Teuila Hughes, a doctoral candidate in Dance Studies at Waipapa Taumata Rau, University of Auckland, said her childhood in Fiji laid the foundations for her research into Siva Samoa, the university said.
The university released her account to mark Fiji Language Week in New Zealand.
Hughes is a dance artist and teacher. Her doctoral research treats Siva Samoa as embodied and relational ancestral knowledge, focusing on va and the relationships that underpin Samoan ways of knowing and being.
She was born in Darwin, Australia, and moved with her family to Suva at the age of two, spending the next 15 years there. Her mother is Samoan, from Vaimoso and Manono in Upolu, and her father has Welsh and Armenian heritage as well as Australian.
Hughes said regular trips to Apia to visit extended family allowed her to connect more deeply with her Samoan culture and identity.
According to the release, family life centred on the ocean, with Hughes, her siblings and her parents all outrigger canoe paddlers who trained and competed together.
She said some of her earliest memories are of learning Siva from family friends in living rooms and front yards, before performing at family gatherings in Fiji and Samoa. Dancing became a way to connect with family and with her sense of being Samoan and of the wider Pacific, she said.
At 12 she began training at the Oceania Centre at the University of the South Pacific in Suva under the late Samoan choreographer Alan Alo. The release said she also occasionally glimpsed the late writer and scholar Dr Epeli Hau'ofa there.
Hughes said she was absorbing a great deal in those years without fully realising it, and that the people and creative environments around her continue to shape her work and how she understands herself.
She later enrolled in a Bachelor of Performing Arts in Dance Studies at the University of Auckland. The move was not easy, she said, as she worked through unfamiliar Western dance forms and academic frameworks.
"There were moments when I felt like an imposter and wondered, 'Who am I, this girl from the islands, to be in this space?'" Hughes said.
Through postgraduate study she came to see the knowledge she carried from her family and culture as a contribution to academic work rather than something separate from it, the release said.
As a teacher, Hughes said she wants students to know they do not have to separate themselves from their families or cultures to belong in academic spaces, and that they can bring those relationships and knowledge systems with them.
After finishing her PhD she hopes to keep teaching and researching, to make work centred on Pacific ancestral knowledge, embodiment and healing, and to open pathways for other Pacific and Indigenous scholars and artists.
The release does not say when Hughes expects to complete her doctorate, or the dates of Fiji Language Week.