"While the child is lying in the cradle, besides singing lullabys and swinging it to sleep, there is also a fish or waterskipper for the child to look at, hanging over the cradle toward the head, but not too high, for the child will roll its eyes upward to look at it. When a child rolls its eyes upward like this, they believe that this is a time when the purchasing mother [spirit] comes to molest it. These fish are tied and woven of nipa palm leaves in the form of a fish of fairly large size, and painted green, red, and, yellow. There are many small fish which are supposed to be its young, hanging from it. Even now these are sometimes seen for sale." 1

Birthdays are of little account in Samoa. But for the birth itself of the baby of high rank, a great feast will be held, and much property given away. The first baby must always be born in the mother's village and if she has gone to live in the village of her husband, she must go home for the occasion. For several months before the birth of the child the father's relatives have brought gifts of food to the prospective mother, while the mother's female relatives have been busy making pure white bark cloth for baby clothes and weaving dozens of tiny pandanus mats which form the layette. The expectant mother goes home laden with food gifts and when she returns to her husband's family, her family provides her with the exact equivalent in mats and bark cloth as a gift to them. At the birth itself the father's mother or sister must be present to care for the new-born baby while the midwife and the relatives of the mother care for her. There is no privacy about a birth. Convention dictates that the mother should neither writhe, nor cry out, nor inveigh against the presence of twenty or thirty people in the house who sit up all night if need be, laughing, joking, and playing games. The midwife cuts the cord with a fresh bamboo knife and then all wait eagerly for the cord to fall off, the signal for a feast. It the baby is a girl, the cord is buried under a paper mulberry tree (the tree from which bark cloth is made) to ensure her growing up to be industrious at household tasks; for a boy it is thrown into the sea that he may be a skilled fisherman, or planted under a taro plant to give him industry in farming. Then the visitors go home, the mother rises and goes about her daily tasks, and the new baby ceases to be of much interest to any one. The day, the month in which it was born, is forgotten. Its first steps or first words are remarked without exuberant comment, without ceremony. . .

Babies are always nursed, and in the few cases where the mother's milk fails her, a wet nurse is sought among the kinsfolk. From the first week they are also given other food, papaya, cocoanut milk, sugar-cane juice; the food is either masticated by the mother and then put into the baby's mouth on her finger, or if it is liquid, a piece of bark cloth is dipped into it and the child allowed to suck it, as shepherds feed orphaned lambs. The babies are nursed whenever they cry and there is no attempt at regularity. Unless a woman expects another child, she will nurse a baby until it is two or three years old, as the simplest device for pacifying its crying. Babies sleep with their mothers as long as they are at the breast; after weaning they are usually handed over to the care of some younger girl in the household. They are bathed frequently with the juice of a wild orange and rubbed with cocoanut oil until their skins glisten.

The chief nurse-maid is usually a child of six or seven who is not strong enough to lift a baby over six month sold, but who can carry the child straddling the left hip, or on the small of the back. A child of six or seven months of age will assume this straddling position naturally when it is picked up. Their diminutive nurses do not encourage children to walk, as babies who can walk about are more complicated charges. They walk before they talk, but it is impossible to give the age of walking with any exactness, though I saw two babies walk whom I knew to be only nine months old, and my impression is that the average age is about a year. The life on the floor, for all activities within a Samoan house are conducted on the floor, encourages crawling, and children under three or four years of age optionally crawl or walk. . .

The weight of the punishment usually falls upon the next oldest child, who learns to shout, “Come out of the sun,” before she has fully appreciated the necessity of doing so herself. By the time Samoan girls and boys have reached sixteen or seventeen years of age these perpetual admonitions to the younger ones have become an inseparable part of their conversation, a monotonous, irritated undercurrent to all their comments. I have known them to intersperse their remarks every two or three minutes with, “Keep still,” “Sit still,” “Keep your mouth shut,” “Stop that noise,” uttered quite mechanically although all of the little ones present may have been behaving as quietly as a row of intimidated mice. On the whole, this last requirement of silence is continually mentioned and never enforced. The little nurses are more interested in peace than in forming the characters of their small charges and when a child begins to howl, it is simply dragged out of earshot of its elders. No mother will ever exert herself to discipline a younger child if an older one can be made responsible. . . .

This fear of the disagreeable consequences resulting from a child's crying, is so firmly fixed in the minds of the older children that long after there is any need for it, they succumb to some little tyrant's threat of making a scene, and five-year-olds bully their way into expeditions on which they will have to be carried, into weaving parties where they will tangle the strands, and cook houses where they will tear up the cooking leaves or get thoroughly smudged with the soot and have to be washed—all because an older boy or girl has become so accustomed to yielding any point to stop an outcry.

"When a child reaches the age of one month and one day (probably people wish to make sure that it is a full month, and so they add another day), it is past danger from illnesses which are understood to be inflicted by spirits. They arrange a big fire-hair-shaving and khwan ceremony. Sometimes they also name the child at this time; this is a matter of receiving the new born child into the register of membership in the family.

In shaving the fire-hair they must make an offering for the spirit of the place according to custom. When they shave the hair they leave a clump at the top of the head, saying that it protects the top of the head which is still thin. The hair that is shaved off is placed in a banana-leaf container with a Caladium or lotus leaf laid in the bottom; sometimes flowers are mixed in. . . . Then it is taken and floated on the water at low water. . . The person who takes it and floats it must say,'‘We ask for a life of coolness and happiness like the sacred Ganges,' or something else of this sort. . . . Our floating the hair on the water is probably derived from. . . Indian custom. . . Then the relatives preform [sic] a ceremony of tying the khwan cotton thread around the child's wrists and ankles, and give a blessing according to custom; or if things are done well there are also gifts for the child. What has been described is the ceremony which ordinary people may perform. In the case of wealthy or prominent people the ceremony may be as large as their resources, ability and birth permit. That is, they must have an astrologer name the auspicious day for the khwan ceremony; there must be Brahman and astrologer's ceremonial things (the astrologer goes and speaks in a low tone beside the eye level shrine on which offerings are laid, there are various offerings; there must be a baaj sii [offering]; there is a person to perform the khwan ceremony, called the child's purchasing mother [midwife]; there is encircling with candles; and there are monks to give Buddhist chants in this ceremony. Sometimes the pot containing the afterbirth which has been saved is also entered in this ceremony, together with the silver and gold coconuts for planting when the afterbirth is buried. What has been described briefly is not always performed exactly like this. There are sometimes additions or deletions. It is rather a matter which depends on one's teacher.

. . . When the khwan and shaving-the-fire-hair ceremony is finished, they perform a ceremony of placing the child in the cradle. They are to procure a white gourd…a medicine-pounding mortar and pestle, and a tom-cat. They must tidy up the cat first. Besides these things there are small cloth bags, one filled with paddy, one with pulse, one with sesame, and one with cottonseed. . . These things are laid in the cradle. If the child to enter the cradle is a boy, there are to be a notebook and pencil. If it is a girl, there are to be a thread and needle laid in the cradle also. . . Besides this there may also be a baaj sii [offering] in a dish and encircling with candles. When the objects named above have been placed in the cradle they begin at once to swing it. . . When they have swung it three times they take the cat out of the cradle and carry the child in the arms and put it in the cradle in place of the cat. They swing it three times in the same way, pronouncing a blessing upon the child according to custom, as they swing it. Thus the ceremony is finished. If the child is also to be named at this time, some teachers write the child's name on a paper and lay it in the cradle also."

Two images. First image of a soft, absorbent, linen towel with indigo woven borders. Second image is an Italian fresco that illustrates the cultural context of the towels. This fresco by Paolo di Giovanni Fei, titled "Birth of the Virgin Mary" (1380) displays several uses for the towels. Women used these soft, fringed cloths as head coverings, tablecloths, and for wrapping household items.