Kapeneta ‘Kap’ Te’o-Tafiti, the PCC’s “ambassador” in the Samoan village, thinks this link to culture is very important.
“Knife dancing is a powerful way for Samoans, especially those who have been away from home for a long time, to become connected with our culture again. It’s also a powerful instrument to introduce Samoan culture to those who don’t know about it,” he says.
“When we share our culture in its pure form, people understand what we’re about,” he continues. “I love helping people understand who we truly are as Samoans, and the way we live and do things.”
Kap, who is extremely personable, originally comes from Saipipi, Savaii — the largest island in Samoa, but one with strong ties to centuries-old Polynesian customs. “We lived in a fale [house] just like this one,” he says, pointing to the family dwelling in the PCC’s Samoan village, “and I had to help cook the food and work in the plantation, just like we explain in our demonstrations here.”
Kap came to work at the Center in 1988 as a BYU-Hawaii work-scholarship student and, following a three-year break during which he taught in Samoa, graduated in three dimensional art in 1995. His creative pieces are for sale in the Center’s Kaha Ki’i Art Gallery.
He entered his first PCC World Fire Knife Competition in 1996 and started working fulltime at the Center in 1997, the same year he started to seriously learn knife dancing. He has competed every year since. “This will be my eleventh year. My best finish was second place in 2004.”
“When I graduated from BYU-Hawaii, I realized that was a very good thing to get into,” he says, adding that his older brother, Ah Chew Tafiti, a professional knife dancer, had taught him a few things when he was a child in Samoa and also helped train him in Hawaii. “My brother started dancing in 1974, and he’s still going,” he says, also crediting former PCC fire knife dancers Sielu Avea and So’o Tufaga for their help.
He explains his own style of knife dancing is very traditional. “There are a lot of baton twirling techniques that are entering into the dance, and it’s very exciting, but I think we should draw the lines between the traditional and creative forms. I’m going to help keep the traditional form alive,” he says, admitting that the addition of fire, which dates back to the 1940s, is one of the most exciting about the modern Samoan knife dance.
Kap, who is 39 and a very healthy near-vegetarian (like most Polynesians, he loves seafood), says he will “give the younger competitors a run for the money. I’ve always been physically fit, but when I met my wife, she was a vegetarian, so I changed. Within two weeks I could feel my breathing and my insides changing.”
Of those young people he now works with in the Samoan village, Kap adds he sees “a lot of potential in them. This is a great place for them. It’s really important for them to learn who we truly are in a Samoan cultural sense.”
