Minorities in the minority: Cook Islands Māori and the Pasifika umbrella category
Abstract
In only a few years, public institutions have favoured the term Pasifika as an umbrella category for more than 380,000 people living in Aotearoa New Zealand. Pasifika has a purpose: irrespective of ethnic, cultural, and linguistic diversity, it sweeps together eight percent of the country on the premise that this sub-population claims ancestry from different Pacific Islands states and territories in the Pacific region. Pasifika has backers: New Zealand citizens working in the education and health sectors, even in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade, apply this classification over New Zealand’s Pacific population. Explicitly, Pasifika points to Pacific generations born in New Zealand who outnumber their migrant grandparents or parents, aunties, and uncles born in Pacific Islands states and territories. Because of Pasifika’s New Zealand-ness, it is assumed people bunched into this category cannot be called Pacific Islanders. Instead, they are named Pasifika, an islander-sounding made-up transliteration of Pacific.
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References
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