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Oscar Kightley Recalled A White Woman Apologizing To Him After Watching His Play About The Terrible Discrimination Pacific Islanders Faced In New Zealand
"We were just so desperate to do well. We wanted to represent our families, our cultures."
For BuzzFeed’s Voices of the Pacific series, I sat down with Oscar to chat about the memento he kept from Sione's Wedding, his favorite aspect of Samoan culture, and more. But I feel like, in a way, everything that's happened in the last 3000 years is the legacy of those first people that set out into this big, vast Pacific ocean before the islands were populated because they saw birds flying, and they thought, "Well, they must be landing somewhere." So being Pasifika, to me — gosh, I've never been asked that, but I just come from this really cool part of the world, and I'm so grateful and blessed that I was, and so I want to use all the tools that came with to walk gently through this Earth and know its beauty all the days of my life and spread that as much as I can.
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