Equal citizenship does not erase the prior belonging of an indigenous people.
Indigeneity reaches back to time immemorial. Colonial rule arrived in Fiji barely 150 years ago. Yet somewhere in our pursuit of a modern, inclusive nation, we seem to be forgetting a fundamental truth.
Indigeneity is not merely an ethnicity. It is not simply one demographic category among many, to be balanced, diluted or redefined at the convenience of the state.
It is something far more profound: an ancestral and enduring relationship between a people, their vanua, their institutions and the land and sea from which their identity and civilisation emerged.
It is a relationship that existed before the modern state — and one whose legitimacy does not depend upon the state’s recognition.
For the iTaukei, this rests upon four fundamental truths.
First, we were here before the state.
We did not arrive as settlers within an established colonial order. Our ancestors developed their own systems of governance, chiefly authority, customary law, language and social organisation, rooted in the vanua. These institutions preceded the Deed of Cession of 1874. They were not creations of colonialism, nor are they merely competing claims within the constitutional order that subsequently emerged.
They are among the foundations upon which that order was built.
Second, the state came to us.
The Deed of Cession was not Fiji joining the world. In a profound historical sense, it was the colonial world coming to Fiji — encountering an existing indigenous civilisation and assuming obligations towards its people, their welfare and their institutions.
Those obligations cannot simply be dismissed as historical inconveniences.
Nor did the modern state create the identity of the indigenous Fijian. The name Fijian was historically associated with the indigenous people long before it was adopted as a common national designation.
The state came after the people, not the people after the state.
Third, indigeneity does not exclude others, but neither can it be extinguished by equality.
Every citizen of Fiji deserves equal dignity, equal protection under the law and an equal stake in our country’s future. That principle should be beyond dispute.
But equal citizenship and indigenous belonging are not interchangeable concepts.
Citizenship is a relationship between the individual and the state. Indigeneity is an ancestral relationship between a people and their homeland, extending across generations and predating the state itself.
One can be shared without extinguishing the other.
Fiji is our common nation. The vanua remains the ancestral foundation of the iTaukei. The name Fijian may now express our shared citizenship, but its indigenous historical roots must not be forgotten or detached from the people from whom that identity originated.
Fourth, indigeneity is collective, inherited and enduring.
Governments may change. Constitutions may be amended. Political institutions may be abolished or restored.
But a people cannot be legislated out of their ancestral existence.
Our indigeneity lives in the vanua, in our customary lands and qoliqoli, in our vosa vakaViti, in our chiefly institutions and in the Bose Levu Vakaturaga. These are not merely cultural ornaments to be preserved for ceremonial occasions. They are living expressions of our collective identity, continuity and authority.
This is why the constitutional removal of the BLV, or the characterisation of indigenous protections as privileges to be weighed against equality, cuts so deeply.
It is not simply a political disagreement. It is a question of our very being — of who we are, where we come from, and whether our ancestral relationship with Fiji can be made conditional upon the political preferences of the day.
When indigeneity is reduced to ethnicity, and ancestral rights are treated as concessions granted by the state, the relationship is inverted.
What existed before the state becomes dependent upon the state for its legitimacy.
That is the fundamental contradiction we must confront.
None of this diminishes the belonging of other communities whose histories, sacrifices and contributions have helped shape modern Fiji. Their place in our nation is real, legitimate and deserving of equal respect.
But inclusion should never require indigenous erasure. Nor should national unity demand that the first people surrender the distinctiveness of their ancestral belonging.
A confident, distinctly Fiji democracy should be capable of embracing both truths: equal citizenship for all and enduring constitutional recognition of the indigenous people.
That is why indigeneity must be expressly recognised in our supreme law, alongside the institutions, customary relationships and collective rights through which it finds expression.
For recognition left to sentiment alone is precarious. Political goodwill can change with governments. Constitutional recognition provides a more enduring safeguard.
Ultimately, the question is not whether Fiji belongs to all its citizens as a modern nation. It does.
The deeper question is whether, in affirming that shared belonging, we are prepared to honour the indigenous foundations upon which our nationhood rests.
Our future must be shared. But our shared future must not be purchased at the price of indigenous forgetting.
Indigeneity is not a privilege bestowed by the state.
It is a truth the state inherited, a covenant history entrusted to us, and a responsibility our Constitution must honour.
