I-Kiribati

The I-Kiribati are a Micronesian people inhabiting the coral atolls of the Gilbert Islands, known to them as Tungaru, and speak Gilbertese, an Oceanic language. Austronesian seafarers settled the chain over centuries; oral traditions recall earlier dark-skinned inhabitants and later western migrants, and around 1300 migrants from Samoa added Polynesian ancestry and new clans.

From the fifteenth century northern atolls had paramount chiefs while central and southern islands ruled through elder councils, Tabiteuea remaining egalitarian. Rival clans fought wars over land with shark-tooth blades and coconut-fibre armour.

John Byron chanced on Nikunau in 1765, and Thomas Gilbert and John Marshall sailed through in 1788; Adam von Krusenstern named the Gilbert Islands after Gilbert on his 1820 maps. Whalers and traders of the 1820s brought goods but no foreign rule, so in 1837 each atoll still ran its own affairs amid clan feuds.