Native Hawaiians in the context of "Bonin Islands"

Native Americans (also called American Indians, First Americans, or Indigenous Americans) are the Indigenous peoples of the United States, particularly of the lower 48 states and Alaska. They may also include any Americans whose origins lie in any of the indigenous peoples of North or South America. The United States Census Bureau publishes data about "American Indians and Alaska Natives", whom it defines as anyone "having origins in any of the original peoples of North and South America ... and who maintains tribal affiliation or community attachment". The census does not, however, enumerate "Native Americans" as such, noting that the latter term can encompass a broader set of groups, e.g. Native Hawaiians, which it tabulates separately.

The European colonization of the Americas from 1492 resulted in a precipitous decline in the size of the Native American population because of newly introduced diseases, including weaponized diseases and biological warfare by colonizers, wars, ethnic cleansing, and enslavement. Numerous scholars have classified elements of the colonization process as comprising genocide against Native Americans. As part of a policy of settler colonialism, European settlers continued to wage war and perpetrated massacres against Native American peoples, removed them from their ancestral lands, and subjected them to one-sided government treaties and discriminatory government policies. Into the 20th century, these policies focused on forced assimilation.

Polynesians are an ethnolinguistic group comprising closely related ethnic groups native to Polynesia, which encompasses the islands within the Polynesian Triangle in the Pacific Ocean. They trace their early prehistoric origins to Island Southeast Asia and are part of the larger Austronesian ethnolinguistic group, with an Urheimat in Taiwan. They speak the Polynesian languages, a branch of the Oceanic subfamily within the Austronesian language family. The Indigenous Māori people form the largest Polynesian population, followed by Samoans, Native Hawaiians, Tahitians, Tongans, and Cook Islands Māori.

As of 2012, there were an estimated 2 million ethnic Polynesians (both full and part) worldwide. The vast majority either inhabit independent Polynesian nation-states (Samoa, Niue, Cook Islands, Tonga, and Tuvalu) or form minorities in countries such as Australia, Chile (Easter Island), New Zealand, France (French Polynesia and Wallis and Futuna), and the United States (Hawaii and American Samoa), as well as in the British Overseas Territory of the Pitcairn Islands. New Zealand had the highest population of Polynesians, estimated at 110,000 in the 18th century.

The Hawaiian Kingdom, also known as the Kingdom of Hawaiʻi (Hawaiian: Ke Aupuni Hawaiʻi [kɛ ɐwˈpuni həˈvɐjʔi]), was an archipelagic country from 1795 to 1893, which eventually encompassed all of the inhabited Hawaiian Islands. It was established in 1795 when Kamehameha I, then Aliʻi nui of Hawaii, conquered the islands of Oʻahu, Maui, Molokaʻi, and Lānaʻi, and unified them under one government. In 1810, the Hawaiian Islands were fully unified when the islands of Kauaʻi and Niʻihau voluntarily joined the Hawaiian Kingdom. Two major dynastic families ruled the kingdom, the House of Kamehameha and the House of Kalākaua.

The kingdom subsequently gained diplomatic recognition from European powers and the United States. An influx of European and American explorers, traders, and whalers soon began arriving to the kingdom, introducing diseases such as syphilis, tuberculosis, smallpox, and measles, leading to the rapid decline of the Native Hawaiian population. In 1887, King Kalākaua was forced to accept a new constitution after a coup d'état by the Honolulu Rifles, a volunteer military unit recruited from American settlers. Queen Liliʻuokalani, who succeeded Kalākaua in 1891, tried to abrogate the new constitution. She was subsequently overthrown in a 1893 coup engineered by the Committee of Safety, a group of Hawaiian subjects who were mostly of American descent, and supported by the U.S. military. The Committee of Safety dissolved the kingdom and established the Republic of Hawaii, intending for the U.S. to annex the islands, which it did on July 7, 1898, via the Newlands Resolution. Hawaii became part of the U.S. as the Territory of Hawaii until it became a U.S. state in 1959.

Hawaiian (ʻōlelo Hawaiʻi, pronounced [ʔoːˈlɛlo həˈvɐiʔi]) is a critically endangered Polynesian language of the Austronesian language family, originating in and native to the Hawaiian Islands. It is the historic native language of the Hawaiian people. Hawaiian, along with English, is an official language of the U.S. state of Hawaiʻi. King Kamehameha III established the first Hawaiian-language constitution in 1839 and 1840.

In 1896, the Republic of Hawaii passed Act 57, an English-only law which subsequently banned Hawaiian language as the medium of instruction in publicly funded schools and promoted strict physical punishment for children caught speaking the Hawaiian language in schools. The Hawaiian language was not again allowed to be used as a medium of instruction in Hawaii's public schools until 1987, a span of 91 years. The number of native speakers of Hawaiian gradually decreased during the period from the 1830s to the 1950s. English essentially displaced Hawaiian on six of seven inhabited islands. In 2001, native speakers of Hawaiian amounted to less than 0.1% of the statewide population.

The United States has a racially and ethnically diverse population. At the federal level, race and ethnicity have been categorized separately. The most recent United States census recognized five racial categories (White, African Americans, Native American/Alaska Native, Asian, and Native Hawaiian/Other Pacific Islander), as well as people who belong to two or more of the racial categories. The United States also recognizes the broader notion of ethnicity. While previous censuses inquired about the "ancestry" of residents, the current form asks people to enter their "origins".

White Americans are the majority in every census-defined region (Northeast, Midwest, South, and West) and 44 out of 50 states, except Hawaii, California, Texas, New Mexico, Nevada, and Maryland. Those identifying as white alone or in combination (including multiracial white Americans) are the majority in every state except for Hawaii and California. The region with the highest proportion of White Americans is the Midwest, at 74.6% per the American Community Survey (ACS), followed by the Northeast, at 64%. Non-Hispanic whites make up 73% of the Midwest's population, the highest proportion of any region, and they make up 62% of the population in the Northeast. At the same time, the regions with the smallest share of White Americans are the West, where they comprise 51.9%, and the South, where they comprise 57.7%. Non-Hispanic whites are a minority in the West, where they make up 47.1% of the population. In the South, make up 54% of the population.