaii. According to Wikipedia, people born in American Samoa are American nationals, but not American citizens. (Separate but equal, anyone?) They can’t vote, nor can they be taxed – thank goodness for some small measure of fairness. They do get to send one non-voting delegate to the House of Representatives. (What’s the point?) No Closure. Although I learned a lot by reading the book and enjoyed some of it – some of it made me sad and angry about the state of our world and those in power – I did find it wanting in one respect. Some major incidents didn’t get closure. For example, during the hurricane, Mr. Cox finds himself forced to provide medical treatment to a little Samoan boy whose hand is almost severed by a flying piece of tin. He isn’t a doctor and the best he can do is to clean the wound, give the kid antibiotic pills, and split the hand. There are only two chapters on the storm and then the next chapter takes place 8 years later. I did want some closure about the little boy and maybe an update about what all the characters are doing now. It was also sad that Funio, the Samoan who jointly received the Goldman Environmental Prize along with Mr. Cox, for their efforts to create the first National Park in Samoa and save the rainforest, dies of cancer shortly afterward. I needed a better kind of closure there! Of course, maybe I’m really asking that one from life. All in all, an eye-opening and enlightening book. Sastun: My Apprenticeship With a Maya Healer (Belize) by Dr. Rosita Arvigo. “Let your food be your medicine, and your medicine be your food.”–Hippocrates. DISCLAIMER: Rosita Arvigo is originally from the USA. However, the Maya healer she studied with unfortunately didn’t leave us any writings in English. BACKSTORY In 1969, the year *I* was born, Rosita Arvigo had just left a career in advertising in Chicago to “live closer to the land”. First she moved to San Francisco, then to a remote village in Mexico’s Sierra Madre mountains where she farmed beside the Nahuatl Indians. Dona Rita, a respected elder, taught Rosita the names and uses of medicinal plants. By 1976 Rosita had moved to Belize, to caretake an organic farm. She returned to Chicago for 3 years to get her degree in “Naprapathy.” (I kept thinking she meant Naturopathy, but a quick trip to Wiki told me that what she studied is a spine-cracker kind of thing.) In cadaver class, she met a “handsome paramedic with healing hands.” In 1981 they resettled in western Belize on 35 acres of uncleared jungle along the Macal River, near the Guatemalan border. But it wasn’t until Rosita met Don Elijio Panti, an elderly Maya healer, that the real adventures began. Belize used to be “British Honduras.” It’s made up of Garifuna people (descendants of Carib, Arawak and West African people); Creoles descended from African slaves; East Indians who came over as “indentured laborers”, Lebanese who came as chicle-bosses (yes, as in Chiclets) and postcolonial Mennonites, British, other Europeans and American expats like Rosita and Greg. A WORD ABOUT GUM. Well, it has to come from somewhere, right? Among Belize’s claims to fame is the Wiki comment “Birthplace of Chewing Gum.” Apparently the word chicle comes either from the Nahuatl word tziktli , or “sticky stuff” or the Mayan word tsicte . The Nahuatl-Aztecs and the Maya prized it for its subtle flavor and high sugar content. MY PERSONAL MEDICAL HISTORY vs MAYAN HEALING. You know those diagrams of pigs, sheep, and cows they used to show on TV in the 70s with all the cuts of meat marked and numbered? Going to the doctor in the US has often felt this way to me. I’m a collection of symptoms for the endocrinologist, who doesn’t treat anything having to do with dental or psychological, you know? The doctor doesn’t ask me what the gynecologist said (even though she is the one who noticed my enlarged thyroid.) I’m not treated in a whole-system way, the way Don Elijio treated his patients. Don Elijio also had an understanding that when you got a person to laugh, half their troubles and sicknesses went away. When is the last time your doctor delighted you or made you laugh? DO ElIJIOS’S LEGACY. Don Elijio went through a lot in his own life. His father was a black magic practitioner–and an abusive drunk. The young Elijio vowed never to be like him, and to only use his talents for healing. (Sadly his beloved daughter married a man just like her grandfather–without the magic–and was eventually killed by him.) Don Elijio believed that his teacher, Jeronimo, had the ability turn into a jaguar after saying an ancient and secret prayer. He told Rosita he had even seen this one night. I didn’t know what to make of this part, or of the part where Rosita said prayers to the Maya spirits at her initiation and palm fronds rustled where there was no wind; but they were intriguing. So what, you ask, is a Sastun? It’s a touchstone that allows you to determine the source of an illness or get divine answers to questions. Don Elijio’s was a green marble. I think Rosita’s was a stone. Don Elijio was very concerned in the beginning when Rosita said she wanted to study with him, because she isn’t Maya and he wasn’t sure the spirits would accept her. But as it turns out, they don’t have enough adherents to be finicky. The knowledge of men and women like Don Elijio is being lost because young people don’t want to apprentice with traditional healers. Plant medicine takes too long. (Even though Big Pharma has derived some of its most powerful drugs from plants, such as the birth control pill that uses ingredients Maya women have relied on for centuries.) RAINFOREST REMEDIES NOW. I liked how each chapter of the book begins with a plant and gives its Spanish and Maya names, plus what it is used for. I was a little suspicious of Rosa-and-Greg’s Rainforest Remedies, having seen a lot of scams in my prior job. But in addition to the website and the seminars and the jars and bottles, they also created a nature preserve and a memorial to the late Don Elijio, both of which I liked, and the book caries this note: “Harper-San-Francisco and the author, in association with the Rainforest Action Network, will facilitate the planting of two trees for every one tree used in the manufacture of this book.” This is a lady who believes what she says and lives what she believes. And *I* also believe that Western medicine is criminally and willfully ignorant about nutrition and natural healing. Nafanua: Saving the Samoan Rain Forest (Samoa) If you say it just right, the island of Savaii rhymes with Hawaii. That’s because the ancient Samoans were thought to have colonized a lot of Polynesia and Melanesia – and they never forgot their home island. Or their underwater goddess, Nafanua. And they kept giving things similar names. Kind of like New Boston or New Amsterdam. Scientists know that developing in geographic isolation is a mixed blessing. On the wonderful side, it causes unique birds and animals to thrive, like the rare Samoan flying fox. And isolation from most predators caused the Samoan rainforest to evolve without protective biology – the author says humans could walk through the rainforest barefoot . But a huge problem with isolation is when that protective shielding goes away – when the Native Americans were rediscovered by the rest of humanity, they were wiped out by diseases they had been shielded from for thousands of years, for example. It was no different for the Samoans when they were colonized in the late 1800s. Samoan Flying Fox…a cool fruit bat which pollinates the rainforest. I don’t like change. I especially hate extinction. Like Paul Alan Cox, I was horrified to read that the rainforest near Falealupo village was about to be logged to death. That the American Fish & Game service was corrupted by Big Business into deliberately hampering efforts to save the endangered Samoan flying fox. (First they told Dr. Cox the species did not exist; then they counted hundreds of another species and informed him that there was no danger.) And I was distressed that the unique Samoan human culture would be dying as well. It was deeply gratifying that Dr. Cox saved the rainforest by putting up his own money to fund the village school, so they wouldn’t have to get the money from logging. He later went on to found Seacology to save some of the world’s ocean ecosystems. Community. While I am grateful to live in a rich country like America, bits of Samoan life do sound like paradise to me. Living close to the ocean. The lack of polluting, stressful technology and machines. The slowness of time, the close-up beauty and peace. And the sense of community and connectedness that we in the West have either lost or never had. In Samoa, while you may have to work your guts out subsistence farming or subsistence fishing, you are never alone. The smallest unit of consciousness in Samoa is a village, Dr. Cox explains: A man accidentally runs over and kills a small boy from a different village. His entire town makes themselves responsible to the grieving father. At sunrise the next day, there they are, 60 chiefs and other men from the driver’s village, sitting across the road in front of the father’s hut. They will not move until the other village forgives their village for the offense. Each man takes it in turn to rise and embrace the father, telling him how personally sorry they are, and giving gifts of money, pigs, and other items that can only be a sacrifice for such poor people. This seems very sensible and very healing to me. As well as Confucian in its insistence on order, ritual, and right action for societal harmony. Dr. Cox and the villagers are all sympathetic characters. Cox is fluent in Samoan, having learned it previously as a young LDS missionary to the islands. He and his family fit into village society as well as they can, much unlike a doctor friend who comes to visit. This small anecdote is the most shocking in the book and only reinforced my personal belief that Western medical practitioners are by inclination and training, too arrogant, too disrespectful, too impatient and too dismissive of anything they weren’t taught in school. Dr. Cox and his family even survive the worst earthquake (8.1) and tsunami in the island’s recorded history, right along with their Samoan friends and neighbors. Confusing Country Names. Throughout the book I thought I was reading about American Samoa, because the author is American, and he was in Samoa. To make matters more confusing, Dr. Cox is listed on Wikipedia as having established the 50th National US Park – in American Samoa . But Falealupo village is in Independent Samoa. This made my head hurt. How about if the US just gives Samoa back to the people it belongs to? Meanwhile, let’s clear up some confusion as best we can. Falealupo village Island of Savaii Independent State of Samoa the setting for this book. These 10 islands are in the western part of the Samoan island chain – four inhabited and six not inhabited. Known as “German Samoa” up until the Germans lost World War 1, they were then known as “Western Samoa” and controlled by New Zealand until winning independence in 1962. They joined the UN in 1976. Savaii island currently has about 43,000 people living there while Upolu island has about 150,000. American Samoa NOT the setting for this book. These 5 islands and 2 coral atolls in the EASTERN part of the island chain have a unique (and in my opinion, horribly unjust) status. About 50,000 people live there. Active American interference as late as the 1930s suppressed a Mau independence movement here like the one that succeeded in the western part of the islands. About the same time as we overthrew the Kingdom of Hawaii. According to Wikipedia, people born in American Samoa are American nationals, but not American citizens. (Separate but equal, anyone?) They can’t vote, nor can they be taxed – thank goodness for some small measure of fairness. They do get to send one non-voting delegate to the House of Representatives. (What’s the point?) No Closure. Although I learned a lot by reading the book and enjoyed some of it – some of it made me sad and angry about the state of our world and those in power – I did find it wanting in one respect. Some major incidents didn’t get closure. For example, during the hurricane, Mr. Cox finds himself forced to provide medical treatment to a little Samoan boy whose hand is almost severed by a flying piece of tin. He isn’t a doctor and the best he can do is to clean the wound, give the kid antibiotic pills, and split the hand. There are only two chapters on the storm and then the next chapter takes place 8 years later. I did want some closure about the little boy and maybe an update about what all the characters are doing now. It was also sad that Funio, the Samoan who jointly received the Goldman Environmental Prize along with Mr. Cox, for their efforts to create the first National Park in Samoa and save the rainforest, dies of cancer shortly afterward. I needed a better kind of closure there! Of course, maybe I’m really asking that one from life. Catalogue. Prompted by his mother's death from breast cancer, ethnobotanist Paul Alan Cox traveled with his family to a remote Samoan village at the edge of a rain forest to search for new leads in treating the disease. Working closely with both native healers and the U.S. National Cancer Institute in an analysis of traditional rain-forest remedies, Cox discovered a promising new plant-derived drug, prostratin, for a different, but equally serious malady: AIDS. The promise of this new drug lead was soon overshadowed, however, by news that a logging company had started to destroy the 30,000-acre rain forest where Cox first collected the plant that yielded prostratin. It was then that the village elders began to instruct Cox in the legends of Nafanua, the Samoan goddess who in ancient times freed the people from oppression and taught them to protect the rain forest. Collaborating with the village elders eager to preserve the spirit of Nafanua's teachings, Cox launched an international campaign to stop the logging of the Falealupo Rain Forest. In Nafanua, he tells the moving story of those efforts, and his involvement in related campaigns to create a U.S. National Park in American Samoa and to place Samoa's endangered flying foxes under international protection. Nafanua explores the profound influence of Western colonialism and discusses the impact of historic misperceptions of the South Seas on appreciation of the dignity of its peoples. Nafanua is a testament to the power of nature to both heal and destroy - and to the equally powerful human capacity for faith and perseverance against seemingly impossible odds. Includes bibliographical references. Online. In the Library. Request this item to view in the Library's reading rooms using your library card. To learn more about how to request items watch this short online video .