Kiribati and Kunan Kiribati

Kunan Kiribati sits at the heart of a much larger story told by climate change and it's anthem might be forced to become part a cultural ark for people facing geographic extinction. The song is at a node where considerations of climate science, colonial history , and questions of legal and cultural continuity all collide. The anthem is reveals how 19th‑century evangelizing practices shaped language, literacy, and national forms of feeling even as they displaced indigenous sonic ecologies . I'm again faced with the limits of the amateur internet historian but can still tell you how this song is an effective national signal. I weave geology, international law anxieties, and cultural survival strategies into a single narrative because the song cannot be disentangled from the forces reshaping its homeland. This is a good one.

Speaker A: 00:00:00

Foreign.

Hello and welcome to the Anthems Podcast.

I'm Patrick and I'm here to tell you the story of a song that helps to tell the story of a nation.

Today we are taking a jump that is close to the equatorial circumference of the moon.

More Precisely, it is 12,211 kilometers, which is 7,588 miles.

This is about 6,100 times more than the 2 meter sea level rise that will make our target country essentially uninhabitable.

If current climate models are assumed correct, that range occurs by the end of the century.

And I do that because mathematical assumptions make the modern world, so we have to assume something in order to function.

You may of course choose to believe whatever you desire, but the fact is that climate modeling in the past five decades has been pretty accurate stuff and also kind of unsettling in what the predictions pretend for our future.

We have got to do better at paying attention to this stuff, fellow humans, because today's show is about the anthem of almost certainly the first country to be physically erased by climate change.

It makes me shudder a little to consider that.

And if you have a very specific existential dread like me, you might know that we're talking about Kiribati.

Officially the Republic of Kiribati.

Today we are in the single country that has territory in all four hemispheres.

Since it spans the equator and the 180th meridian.

This is a seemingly very tiny place as a word and a dot on my map that I learned was a country the morning that I decided to learn about the country, very much a place under the purview of one of the big themes of the Anthems podcast, the planetary consequences of human affected change.

Here it's specifically climate change, because nations like Kiribati are expected to be the first places to become uninhabitable.

It should not perhaps be a surprise to me that the people could have a mass migration or dispersion, because someday I'm going to figure out how to tell you about the Romani people.

But forever displacement is a much sadder thing to think about.

Doesn't matter how big or small the number of the people I am thinking about, People are distinct in culture in lots of different ways, and if they're not actively trying to eliminate others, they should get self determination, including their land.

Of course, the implications of that are an absolute thicket of stuff to consider, but it's a good reason for me to tell you about Kunan Kiribati.

Now, I have not eaten any food from here specifically, but the national dish is something called palusami, which is coconut milk, a combo of taro, banana and breadfruit leaves with curry powder and black pepper, and then it's baked in an underground earthen oven and that sounds incredible.

It's very much a dish that's in my wheelhouse of flavor.

Hopefully this song is at least a little like that for you.

My initial reaction is that it feels a bit long, but this is actually one of the best ones that I've heard.

Then I found the version that I played which is close to the anthem as written composed, and bam.

I listened to probably the most versions of this song so far, but I really like the one I picked and there are so many versions of this song out there.

More about the song in a bit.

All the cool stuff I recommend about countries shouldn't just be things I like, so I will note that Kira Mas, or Christmas island is is the largest coral atoll by land area and is a gateway to some of the best places for scuba out there.

Going into the ocean, other than a little bit of beach swimming, is a hard pass for me because of the actual terror, but I still recognize the ecological significance of the place and love that someone is going down there and taking pictures because I like to see them.

And it's another stunning thing about our planet, despite me not being someone that's ever going underwater like that unless something extraordinary happens to require it.

These reefs support hundreds of species of fish, dozens of marine mammal species, hundreds of types of corals, and thousands of kinds of shellfish.

So where do we go to get to this biodiversity goldmine?

Kiribati is another country that isn't super easy to pinpoint on a map unless you already know where it is or happen to be an international dateline nerd.

Because the nation's 313 square miles of islands are spread around 1.3 million square miles of ocean.

The east to west span of these islands and atolls is nearly the width of the continental United States.

It's huge.

Thankfully though, at least for placement purposes, 70% of the land is the island of Kiramas and That is about 1,000 miles south of the US state of Hawaii.

Honestly though, just look for the international date line in the Pacific Ocean on a decent map or globe and around 3,500 miles east of Papua New Guinea.

It takes a wild looking jog that is so Kiribati has the same day on all of its geography and I think it's pretty cool.

The 130,000 residents here live in a tropical rainforest climate that is rarely affected by a fully developed cyclone, but but some do affect them on the way to full storm strength.

In June of: 2008

I understand this is the second episode in a row where I seemingly open and keep going with climate change based doom saying but that's not my intention.

It's a complete coincidence.

Due to the format of the show, there's some chance stuff and large concerns in the past two countries just happen to be sea level rise screwing stuff up.

No Doom saying here because I'm in my mid-40s and I expect weird coincidences to be normal.

For our geology diversion we are going to look at coral atolls since Kira Mass is the largest single one on the planet.

If we're measuring by dry land area, there are about 440 of these that we know about on the whole planet and almost all of them are in the Pacific Ocean.

I'm not a geologist, but my guess is that it is Ring of Fire related.

Actual scientists are pretty sure that when they form it's because a volcanic island has coral growing out around the shore and building up over as few as a couple hundred thousand years or as long as more than 30 million.

As the dormant volcano island slowly sinks into the ocean, you get an atoll which with a lagoon in the middle.

Some of these things are not small at all and Kira Mass is almost exactly 120 square miles.

For context, that is very close to the size of the nation of Malta episode I don't know yet.

People live there too, nearly 8,000 of them by now.

Despite the atoll being subject to rigors and the long term health consequences of nuclear weapons testing during the Cold War, which my government has settled on.

Deny the obvious connection until everyone cares is dead root and this is predictable for the my government to do, but I'm still disgusted by it.

Anyway, we've got to get on the timeline that leads to the anthem, do we not?

This is another area that is a way longer than I expected history with the Gilbertese people having what I consider a cohesive story as far back as 3,000 years before the comet ever era.

through the timeline in like: 1606

It means good trip and it makes Kiribati sound like a resort town.

But seriously folks, the colonial Spanish world is absolutely stocked up with terribly simple and silly place names.

It's such a strange decision on their part.

a global circumnavigation in: 1764

The British will be back, though.

This is another of the seemingly endless list of former members of the empire.

ert, was passing through on a: 1718

Oddly enough, this inspired a Russian admiral to name them after him and do it in French for some reason.

However, though those folks were just passing through.

mapped the archipelago was in: 1824

lly start to happen until the: 1850

It's probably definitely not always the case, but the overlap is not a thing that I can ignore.

And it's also always not a straight line correlation, meaning British colonialism does not always equate to British missionaries arriving in a region first.

Here it was actually the Americans that got there first in the form of the Mormon Church.

There's no real point in mentioning it other than that they have not popped up on my show before and they may not again, so they get a mention in history here.

Regardless, by: 1888

Clearly there are many people that have done a great deal of scholarly work in this area, so there is a lot to say about it, most of which I'm going to skip and offer a much briefer explanation because it's interesting but tangential.

Christian missionaries mostly co opted as the religious and cultural arm of the imperialist and colonial powers of Europe and later to a less formally integrated extent, but still present the United States.

So the modern progressive view tends to look at them as shock troops for the softening of the people for the coming takeover by educating the savages ahead of time.

There is also a very strong chance that the individual missionary didn't understand or know this and really were doing what they thought was right most of the time.

At least based on what I know about us humans, the biggest driver of European traffic to Kiribati was not missionaries.

It was merchants and fishermen and whalers.

Because it turns out that having a small but fairly civilized group of islands in the middle of the Pacific is a great stopover point if you're fishing.

Throughout 19th century, the maritime traffic increased dramatically and it resulted in tribal upheaval due to European diseases.

It also caused massive binge drinking, with the newly traded European liquor being so destructive that the high chief at the time completely banned the sale.

lago a protectorate in May of: 1892

The process of transitioning from a region of interest into a protectorate was something that never really became a boilerplate process for the British.

I'm certain they'd have loved that, but humanity is simply too variable for it to happen in Kirabati.

It was fairly ordered, though, with this podcaster suspecting that it was mostly because there were not enough people there to provide a measurable resistance against the British.

Here they appointed a Resident Commissioner named Charles Swain, a man that although does not read like a magnanimous colonial administrator.

I also didn't discover that he was a terrible guy to everybody in Kiribati, mostly just ineffectual due to the inherent difficulty in administrating an area that was culturally variable and spread out over a huge area with many and varied claims of traders and locals, and doing it with 18th century technology.

The colonial presence mostly evolved into a procurement system for labor to exploit phosphate deposits, so it was typical stuff.

The paper that I read about is called Ruining the Pacific Australia's Phosphate Imperialism, and that kind of sums up the colonial attitude towards a whole lot more than what I'm covering in this episode.

olony, with that occurring in: 1916

So the British were doing stuff like this, I guess.

By then, though, our writer was alive.

oba Temuera Eriam was born in: 1910

He was a member of the British Empire, a politician, a writer and a musician.

He also wrote both the Gilbertes and English lyrics to Kunan Kiribati.

He passed in: 1988

In the past I've attributed this to what I was calling regular people syndrome or something like that anyway, but that seemed unsatisfying to me in the case of people like this because this man is not like a regular guy.

There's a whole bunch of information about out there because he's a well known politician and he was quite instrumental in the development of the country, but almost everything that is recorded about the guy is sitting in British government records on microfiche somewhere.

There is little to no incentive for that information to get converted into an accessible digital format and put online where a guy in the United States just using Google can get it.

It's very frustrating stuff because I can look enough into the records to know that there is a lot of stuff there about this guy, but I can't see any of it.

I just know that there are things that he was involved in because it was it's mentioned in Wikipedia, but there's no references for any of that stuff.

I know that he was elected in: 1967

But apart from a few mentions on these lesser visited parts of Wikipedia, I can't read or see the source myself.

And that means that I can't tell you a bunch of stuff about this guy without it not being verifiable for me.

I suspect that any actual historians listening to me are chuckling that I've actually finally got around to figuring this bit out.

Thankfully there's a bunch else to say about the country and the anthem and that Arieus left as part of his legacy.

,: 1916

Since I can't accurately and reliably tell you about the writer, I'll have to settle for relating the time that he lived through because it shaped his writing and who he was.

On the date that I mentioned, the islands were made into a crown colony.

States under the Guano act of: 1856

Yes, I did say guano, and I am referring to the normal meaning bat poop.

It deserves an aside because it encapsulates US imperialism in a way that many other things do not.

First off, the words wait, what and why are appropriate for you to be thinking right now.

The why is easy because guano was a prized form of fertilizer and a source of saltpeter Given that stuff is for farming and firearms, is anyone shocked even a little bit that my country was interested in them?

The act gave any American the ability to claim any uninhabited or unclaimed island that contained guano as a US territory.

Some of the islands in Carabas are uninhabited and bats also live there.

This was a failed effort on my country's part, but it did give me a chance to mention a random thing I know that I learned on a different can credentialed podcast.

Regardless of the fecally based disputation by the United States, the island still became a colony of the British Empire and were piecemeal added to over the next 50 years and change.

We're not covering all of that because it's more of the same kind of colonial administrative yada yada that the British are well known for, and mostly it was just a place for them to steal phosphate from.

And that makes me sad because of my stolen narrative realization a little while ago.

at Japan occupied Kiribati in: 1942

This prompted the British to evacuate, and in November of the same year Allied forces, which was primarily the United States this time, fought off Japanese forces in real bloody but pivotal fighting.

Of course we know that the Allies won the war, and I'm not sure if I mentioned it or honestly if I knew it at all before the reading of this episode, but the events of the war prompted the newly created United nations to create a Special Committee on Decolonization.

mittee didn't even form until: 1962

So I am definitely not patting any of these people on the back for their timeline.

But they did get there though, at least in Kira Bass, because the completely decolonized query is complicated in a way that I am wildly unqualified to answer.

But I am definitely reading all about it because there is a significant overlap with national anthems in that which shouldn't be a surprise to me at all.

So in: 1974

It just seems weird to a guy that grew up being told government was the will of the people and not the whim of a king.

And here I know I could digress listeners.

rts gained self governance in: 1977

I wish we had young people in charge in many a place.

try upon full independence in: 1979

s chosen upon independence in: 1970

Sometime before that there was a nationwide contest for the anthem and I think this is honestly my favorite way for a country to pick an anthem because I like self determination for a country's people.

I've mentioned that, but all I can say for sure about this contest is that it happened and Uriam's song won right back up against the lack of a robust effort to digitalize colonial records for smaller countries.

the National Identity act of: 1989

By then we've already had our anthem for a little while and that means I can go on to discuss the song itself.

Musically speaking, we are again in relatively uncomplicated territory, which is another thing I kind of dig about this anthem.

These are the songs of the people and I think that even us non trained folks should be able to sing them pretty decently.

That said, this was originally written as a four part vocal harmony in common time with diatonic major, so it was written by somebody who was trained.

My metronome says it's a Dante and that is a stately 72 beats per minute and ticked out.

It feels a bit slow, but according to my fitness tracker, it's very close to my average resting heart rate and so much music is written at this tempo.

Probably a coincidence, we've got a typical Western progression with 1-455-and- dominant seventh of whatever your V chord is and that gets built into a stepwise pattern.

Most of the song with basic intervals.

I actually really like this one because I understand it and I've learned a ton of stuff about music because of it.

My only miss for it is that indigenous Kiribati music is even better with stuff like vocal drones and microtonal progressions and body percussion.

So why did we not get something containing the music of the people that live there?

I've gotten aside about that.

We did get a good piece of music and I will again say that this is a top 10 anthem for me, maybe even a top five.

But it's actually very directly a product of the missionary work I was talking about.

The song is firmly in a tradition that was started by 19th century missionaries mostly as a way of getting language development read whatever language the missionaries spoke and cultural integration going in the lands they wanted to do missionary work in.

I will not delve into this topic any deeper, but the literature is rich if you are so inclined.

Again, it's probably something that's super sad in a lot of ways too.

Kunan Kir Bess is a textbook song of this type, even though it is a song that is designed for a very different goal.

It's called a hymnady.

I'll talk a little bit more about them in a moment.

Fascinating stuff for me that speaks to the depth of the imperial or colonial religious footprint that the west left.

Consequential stuff.

Now, lyrically speaking, I'm reading something that makes a ton of sense as the winner of a national anthem contest.

We'll talk about the lyrical content after the read through, but because this is pretty strictly a hymnody, there are some things to say about it.

In general we have three verses, they are eight lines apiece and the first four lines are quatrain.

And in the case of a hymnody song, it works more like the verses of a song do instead of the parts of a larger and many verse poetic structure sort of like a sonnet stanza.

Think what Nostradamus wrote because that was really just a big poem.

The second four lines are abab rhyme scheme and it makes a varied refrain in style but not specifically content.

The Gilbert version has eight syllables for almost all of the lines to make it fit well to a nice singable common time.

Four, four.

And it makes sense that it won the contest.

Of course most of this does not apply to the English version, although this time we did do have a translation that was written by the very same writer at the same time.

And I so far I don't think I've had a bunch of those onto the read through.

I will read the English version from my copy of the 11th edition of National Anthems of the World.

You can check that out in reference 34 in the show notes.

Stand up Kira Best Stand up with jubilation.

Prepare to accept responsibility and to help each other.

Be steadfastly righteous, Love all our people.

The attainment of content and peace by our people will be achieved when all our hearts beat as one.

Love one another, Promote happiness and unity.

We beseech you, O God, to protect us and lead us in the days to come.

Help us with your loving hand.

Bless our government and all our people.

Bless our government and all our people Like I said, this is not an especially complicated piece of writing, in sentiment or in content, despite its effectiveness as a national anthem.

And to be clear, I do think it's an effective anthem despite missing a couple of chances.

The first quatrain gets right at the sentiment, encouraging people to literally get up with extreme joy and sing for the nation.

The immediate temperance of that, with a call to pull together and remain true, gives it a little bit of a rhythm.

The first refrain has the twin ideals of doing the right thing and loving everyone.

That's a hard couple of sentiments for one to argue against.

Regardless of your motivation for that argument, the second quatrain goes right back into the people make the country.

It's cheery, for sure, but there is a tinge of nationalism in the writing as well as what sounds like it could be an admonishment to be content with what you've got, and if you're not happy with it, you're not participating properly.

National anthems are, as I have repeated, kind of inherently nationalistic things, so don't be surprised by that.

This was an anthem written as an entry to an anthem contest by a man that was heavily involved in the politics of the nation during transition into a free state.

And you can hear that in his writing.

Until the third verse, at least, you can, because there the hymnody influence becomes too much and the anthem becomes an actual hymn.

Honestly, it feels a little generic in its praise, and on the show we have heard better hymns in this department.

Despite that, though, and because of the fact that it's literally modeled on a missionary song and written by a religious man in a religious country, it is one of the more overtly religious songs that we have heard.

They do focus on praising God and the pursuit of Kira Bass, but not in a way that is identifiable as specific to the nation's identity.

In my opinion.

The final refrain wraps things up in a satisfying enough way, though, for an anthem.

I do give the missionaries credit for having a really neat way of packaging pretty much any message that you would like to send and putting it to a tune.

It turns out to be quite an effective formula for writing an anthem, and it makes for a decent listening experience.

So a top 10 anthem and a really interesting, uniquely placed place on the planet are good to cover.

st in: 1994

I sure couldn't.

It's a cool place though, and I'll probably never go there because the ocean fills me with a deep sort of fear and Kiribati has so much of it, like so much of it.

But I have enjoyed learning what I can about the people that have carved out a culture on the islands and atolls in the middle of the deep water that we've got out there.

And maybe someday I'll randomly end up there just because it's the first country that welcomes the New year.

They're also the first country that has gone ahead and purchased land, specifically 2,210 hectares of land at Ngdvadu Estate in Van Wei Levu, Fiji.

And they've done this as a refuge for their people when climate change swallows the livable part of the country.

It's such an incredibly sad thing to write, and I can't end on a sad note like that about such an interesting place.

So to bring the mood back from existential, I'm going to talk about the amazing traditional armor that cures Kirabat's warriors were it consisted mostly of heavy woven coconut sections which were like almost like plate mail made out of coconut.

Surprisingly durable stuff and effective against the spears and daggers that their enemies would have wielded.

The helmets though, were entirely for show, but they were also super effective because they were made from the skin of a type of blowfish called the porcupinefish.

Very last reference.

Very cool looking.

Check them out onto the credits.

The writing and recording and production for the show are done by me and I use the theme music I wrote with my permission.

Unless otherwise noted, the anthems I play are free to play, and this time I have spent an inordinate amount of time trying to find out what the group is called that sings this anthem, but I have failed in my discovery thus far.

If anything pans out, I will update my sources are in the show notes and they [email protected] I can be found on Facebook as the anthemspodcast and I post about the show.

Mostly though, I'm asking you to help me with the hashtag anthemspod Post with it.

Hopefully it will help Kira Bass continue to be kind of a chill place to live where your rights are generally respected by the government.

Although, as in my country, the independence of the judiciary is something that people are a bit worried about.

I don't think we get an independent human judiciary anywhere because humans are political animals.

Send me thoughts, please.

-: 8357

Apple this is canned credentialed content.

-: 9255

Maybe you're neck deep in a home remodeling project that you have been forced into doing and that you don't really want to do and it was caused by moisture and time and years of neglect that I was not present to be neglectful for and I'm entirely done with the reality of all of it.

Or maybe you're renting and happy that you're not dealing with any of it.

Regardless of how you live.

I am forever grateful that you're spending some of your time there hearing my show.

None of the writing for it is done with generative AI.

It's all my fault and it's also my copyright and it may not be used to train AI SA.

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