Climate Activist Suluafi Brianna Fruean on Running for Miss Samoa and the Importance of Representation

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Growing up in the mid-00s, climate activist Suluafi Brianna Fruean loved watching the Miss Samoa beauty pageants. It was a form of representation that felt few and far between for young Samoan girls, one in which Fruean could finally see girls who looked like her.

“Miss Samoa was a space where I could look to and see myself in, as opposed to … turning on the TV and watching One Tree Hill and Gossip Girl. I did not look like Peyton or Blair or any of those girls,” Fruean says via Zoom. “Seeing Miss Samoa and actually, all of the Pacific pageants [like] Miss Heilala, Miss Hibiscus — it was just a place where as a little girl I could see myself reflected in these women. I think that's why I was really drawn to it.”

But as she watched Samoan women parade across stage in a way that helped her imagine her future self, Fruean was also hyper-aware of the ongoing threat to that future that lurked outside her living room window: the climate crisis in the Pacific Islands. In August, Reuters reported that the UN Secretary-General issued a global SOS, ‘Save Our Seas,’ as ocean temperatures are rising in the Pacific Islands three times the rate worldwide; the UN also reports that 50,000 people in the Pacific are forced to leave their homes each year because of the impact of climate change. That’s why Fruean became a climate activist at an early age, and why she’s bringing that work to the Miss Samoa stage now. Last month, Fruean announced that she would be running for Miss Samoa on September 7 in an effort to spread awareness to the climate crisis.

Fruean has been a climate activist for about 15 years, starting when she was in primary school. Her activism was sparked when a teacher told her a shocking fact.

“She said, ‘Climate change could mean places like Tuvalu and Tokelau would be gone within your generation,’ and that broke my heart,” Fruean remembers. “Even as a little girl, I could understand what that meant and how devastating that future was. And so I decided that I wanted to do something.”

Fruean did exactly that, and started a climate change group at school in Samoa when she was 11 years old. From there, she went on to become a founding member of the Pacific Climate Warriors, “a youth-led grassroots network working with communities to fight climate change from the Pacific Islands and diaspora.”

While leading a movement comes naturally, Fruean says that pageantry does not. The decision to run for Miss Samoa came as a promise to her late mentor, Koreti Tiumalu Mavaega, with whom she spent time brainstorming ways to bring awareness to climate justice. After years of hesitation, Fruean is ready to make good on her promise, not just for her mentor, but for her community.

“Being indigenous has completely shaped my activism because I go at everything from a place of collectivism — this belief that we aren't individuals, we're part of a bigger picture," she says. "Understanding that we're not self-made, we're village-made, we're community-made, and therefore it does a couple of things for me as a climate activist. It reminds me that every move I make, I'm not making on my own.”

The hesitancy Fruean felt before deciding to run stemmed from the obvious pressures of competing in a beauty pageant and facing the “norms” of having to look a certain way or be a certain age — aspects of pageantry that Fruean is challenging with her campaign. “I've never grown up to be the one people would think would run for Miss Samoa, and I think there's a very specific look. More than likely it's the girl who's lighter skinned, who's slim, who has more Eurocentric features," Fruean says.

The Miss Samoa pageant not only highlights the beauty of the women competing, but also acts as a platform for contestants to showcase their talents and Samoan culture through performance. While Fruean is competing because of her indigeneity, she says she also isn’t a typical pageant girl in what talent she brings to the table.

“I don't have the posture, I never grew up dancing. Siva Samoa [dancing] is such a big part of Miss Samoa and of what we think a Pacific pageant should be. [...] I also don't sing,” she says. “I always watched Miss Samoa and would feel like I could see parts of myself in these women, but I never truly felt like them. I never felt like that could be me one day.”

At 26, this is also the last year that Fruean is eligible to run, another factor that she feels has made all the difference. “I think running older is also really important. I feel like at this age, I'm the most ready. [...] Also to be an activist and to join really challenges the space. I've actually written and helped a lot of the girls with pre-pageant-interviews, and I've been on a couple of the teams in the past writing speeches. But I've never been asked by a team, ‘You should be up there one day.’ It was more like you should be behind the scenes writing stuff.”

While challenging pageantry norms can be scary in itself, Fruean is also taking on the challenge of reinventing what it means to be an activist. After having reservations that entering a beauty pageant would affect her activism credibility, she prevailed and decided to run anyway. “I had worries that people would see this as more of a vanity project,” Fruean says. “I was really scared that other activists would think that this was a waste of time or not good energy spent, and I should be spending more energy on campaigns that we're working on together. But I think I really found the push to run after talking to other BIPOC activists.”

Regardless of her worries, Fruean enlisted the help of her family and friends to make her campaign come to life. “The two lead people on the campaign are my mom and my sister, and then we have a group chat. We liaise with everyone, but it's really like every single person that is a part of this journey. I wanted to be very specific and intentional with people I bring in because pageantry can also bring toxicity where teams start getting really nasty with each other.”

Crown or no crown, Freuen has already disrupted both spaces in the best possible way, and hopes that this campaign will encourage more young people to take up space in places they’ve never seen themselves in before.

“I hope young people see that they can enter any space that they want to. Whatever space you see, you look up to, that's a space for you," she says. "And more than just pageantry, maybe you have a secret dream that you’re too scared to tell people because you think people wouldn't agree or accept. If there's a reason why, God, the universe, whatever power you believe is higher than you, put that in your heart, follow that. There's a reason why it's there.”

Originally Appeared on Teen Vogue