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He dances with knives — that are on fire. TikToker Mikaele Oloa competes in this dangerous sport for one very special reason ...
Transcript
00:00This is my trophy from 2005.
00:04Yeah!
00:13To win this one, you do have to be 18 years old,
00:18but I was 15 years at that time.
00:20Whenever I'm on that stage and dancing,
00:22I'm not just dancing for myself,
00:25I'm dancing for my family,
00:27I'm dancing for my ancestors.
00:31Yeah!
00:34If you would look at a map of the world,
00:37and just put a dot in the middle of the Pacific Ocean,
00:40that little dot is probably bigger than the island of Samoa.
00:43Fireknife dancing is a Samoan dance.
00:47It's a cultural dance.
00:49It actually derives from war,
00:51but in the old days, it was actually carved out of wood,
00:54out of stone, and also the hook was made from,
00:57often, boar tusk.
00:59When metal got introduced to Samoa,
01:01that's when we had the metal blade.
01:03They would be dancing and spinning the stick
01:05as a sign of, you know, we won victory.
01:17So this is the one that I dance with every night,
01:19and then this is what we use that is on fire.
01:30My dad actually, when he was a young kid,
01:35he actually was blessed to be a part of a group
01:38that traveled throughout the islands, throughout America,
01:41to raise money for Samoa,
01:43dancing and, you know, doing a lot of cultural things.
01:47So he's the one that taught me,
01:49and fireknife dancing was actually the thing
01:52that brought me closer to my culture.
01:54I always strive to learn more things about my culture,
01:57because it's hard to come around those things,
01:59especially growing up in the mainland.
02:13Hey, talo for my family.
02:15So today I'm going to show you guys
02:16how we cook another Samoan dish.
02:18We call this fali fufai.
02:20The content that I make on TikTok
02:23is all basically cultural content.
02:26All right, and that's how you make a pali,
02:28just like that.
02:29A headband, nice and easy.
02:31Stay tuned, I'll show you guys how to make some of these.
02:33Some of the young kids growing up nowadays,
02:35they might not even know any of this stuff,
02:37you know what I mean?
02:38Because they're never around it.
02:40So I hope that my content can touch them
02:43in a way that they want to learn more about their culture.
02:46I'm at that age that, you know,
02:48I like to teach the young kids now,
02:50the next generation coming up.
02:52I do it for my family, for my last name.
02:55I always say, do it for your last name, not your first.