The Gilbertese are a culture, language, and a set of islands in the Pacific Ocean. The Gilbertese are an isolated outpost some 2000 miles from their Micronesian homeland to the west. They take their name from a British sea captain, Thomas Gilbert, who explored the group in 1788. The Gilbert Islands, 16 tiny atolls and a raised phosphate island, straddle the Equator just west of the International Dateline. For most of the twentieth century they were politically linked with the Polynesian islands just south of them, as the British Gilbert and Ellice Island Colony. In 1979, the Gilberts became the oceanic Republic of Kiribati, and Christmas one of her 33 far-flung isles, scattered across a national territory comprising more than two million square miles of open sea. (http://www.trussel.com/kir/xmasi.htm).
Gilbertese culture and life have managed to survive colonial rule better than perhaps any other people. The Gilbertse go about their daily lives today, gracefully weaving the intrusions of the technological world into the atoll environment, successfully maintaining much of the traditional life they have evolved so elegantly over thousands of years.
Family complexes of the Gilbertese, often stretch from the ocean breakers to the lapping lagoon, strung out along the reef in necklace of small villages. The center of a village, the gathering place of community life, is the mwaneava. This is the focal point of traditional life, each post of the structure marks off the boundary of one clan and the other. It is the place for greeting visitors, for oratory, council, decisions. It's a place for relaxing, arguing, for celebration and dancing. As each structure is essentially a single room, homes are complexes of huts, for sleeping and socializing, cooking, and storage.
The Gilbertese society is based on respect for the ancestral and the old, who pass on their wisdom only to the deserving. They are masters of transition, blending youth and age, this world and the next, seemingly effortlessly. In their culture way, a man is a fisherman, but today he may get away for the weekend in a rented powerboat, the expense a shared gamble on a profitable catches.
The cornerstone of the Gilbertese diet is dependent on the coconut which may be rated, squeezed through the gauzy mesh which encircles the base of the tree, and transformed into coconut cream for the fish. (http://www.trussel.com/kir/xmasi.htm). A place for dancing. The Gilbertese national dance, the ruoia, is a unique and powerful spectacle. A row of young girls, decorated with sprigs of flowers, cowrie shells, grass skirts, arms outstretched only their fingertips seem to move as they cast darting fixed- glances over great distances. They are the frigate birds, gliding on currents of air, scanning far below. Behind them, chanting and clapping in ever-crescendoing volume and rhythm, rows of gleaming warrior work themselves into frenzy, encroaching slowly, forcing the birds ever forward in an invisible shuffle. (http://www.trussel.com/dir/xmas/htm).
The language of the Gilbertese is very complicated. From the English to Gilerbtese Dictionary there are 52,000 entries. The language is sometimes called "Kibati" or just "Kiribati". This is the same language. But most of the people recognize it by familiar "Gilbertese"; however the people of the Republic of Kiribati call their language "Kiribati".
http://www.trussel.com/kir/xmasi.htm
http://kiribati.freeyellow.com/index.html
Written by: Matt Paterson