In 1989 New Zealand legislators revised their child welfare legislation, partially
in response to M¯aori and Pacific Island critiques that the previous state-centered
regime had failed to take into account their culturally distinctive techniques for being
a family and had failed to support culturally specific practices of decision making
and conflict resolution. Legislators instituted a new and increasingly popular form of
alternative dispute resolution—the family group conference—in an attempt to create
a bureaucratic response to family dysfunction that was capacious enough to allow for
any and every family’s involvement. In the process, however, they continued to understand
what counts as a family along nuclear family lines. Against the New Zealand
lawmakers’ assumptions, this article illustrates how, in the context of transnational
migration, Samoan families experience tensions between the nuclear family unit that
lawmakers envision and their lived extended kinship groups. As extended families,
Samoan migrant families’ goal is not to produce socially productive citizens for the
nation-state, but rather to produce a transnational family reputation. Thus, despite the
legislators’ efforts to create culturally sensitive forms for family conflict resolution,
Samoan social workers and community counselors had to translate the legislative
act for Samoan families, negotiating and managing the conflicting presuppositions
of what it means to be a nuclear family embedded in the act and what it means to be
an extended family for Samoans.