Ethnonyms: tangata Kūki ‘Airani, te reo Māori Kūki ‘Airani, Cook Islanders, Cook Islands Māori
Total population: About 137,000
Ethnolinguistic classification: Austronesian → Malayo-Polynesian → Oceanic → Central Pacific → East Central Pacific → Polynesian → Eastern Polynesian → Tahitic → Eastern Māori → Rarotongan
Homeland: Cook Islands, Rarotonga
Regions with significant populations: New Zealand, Auckland, Wellington, Cook Islands, Australia
Languages and dialects: Cook Islands Māori, Rarotonga, Aitutaki, Mangaia, Ngāputoru, Tongareva, Penrhyn, Rakahanga-Manihiki, Pukapukan
Religion: Christianity (majority), Cook Islands Christian Church, Catholic Church, Anglicanism, Seventh-day Adventist Church, Baháʼí Faith
Cook Islanders are the indigenous Polynesian people of the Cook Islands, and the identity is best understood as a diverse island-based heritage rather than a single uniform culture: Britannica notes that, apart from the people of isolated Pukapuka, almost all Cook Islanders have mixed Polynesian ancestry, with historical intermarriage also involving European, Chinese, and African settlers, while Te Ara emphasizes that the wider community includes multiple island histories and dialect communities. Linguistically, Cook Islands Māori is an Eastern Polynesian language related to New Zealand Māori, Hawaiian, and Tahitian; Pukapuka belongs to a different Western Polynesian branch, and there are several distinct dialects across the islands, with Rarotongan often serving as the main taught form. Socially and culturally, Cook Islanders are strongly organized around kinship, with the extended family remaining a powerful unifying force, while church life has long been central both in the islands and in diaspora communities. Their cultural life is visible in practices such as tīvaevae quilting, ceremonial hair-cutting at adolescence, energetic dance and drumming, and social music built around ukulele and guitar, all of which Te Ara describes as flourishing customs. Modern Cook Islands identity is also deeply transnational: many Cook Islanders live outside the islands, especially in New Zealand and Australia, and Te Ara reports that by 2018 more than 80,000 people in New Zealand identified with Cook Islands ethnicity, around 85% of them New Zealand-born, while an estimated 28,000 lived in Australia in 2021. That dispersion has made language preservation a major concern, because only a minority of Cook Islanders in New Zealand could converse in Cook Islands Māori by the 2000s and 2010s, prompting language nests, school teaching, and other revitalization efforts. Christianity is also a major part of the cultural landscape, with the Cook Islands Christian Church historically the largest denomination and other Christian traditions also present.
