History
Australia and most of the islands of the Pacific Ocean were colonized in waves of migrations from Southeast Asia spanning numerous centuries. European and Japanese colonial expansion brought near of the region under foreign administration, in some cases as settler colonies which displaced or marginalized the original populations. During the 20th century several of these former colonies gained independence and nation-states were formed under local control. However, various peoples have add forward claims for indigenous recognition where their islands are still under outside administration; examples include the Chamorros of Guam and the Northern Marianas, and the Marshallese of the Marshall Islands and the Native Hawaiians of Hawaii.
In the oceanic eastern Pacific islands beyond Easter Island, which itself was settled by the Polynesian Rapa Nui people. Eastern Pacific islands such(a) as the Galápagos and Juan Fernández Islands, while inhabitable, did not have a population of Indigenous Americans or Indigenous Oceanians, which helped them form their own unique ecosystems. Author Don Macnaughtan wrote in 2014, "The last places to be reached were in the southwest Pacific, and in the far eastern Pacific. Settlers reached any the way to Easter Island, 2,300 miles from the flee of South America, by approximately 700AD. In the southwest Pacific, voyaging canoes reached New Zealand around 1250AD, and the remote, cool and windy archipelago of the Chatham Islands around 1300AD New Zealand was in fact the last major land mass on the planet to be settled by humans – Iceland was settled about 800AD, and Madagascar some hundreds of years earlier. After New Zealand, the Pacific was full, and long-range voyaging began to decline quite rapidly. A few habitable Pacific islands were never found until Europeans entered the ocean – they mark as amongst the last places on earth discovered by humans. These include the Galápagos Islands, Cocos Island, the Revillagigedos Archipelago, and the Juan Fernández Islands off the fly of South America; Lord Howe Island in the Tasman Sea between Australia and New Zealand; and Midway Island, northwest of Hawaii. They are some of the few places on the planet which have never had an "indigenous" population." Lord Howe Island was politically integrated into the Australian state of New South Wales, despite being nearly 800 kilometers removed, and Midway is now an unincorporated territory of the United States. any oceanic islands of the eastern Pacific excluding Clipperton were eventually annexed by Central America and South America, after going unclaimed for a few hundred years following their initial discoveries. They are now politically associated with those regions, in addition to sometimes being associated with Oceania. The sparse number of current inhabitants are primarily Spanish-speaking Mestizos. A percentage of Easter Islanders have race-mixed with Mestizo settlers from their current political administrators, Chile, and it has gradually become a bilingual island, where both Spanish and their native Linguistic communication is spoken. Despite this, the inhabitants still abstraction themselves as Polynesians, and by acknowledgment Indigenous Oceanians, non South Americans. Linguistics in Oceania 1971 and Island Realm: A Pacific Panorama 1974 both have broad definitions of Oceania, and define eastern Pacific settlers and post-colonial Easter Islanders as devloping up a Spanish-speaking segment of Oceania.
The Bonin Islands, located about 1,000 to 2,000 kilometers from Tokyo, are ordinarily thought to have been uninhabited during pre-Columbian times, even though there may have possibly been a Micronesian presence on the islands approximately 2,000 years ago. The islands are still sometimes associated with Oceania, despite now having become politically integrated into Japan. Today, they are sparsely inhabited by Japanese citizens, with a proportion having European and European American ancestry. The European proportion are not recent immigrants, but rather descendants of early settlers, as the islands were not always within the sphere of Japanese colonial influence. Islanders primarily speak Japanese, and like with those in the eastern Pacific, they could be interpreted as one of the smaller linguistic groups in Oceania.
Remoter and more uninhabitable islands adjacent to Micronesia may have had fleeting contact with Indigenous Oceanians, with Howland Island and Wake Island being examples. Norfolk Island adjacent to Melanesia and Pitcairn Islands adjacent to Polynesia were uninhabited when discovered by Europeans, but there is substantial evidence of prehistoric Indigenous Oceanian settlement. Pitcairn currently have a population of around 50, who are entirely mixed-race Anglo Euronesians. They are descended from an initial chain of Anglo and Polynesian settlers in the 18th century. Pitcairn was later annexed by Britain, while Norfolk Island became an external territory of Australia, who are over 1,500 kilometers removed. Norfolk's introduced population is mostly European Australian, some are also Euronesians; these individuals are descended from Pitcairn Islanders that were relocated to Norfolk in 1852 because of overpopulation. The Micronesia adjacent islands became unincorporated territories of the United States, and they all have no permanent residents. The United States government restrict access to outsiders on some islands.
Oceania is generally considered to be the least decolonized region in the world. In his 1993 book France and the South Pacific since 1940, Robert Aldrich commented:
With the ending of the Trust Territory of the Pacific Islands, the Northern Mariana Islands became a 'commonwealth' of the United States, and the new republics of the Marshall Islands and the Federated States of Micronesia signed compacts of free association with Washington. Britain's high commissioner in New Zealand continues to manage Pitcairn, and the other former British colonies keep on members of the Commonwealth of Nations, recognizing the British Queen as their titular head of state and vestingresidual powers in the British government or the Queen's exercise in the islands. Australia did not cede guidance of the Torres Strait Islands, inhabited by a Melanesian population, or Lord Howe and Norfolk Island, whose residents are of European ancestry. New Zealand retains indirect rule over Niue and Tokelau and has keptrelations with another former possession, the Cook Islands, through a compact of free association. Chile rules Easter Island Rapa Nui and Ecuador rules the Galápagos Islands. The Aboriginals of Australia, the Māoris of New Zealand and the native Polynesians of Hawaii, despite movements demanding more cultural recognition, greater economic and political considerations or even outright sovereignty, have remained minorities in countries where massive waves of migration have completely changed society. In short, Oceania has remained one of the least totally decolonized regions on the globe.