The author (centre) with two Kiribati residents  © Guigone Camus 2014
By Guigone Camus

[Interview translated from French]

1. What are some distinctive social and cultural features of Kiribati?

Kiribati is composed of 33 atolls located in eastern Micronesia, representing a total land area of 810 km². Of the 33 atolls, 21 are inhabited; around half of the total population of just over 100 000 people lives on Tarawa atoll, the administrative centre of Kiribati. Archaeological evidence indicates that the first settlements on Kiribati date from the beginning of the first millennium AD. Oral tradition refers to successive migration waves, and tells about mythical ancestors who crossed seas by canoe, and came to establish settlements on the different islands of the archipelago. According to those oral accounts, the social structures we see in Kiribati nowadays were inherited from those ancestors.

While the inhabitants of Kiribati recognize different traits specific to each island, they all unanimously refer to themselves as I-Kiribati, “inhabitants of Kiribati”. That common identity is built on shared oral tradition, social structure and language. The relatively recent establishment of the Independent and Sovereign Republic of Kiribati in July 1979, following nearly a century of British colonial rule, also contributes to a strengthened sense of belonging to one nation.  

In terms of administrative organization, each island is divided into districts. Each district has its own maneaba, a large common house where the entire community of the district meets to discuss key political issues. The maneaba plays a key symbolic role inherited from the pre-colonial social and political system, which connects the descendants of the mythical ancestors to their roots. The maneabas, present on every island of the archipelago, remain the key arena for democratic public debate on the islands south of the equator.

2. How do nature and the environment contribute to the social and cultural values of islanders and how do they influence the way they communicate?

The I-Kiribati have an exceptionally precise knowledge and understanding of land and marine environments that they control. Every single element of the environment is known, named and attributed to specific individuals or groups. The knowledge and distribution of land and nature, which are inherited from their ancestors, form the basis of social equilibrium. In parallel, the attribution of a symbolic meaning to each element of nature and each piece of land by relating them to characters and events from ancient mythology help the I-Kiribati to fully control their environment. This symbolism is conveyed through local oral tradition. Ancestral myths, which are closely connected to genealogy, are the main vehicle by which local people preserve their unique knowledge. The transmission of myths to younger generations is a responsibility shared and exercised by all I-Kiribati men and women alike.

3. How do climate change and sea level rise affect local traditions and social structures of small islands communities? Are the effects of climate change and the potential necessity to relocate perceived as a stronger threat by the population?

The islands are affected in different ways by the consequences of global warming, with the most threatened location being Tarawa, the capital atoll. The combination of rising sea level and overpopulation of this small island (over 50,000 inhabitants for only 32 km ²) already led to significant soil and lagoon degradation. The lessened productivity of the land, lack of access to drinking water and limited health capacities are all factors that will worsen the current situation, especially if the predictions of the 5th IPCC report are confirmed with an increase in sea levels of 29 to 82 cm by the end of the century. Just as with the Maldives and Tuvalu, the size of these low-lying islands may be reduced.

Research, information and action cells are being put in place (Kiribati Adaptation Programme) but local populations are very anxious at the thought of having to one day leave the land inherited from their ancestors. They worry about the future of their children who will very likely have to face this dilemma.

There is a legal gap when it comes to defining the status of so-called “climate refugees”. When the president of the Fiji Islands, located more than 2,000 km away from Kiribati, says that he is ready to host I- Kiribati in case of flooding of the atolls, a question remains: will I- Kiribati become Fijian citizens? Can you be a citizen of a country which is gone?

4. Migration and resettlement linked to environment in the region, and involving Kiribati in particular, are not a new phenomenon: there were several precedents of relocation of communities or purchase of new land by the government throughout the 20th century. How is past migration integrated into the local population’s oral traditions and identity? How is projected migration associated with climate change different from past migration and resettlement linked to environment? Can the unique culture of small islands be preserved if relocation takes place? In the case of Kiribati, how could relocation influence oral traditions?

The President of the Republic of Kiribati, Mr. Anote Tong, has recently purchased 28 km² of arable land in Fiji. In the future, this new land should help to ensure food security for the I-Kiribati. The soils of the low-lying limestone and coral islands of Kiribati are poor and this limits the ability to cultivate plants and crops. On top of that, sea level rise will reduce the available land area, and will also result in the salinization of soil and of underground fresh water reserves. As a result, growing crops will become even more challenging, in a context of rising temperatures and drier climate.

There have been several cases of resettlement in the Pacific in the past. At the end of the Second World War, the population of the Banaba Island (South-West of Kiribati) was relocated to Rabi Island in Fiji by the British government. The relocation was conducted to allow the British Empire to expand phosphate mining operations on the Banaba Island.

Yet, existing anthropological research conducted on Banaba suggests that the interdependency between man and land can be reinvented: sacred dances, songs and rites can revive and reinforce a community’s identity, even more so in situations of exile (Kempf 2013).

In the worst-case scenario, the possible submergence of the Kiribati Islands raises a second problem, in addition to exile: the issue of preserving an uprooted community’s identity on a foreign land, in an unknown environment -the physical foundation of which would disappear forever. The prospect is one of irrevocable disorientation, of bereavement of ancestral land. Could such a loss in fact reinforce the islanders’ collective memory? What would happen to their oral tradition, which has transmitted such a unique knowledge of nature, sea and land from one generation to another? To what extent can the capacity for resilience and inventiveness of a civilization ensure that places that do not exist anymore are still remembered, still identified with, and the knowledge relating to them, preserved? So many questions arise from the prospects of a nature pushed to its limits by humanity’s excesses; limits that are about to be reached in Kiribati.

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Guigone Camus is a Ph.D candidate in ethnology and anthropology at the École des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences, EHESS-Iris) in France, and is writing a dissertation on the Gilbert Islands archipelago. She has recently published a study on the Tabiteuea Atoll, which is the main subject of her doctoral research. (Guigone Camus, Tabiteuea Kiribati, Éditions Hazan/ Fondation Culturelle Musée Barbier-Mueller, 2014.)