I am a human geographer whose work also has an interdisciplinary focus engaging cognate areas of geography, indigenous geography, place and identity, development studies, Pacific studies, diaspora, transnationalism and Pacific labor mobility. Discourses and practices relating to migration and identity are strongly inflected with considerations of race and class but also indigenous understandings of concepts of migration, place and identity. The second focuses on how fa'a-Samoa (Samoan culture and way of life) is used as an intellectual tool by Samoans or for that matter Hawaiians and other Pacific Islanders as they negotiate their worlds at home and in the new places. Migration does not mean a severance of ties and abandonment of culture. Rather I argue that conventional scholarly approaches to migration have been dominated by economistic perspective. These conceptions of movement are embedded in notions of individualism and the primacy of economic motivations as understood in capitalist terms. Thus, these fail to explain fully what is happening in Pacific Islands societies and their overseas populations where principles of reciprocity, participation, obligation, sharing and collectivism remain strong even in the face of late capitalism, westernization, modernization and globalization. My recent research has focused on Samoan oral traditions as in storytelling or tala le vavau. The rich oral tradition of Samoan storytelling, as heard in the tala le vavau (ancient stories, often translated as myths and legends) e.g. Metotagivale and Alo, highlights the core cultural values that underscore fa’a-Samoa (Samoan culture and ways of knowing) of fanua or place. I argue that Samoan Indigenous ways of understanding place can be synthesized with the phenomenology approach to contribute to a broader academic understanding of place and physical resources.