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Wedding Tapa, 19th century, from the collection of Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Tapa cloth (or simply tapa) is a barkcloth made in the islands of the Pacific Ocean, primarily in Tonga, Samoa and Fiji, but as far afield as Niue, Cook Islands, Futuna, Solomon Islands, Java, New Zealand, Vanuatu, Papua New Guinea and Hawaii (where it is called kapa).
Any description of Tongan culture that limits itself to what Tongans see as anga fakatonga would give a seriously distorted view of what people actually do, in Tonga, or in diaspora, because accommodations are so often made to anga fakapālangi. The following account tries to give both the idealized and the on-the-ground versions of Tongan culture.
Koloa, which translates as "value", is a term to describe textiles made by Tongan women.These take many forms, including ngatu, widely known in the Pacific as tapa cloth, which is made from bark and inscribed with intricate patterns and symbols; ta’ovala, which are mats woven from strips of pandanus leaves; and kafa, which is braided coconut fibre or, sometimes, human hair.
A taʻovala is an article of Tongan dress, a mat wrapped around the waist, worn by men and women, at all formal occasions, much like the tie for men in the Western culture. The ta'ovala is also commonly seen among the Fijian Lau Islands, and Wallis island, both regions once heavily influenced by Tongan hegemony and cultural diffusion.
Tongans or Tongan people are a Polynesian ethnic group native to Tonga, a Polynesian archipelago in the Pacific Ocean. Tongans represent more than 98% of the inhabitants of Tonga. The rest are European (the majority are British ), mixed European, and other Pacific Islanders .
Tongan narrative, Tongan mythology, or ancient Tongan religion, sometimes referred to as tala-ē-fonua (meaning, "telling of the land and its people") [1] in Tongan, is the collation of various myths, legends, stories, traditions, characters, creatures, spirits, and gods of the Polynesian islands that now make up the island nation of Tonga.
A kiekie is a Tongan dress, an ornamental girdle around the waist, mainly worn by women on semiformal occasions, but nowadays also sometimes by men. At highly formal occasions both gender will settle for a taʻovala. At casual occasions no girdle is needed for any gender, although women may continue wearing a kiekie even then, as it is ...
The puletasi (Samoa) or puletaha (Tonga) is a traditional item of clothing worn by Samoan, Tongan, and Fijian women and girls. Today, puletasi is used as a female full dress. It is most commonly worn to church and formal cultural event