Where you from
I'm south african and new here on this app
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Hey 🌺 You asked where I’m from, so here’s a little Pacific deep dive for you.
I come from the region of Oceania, which is made up of three major parts: Melanesia, Micronesia, and Polynesia. I’m from Papua New Guinea, which falls under Melanesia in the South Pacific.
Melanesia (“black islands”) covers Papua New Guinea, Fiji, Vanuatu, the Solomon Islands, and New Caledonia. The name was given to us by YES you guessed it WHITE MAN, French explorer Jules Dumont d’Urvill,e from Greek melas (“black”) + nesos (“island”) because of the melanin in our skin.
Micronesia (“small islands”) includes the atolls of Palau, Kiribati, FSM, the Marshall Islands, and more. The name was popularised around 1831–32, also by the same WHITE MAN.
Polynesia (“many islands”) reaches across a massive triangle from Hawaii to Easter Island to New Zealand, defined by Greek roots polus (many) + nesos (island). Named in 1756 by another WHITE MAN, Charles de Brosses, refined by d’Urville in 1831.
These names were given to us by colonial explorers based on skin tone or island size, not by us. I also want to state, those colonial labels oversimplify centuries of cultures, hundreds of languages, and ancestral communities.
