Nikunau is a low coral atoll in the Gilbert Islands that forms a council district of the Republic of Kiribati.

[1] The island's population includes 1,789 Kain Nikunau I-Kiribati people (at the most recent census).

Other residents over the years have included castaways and beachcombers in the days of whaling and itinerant trading, Protestant Samoan pastors, traders and agents running the island's trade stores and cooperatives (e.g. Andrew Turner, Tom Day, Frank Even, Kum Kee, Kwong), and Roman Catholic clergy.

[1] “as long as there is a sea and a navigator to listen to the talk of the sea, there are islands”Nikunau's history comprises oral accounts passed down through the generations, primarily from unimane to unimane (the elderly men of each family in each generation), and committed to writings by I-Matang (pale-skinned people of European descent) since the 19th century.

Maude, who were longtime officials of the British Colony of the Gilbert and Ellice Islands; Barrie MacDonald, a professor of history who has specialised in the history of that colony and the Republic of Kiribati that was created out of it; and Jean-Paul Latouche, who wrote down the stories of unimane of the 1960s in te taetae ni Kiribati (Gilbertese language) and translated them into French.

Another significant contributor is Anne Di Piazza, who carried out some archaeological digs near Rungata in the 1990s.

From these we know that the island has been inhabited since time immemorial (at least 2000 BP);[2] that it was significant in Gilbertese political and cultural history in the extension of the mwaneaba system in about the 16th century; that it received its first recorded British visitors on 2 July 1765, namely Commodore John Byron and the English ships and crew under his command HMS Dolphin on their circumnavigation of the world (the island was referred to on European maps for a while as Byron Island in his honour.

;[3] and that it was the centre of I-Matang whaling operations in the 1820s to 1840s at the On-the-Line grounds (the Line referring to the Equator).

Kain Nikunau resided in multi-dwelling dispersed settlements centred on probably six mwaneaba, which were the hub of social, political, religious, economic and cultural activities.

[4] They were organised along lines of blood, adoption and marriage into boti (tribal polity) and utu (extended family).

[5] Various laws, customs and beliefs applied political, economic and social roles and conduct, including birth, marriage, death and after-life/death, and regarding land, reef and ocean resources, and similar.

Subsistence living is still the norm but cash and trade goods can still be obtained by producing copra.

The other sources of cash on the island have been and still are spending by the Colony and Republic government and its officials and public employees stationed on the island, including at the "government station" or, as it is now, the Nikunau Island Council settlement (the Council receives a grant from the Government of Kiribati to cover 80+% of its recurrent spending); and remittances received by Kain Nikunau from utu working (and increasingly living permanently) overseas, elsewhere in the colony/republic and in Pacific Ocean and Rim countries and on foreign ships.

Kain Nikunau featured in the Pacific labour trade throughout the rest of the 19th century, going to Samoa, Fiji, New South Wales, Queensland, Central America and so on, but typically returning to their island.

Tarawa was also the main or only centre for secondary education and other highly centralised "social and economic development" and still is.

The history of this migration is associated with the aforesaid "social and economic development", notably in education, hospitals, amenities and cash employment, started by British officials such as Michael Bernacchi and V.J.

Andersen, with grants from London from the Colonial Development and Welfare Fund and carried on since Kiribati independence by the Asian Development Bank and the aid arms of various foreign governments, including Australia, Japan, Korea, New Zealand, Britain, the European Union, the UNDP, the People's Republic of China and Nationalist China.

Tungaru traditions: Writings on the atoll culture of the Gilberts, Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press.

Gilbert and Ellice Islands Colony: Instructions and Hints to District Officers, Deputy Commissioners and Sub-accountants, His Britannic Majesty's High Commission for the Western Pacific, Suva, Fiji.

The first twelve years, in: H. Van Trease, (Ed) Atoll Politics: The Republic of Kiribati, pp.

Reorganized meeting house system: The focus of social life in a contemporary village in Tabiteuea South, Kiribati.

), Social Change in the Pacific Islands, Kegan Paul International, London, pp. 264–99.

Cinderellas of the Empire: Towards a History of Kiribati and Tuvalu, Australian National University Press, Canberra.

The Evolution of the Gilbertese Boti: An Ethnohistorical Interpretation, Journal of the Polynesian Society, 72 (Supplement), pp. 1–68.

Foreword, in Sabatier, E. (translated by U. Nixon), Astride the Equator: An Account of the Gilbert Islands, Oxford University Press, Melbourne, pp.

Notes, in Sabatier, E. (translated by U. Nixon), Astride the Equator: An Account of the Gilbert Islands, Oxford University Press, Melbourne, pp. 353–373.

Munro, D, Firth, S. From company rule to consular control: Gilbert Island labourers on German plantations in Samoa.

A voyage round the world in His Majesty's Ship the ‘Dolphin’, commanded by the honourable commodore Byron.

Astride the Equator: An account of the Gilbert Islands, Oxford University Press, Melbourne.

The Chinese communities in the smaller countries of the South Pacific: Kiribati, Nauru Tonga and the Cook Islands (Macmillan Brown Working Paper Series) [Online].