Samoa is an independent Polynesian nation of two main islands and several smaller ones in the central South Pacific, long regarded as a heartland of Polynesian culture. Settled by Lapita voyagers roughly three thousand years ago, it carried the matai chiefly-title system and the customary order known as fa'a Samoa through a colonial era that split the archipelago among Germany, the United States, and New Zealand. After a nonviolent independence movement, it became, on 1 January 1962, the first Pacific island nation to regain its independence in the twentieth century. It is distinct from American Samoa, the United States territory that occupies the eastern islands.
In November 1918 a steamer from New Zealand docked at Apia carrying the influenza. Within weeks it killed about a fifth of Western Samoa's people. A few miles east, across a border that three empires had drawn straight through one nation, American Samoa sealed its harbor and lost no one. The same people, the same islands, split by a line on a map into two fates. The Samoans who buried their dead did not forget who had opened the door, and their grief helped light the movement that would make Western Samoa the first Pacific country to win back its independence.