When Joseph Seia, founder and executive director of the Pacific Islander Community Association of Washington, first read the draft of the National Academies of Science, Engineering and Medicine's framework for distributing the COVID-19 vaccine, he noticed a troubling omission.
Native Hawaiians and Pacific Islanders (NHPI), despite their fast-growing case numbers, were not named as a vulnerable ethnic minority. So Seia mobilized a team to get it changed.
"Because we've been tracking our own data, we know that [NHPI] are faring worse than any other minority group. But the federal government does not always prioritize the tracking of NHPI data, so we're nowhere visible," says Seia.
Researchers creating the framework had chosen to include Pacific Islanders under the umbrella term AAPI, or Asian American Pacific Islander. Although Asians have also struggled in the pandemic, the death rate of NHPI is over 1.5 times the rate for Asian Americans.
NHPI are also four times more likely to be hospitalized than their white counterparts and have the highest covid death rates of any ethnic group in the United States — but these statistics were obscured by the larger AAPI categorization.
"If we're not there to advocate for ourselves, the lumping just erases us," Seia told Insider.
Seia and the National Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islander Policy Council sent a letter to President Biden and his COVID-19 task force.
"Our communities' experiences are different," the letter read. "Native Hawaiians and Pacific Islanders are subject to racism by erasure and being omitted from interventions targeting the disproportionate impact the virus has had on communities of color."
It went on to call for the desegregation of Asian American and Pacific Islander health data and the allocation of federal funds to Pacific Islander communities.
The White House listened. Native Hawaiians and Pacific Islanders were eventually given their own category — and with it, a fair shot at vaccination. This letter is just one instance where Seia has argued the needs of Pacific Islanders are being overlooked because of their inclusion in the term AAPI.
NHPI advocates across the diaspora are speaking out about their erasure to demand representation in their own right, without being lumped into a larger category that they feel doesn't represent them.
"The aggregation of AAPI has made our communities invisible. And I say that to mean, when you lump us together there's no effort to actually look at how the Pacific Islander community is actually faring," says Seia.
The US Census Bureau's creation of the Asian Pacific Islander (APA) identifier in the 1980s took an already overcrowded grouping—all Americans with Asian roots—and added in another, jarringly disparate people.
Pacific Islanders referred to under the term APA include Native Hawaiian, Samoan, Tongan, and Marshallese people, in addition to countless other island groups from Micronesia and Polynesia.
This blended category is unique to the United States—nowhere else in the world are Asians linked with Pacific Islanders. And activists say it's created issues that extend from health, to identity, to education, and beyond.
A 2010 study from the Prison Policy Initiative showed that Pacific Islanders have the third highest rate of incarceration of any ethnic group, right behind Black and Native Americans, respectively. Asians, meanwhile, are the least likely ethnic group to be incarcerated — their rate of imprisonment is almost a quarter of the rate of White Americans.
But in Seia's community of King's County, Washington, Pacific Islanders make up "one-hundred percent of young, [AAPI] people here that have long term sentencing." These numbers often go unreported because of the swollen AAPI category, he says.
To highlight this issue, Seia and his team are constantly gathering more NHPI-specific data. He believes that with more data, more funding may come from federal agencies to combat these inequalities.
But data-gathering proves difficult when NHPI are consistently miscategorized.
This erasure of Pacific Islanders under the term AAPI is particularly pernicious when you consider the settler roots of Asians in the Pacific, says Mapuana Hayashi-Simpliciano, PhD, an indigenous scholar and activist in Hawaii.
Asians first came to Hawaii as laborers in the mid-1800s. By then, Hawaii was already at the mercy of Western colonial powers. Soon, newly-immigrated Chinese and Japanese laborers were swept up in the "Americanization" movement of US-colonists. They went on to occupy Native lands and perpetuate the subjugation of their Indigenous neighbors.
"Hawaii and the Pacific is a place where people of Asian ethnicity—especially East Asians— have risen to a status of political power and continue to displace kanaka maoli [Native Hawaiians]," says Hayashi-Simpliciano.
To move forward, many activists are following the legacy of the late Native Hawaiian senator from Hawaii, Daniel Akaka, who championed a 1997 policy known as OMB-15. This gave Native Hawaiians and Pacific Islanders their own category on the census —retiring the API, or Asian Pacific Islander, moniker.
But despite this federal mandate to separate the two groups, Seia says that there hasn't been real change. "There wasn't a data commission to really drive the changes," he says, so there hasn't been tangible progress.
Many advocates, including Seia, are calling for a national, Pacific-Islander-led organization to advocate for the needs of the community.
"Because we don't have a national organization yet, federal agencies give money to Asian organizations to also do Native Hawaiian Pacific Islander work," he told Insider. "And we all know that's a problem. Because Asian folks don't know how to work with us—we know how to work with us," Seia argued.
The path to progress, according to Seia, is to recognize Pacific Islanders for what they are: indigenous people with their own distinct desires and needs.
"It's not that we don't want to be lumped in with Asians, because people can simplify it as that," he says. Instead, Seia says that Pacific Islanders are simply fighting for the right to determine their own identity—and the tools to protect that identity.
