Fast Facts
- Named for: Gilbert Islands (Thomas Gilbert) and Christmas Island (named by Cook)
- Capital: Tarawa (upper left)
- Long/Lat: 1.3 N/173.2 E, 4800 miles & 14 hours west of Castro Valley, though there is no direct route. You can fly through Honolulu.
- Population: 116,000 or 2x Castro Valleys
- Size: 313 sq mi, or only 18 Castro Valleys (not counting the water)
- Avg temp in April: 87 F/31 C
- Median household income: $4,400 annual
- Ethnicity: Gilbertese (from Kiribati), but ancestors were Melanesian, Micronesian & Polynesian
- Main industries: Fish,
phosphate, tourism
The Kiribati Islands are the indigenous people’s way to pronounce “Gilbert,” as these were originally called the Gilbert Islands after Thomas Gilbert in 1788. Gilbert worked for the British East India Company, and the Brits were all over, colonizing “New South Wales” (Australia) and scooping up as many islands as they could claim. Look! that one looks like a Phoenix. Let’s call it Phoenix Islands. Look! it’s Christmas day, so we’ll call that one Christmas Island. How about Gilbert for these and Ellice for those?
You can probably imagine whose imagination dreamed up Christmas island for the one they passed on Christmas Day (*cough* *Cook*). After a century or so, the British hold on these islands started to waver a bit. In the mid-20th century, they prepared to draw a circle around all these little bits of rock in the water, and make them one country.
However, turns out that all the -Nesians–the Micronesians, Polynesians, Austronesians, and Melanesians–who live in these islands aren’t the same. Imagine that! The different tribes didn’t entirely all agree on British governance processes. In 1979, the piece known as Ellis decided to split off and become Tuvalu, and the rest became Kiribati. Gilbert became Kiribati; Christmas became Kiritimati; and the capital became Tarawa.
Fun fact: Thomas Gilbert’s East India flag @1788 looked like this:
Guess what the VERY FIRST American flag looked like? I’ll give you one guess, and don’t say Betsy Ross because that was good marketing on the part of her great-grandson. I’m writing a book, we’ll cover this all in June’s chapter on Flag Day.
Anyway, before “letting” the islands go, the Brits left stuff behind. First, there was a natural deposit of phosphates on Banaba Island, so that was quickly plundered. (See Nauru, which I will not be covering). Secondly, if you remember your “atoll” history from the 1950s, several different countries decided that all these remote atolls were great for… atomic bomb testing! Very remote, except if you lived near there. Naturally, the environmental effects from phosphate mining and underground H-bombs weren’t so great for people who lived mostly off fish and agriculture.
That’s kind of a bummer, so let’s perhaps switch to a neutral topic: the definition of an atoll. An atoll is a unique kind of “island” that is created out of volcanoes, coral, and water. The volcanoes burble up land above the surface–remember Iceland? But, over time, they do start to sink. In the meantime, coral and other life build reefs along the periphery and when the original land sinks, the reef stays up. I know folks who are experts on reefs and such, and I hope I haven’t got that wrong. They’ll tell me.
Tarawa is one of the atolls in Kiribati, and it happens to be one where population clusters, so much that South Tarawa has the same population density as Tokyo. Those who might want to build out tourist settlements–hotels and whatnot–would look for a place like Tarawa to do so. But they might want to hold off on that.
Kiribati’s islands are at high risk because of the rise in ocean levels due to climate change. We can argue, if we must, about causes and so forth, but climate change is happening. Two of theor uninhabited islands have already gone under since the beginning of the century. The islanders, who fish, swim, and sail the way that we watch TV and argue about baseball, might survive with their traditional knowledge. But there’s another problem: the erosion of traditions.
An analysis of Kiribati culture that focuses on the mwaneaba gives a hint. The mwaneaba is the meeting house, built from traditional materials and used for everything that a community might need. However, along with the flea markets and children’s games, it is used as their legislative place, where decision-makers sat in particular places based on their level of leadership. Hurricanes and disasters have been known to happen here, but, even if the buildings don’t last intact, they can be rebuilt.
If they use traditional materials, that is. More recently, the Kiribati have been persuaded to build these meetings houses with iron and concrete. When hurricanes hit now, rebuilding is costly, and may be delayed for long periods. It’s hard to keep the cultural processes of leadership.
Young people, who now have access to some Internet and global friends, are often not interested in anything related to traditional culture. They couldn’t care less where to sit in the mwaneaba. But when the seas rise, they may want to learn some of those survival quickly, as opposed to waiting for a modern type of bailout.
The other unique thing about Kiribati is that it’s the first place of civilization on the other side of the international date line. It’s the first place where the sun rises on a “new day.” That may put Kiribati, not as a lagging poor culture, but in the vanguard of showing how to cope with dramatic environmental change. They’ve done it for centuries already.