An Octopus Never Forgets

A handcrafted lure reveals how culture, story, and sustenance intertwine.

It took Gene Carl Feldman an hour to walk around the tiny Western Samoan island of Manono, where he received his Peace Corps training, but only if he politely refused the countless invitations he received to stop and eat at each and every home he passed. And most of those meals were either grown or raised on the island or caught in the nearby lagoon. 

Manono was Gene’s 1974 training site.

“As a 21-year-old kid from New York City, life on the island of Manono was far from anything that I had ever experienced.”

His favorite meal was fai’ai fe’e, or octopus cooked in a stone oven and served in coconut cream. It wasn’t long before he realized that his host father, Sulu Fa’afuata, was perhaps the best octopus fisherman on the island. Sulu was also skilled in the traditional art of crafting the lure that is used throughout many Pacific Island nations to catch octopus.

The lure is shaped like a rat, following an ancient Polynesian legend about a helpful octopus who saved a rat from drowning by letting the rat sit on its head as the octopus swam to shore. But when they reached dry land the ungrateful rat defecated on the octopus’s head before jumping onto the beach and scattering away. To this day, the octopus seeks revenge against the rat for its betrayal: the lure, ma’a ta’i fe’e, is shaped like a rat.

Gene often watched Sulu twist an ancient hand drill to bore holes in pieces of cowrie shell that he affixed to a cone-shaped stone with either sennit twine or modern fishing line. He then fashioned a tail and whiskers to create a perfect facsimile of the octopus’s arch nemesis, the rat.

Gene would often accompany Sulu in his paopao, a small hand-carved outrigger canoe, to watch Sulu lower the lure into the lagoon, then bounce it up and down above the bottom of the lagoon, sometimes tapping the lure on a coral head to make it sound like the squeaks of a rat. “The octopus would rush out and grab the lure in its tentacles,” Gene recalls, “and hold on with a vengeance as Sulu lifted line, lure, and octopus from the lagoon and bit the octopus between the eyes to kill it.”

On Gene’s last visit to Manono, Sulu gave him one of his well-used octopus lures. Until Gene retired decades later from a lengthy career as an oceanographer, the lure hung in a place of honor on the wall in his office at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland.

The Museum is currently preparing a new exhibit, 65 Objects That Changed the World, marking the 65th anniversary of the Peace Corps and America 250. Through objects and stories drawn from service, the exhibition explores how individual acts of global engagement shape lives, communities, and our shared civic history, inviting reflection on leadership, service, and responsibility in an interconnected world.

Please consider supporting the museum to bring this important exhibit to the general public. To donate an item or share a story, go to museumofthepeacecorpsexperience.org, click on “Objects” or “Stories,” and follow the directions for submission.