Consuming Ocean Island

Katerina Martina Teaiwa

Description

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Consuming Ocean Island tells the story of the land and people of Banaba, a small Pacific island, which, from 1900 to 1980, was heavily mined for phosphate, an essential ingredient in fertilizer. As mining stripped away the island's surface, the land was rendered uninhabitable, and the indigenous Banabans were relocated to Rabi Island in Fiji. Katerina Martina Teaiwa tells the story of this human and ecological calamity by weaving together memories, records, and images from displaced islanders, colonial administrators, and employees of the mining company. Her compelling narrative reminds us of what is at stake whenever the interests of industrial agriculture and indigenous minorities come into conflict. The Banaban experience offers insight into the plight of other island peoples facing forced migration as a result of human impact on the environment.

Prelude: Three Global Stories

Acknowledgments
Notes on Orthography and Geography

Part I. Phosphate Pasts
1. The Little Rock That Feeds
2. Stories of P
3. Land from the Sea

Part II. Mine/lands
4. Remembering Ocean Island
5. Land from the Sky
6. Interlude: Another Visit to Ocean Island
7. E Kawa te aba: The Trials of the Ocean Islanders
8. Remix: Our Sea of Phosphate (photo essay)

Part III. Between Our Islands
9. Interlude: Coming Home to Fiji
10. Between Rabi and Banaba

Coda

Ocean Island/Banaba Timeline
Notes
Bibliography

Sujets

• Ethnic Studies
• HISTORY
• Histoire
• Oceanía
• General officer
• Oceania
• Anthropology
• General
• Océanie

Informations

• Publié par: Indiana University Press
• Date de parution: 27 décembre 2014
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780253014603
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

CONSUMING OCEAN ISLAND
TRACKING GLOBALIZATION
Robert J. Foster, editor
Editorial advisory board:
Mohammed Bamyeh
Lisa Cartwright
Randall Halle
CONSUMING OCEAN ISLAND
Stories of People and Phosphate from Banaba
Katerina Martina Teaiwa
This book is a publication of
Indiana University Press
Office of Scholarly Publishing
Herman B Wells Library 350
1320 East 10th Street
Bloomington, Indiana 47405 USA
iupress.indiana.edu
Telephone [phone]
Fax [phone]
2015 by Katerina Teaiwa
All rights reserved
No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. The Association of American University Presses Resolution on Permissions constitutes the only exception to this prohibition.
The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences-Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992.
Manufactured in the United States of America
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Teaiwa, Katerina Martina.
Consuming Ocean Island : stories of people and phosphate from Banaba / Katerina Martina Teaiwa.
pages cm
ISBN 978-0-253-01444-3 (cl) - ISBN 978-0-253-01452-8 (pb) - ISBN 978-0-253-01460-3 (eb) 1. Banaba (Kiribati)-History-20th century. 2. Phosphate mines and mining-Kiribati-Banaba-History-20th century. 3. Banabans (I-Kiribati people)-Relocation-History-20th century. I. Title.
DU615.T45 2014
996.81-dc23
2014009591
1 2 3 4 5 20 19 18 17 16 15
For John Tabakitoa and Joan Kathryn Martin Teaiwa, and with thanks to Nick, Tearia, Tere, Maria, and our multisited kainga
Naturally some think the native owners are right, yet it is inconceivable that less than 500 Ocean Island-born natives can be allowed to prevent the mining and export of a produc[t] of such immense value to all the rest of mankind.
- Sydney Morning Herald , April 13,1912
Contents
Prelude: Three Global Stories
Preface: On Other Ways of Tracking the Global
Notes on Orthography and Geography
Part I. Phosphate Pasts
1 The Little Rock That Feeds
2 Stories of P
3 Land from the Sea
Part II. Mine/Lands
4 Remembering Ocean Island
5 Land from the Sky
6 Interlude: Another Visit to Ocean Island
7 E Kawa Te Aba: The Trials of the Ocean Islanders
8 Remix: Our Sea of Phosphate
Part III. Between Our Islands
9 Interlude: Coming Home to Fiji?
10 Between Rabi and Banaba
Coda: Phosphate Futures
Acknowledgments
Notes
Bibliography
Index
Prelude
Three Global Stories
Heaven was a rock lying over the earth and rooted in the deep places of the sea.
All the lands of the ancestors were embedded in the rock and stood out like hills on the topside. Banaba was the buto , the navel, and all the multitudes of lands and ancestors in Te Bongiro, the darkness, lay around it. In the time of Te Bongiro, heaven began to move and the earth began to move; they rubbed together as two hands are rubbed together, and from this came Tabakea, the first of all. Tabakea, the turtle, lived on Banaba with Nakaa, his brother. With them lived Auriaria the giant, Tabuariki the shark and thunder, Tituabine the stingray and lightning, and Taburimai, Nawai, Aorao, and many others. Beneath the rock were te baba ma bono , the deaf mutes, and te rang , the slaves.
The inhabitants of the rock began to have children. A woman of Banaba, Tangan-nang, conceived and bore a child; it was the bird Te Kunei. The bird grew large and flew over the sea to catch fish, and often it would bring back food for its mother.
There came a time when the bird flew far to sea and caught a rereba fish, which it carried home to Banaba. Tangan-nang did not kill the fish; she kept it in a bowl of seawater. But the small rereba grew into a large urua fish, the full size of a man. They feared it and cast it into the sea, but the urua returned with many great and fierce fish. Tabakea had an idea about how to save them from the urua and his multitude-Tabakea took a little beru , or lizard, and cast it into a fire. He put the ashes into a clam shell filled with water, and after three moons Nareau, a tiny dark man, emerged from the shell. Tabakea repeated this process with Nareau several times until he was the size of a small man. He then claimed him as a son. Nareau destroyed the urua and scattered its bones around Banaba.
Auriaria became the lord of Te Bongiro, and he pierced heaven with his staff. The rock then fell into the sea, upside down with its roots in the air, burying Tabakea underneath. Auriaria traveled southward until his foot struck a reef-rock. There he stayed and made a great land, which he named Samoa. He met a razor clam, Katati, which he flung into the east and that was the sun. And again he took a shellfish, Nimatanin, and that was the moon. Then he took the body of Riki, the eel, and laid it across heaven. The white belly of Riki is seen across the sky today: it is the Milky Way. Then Auriaria planted a tree on Samoa, from which sprang a host of ancestors. He returned to Banaba and his children are there to this day. 1


Banaba/Ocean Island. Digital Globe/Google Earth
March 15, 1997
I arrived on the island of Banaba in the western part of Kiribati on a government boat filled with all manner of cargo: women and children; male crew members; freely wandering chickens, ducks, and dogs; tinned corned beef and tinned fish of various sizes; sacks of rice; kilograms of pounded, paper-bagged kava; and my father, Tabakitoa. 2 With no visible moon or light of any kind, we somehow disembarked, clutching our bags, and ascended slippery invisible steps from the wharf landing. The total darkness was overwhelming to me, the sound of the ocean deafening. Yet everyone else seemed to be able to see perfectly and were less bothered by the din.
I was deposited on the back of a small, sturdy motorbike which then sped up a bumpy, dark road to a grand but dilapidated house. I later discovered that the driver was my father s younger brother Eritai, whom he had not seen for over thirty years. After a night mostly devoid of sleep but including several encounters with large, healthy-looking rats, I awoke to an extraordinary view.

Banaba pinnacles, April 2000. Photo by Katerina Martina Teaiwa
Banaba was a desiccated field of rocks and jagged limestone pinnacles jutting out of a gray earth, laced with patches of dark green foliage. Roofless concrete buildings and corrugated iron warehouses littered the vista, which was punctuated here and there by startling red flame trees and coconut trunks weirdly devoid of fronds. An indigo ocean encircled the island, filling the horizon that seemed to curve outward from my window. Jagged rock and rusted iron in a vast blue sea: not an idyllic island scene, but an industrial oceanic wasteland.

April 10, 2002
My younger sister Maria and I traveled to Rabi in Fiji. After the plane trip from Suva to Savusavu and four hours in a truck along the bumpy coastal road of northern Vanua Levu, we arrived at Karoko Point across the bay from the village of Tabiang. My cousin Lala and uncle Teruamwi were waiting for us in a boat named Manoa , after my elder sister Teresia s son. I had never seen the sea so rough, and the twenty-minute crossing took almost an hour before we arrived at the kainga , the family hamlet, at Tabona, just outside Tabiang. The turbulent seas were just the beginning of three harrowing days to come. The rain arrived that night, turning into a deluge so deafening that by the second night we could barely hear each other speak inside my father s tin-roofed house.
The next morning there was over two feet of water across the kainga, and a large stretch of road had washed away. The brand-new trenches dug around each house to accommodate the much-anticipated electricity lines now overflowed with muddy water. A pipe had burst during the downpour and all the taps were dry. Our rainwater tank quickly became an invaluable source of clean drinking water for people in Tabona and Tabiang. Two of my cousins placed the one-ton ice chest, normally used for storing fish, just below the tank to catch the overflow, and this provided extra water for washing dishes and clothes and for bathing, though most of us ended up showering in the rain.
On the third day, when the storm finally broke, we attempted a short fishing trip. The sea was brown and filled with debris; it seemed impossible to catch anything in the murky water. After traveling for only two minutes, the engine on the boat died. One of the men, an experienced diver, jumped into the water and with the rope in one hand pulled us back to shore, where a mechanic just happened to be working on a second boat. He quickly fixed the problem and we set out again, this time accompanied by a wooden outrigger canoe. Lala caught a few fish from the canoe, but no one on the motorized vessel caught anything. On our return we learned that six people-two adults and four children-had tragically been killed in a landslide in Buakonikai village to the east of Tabiang. They had all been sleeping when the mountain behind them came crashing into their homes.
The reality of regular heavy rains and cyclones on Rabi contrasts rather starkly with the dryness of the original home island of Banaba in the central Pacific. Nevertheless, despite the rain, the flood, the road washing away, and the brown muddy sea, our kainga had an improvised b