Photo: the U.S. Embassy in New Zealand 2 hours ago The racial classification of Pacific Islanders has long eluded the minds of governments, the general public and, at times, the Pacific Islander community itself. European explorers found the Indigenous people of the Pacific an enigma defying categorization, though the lasting terms of Polynesia, Melanesia and Micronesia stem from French explorer Jules Dumont D’urville’s observation. He had named these groups within a framework of hierarchical racialization, privileging the lighter skin of Polynesians. University of Utah professor Maile Arvin’s “Possessing Polynesians” is the keystone body of research regarding the racialization of Polynesians in proximity to whites, in which race scientists positioned them as a branch of the Caucasian race, ripe for rehabilitation to a state of civilization. Other racial science posited Pacific Islander origins as being of either Malay or “Mongoloid” inflections, or both. In the middle of the 20th century, Thor Heyerdahl proposed a Polynesian homeland in Peru, where a mythical race of light-complexioned, bearded people fled a civil war and drifted out to the Pacific in rafts.