Fijian

The Indigenous Fijian people, known as iTaukei, are a Melanesian population native to the Fiji Islands in the South Pacific, traditionally organized into a hierarchical system of chiefly confederacies and communal landholding, vasu and mataqali clan structures that continue to shape land tenure and political life in modern Fiji. Fijian society historically combined root-crop and fishing subsistence with a warrior tradition, largely giving way to widespread Methodist Christian conversion in the nineteenth century. Since British colonial rule brought large numbers of Indian indentured laborers to Fiji beginning in 1879, relations between Indigenous Fijians and Fiji's substantial Indo-Fijian minority have shaped much of the country's modern political history, including a series of coups since 1987.