In which the Author suspends the Space-Time Continuum and just moves on, vaguely Theme-Like, beginning with an Unauthoritative Account of the Island’s Beginnings.
A long time ago, Tarawa was brought forth by Nareau the Creator. Nareau the Creator was a spider and he looked upon his work and saw that it was good. Perhaps because he was a spider. Nareau the Creator then flung grains of Tarawa to the wind and from these grains other islands were born and together these islands were called Tungaru. He created demigods and people and they procreated but the demigod gene seems to have died out, and so very soon there were just people. He created distant lands and sent Nareau the Wise to tend to the land of white-skinned spirits, the I-Matang world, and Nareau the Cunning to oversee the land of black-skinned spirits. Their intermingling was not advised.
I sometimes wished that Nareau had been a little more expansive in his ambitions. As the primordial source of life, Tarawa is a bit modest. Which grain was it that led to the Eurasian landmass? Why couldn’t we have kept that one, I wondered. How about the Bora Bora grain? Couldn’t Nareau at least have left a grain or two that could have morphed into hills, mountains even, something to break the monotony of a low island? As I cycled up and down the atoll on a thirdhand mountain bike that would never see a mountain, or a hill, or even a rise requiring a gear change, I realized that Nareau, unlike the great majority of deities, was a humble god, prone to thrift and frugality, and while I believe this should be encouraged among deities everywhere, I did periodically yearn for a god who kept a grander residence. Not that Tarawa is without its moments of grandeur—it is, after all, a tropical island—it’s just that it’s very, very small.
The total landmass of Tarawa is twelve square miles, roughly the size of some driveways in Illinois. This figure is illusory, however, for it creates the impression of a block of land, and this Tarawa is decidedly not. Its twelve square miles of coral are divided into elongated slivers, narrow islets crowned with the tufts of palm trees, prevented from becoming a unified whole by a myriad of channels linking the ocean with the lagoon, and stretched out over a reef extending nearly forty miles. The reef itself is shaped like a tottering inverted L, with the western side open to the ocean. We lived near the nook of the atoll, in the village of Bikenibeu, and this I liked because lagoonside it was possible to see land across the way, and this comforted me because I spent my formative years on continents and grew accustomed to its presence. Elsewhere on Tarawa, however, one could see only the ocean, the lagoon, and the land below one’s feet, which never seemed like enough, and I gave thanks every day that neither tsunamis nor cyclones were prevalent here, though I cast a wary eye on distant swells and ominous clouds because you never know, do you?
Soon I began to wonder about the original inhabitants of Tarawa. Settling down on a coral atoll is not quite like settling down in California, which had the advantage of fertile soil, a temperate climate, and freeways for convenient exploration. Tarawa is a difficult place. The soil, a porous limestone sediment, is lamentable, unsuitable for anything but the hardiest plants. The coconut palm trees that today dominate the island were all planted, and it is likely that the first settlers could only rely upon the humble pandanus tree, which is certainly a useful tree to have around, but its dull, starchy fruit doesn’t quite tickle the palate. Mangoes they are not. The only mammal endemic to Kiribati is the Polynesian rat. A horse was once brought to Butaritari, in the northern Gilbert Islands, but it soon died of starvation. Droughts can last for years. The freshwater lens, which is typically just five to ten feet deep, is often brackish. And did I mention that it’s hot?
There is little research on the first settlers to reach Kiribati. The islands form the nexus of Oceania, but unlike most nexus-type places, to be in the middle of anything in the Pacific is to be in the middle of nowhere. Kiribati lies roughly halfway between Australia and Canada, and Russia and Chile. Looking southward from Tarawa, as we did from our house, there was nothing between us and Antarctica, except, of course, half a planet’s worth of ocean. Far to the southwest lie the black islands of Melanesia—the Solomons, Vanuatu, Fiji, New Caledonia, New Guinea. The heartland of Micronesia, such as it is, is found to the north and northwest—the Marshalls, the Carolines, Nauru, Palau, Guam. Its nearest neighbor is Tuvalu, a Polynesian country. Farther to the southeast are the Polynesian islands of Tonga, Samoa, and Tahiti.
The few I-Matang scholars who have delved into the ethnography of Kiribati tend to believe that the very first people to arrive here some four thousand years ago were Melanesians, probably from the Solomon Islands or the northern islands of Vanuatu. Why they believe this remains unclear to me. There is certainly no archeological evidence suggesting that four thousand years ago Kiribati was occupied by Melanesians. Nor is there any compelling linguistic proof. In appearance, the I-Kiribati differ markedly from Melanesians. Unsurprisingly, given the vastly different environmental realities of atolls and the lush, hilly, and (relatively) large islands that comprise most of Melanesia, there are also no lingering manifestations of Melanesian culture in contemporary Kiribati. When four fishermen from Papua New Guinea washed up on Tarawa, having drifted for several months in an open boat, they were not regarded as kin. After church groups nursed the unfortunate fishermen back to health, the I-Kiribati would stop and point at te black man whenever they ventured out. As one who elicited gapes and stares myself, I felt I had more in common with the few Melanesians who periodically appeared on Tarawa.
It is likely that we will never know for certain where the original I-Kiribati came from, which has led to some speculation among New Agers that they came from outer space. I find this improbable. One need only consider Air Kiribati. Those who have spent months marooned on an outer island waiting for the wanikiba (flying canoe) to be fixed will find it inconceivable that the same people responsible for Air Kiribati were once masters of intergalactic travel. But a dearth of evidence requires conjecture. Outside of a few Polynesian islands, where stone structures from distant eras still stand, and the enigmatic Lapita pottery, which has been found in both Melanesia and Polynesia, there is little archeological evidence to be found on the islands of the Pacific, particularly on the atolls, where nearly everything is built from wood and thatch, which rarely survives ten years in a hot, humid climate, much less four thousand years. Add to this the absence of writing until the arrival of missionaries in the late nineteenth century and the story of Kiribati can only be found in tales passed orally from generation to generation. This is too bad, of course. Myths and legends are mutable, varying in tone, meaning, even in substance, to reflect the bias of the storyteller or to accommodate changing times. I have always preferred the shard of pottery, the bronze coin, the blackened hearth, the ancient bill of receipt, and evocative statues of fertility goddesses for what they say of the past. For the I-Kiribati, however, their entire history resides in the stories told by a few old men. Fortunately, someone recorded those stories.
In 1914, the British Colonial Office sent a remarkable young cadet to its outpost in Kiribati. One would think that at the dawn of the Great War there would be numerous applicants for a position in the empire’s most remote colony, but in fact there was only one. His name was Arthur Grimble, and in a boon for students of Kiribati history—both of them—the Colonial Office in London ignored his subsequent entreaties to be sent to the Somme, and he remained in the islands, rising eventually to the position of resident commissioner, which is colonial-speak for God. Grimble became very fond of the I-Kiribati and today there are hundreds of islanders who can trace their lineage to him. When not dispensing justice and promoting civilization, a burden he afflicted primarily upon frothing missionaries and perfidious traders, Grimble set about recording genealogies and the nuances of island mythology, recognizing that the unwritten story inevitably becomes the forgotten story.
Kiribati mythology points strongly toward Samoa. Grimble’s research suggests that sometime around A.D. 1250, a fierce Polynesian tribe found themselves expelled from Samoa, whereupon they set forth for the islands of Kiribati. These were the same Polynesians who colonized Tahiti and New Zealand, and when they reached the islands of Arorae, Nikunau, Beru, Tabiteuea, Nonouti, Butaritari, and Tarawa, they did what they usually did upon arriving someplace new. They ate the men they found there.
The Polynesians worshipped the god Rongo, and what Rongo liked was human flesh. The sails of their war canoes were creatively decorated with the likeness of a human head, called te bou-uoua. There was another crest called tim-tim-te-rara. This translates as drip-drip-the-blood, a reference to the heads driven on stakes that Rongo liked to see scattered around like knickknacks. So, picture lolling about on the beach, idly scanning the horizon, when suddenly you see hundreds of warriors approach in canoes bedecked with the image of a severed head. It’s not going to be a good day.
But who were the people they found there? One evening, I went to ask Bwenawa, an unimane, or old man, who oversaw the demonstration garden at FSP, a job akin to that of an alchemist on Tarawa. In Kiribati, the unimane and unaine (old women) are considered the guardians of the culture, a state of affairs that sets it apart from the United States, where the final arbiter for all things cultural is the adolescent male, which explains the otherwise inexplicable popularity of the World Wrestling Federation, gangsta rap, and Pamela Anderson. Bwenawa, a dark, stocky man with bad teeth and a forest of ear hair whose appearance was not entirely displeasing on account of his gentle face and luxurious Elvis hair, was, like most I-Kiribati, deeply incurious about the outside world. There were no distinctions between Australians, Germans, and Russians, or the languages they spoke. They were simply I-Matang. But when it came to the minutiae of island life, there was not a more informed, enthusiastic student and teacher than Bwenawa. He became luminous upon hearing of the medicinal uses of a shrub found on Beru. He marveled at the strength of locally made coconut fiber rope. When he danced the up-tempo traditional dances, he was full of mirth. When he sang the sad songs, he trembled on the brink of despair. He was about as agreeable a conduit to all things Kiribati as could be. And so when I met with Bwenawa in a local meetinghouse, a maneaba, made of coconut timber with a thatched roof that descended nearly to the ground, he seemed very pleased to answer my questions about Tarawa’s beginnings.
“It is a very interesting story,” he began. His eyes lit up and he seemed to go into a trance, and then he lost me completely in his efforts to translate the story of creation into English. There was Nareau the Creator and Nareau the Elder and Nareau the Younger and Nareau the Cunning and Nareau the Wise, and Grumpy Nareau, Sneezy Nareau, Dopey Nareau, and Sleepy Nareau. There was, it seems, much slumbering going on in the beginning until Nareau the Elder, or the Younger, or possibly Dopey, awoke the spirit of the land, which had been entombed (where? you want to ask, but I didn’t), and united it with the spirit of the air, which was drifting aimlessly, as air is often wont to do. There was the North Wind and the South Wind and the East Wind and the West Wind and they blew, from the North, South, East, and West, respectively. There were eels and bats and rays and they all came to bad ends. Ditto an octopus.
“You see, it was like the movement of a turtle,” said Bwenawa. No, I didn’t quite see. I picked up the severing of limbs, the tossing of flesh, and the general sense that the world’s creation was largely due to the boredom of the gods, but the poetry of creation—the movement of a turtle—escaped me, and I was too incurious of mythology to find out more. I’ll take just the facts, if you please. What I did find interesting, though, was the implied permanence of the ocean. Before all else there was that great blue mass of water. That the I-Kiribati could not conceive of a world or a state of existence that precluded the immutability, the constancy of the ocean, was not surprising. To view life from the perspective of an atoll, where land and all that resides upon it seems acutely impermanent, is to view the ocean as other, more tethered, cultures perceive the universe. The ocean does seem infinite when seen from an atoll, by day merging with the blue sky, by night extending toward the stars, seamlessly. Just as many westerners cannot conceive of God without placing him within something—the black void of space, a puffy white cloud, the throne room at a Renaissance fair—the I-Kiribati could not conceive of life without it being immersed within the context of the ocean. But someone had to have crossed that ocean to be the first to set foot on the islands of Kiribati. I pressed Bwenawa.
“Some educated people think that the I-Kiribati came from someplace else. But most believe that we have always been here, as descendants from the spirits.”
We were sitting on mats. A kerosene lantern offered a dim light. Shadows flitted across the rafters of the maneaba. The ocean offered its usual white noise. It was easy to believe that what is always was. But the great Pacific migrations that brought people from Asia into the Pacific were all about change and movement. Beginning several thousand years ago, many of the remote islands of Oceania were reached by people whose feats in seamanship and navigation have never been equaled, not by Columbus, not by Magellan, not even by Cook. That these peoples took to the seas at a time when Europeans were still exploring the utility of femur bones is staggering, and one can only wonder about what would have caused these people to take sail, for these were no mere voyages of exploration, but of colonization.
But where did these people come from? And who were the first to arrive in Kiribati?
Bwenawa seemed amused by my efforts to discern a beginning that did not involve a divine spider. He was much more inclined to tell me more of the Nareau family.
“… and then Nareau killed his father and he cut out his father’s eye and threw it to the sky and it became the sun.”
“Do you believe that, Bwenawa?”
“We are all Christians now… . And then Nareau cut out the other eye and threw it to the sky and it became the moon…”
I asked him about any legends that refered to islands other than Samoa.
“There are legends that speak of high islands to the west. They are there to protect us from the westerly wind.” The westerlies are the storm winds.
And then he whispered, as if revealing secret, ancient knowledge. “Some think that the first I-Kiribati came from the west.”
I looked pleased. Bwenawa looked pleased.
“From where in the west, Bwenawa?”
“They say Sumatra.”
This was interesting.
“They came with the coconut palm tree and the breadfruit tree and the pig,” he said, listing trees that are not indigenous to Kiribati, but native to Southeast Asia. “And then, maybe a thousand years ago, men came from Tonga and they killed all the men in Kiribati, but not the women. And then, maybe seven hundred years ago, men came from Samoa and on some of the islands they killed all the men again, but not the women. And so you see,” he smiled beatifically, “that is why all I-Kiribati look different from one another.”
It was a heartwarming story. And possibly true. Grimble noted the similarities between the I-Kiribati sailing canoes and those found in the Moluccas Islands in Indonesia. The I-Kiribati language, like all the languages of Oceania (except those found in parts of New Guinea), falls in the Central–Eastern Malayo–Polynesian subfamily of the Austronesian language family, which originates in Taiwan. And though it is indeed a great distance from Indonesia to Kiribati, as the drifting fishermen from Papua New Guinea demonstrated, there is a strong west to east current in this part of the Pacific. While the predominant winds in Kiribati are the trade winds from the east, a strong westerly wind usually blows from November through February. Long-distance downwind sailing would certainly be possible in the large outrigger sailing canoes ostensibly used by the ancient seafarers.
More likely, however, is that people from Southeast Asia first settled in nearby Melanesian islands, possibly interbred, and then subsequently moved farther into the Pacific, perhaps to Kiribati. It is also likely that Bwenawa’s recounting of the Tongans’ friendly arrival in Kiribati is true. Tonga has lately been recognized as a possible “founding colony,” a place from which subsequent expansion and exploration in the Pacific occurred.
But, alas, we don’t really know much about the ancient I-Kiribati. Any evidence of pre-Samoan horde settlements dissipated long ago. We can speculate, look for links between island groups, even do DNA analysis, but in the end it will tell us very little. Bwenawa is correct. There is remarkable variation in the appearance of the I-Kiribati, not in skin color (brown) or hair type (straight and black), but in facial features. One can see the sharpness of Asia, the roundness of Polynesia, even the eye coloring of Europe, as if every intrusion of the outside world has been marked indelibly on the faces of the I-Kiribati. When outsiders arrived upon the islands of Kiribati, they inevitably adapted to the demands of place. The Samoans may have feasted upon the flesh of the I-Kiribati, but very soon they became I-Kiribati themselves, altering hardly at all the culture they found on the islands. This is because one cannot conquer an atoll. The atoll trumps all.