If the Dredge Finds the Electra, Kiribati Decides the Rest

When the expedition crew gathers at Tarawa on October 6, 3 of the 17 people on its team list are I-Kiribati. Meere Kenana, curator at the Kiribati Culture and Museum, sails with Agnes Naare and Heidi Boraia-Tangata of the Ministry of Line and Phoenix Islands Development. Their vessel, chartered from the Kiribati National Shipping Line, leaves the next day on a 6-day passage to Nikumaroro in the Phoenix group. With Purdue University and the Purdue Research Foundation as partners, the Archaeological Legacy Institute leads the voyage. Around October 22 the crew expects to dock in Tarawa again.

A year earlier the voyage was to leave the Marshall Islands on November 4, 2025, at the end of the safe weather window. Steve Schultz, general counsel of Purdue, told the Finding Amelia podcast the Kiribati research permit committee was still processing the Nikumaroro application at that point. The South Pacific cyclone season ruled out a later departure. Over the winter months the team concluded that a project of this weight in Kiribati needed approval from the cabinet itself. Schultz compared the system with British cabinet government. The president of Kiribati is a member of the cabinet.

In search of an audience with cabinet ministers, Purdue drew on help from the State Department and the US embassy in Fiji. The ministers invited Schultz, Rick Pettigrew of the institute and the Purdue alumnus Marc Hagle to Tarawa in April 2026. Once in Tarawa, the visitors outlined a written proposal over dinner, a science project aimed at the Taraia Object and set in a longer collaboration with Kiribati. The team received word of cabinet approval in the middle of July.

Purdue put a custody proposal to the cabinet. Schultz said the university would count it an honor to be the long-term custodian of an artifact found in Kiribati territorial waters. Under that proposal, Purdue would share the benefits with Kiribati as the country of the find. Pettigrew's institute plans a full-scale excavation within a year of a positive identification, again with Kiribati permission. The Purdue release adds that removing the wreckage to West Lafayette needs the consent of the government of Kiribati.

As a lawyer, Schultz calls the Purdue position an equitable claim, a claim grounded in intent. He bases it on contemporaneous records stating the wish of Earhart and her husband, George Putnam, to give the aircraft back to the university. The Purdue Research Foundation had given her the purchase money without conditions, in his account. For Mikarite Temari, head of the Ministry of Line and Phoenix Islands Development, Nikumaroro is part of Kiribati heritage. The minister said the government has a duty to protect the atoll and to study it.

Schultz describes Kiribati as about 33 islands in 3 main groups. By his account, the country ranks among the largest by territory and among the smallest by dry ground. The Phoenix group lies at the center of the 3. East of it lie the Line Islands. Together the 2 groups make up an economic development area, the remit of the Temari ministry. Temari named regenerative tourism and cultural preservation among the priorities for a lasting partnership with the institute and Purdue.

The British colonial file on the bones found on the atoll in 1940 bears the heading Bones discovered on Gardner Island, according to Schultz. In 1937 too, Gardner was the charted name. The Gilbertese name, Nikumaroro, dates from a British scheme of 1938 to colonize the Phoenix group with families from the Gilbert Islands. Kiribati itself began as a Gilbertese adaptation of the English Gilberts. Gilbertese, the outsider name for the language, is Taetae ni Kiribati to its speakers.

On files for a law firm acting for I-Kiribati families in Wellington, a Huri Translations reviewer checked the statutory references in the draft. The draft cited the Domestic Violence Act 1995, a repealed statute. The reviewer replaced the citation with the Family Violence Act 2018, the title in force for those filings. In a court filing, the uncorrected citation would have named a withdrawn law.

To explain the name of the peninsula beside the object, Schultz relayed a gloss from conversations with Kiribati officials. In Gilbertese, taraia (go look at it) can also mean go find it in some phrases. Printed Gilbertese texts open sentences with taraia as a call to look or to take note. The Taraia Object takes its name from that peninsula on the lagoon shore. An enthusiast of the castaway hypothesis first spotted the shape in satellite imagery in 2020. On aerial photos of the lagoon from 1938, the shape also appears.

For 5 days on site, the team enters through the Blasted Channel and crosses to the lagoon along the Gallagher Highway. British colonial officials dynamited the channel through the reef to stop waiting on the tide. The track bears the name of Gerald Gallagher, officer in charge of the 1938 scheme until his death on the atoll in 1941. By origin, Tarawa is an old Gilbertese form of te rawa (the passage), after the ship channel into its lagoon. On the Huri site, the post-edited reef-and-tide text in Taetae ni Kiribati uses te rawa for a deep-water channel.

The field plan for the Taraia site has 3 stages. First the team films and photographs the site undisturbed. The second stage uses magnetometers and sonar. For the third stage the team excavates underwater with a hydraulic dredge to expose the object for identification. Listing digging and the extraction of samples among its triggers, the University of the South Pacific guide to research in Kiribati puts culture-related and environment-related research under permit. Nikumaroro lies in the Phoenix Islands Protected Area, on the World Heritage List since 2010.

Purdue released the 4 episodes of Finding Amelia on September 28 and published English transcripts on its stories site alongside video on YouTube. In the fourth transcript, Schultz gives reasons to believe the object is the electorate, a mishearing of Electra. In the episode Schultz expects the last Kiribati representative to come from Linnix, his shorthand for the Line and Phoenix ministry. The September 28 release names 2 ministry staff, Naare and Boraia-Tangata.

If the dredge exposes the Electra, the Kiribati representatives aboard join the talks on the voyage back to Tarawa, in Schultz's account. He said lifting the aircraft out of the lagoon after a full excavation might need help from the US military. He called that a separate set of conversations.