“Pacific Islanders” is a colonial term historically imposed by Western explorers and administrators to collectively label the diverse Indigenous peoples of the Pacific Ocean region—primarily those from Polynesia, Micronesia, and Melanesia. Like the term “Pacific” itself, which was named by European explorers to denote the “peaceful” ocean they encountered, Pacific Islanders often reflects an outsider’s view—emphasizing remoteness, smallness, and fragmentation. This image, as Pacific scholar Epeli Hauʻofa explains in Our Sea of Islands, is misleading and harmful. It ignores how Pacific peoples have always seen the ocean not as a barrier, but as a space that connects them. For thousands of years, they have travelled across the sea, sharing knowledge, trading, and building strong cultural ties. Hauʻofa encourages us to see Oceania not as a group of disconnected islands, but as a huge and connected world shaped by the ocean. Today, Pacific Islanders is still used in many official contexts, like government forms and statistics in countries such as the United States, Australia, and New Zealand. But many Indigenous people prefer to use terms like Oceanians or to identify by their specific cultures—such as Samoan, Fijian, or Chuukese. These names honor the uniqueness of each group and push back against colonial ways of categorizing people. Being a Pacific Islander, then, is not just a demographic label. It reflects a living connection to the ocean, to ancestors, to land, and to a shared history of movement, resistance, and cultural strength.