Matauninga

Cassandra, Lucy and Marita describe I-Kiribati etiquette.

Lucy: What I know, what we’ve been taught by my mum, our grandmothers, grandparents ... to go in the maneaba, we call it ... very important for us, what do you call that, matauninga. You have to bend down to go inside. That’s number one in our Kiribati culture.

Cassandra: I think the maneaba etiquette starts to our everyday lives as I-kiribati people, I think how we bring that into our everyday lives is how we start to understand who we’re interacting with, the dynamics of the people around us, where conversations are happening across a table or across a room, we start to have that awareness of, even a whole building.

If people are speaking to each other or acknowledging each other, we look for a way to walk around that conversation and not interrupt. We start to understand who is the elder in the room and understand the dynamics of people around us. Even growing up and living in Australia, once that maneaba etiquette started to form a part of my identity and how I acted in the maneaba started to bleed into everywhere else in my life and it became into my body, how I started interacting with other people around me and that’s definitely derived from the way that you act in a maneaba and the people around you.

Lucy: Now you grow up in Australia, you’re born in Australia, but you still remember what your mum taught you, or you’ve been in Kiribati, you know what the word matauninga means. Not just in the maneaba but, like you said, walk around people, o rapproach people and things like that. No matter who we are, where we go, we always remember that word in us: matauninga.