According to a page on "Pacific Islander" characters on PUBLIC DOMAIN SUPER HEROES, the earliest contender for "Polynesian superhero" may be The Red Mask, native to a fictional island, Kaukura. He originated in a newspaper strip, "Adventures of the Red Mask" which first ran in 1936 (same year as the Phantom's debut). This site has a breakdown of available info here.
It would be interesting to know if any episodes of the short-lived strip intimated possible romance between the Red Mask and the blonde heroine Nina. It's true, as Allan Holtz says in his article, that the hero is inconsistently colored. I don't see his "wavy" hair being an objection, though. Pacific Islanders did not all have "woolly" hair, since some of the islands were close to the Asian mainland, which meant more potential intermarriage with Asians who had predominantly straight hair.
Nedor Publishing reprinted some sequences of the strip in four issues of BEST COMICS, but only one online reprint site has even a single issue of this title. I think Red Mask does have some claim to "first POC masked hero in comics."
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