Reggie Meredith Fiitao: Tālofa lava. My name is Reggie Meredith Fitiao. I'm from the village of Leone in Pago Pago, Tutuila, American Samoa, and I'm a siapo maker. When I was about nine years old, my Great Auntie Mary was the one that introduced me and my family to working with siapo. The trees, the u'a, comes from the paper mulberry trees. They grow tall. You're looking at the diameter of a broom handle, so they say about 10 months and they'll be 10 feet tall, sometimes taller, which is a good time to harvest. The work is done in the morning because it's the coolest time of the day, and that means making an incision in the bark so that you can peel the bark away from the center core, and you're going to remove the outer skin from the inner skin. You work on cleaning and ridding the inner bast of all the excessive debris that might be there using shells. Shells and the water. As you continue to groom then it becomes really damp. Then it's folded twice, and then it's prepared to be beaten. When it's beaten and you finally get to the last finishing move, and you open it up and you let it fold out, there's this beautiful, unique scent to the bark. It's fresh. It smells like the forest.

Reggie Meredith Fiitao: We have different islands that do tapa still today, and you'll notice I changed the word from siapo, which is our word, to tapa which is a universal word of bark cloth production, or making. The wider diaspora of siapo making, there's some in Tonga, in Fiji, in Hawaii, Tahiti, but here on our island, there's very few. One of them is Su'a Ulisone Fitiao, my husband, and myself. We have a studio gallery that invites people in to come and share and learn more about siapo making. Now, if you go to the other islands in Samoa, there'll be a lot more siapo makers there. There are many that I do know. I'm always so grateful to run into them because we have this common thread, this bond. So we talk shop, of course. Thirty-three years later, I'm still here serving in the arts, still working with siapo. And it's profound because I just felt like it was my calling to stay the course and really work with the local people, with my people.