From 1900 to 1980, the phosphate-rich island of Banaba (or Ocean Island) in the Pacific Ocean was stripped of 90 percent of its surface by mining,1 a process which included the desecration of burial sites.2 In 1945, British forces forcibly deported most of the island’s population to Rabi, Fiji.3 For an Indigenous people whose identity is so deeply bound to land,4 this loss and displacement have been especially devastating—to say nothing of the economic effects Banabans have faced, having seen so little of the proceeds of the mining activity that decimated their land.5
Katerina Teaiwa, an interdisciplinary artist and scholar, has transformed the last twenty or so years of her academic and archival research on Banaba into the multiform art exhibition Project Banaba (2017–2024), which has been presented in Australia, Aotearoa New Zealand, and Hawai‘i—three key sites of extractive empire enriched by the mining of phosphate on Banaba. In the following conversation, Teaiwa talks about how her research and art have brought international awareness to Banaba while also restoring Banaba’s stories to its diaspora—a reparative act through which Banabans can revitalize their culture and celebrate their resilience.
Tendai Mutambu: Kati, could you please introduce yourself?
Katerina Teaiwa: I am Katerina Teaiwa. I have ancestral links to Tabiteuea and Banaba Island in Kiribati, and I’m also connected to Rabi Island in Fiji, where I was born and raised. My mother is African American from Washington, DC. I’m a professor in Pacific studies in the Gender, Media, and Cultural Studies program at the Australian National University in Canberra. I am also a practicing visual artist.
Tendai: I’m curious what life has been like on Rabi Island for the Banaban diaspora. How was your experience growing up there, in terms of race and class? What is the status of Banabans in terms of citizenship and rights? And on a social and cultural level, what is their relationship like to the native Fijian population?
Katerina: I was born in Savusavu, not too far from Rabi, but then my family moved to other parts of Fiji before settling in Suva, where my father worked for the government. He would regularly take us to both Banaban and Kiribati cultural gatherings, and we would also occasionally make the long journey to Rabi to visit my grandfather and many aunties, uncles and cousins in the villages of Tabiang and Tabwewa. Everything was racialized in Fiji when we were growing up. The larger groups were indigenous Fijians (iTaukei), Indo-Fijians, Rotumans, and Europeans, or those of mixed European and Pacific heritage. There was no mention of Banabans on most identity forms, and we would have to choose the category “other,” even though we were classed as “Indigenous” in the 1970 Fiji constitution. This changed with the 1990 constitution: Banabans lost the status that had given them some of the rights afforded to Indigenous Fiijans and Rotumans. Banabans are also supposed to have citizenship rights, rights to their lands, and other opportunities in Kiribati, but things like education scholarships are difficult to obtain in either country, where Banabans face various forms of discrimination. Over the last few decades, there’s been much intermarriage between Banabans and other cultures in Fiji, but this hasn’t led to increased understanding of Banaban precarity in either Fiji or Kiribati. My family was unusual because both my parents had university degrees and good jobs, and both prioritized education—which was not something most Banabans could afford.
Tendai: Has your African American ancestry—or elements of how race is conceptualized in that context—informed your work on Banaba or your relationship to Banaban identity?
Katerina: Yes, my African American ancestry has definitely informed my approach to and understanding of Banaban colonial history. My grandfather was one of the few Black senior military officers in his time, and my grandmother was very progressive, always advocating for spaces and approaches that provided opportunities for Black communities, especially in the arts and education. She instilled in my mother a love for visual art, music, and dance, and she raised us on a whole range of American arts, from the Dance Theatre of Harlem to Broadway. That love of music and dance allowed us to appreciate the powerful music and dance expressed in our Banaban and Kiribati communities. Most of the women in my family on both sides are Catholic, and my mother was particularly devout—but in an unusual, critical, feminist, progressive way. My mother was one of many in the crowd at Martin Luther King’s famous 1963 speech. She had a very strong sense of justice, the problems of war, the legacies of slavery, and the racism and discrimination faced by both Black and Indigenous peoples. My sisters and I definitely got our progressive politics from her.
Tendai: When did you develop an interest in Banaban history, and when did you start studying it formally?
Katerina: In spite of much exposure to Banaban culture, I still grew up not knowing much about Banaba or the broader Pacific, so I decided to study Banaban history at the University of Hawai‘i. The study of colonialism was front and center in our program. Among Banabans, there’s a widespread conservative Christian deference for the British, Anglo-Australians, and Anglo–New Zealanders, so I hadn’t realized how much we—and our land—had been exploited.
Tendai: Can you elaborate a bit on this “conservative Christian deference” and how you’ve seen it manifest among Banabans? How does it shape the Banaban understanding of their colonial histories?
Katerina: The only kind of education provided to Banabans was a religious education.6 Banabans learned to frame their experiences in Christian terms, often likening their displacement from Banaba to those forced out of their homelands in biblical times. They would also associate the British monarch with God and put their faith in both kinds of authority, along with their hopes for justice, sovereignty, and self-determination. For example: the motto of the Rabi Council of Leaders is “Our God help us.” When Banabans were actively fighting for reparations, justice, and the rehabilitation of the island, they would describe themselves as a pitiful people and appeal to the morality and mercy of God, the monarch, and the judge presiding over their lawsuits. So by “conservative” I mean that those Banabans accepted dominant assumptions about race, class, and power that they learned from missionaries, colonial officials, and those running mines, plantations, and other businesses all across the Pacific.
Tendai: After completing your master’s degree in Hawai‘i, you pursued doctoral studies in anthropology in Australia—the heart of this extractive empire in the South Pacific—where a lot of the archives containing this history are located. How did you find the shift from such a critical, decolonial education at the master’s level into a discipline that has such colonial history?
Katerina: My master’s was quite Indigenous-led and critical of anthropology, so a PhD in anthropology wasn’t a great fit for me—the field of history probably would have been better. I ended up having a bit of a battle with senior anthropologists for three and a half years.
As a result of feeling uncomfortable in anthropology, I took a creative approach to studying Banaban history and culture, utilizing visual sources that I found in archives. I found textual knowledge like writing extremely colonizing, especially in English. The Pacific wasn’t a place where they had textual forms of knowledge production. It was all oral, embodied, carved, tattooed, woven—and it was performed and transmitted through objects. For my dissertation, I started recording all my research on miniDV tapes and a few notebooks. I amassed a large amount of visual content that documented eighty years of mining on Banaba. When I finished, they said, “You’ve got to write a book and journal articles now.” And so my visual, creative work, even though it was examined, sat on a shelf. I wrote Consuming Ocean Island (2014), and I remember that book was so damn hard. My body was just not made to sit at a desk for hours. I eventually came to transform all of it into the multimedia exhibition that is Project Banaba.
Tendai: Talk me through the idea for your exhibition, Project Banaba, and its genesis. How did the different collaborations come about?
Katerina: It came about through my friendship and dialogue with the interdisciplinary artist Yuki Kihara.7 She helped me see that I could make an exhibition because I was already an artist in so many other ways—just without that label. While I was known in academia, Yuki had networks and an incredible reputation within the arts that helped us secure gallery and museum support. We were also both angry about the injustice of the destruction of the island in order to feed parts of the British Empire. It may be a Banaban story, but it’s also a Pacific story about how globalization and industrial agriculture have contributed to decimating the region.
Tendai: You’ve been very deliberate in selecting where the exhibition tours and is staged. What is the significance of the venues that you’ve chosen for the exhibition so far?
Katerina: The exhibition venues are in cities where the phosphate mining industry kept major headquarters, processing plants, or distribution points for phosphate after it was chemically transformed into fertilizer. They are also places where Banaban people went after being displaced.
It may be a Banaban story, but it’s also a Pacific story about how globalization and industrial agriculture have contributed to decimating the region.
In pre-Christian Indigenous Banaban thinking, you belong to the land, and you’re born of the land—to be a Banaban is to be of the rock. So my following the land through the production of phosphate fertilizer is a way of keeping the land at the center of everything. For me to tell this Banaban story, there needs to be an ancestral logic that guides it all. It returns the story to the Banabans, and it signals to the ancestors that we in the present care where the land went and what happened to it.
Carriageworks is in Sydney, Australia, which is the city where a couple of men who worked for the Pacific Guano Company realized a rock doorstop in their office was almost pure phosphate from the Pacific. The next venue, MTG Hawke’s Bay Tai Ahuriri in Aotearoa New Zealand, is near the plant that processed phosphate from Banaba and Nauru (another small island nation in the Pacific) for decades. After that iteration, the exhibition went to Te Uru in Auckland, Aotearoa New Zealand, which is the city where the headquarters of the phosphate mining company and the British phosphate commissioner were located. The most recent venue, in Hawai‘i, opened up an area I hadn’t covered in my original research: the flow of phosphate to Hawai‘i for the plantations that were being developed there after the United States stole Kānaka Maoli land. There were also Banabans and Gilbertese from Banaba who were stranded in Hawai‘i after being picked up by blackbirding vessels and dropped off in Hawai‘i, Tahiti, and other places.8
In pre-Christian Indigenous Banaban thinking, you belong to the land, and you’re born of the land—to be a Banaban is to be of the rock.
We went into the archives at the Bishop Museum in Honolulu, where, with the help of Joy Enomoto—an incredible Hawaiian activist, artist, librarian, and archivist—we found records of phosphate shipments made directly from Banaba to Honolulu. It was an opportunity to deepen the story and extend our research.
Tendai: Project Banaba has been presented in contemporary galleries as well as in more conventional museum settings. How has your approach differed across these venues based on the limitations and possibilities they offer you as a researcher and as an artist? Have you found more freedom in more contemporary and less museum-based spaces? In what ways have you subverted some of the demands these spaces put on Indigenous artists and art forms?
Katerina: The museum spaces are quite different from the contemporary gallery spaces. In a museum, the exhibition becomes more dense and filled with labels and explainers, while people can approach it primarily as “art” in a contemporary gallery. Such approaches are often shaped by the curators—museum curators add things from their collections, or they get things on loan, and I end up with dozens of objects on display. The benefit of working with a museum is its connection to communities and prioritization of learning and educational outcomes. The contemporary gallery is more experiential and contemplative—people can fill in the gaps while meditating on what they’re seeing or experiencing. I think I subvert both kinds of spaces by ensuring that the way we present things is informed by ancestral values and thinking. We also make real connections to the actual sites of museums and galleries by finding and revealing points of kinship, travel, extraction, trade, and consumption that link those sites to Banaban peoples, lands, and phosphate.
Tendai: In Auckland you also staged Te Kaneati alongside Project Banaba. The former was an exhibition of loaned regalia, objects, and videos, as well as offsite workshops for the Banaban diaspora in Aotearoa New Zealand. It created connections between elements of traditional craft and performance and your own contemporary art practice. Can you describe Te Kaneati and the motivation for staging it?
Katerina: When we announced Project Banaba at MTG, different communities unexpectedly came out and said, “I have a connection to this island.” Once those stories started to come to us, we realized that Project Banaba could stimulate further cultural and intellectual exchange among various Pacific communities.
There are only about 6,000 Banabans in the world.9 We don’t have the same kinds of opportunities that a lot of other Pacific diasporas have, so I realized we would have to figure out ways in which Project Banaba could support cultural revitalization. Of course, the best place to do that would be in Fiji or Kiribati, but there aren’t the same well-resourced galleries or museums there. Having Project Banaba in Aotearoa New Zealand and Australia—the heart of the extractive empire—meant we could still connect to the Banaban, the Gilbertese, and even to Vanua [Fiji] and other diasporas living there who are relevant to the Banaban story.
Tendai: What kinds of art forms were being explored in the workshops? Who was involved, and how? I remember dance being a big part of them when I became involved as a supporting curator at Te Uru in Auckland.
Katerina: There was dance, music, and regalia-making, which all of us have practiced in our families for a long time. People have stopped passing on that knowledge to younger generations, or young people haven’t been so interested in learning. One of the things that was produced in those workshops that also then became part of Project Banaba in Honolulu were te kamari—beaded necklaces based on a form found in other parts of Micronesia. They would have been made out of other materials before the introduction of the plastic or glass used today. When I grew up in Fiji, we would have these treasures in our house—objects made by Banaban or Gilbertese women—which were gifted to us as Banaban girls and women.
I think it was the first time Banaban artists were able to display their work in a contemporary art gallery. Having their work in conversation with Project Banaba was really profound. It wasn’t just about the story I was trying to tell as a solo artist; it also opened Project Banaba up to be able to incorporate material and stories from these workshops.
Tendai: One of Project Banaba’s significant contributions to Pasifika arts, in my opinion, is how well it brought together archival research and artistic object- and image-making in a way that was familiar to a contemporary art audience, alongside traditional craft and performance through the accompanying exhibition and workshops, Te Kaneati. The programming was capacious enough to allow all these things to sit alongside each other. How did you navigate making these objects and stories legible and appealing to non-Banabans while still centering a Banaban audience?
Katerina: Rather than thinking about audiences, I start with thinking about the land or the island: how to reconstruct, heal and repair it. By my doing that, the exhibition ends up appealing to many people in different ways—hopefully, especially, Banabans. Everyone gets that our environments are in danger, and here is a landscape—in a beautiful part of the world filled with swaying palm trees, blue skies, and oceans—that has already been destroyed. Because I’ve been doing this research for so many years and have written so much and done so much interdisciplinary thinking and teaching about the Pacific, visualization comes very intuitively, especially when I activate my dance and arts background. There are enough heritage elements in Project Banaba that will always speak to heritage arts, and the textile, photographic, and audiovisual elements will always be legible to art audiences. For Te Kaneati, Yuki Kihara’s skills in working with communities was also critical to bringing everyday culture into dialogue with archivally and ancestrally inspired art.
Tendai: Can you describe the exhibition? What have you chosen to include (and to add in subsequent versions), and what kinds of stories do these elements tell?
Katerina: There are three parts. The first, “The Body of the Land / The Body of the People,” is archival and consists of textiles, which have grown in number over the course of the exhibition’s touring. One element is black-and-white images of the ancestors—the original Banabans who encountered the “explorers and discoverers” of phosphate from Great Britain, Australia, and Aotearoa New Zealand. These are actual images printed on see-through voile textiles that hang from the ceiling like guardians.
The other element of “The Body of the Land” is made up of several burlap sacks that represent the land. On one side, the sacks are printed with quotes from the archives and the logo of the company responsible for most of the phosphate processing in Australia. On the other side is appliquéd cotton and calico in the shape of the pinnacle structures from the island. So the fronts feature the agents of extraction, and the backs what’s left on the land after you’ve extracted all the phosphate.
“Mine Land: For Teresia,” the second part of the exhibition, is a three-screen projection based on a poem written by my sister Teresia Teaiwa called “Mine Lands,” based on the song “This Land Is Your Land.” The projection shows a hundred years in the life of Banaba, from 1900 to 2000. It’s a montage of the entire history of phosphate mining on Banaba: in it you can see visitors, miners, and a population of Chinese, Japanese, Tuvaluan, and Gilbertese workers.
The last part is called “Teaiwa’s Kainga,” and this is where I show Banabans getting on with life. They’re displaced, but they’re living, playing, and working. These are images of my family. I want to show how, even when people go through war and occupation—Banaba was occupied by the Japanese during World War II, and people were killed—there is still life, beauty, and joy. People are trying to piece things together and create a home, even though it’s not on their ancestral lands. In the exhibition, I bring all of them together to coexist in the same space as the land and the ancestors.
At MTG we incorporated a Cook Islands dancing skirt—familiar to other Pacific cultures‚ made of phosphate sacks from the processing plant. It expanded the story to include how Pacific labor has contributed to the building of settler colonies.
Rather than thinking about audiences, I start with thinking about the land or the island: how to reconstruct, heal and repair it.
Tendai: What is the present situation on Banaba in terms of governance and who decides on the future? I know there’s been talk of further mining, but there’s also been plenty of opposition.
Katerina: Banaba is under the jurisdiction of both the Kiribati government and the Rabi Council of Leaders. The council is currently run by an administrator appointed by the Fiji government but is supposed to be a body of elected representatives. There are two parliamentary seats reserved in the Kiribati government for one member from Banaba and another from the Rabi Council. The council has greater power of governance over Banaba, but Kiribati is supposed to supply basic services. If the Rabi Council has no funds and is not run effectively, then Banaba falls into disarray and isolation, with no power, fresh water, or food supply. The Kiribati government rarely steps in to address such issues unless an economic rationale or opportunity presents itself, led by the two Banaban members of Parliament. At the moment, Banabans are very divided on what should happen to the island, with the administrator and the current MP from Banaba on the side of commercial exploitation, and with younger people and a few elders on the other side lobbying to safeguard, protect, restore, and repair the island for future generations.
There’s desire for reparation, but the Banaban community—as small as we are—is extremely divided on how this will happen. When you tell people that their only avenue to success is selling and leasing off their land, you introduce something toxic and extremely divisive. We’ve wound up with Banabans who would very happily mine off the rest of their island or sell off the rest. Fortunately, there are a lot of people who want to heal the island, but many Banabans are struggling economically on Rabi and facing issues like citizenship rights in Fiji and Kiribati, lack of access to government scholarships—all of these sorts of things. Clearly, I’m on the side of repair and healing. But you’ve got to be in a privileged position, as well, to even consider that.
Tendai: What changes have you witnessed in the international reception of the Banaba story since the publication of your book in 2014?
Katerina: Between my book and Project Banaba, more people know about what happened to Banaba. The Guardian has published lots of my writing about this issue, and I’ve been interviewed by many people for radio, journals, and magazines. People who are working in the climate-action context have become quite interested.
There are also passionate Banaban activists and other folks, especially young people on the ground, really working on spreading the message. I know they are inspired by my research and the exhibition. Now I hear Banaban people using my words—sometimes without attribution, but that’s okay. That is awesome. Taking the risk of putting on exhibitions—even though, in academia, you don’t get a lot of research points for doing it—definitely paid off. The research had more of an impact than it would have if I’d only focused on producing things like journal articles. We’re also being challenged by various forces that are not happy with us, but it is what it is. I have to do this. This is my life’s work.
1. Joshua McDonald, “The Island with No Water: How Foreign Mining Destroyed Banaba,” Guardian, June 8, 2021, theguardian.com.
2. Katerina Teaiwa, Consuming Ocean Island: Stories of People and Phosphate from Banaba (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2014), 5.
3. Teaiwa, Consuming Ocean Island, xvi.
4. Teaiwa, Consuming Ocean Island, 7–8.
5. Gregory T. Cushman, Guano and the Opening of the Pacific World (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 127.
6. Wolfgang Kempf, “A Promised Land in the Diaspora: Christian Religion, Social Memory, and Identity among Banabans in Fiji,” Pacific Studies 35, nos. 1/2 (April–August 2012).
7. Yuki Kihara is an interdisciplinary artist of Japanese and Samoan descent working with photography, performance, video, and installation to explore identity, colonialism, and gender. In 2022 she represented Aotearoa New Zealand at the Venice Biennale with her exhibition Paradise Camp. See the exhibition website, paradisecamp.ws.
8. “Blackbirding” refers to the large-scale kidnapping or coercing of Indigenous people from the Pacific to work as laborers throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
9. McDonald, “Island with No Water.”