Pacific Islander (or
Pacific Person, pl:
Pacific People, also called
Oceanic[s]), is a
geographic term to describe the
Austronesian inhabitants of any of the three major sub-regions of
Oceania:
Polynesia,
Melanesia and
Micronesia. According to the Encyclopedia Britannica, these three regions, together with their islands consist of:
Polynesia: The islands scattered across a triangle covering the east-central region of the Pacific Ocean. The triangle is bounded by the
Hawaiian islands in the north,
New Zealand in the west, and
Easter Island in the east. The rest of Polynesia comprises
Samoan islands (
American Samoa and
Samoa), the
Cook Islands,
French Polynesia (
Tahiti and The
Society Islands,
Marquesas Islands,
Austral Islands, and the
Tuamotu Archipelago),
Niue Island,
Tokelau and
Tuvalu,
Tonga,
Wallis and Futuna, and
Pitcairn Island.
Melanesia: The island of
New Guinea, the Bismarck and Louisiade archipelagos, the
Admiralty Islands, and
Bougainville Island (which make up the independent state of
Papua New Guinea), the
Solomon Islands, the
Santa Cruz Islands (part of the Solomon Islands),
New Caledonia and
Loyalty Islands,
Vanuatu (formerly New Hebrides),
Fiji,
Norfolk Island, and various smaller islands.
Micronesia: The islands of
Kiribati,
Guam,
Nauru, the Commonwealth of the
Northern Marianas, the Republic of the
Marshall Islands,
Palau, and the
Federated States of Micronesia (
Yap,
Chuuk,
Pohnpei, and
Kosrae, all in the
Caroline Islands).
Usage of term in Australia, New Zealand, United States and United Kingdom
In Australia the term
South Sea Islander was used in the past to describe Australian descendants of people from the more than 80 islands in the Western Pacific. In 1901 legislation was enacted to restrict entry of Pacific Islanders to Australia and to facilitate their deportation:
Pacific Island Labourers Act 1901. In the legislation Pacific Islanders were defined as:
“Pacific Island Labourer” includes all natives not of European extraction of any island except the islands of New Zealand situated in the Pacific Ocean beyond the Commonwealth [of Australia] as constituted at the commencement of this Act.
In 2008 a newly announced Pacific Islander guestworker scheme provides visas for workers from Kiribati, Tonga, Vanuatu and Papua New Guinea to work in Australia. The pilot scheme includes one country each from Melanesia (Vanuatu), Polynesia (Tonga) and Micronesia (Kiribati): countries which already send workers to New Zealand under its seasonal labour scheme. Australia’s pilot scheme also includes Papua New Guinea.
Local usage in
New Zealand uses the term to distinguish those who have emigrated from one of these areas in modern times from the
indigenous New Zealand
Māori (who are also
Polynesian but arrived in New Zealand many centuries earlier), and from other ethnic groups. A stated reason for making the ethnic distinction is that the Pacific peoples suffer from socio-economic disadvantages as a group and benefit from culturally targeted social and health assistance.
In the
United Kingdom, the term "Pacific Islander" refers to people originating from the islands of the Pacific (excluding the larger islands of
Australia and
New Zealand - see
Pacific Islander British).
In the
United States, the geographic location of "Pacific Islander" is the same, but is generally understood as a reference to indigenous natives of
Hawaii. Pacific Islanders are defined as a native or inhabitant of any of the Polynesian, Micronesian, or Melanesian islands of Oceania. Some examples of the ethnic groups that would be considered Pacific Islanders are the indigenous peoples of Hawaii, the Marianas, Samoans, Guamanian, Chamoru,Tahitians, Mariana Islander, and Chuukese.
Excluded
Inhabitants of the following islands and regions are not considered to be Pacific Islanders: Russia's
Kuril Islands, Alaska's
Aleutian Islands,
Taiwan,
Japan,
Philippines,
Indonesia, as they are not located within the three regions of Oceania (
Polynesia,
Micronesia and
Melanesia).
List of Pacific peoples
See also
- Blackbirding - the recruitment of people through trickery and kidnappings to work on plantations, particularly the sugar cane plantations of Queensland (Australia) and Fiji
