Which Pacific islands have indigenous Black or dark-skinned populations like Melanesia?
Executive summary
The Pacific subregion commonly labeled Melanesia is the primary area of islands whose indigenous populations are characteristically dark-skinned—hence the name derived from the Greek for “black islands”—and that category includes the large island of New Guinea, the Bismarck Archipelago, the Solomon Islands, Vanuatu, New Caledonia and Fiji among others [1] [2]. European explorers coined Melanesia to mark observed physical differences from lighter-skinned Polynesians, a racialized geographic label that persists in ethnography and popular usage [2].
1. What “Melanesia” refers to and which islands it names
Melanesia is a broadly agreed subregion of Oceania stretching from New Guinea eastward through the Solomon Islands and Vanuatu to New Caledonia and Fiji, and it was named in the nineteenth century explicitly to denote islands inhabited by darker-skinned peoples—New Guinea, the Bismarck Archipelago, the Solomons, Vanuatu, New Caledonia and Fiji are repeatedly listed as core Melanesian territories in encyclopedic and academic accounts [1] [3] [4] [2].
2. Specific national and island examples where dark-skinned indigenous populations predominate
The single largest area of indigenous dark-skinned populations is New Guinea (including Papua New Guinea and the western New Guinea provinces), where Papuan peoples with deep historical roots predominate; adjacent island groups such as the Bismarck Archipelago and Bougainville are similarly populated [2] [5]. The sovereign states of the Solomon Islands, Vanuatu and Fiji are likewise cited as Melanesian countries whose indigenous majorities are often described as dark-skinned Melanesians [3] [4] [6].
3. The label’s history, politics and limits — a colonial construct with continuing effects
The term Melanesia was introduced by European navigators and naturalists in the 1800s to classify physical appearance and geography—Jules Dumont d’Urville coined the name alongside Micronesia and Polynesia—and scholars note that the label reflects nineteenth‑century racial thinking as much as population distribution, which means the term both describes and exoticizes communities [2] [7]. Political movements and identity politics in the twentieth century sometimes reclaimed “Black” or Melanesian identities as anti-colonial markers, showing the term’s ongoing political salience beyond mere description [8].
4. Dark-skinned people outside the Melanesian core and complex ancestry
Not all dark-skinned Pacific Islanders live inside the Melanesian map: indigenous Australians and some Torres Strait Islanders are related to Melanesian groups in language and genetics [1] [8], and genetic and phenotypic overlap blurs neat boundaries—Polynesians and Micronesians include admixture from Austronesian expansions and older Papuan substrates, and individuals or communities in other Pacific islands can appear darker-skinned or have features readers might associate with “Black” phenotypes [9] [10] [6]. Reporting also observes that features sometimes read as “African” can occur across tropical regions through shared ancient population movements, a fact highlighted in commentary about perceived kinship between African Americans and indigenous Hawaiians or other islanders [11].
5. Caveats, uncertainties and what the sources do not settle
Primary sources used here consistently list Papua New Guinea, the Bismarck Archipelago, the Solomon Islands, Vanuatu, New Caledonia and Fiji as the canonical dark-skinned Melanesian islands [1] [3] [4] [2], and they document related populations in northern Australia and the Torres Strait [1] [8], but the reviewed material does not provide a single exhaustive, bordered list that resolves every exception or island-by-island skin‑tone distribution; genetic diversity, historical admixture and local self-identification complicate any simple map beyond what the cited sources state [9] [6].