Indigenous Caribbean History Is Present Tense

Speaker 0:00

Welcome to Strictly Facts, a Guide to Caribbean History and Culture, hosted by me, Dr. Alexandria Miller. Strictly Facts teaches the history, politics, and activism of the Caribbean and connects these themes to contemporary music and popular culture.

Speaker 1 0:17

Hello, hello everyone. Welcome back to another episode of Strictly Fox, a guide to Caribbean History and Culture. When we think about indigenous history in the Caribbean, far too often we think about it in past tense. For generations, popular histories of the region have told us that indigenous people disappeared following European colonization. But not only do Caribbean indigenous communities continue to exist today, these histories behind the people are far more complex than the colonial narratives we have inherited. Long before Europeans arrived to the region, the Caribbean was already a dynamic and interconnected space. Indigenous peoples moved between islands and the mainlands, traded, formed relationships and political alliances, and exchanged languages and cultural practices. Rather than barriers separating isolated societies, Caribbean waterways served as routes connecting communities across what we know as the Circum Caribbean. These connections became even more complex with European colonization and the transatlantic slave trade. In places like St. Vincent and the Grenadines, these encounters contributed to the development of Afro-Indigenous communities whose descendants would become known as the Garapuna. Their history would eventually stretch from St. Vincent to Central America, the United States, and beyond, carrying with it histories of resistance, forced exile, migration, cultural preservation, and continued reinvention. Their communities challenge us not only to reconsider what happened during colonization, but also to question what we mean by indigenous homeland and their survival in the Caribbean.

Meet Dr. Paula Prescod

Speaker 1 2:02

Joining me today to explore these histories is Dr. Paula Prescod, associate professor of linguistics and didactics at the Université du Hiner di Zouber, and the editor of the new book, The Carib, Kalinago, and Garafuna Peoples, Indigeneity, Hybridization, and Mobility in the Americas, bringing together, you know, scholars across several disciplines. The collection examines the interconnected histories of the Carib, Kalinago, and Garrafuna peoples from the colonial period through the present. And so, Dr. Prescod, it's so great to have you on Strictly Facts. Um, why don't you start with a brief introduction of yourself? Um, where, of course, you know, Caribbean is near to you, and what interested you in, you know, the history of St. Vincent, indigenous cultures and linguistics.

Speaker 2 2:54

Thanks a lot, Dr. Miller. It's nice to have the opportunity to talk about uh St. Vincent and the Grenadines and the indigenous people of the region. I myself am from St. Vincent and the Grenadines. I was born in St. Vincent uh in the 28th century. And my academic research on the linguistic repertoires and heritage of intentions led me to pay a lot more attention to the history of entanglements in St. Vincent and the Grenadines between the earliest recorded inhabitants, generally referred to as Carib and Island Carib in the literature and successive uh generations of newcomers. I identify myself as a linguist because my um doctoral dissertation uh dealt with the grammatical description of Incentian Creole that was in 2004. But much of my research in the past decade has led me to intersect disciplines in the social sciences, um, and uh this cross-disciplinary work has better enabled me to understand the dynamic forces and the social, historical, and cultural factors that influence populations and their current realities. And this brought me to the research on the Gary Funa and uh Kalinago. As a young adult, I listened regularly to uh morning program, radio program entitled From Whence We Came, which aired on the national radio between uh November 1987 and 1989, early 1989. The host, uh Dr. Adrian Fraser, who I've had the privilege of rerunning one of his articles in this book, one of his chapters, offered rich insights into local Vincentian history, history that was absent from school curricular at the time. And in my collection, recollection, Dr. Fraser's work raised public awareness uh regarding the history and lived experiences of the Vincentian. At the time, we call them Carib, uh Garifuna. So this is basically what has brought me to edit this book on the Carib, Caligant Nago, and the Garifuna peoples.

Speaker 1 5:03

Wonderful. Thank you so much for having us. I think, you know, for our listeners who might be tuning in, um, if you've heard our previous episodes, we've, you know, talked with a few other scholars, Dr. Danny, um, Dr. Paulo Lopez Oro on, you know, St. Vincent and the history of the Garrafuna people. But I think, you know, for this episode, we're really approaching this understanding of indigeneity in a particular way. Um, one that of course was encapsulated in those earlier discussions. But I think, you know, based off your collection, Dr. Prescod, it's really forcing us to reconsider any sort of myths and understandings of um indigeneity in the Caribbean. And so for those who may have not tuned into those early episodes, I definitely recommend them and I'll link them in our show notes.

St. Vincent To Central America

Speaker 1 5:50

But just to give a brief sort of, you know, recap, um, St. Vincent was also known as Yoramain, was in Garafuna traditions, became home to indigenous populations as well as Africans who survived on the island. Over time, um, you know, processes of intermarriage and cultural and linguistic exchange contributed to an Afro-indigenous population whom European sources would come to distinguish as the quote black Caribs, and whose descendants today are known as the Garafuna or Garinagu. Um, importantly, as Dr. Prescod's book emphasizes, those identities emerged within a Caribbean that was already characterized by considerable cultural and linguistic exchange, as I mentioned. And so St. Vincent remained one of the strongest centers of indigenous resistance to European colonization in the Lesser Antilles. As Britain attempted to expand its control in the island and its plantation economy over land and sovereignty, cultivated in what became known as the First and Second Carib Wars throughout the late 1700s. During the latter conflict, um, the Second Carib War, Joseph Chateauer, one of the most prominent leaders of the resistance, and now Saint Vincent and the Grand Aids' first national hero, was killed. And so following British victory, thousands of indigenous and Afro-Indigenous were imprisoned in Ballasot, a small island off St. Vincent, where, of course, as you know, we come to know this story of disease and starvation and things like that as they impacted, you know, indigenous communities. But so much more than that, you know, for the what would then become the Garrafuna population, um, the British deported over 2,000 of their survivors to Roatan off the coast of what is present-day Honduras. And from there, Garafuna communities eventually became established along the Caribbean coast between Honduras, Belize, Guatemala, Nicaragua, and then, you know, as we know of as Caribbean people, we continue to move. And so I wanted to highlight that for our listeners, just to, you know, establish that little historical background and also to sort of erase that that misconception that exile didn't mean the end of Garrafuna identity. Rather, it was definitely, you know, their relationship with St. Vincent has continued um throughout their movement to Central America and been preserved and adapted, as we will continue to talk about today.

Debunking The Arawak Carib Divide

Speaker 1 8:29

And so, in establishing that a little bit, Dr. Prescod, you know, many of us were taught this sort of simplified history of indigenous peoples, and you know, they largely disappeared due to Columbus and all of these, these sort of um erasures in our history. And something you also bring up in your book is the sort of divide between the Arawaks and the Caribs, one, the former being sort of seen as quote calm and quote peaceful, but the other Caribs being seen as cannibalistic. Um, and so your book challenges us to rethink these binaries in many ways and presents a much more complex picture. And so, where do you think this history of, you know, the Black uh Carib or the Carib and Arawak narratives came from? Why is it misleading? And what should we understand instead about these indigenous peoples who inhabited places like St. Vincent and the wider Caribbean?

Speaker 2 9:27

Thanks a lot, Dr. Miller. You said it, I mean, in a mouthful because uh many of the tropes we have always been exposed to have been exposed in your uh introduction. And so thanks a lot for that. And uh you rightly said uh some of the uh programs, episodes you've hosted previously would give us a very good background as to the the realities of the Garifona experiences in the Circum Caribbean region. Well, I would spend much more time talking about my authors than you know the general Caribbean history. Uh the first one I'd like to talk about and the way he deals with this misrepresentation and the deceitful um name-calling is uh written by Nicholas Farklus and four co-authors. They have shown that the indigenous peoples of the Caribbean shared many core beliefs and customary practices, yet European colonial narratives enforced a stark divide between the good peaceful Arawaks and Tainos and the evil savage Carib and island Carib at the time too. There was also the word Gallibi that circulated. The authors in this particular chapter that I'll come back to uh eventually, um they remind us that other anthropologists and historians, and I mentioned Whitehead and Hume, for instance, have shown that under the European colonial gaze, some of these practices were mischaracterized as raiding women and eating human flesh at the time. So therefore basically misrepresented and misunderstood. The use of Carib at this moment, because we'll get into why we will take a sort of a distance from the term later on. So to discredit the Carib claim to the territories they lived on and to orchestrate their expulsion from these territories, the Europeans, particularly the English, described them as a group of uh cannibalistic uh savages, as you rightly said, distinct from these peaceful Arawak who had suffered at the hands of the Carib men. The storyline, beginning with Christopher Columbus, um and repeated by succeeding explorers and missionaries alike, constructed this kind of dichotomy to justify conquest and intentionally mislead um their readers at the time to portray the Carib men as women raiding, aggressors, enemies of the of the Arawak. If nothing else, this divide served um a double purpose, a twofold aim. It fostered colonial expansion and erased the cultural entanglement that actually existed between all of the Caribbean indigenous peoples. So I think one of the things I'd like to focus on here is that there is nothing that is archaeologically helpful to show us that there was actually this uh enmity between the Carib and Arawak, if we keep those names uh in the in the 16th, 17th centuries, that we have lots of um writings about, but that there was much more um interdependence, interconnection, uh readjustment, syncretism as well, that allowed these uh groups of indigenous peoples to um cohabit and strengthen sometimes each other.

Speaker 1 13:01

Thank you for

Naming Politics And Cannibal Myths

Speaker 1 13:02

establishing that. I I want to um you know take us on a another point that she sort of alluded to, and that's the fact of you know, these various names that we encounter or that are referred to in sort of these populations, right? And in your book, it's teased out significantly, right? And so some people I think will for the most part be familiar with Carib, Kalinago, hopefully as well, Garafuna, but also um Garinagu is one that's also um presented in your book. And so I think you're very intentional about not treating them as sort of interchangeable and you know, simply declaring that, you know, one term is quote unquote correct. And so how do these names change over time? Um, what are sort of the politics between or the differences between um the self-identification and what do they teach us about indigenous identity in the Caribbean today?

Speaker 2 13:59

Absolutely. So the people of the Lestantles, whom we call the Carib or Island Carib, are more accurately called Kalina, also referred to in in some um European historical documents as Carina with an R, so L on R. Kalina and Karina cognates, which could be explained by the covariant status of the songs le and r in the original Caribbean, um these um linguistically and culturally diverse groups of peoples that came from South America across the archipelago. Kalinago and Garinago are also cognates. Uh, I use that pronunciation uh instead of Kalinago and Garinago because the Central Americans actually put the stress on the second syllable Kalinago and Garinago. Um, but whereas in sentencing we use the the stress on the third syllable kalinago. But let me call focus on kalinago and garinago, which are also cognates, because in these two ascriptions we find an L and R alternation, Kali and Gari. Even in the sound of karu, ka uhinago and garinago, there is another alternation with the q and the g. In lots of languages in the world, these two sounds are um are not distinguished. So some people, when they hear English game, they will think they heard came and vice versa. So we have already confusion coming from perception of the Europeans at the time. They were convinced that what they heard was canni, uh caliba, and which allowed uh Christopher Columbus to make their um the confusion between Cali and Cannibal. So we know the cannibal was brought into focus because of the name that he thought he perceived. Now, had the indigenous Caribbean groups been the first to tell their story, we would would have been spared uh the whole plethora of distinctions and designations we used to name them. Pelprat, uh a French uh Jesuit priest in 1655, I think, was his first publication, was one of the first to associate Carib in the Antilles with Galibi from South America. He contended that the island carib were descended from the mainland group in South America, and a decade later there was another um missionary, Raymond Breton, who refuted the idea that the Island Carib he sought to evangelize in Dominica used the term Galibi as a term of self- uh abscription. According to Breton, the Carib reported that Galibi, in fact, was the name given to them by the Europeans, but that it was more appropriate to call them Calinago in the woman's language and Calipone in the men's language. So we've got the cognate's hand, we ask ourselves who holds the authority to name whom? The question of naming is complex, and among Vincentians, identity varies widely. Some accept the label caril, others tolerate it or accept it when used by outsiders, while others firmly claim Kari Nago and Kari Gari Funa. I show this in one of my chapters, uh, one that I wrote myself here as a signifier of indigenity in cinemas and Grenadines, and um where some of the uh descendants of the Vincentian indigenous actually use the word Carib to name themselves. And in the volume, the authors who use the name Carib do so with deliberate distance, motivated by their respect for the indigenous peoples who still identify as Carib or who claim the Carib heritage. And so I thought that omitting the name Carib from the title of the collection would erase their voice and render them completely invisible. As that chapter shows, the term still holds some personal resonance for certain intentions, uh and which is paradoxical, in fact, because um uh the word itself is associated with cannibals, as I've shown. Um, and throughout European invasion and presence in the islands, it caused significant harm, self-depreciation. Uh so what we would want to say is that self-identity is what is important as Vincentians continue now to call themselves Cari. There are fewer of them who do so. More of them are getting into the habit of recognizing the Kalinago history and the Garinagu, Garinagu being said the term the plural of Kari, uh Garifuna. Uh but in any case, uh I wanted to insist on the fact that um there is no consensus about the name. And then to be fair to history, we would want to put all of these names back into the title of a book that is supposed to be uh sort of a heritage of intention history.

Speaker 1 19:06

It's always great having linguistics or you know, people with linguistics specialties on the podcast because I think it allows us to really break down and understand the etymologies of certain words. So thank you so much for presenting that. I think you know, something that far few of us know completely in terms of just the breakdown of these words and how they came to be.

Waterways As Indigenous Thoroughfares

Speaker 1 19:28

I want to sort of shift gears a little bit because there is a point in the book about uh thoroughfares, right? And I've said this a million times on the podcast, it's almost probably like a broken record at this point. Caribbean people are always moving, right? Um, it's how my family got to the United States, you know, but also I have family in England and Canada and, you know, on so forth and so forth, right? But I think far too often we think about it in the time period of this book, right? That the book is focusing on. And so I um presented it in the introduction as sort of the circumcaribbean and the ways that, you know, people and scholars talk about movement oftentimes, but presenting it as sort of this interconnected space through waterways is one that I think gets presented in the book as what you call thoroughfares. And so, how might Caribbean history look different if we take this approach rather than looking at water as barriers, right? And seeing the sea as primarily something that connected indigenous communities rather than separated them based off, you know, distinct islands.

Speaker 2 20:41

Yeah, it's interesting because I grew up in a the decade where um parents very often thought it was best that children stayed away from the water because the water could be so dangerous, right? And so many um Vincentians didn't learn to swim on their own. Uh they just learned to swim just by chance, sometimes just to save their lives. But then that that's a question about water, and when you ask about uh the history of a Caribbean person, uh I can say with breath with um, ask the sea. If you want to know my story, ask the sea. And so, yeah, the idea of waterways functioning as thoroughfares, the the concept of Circum Caribbean as um interconnected space. This was developed by uh Tessa Murphy in a book uh she uh wrote, published in 2021, uh the Creole Archipelago, uh Race and Borders in the Colonial Caribbean. Uh and in this text, she said that Kalinagos treated waterways not as barriers but as thoroughfares. Uh so I we really took that from uh Murphy. But we built upon this idea in this book by highlighting how the sea mirrors the fluidity of indigenous cultures, the fluidity of borders physical. And imagined, but also tangible and symbolic, the fluidity of indigenous histories, fluidity of the spaces indigenous peoples navigated through choice, chance, and coercion forced submission. There are three contributions in the book that allow us to really understand this idea of how these superhighways, the seas, water, did not prevent the Kalinago from navigating and forming alliances. In fact, Zilke Jansen's chapter entitled The Kalinago Linguistic Mediators in the Colonial Caribbean describes how interethnic contact gave the Kalinago complex overlapping linguistic repertoires that incorporated elements from Spanish and French, particularly Gallicisms and Hispanisms, as she called them. One Hispanism she made mention of was Mushi, derived from Spanish Mucho, meaning very. Contact between indigenous peoples and Europeans also left traces in the linguistic landscape of present-day St. Vincent and the Grenadines. Another example is the fruit that we called Mammy Coti, Mammy Apple, which was recorded in the Kalinago repertoire as early as 1607, according to this article, this chapter by Silke Jansen. Already in a dictionary published by Richard Alsop 1996 entitled Dictionary of Caribbean English Usage, there is a list of entries, separate entries for Mamsipote, that we call the Mammy Apple, and Mammy Sipotti that is also known as the Sapodilla, just going back to the example uh brought by Yesilga Jansen, and also shows that the the similar skins of these two fruits sometimes cause people to confuse them. Terms related to food, trade goods, dangers of the Antillan environment reflect the nature of their cross-cultural encounters across the seas. And so Jansen shows that this shared vocabulary underscores Kalinago's crucial yet often ignored role as linguistic mediators, cultural mediators in the Caribbean Sea across the islands. A second article, a second contribution with Nicholas Raphaelus that I've mentioned previously, and his four co-authors. And they've shown in this chapter they call Contact Exchange Hybridity, the decolonial rereadings of Garrifuna history and the prehistory of Indigenous Americas. They underscore the need for radical rereadings of the Indigenous Caribbean, the Indigenous Americas, and they show that there's nothing abnormal or exceptional about this contact exchange and interconnectedness that operated on the oceans. This characterizes the Gariguna in general and indigenous peoples more globally. Rivers, seas, oceans, other aquatic highways have connected the distant peoples over centuries rather than separating and dividing them. The authors reconceptualized the lower Mississippi River basin, the northern Gulf Coast, the Caribbean Sea, and the Orinoco and Amazon basins as a mega corridor. I think the term mega corridor is very interesting here, that fostered cohabitation, cultural innovation, and collective resistance to domination. And then there is another article, Ernesto Mercado Montero, which is more of a historical contribution. Ernesto Mercado Montero shows how the Warner Experiment, he calls this the Warner Experiment, a hybrid commonwealth in the Lesser Antillian sugar frontier. That this is another example of cross-ethnic contact and cultural entanglement that happens across the waters of the Caribbean and the Second Caribbean generally. Thomas Warner was known as Indian Warner, Caribbean, because of his indigenous heritage, born to an Englishman and Kalinago, a woman from Dominica. He had adopted Kalinago traditions of let's say raiding, because that's what it was called then and captive taken, to gain control over the Wenwood Islands by skillfully navigating alliances both with and against the English. The networks built by Indian Warner, Carrie Warner, Thomas Warner himself, ultimately entangled the lives of natives and Europeans in the Lesser Antilles. So we're not only talking about an entanglement of lives of the different groups of indigenous peoples, we're also talking about an interdependency with the Europeans. It went in both directions. The author, Ernesto Mercado Monteiro, portrays Indian Warner as a culturally fluid strategist, again talking about the water, a fluid strategist who operated seamlessly between the indigenous and uh English politics and cultures to achieve power in a climate of conflict and violence. So we see the the stretch of water which um seems to separate islands, in fact, just allowed uh indigenous peoples and the Europeans with whom they were forced to cohabit and live uh live alongside to actually build um build resources together.

Mobility Through Violence And Agency

Speaker 1 27:54

That I think to me brings up the other perspective of you know movement and mobility in a sense that also shows up in this text, right? And so from of course what we know of Garahuna history, it contains trade, um voluntary migration as you've outlined for us, but also um enslavement, exile, displacement. And then when we look, you know, the more recent histories, um, there is the history of mobility, you know, for instance, with populations moving from Central America to New York to California. Um and so how do you we sort of distinguish between mobility as um you know as produced by violence or through violence, um, and mobility as an expression of sort of agency in a sense and this whole overall history of the Yarofuni people?

Speaker 2 28:48

And so there there's actually a that that link, you're quite right, uh the the history of the Garinagu uh is often uh defined as one of uprooting and rooting. I'll I'll pronounce them differently than than you do in the Americas and in North America, root as R-W-T and root R-O-U-T-E. So it's one of uprooting and rooting to new territories, a story that compels us to rethink the relationship between roots, roots, and identity. Uh so I'll come back to some of the uh aspects of uh mobility just now and how I mean uh uh in in relation to violence. But the legacy of displacement and mobility challenges conventional paradigms that prioritize attachment to territory and dwelling in in fixed spaces over transformative journey. The indigenous population of St. Benson and Grenadines actively resisted uh European enslavement and uh displacement. Well, there was a lot of violence. Um this was targeted particularly by the English. Colonial authorities accused them of allowing their customs and language to be usurped by ship-wrecked uh Africans and Maroons who had fleeed uh plantations. However, the resulting interactions and syncretism between the Africans and the indigenous populations, even if they were shown to be violent towards uh uh each other, in San Vincennes and the Grenadines forged an identity that maintained the core indigenous practices of the 17th century, even as they became increasingly indistinguishable from uh Vincentian Creoles. And by the late 18th century, it became urgent uh for the English to erase these groups that had actively resisted their forces in the conflicts of 1772. You refer to them as the First Carib War, 1779, and the second in 1795. So despite courageous resistance, uh Gary Funu Walt routed. So we've got that first mobility, second mobility if you would like, from St. Vincent, routed to Baliso, a barren island uh in the Grenadines, rooted to Rotan. You talked about that uh also in March of 1797. From Rotan, they eventually established communities across the whole of Central America, particularly Belize, Honduras, Guatemala, and Nicaragua. I'm just repeating it so that our reader, our listeners would know. Well, it's so important that we we both have um um have have decided to stress that aspect. The fact that the Garifuna, their lives uh did not end with the violence meted out to them in the in the 17th and 18th century. They all was carried out on racial motives. It had to be a question of race at the time. According to Nancy Gonzalez, uh an anthropologist uh who wrote a lot in the 1970s, 80s of the Gary Foonaplight, um, according to her, this the English segregated individuals based on skin tone, rooting captives of darker skin tone to Ruatan and reruting lighter skinned captives back to mainland St. Vincent. So these are examples of forced territorial displacement, which have always been a feature of the Garifuna experience. But ironically, while the idea of attachment to you Romaine, St. Vincent, the original name of St. Vincent Bayerg, Indigenous, is a strong element of the Garifuna culture. The word culture itself being uh a word that is territorially um grounded, botanically grounded, um the physical land is not the sole anchor of the Garifuna culture. One of the films that we've analyzed in this book by Andrea E. Leland, uh co-produced with uh Kathy Berger, The Garifuna Journey, demonstrates that what really authenticates uh the Garifuna experience of Central America is their spiritual vitality, their ancestral rights, notably the Dugu. There's a lot of mobility in this as well because an entire community comes back home to participate in the traditional wakes, and they also uh have uh an authentication of the language. So along with their heritage language, uh vibrant traditional forms of music, song, dance have on withstood pressures uh throughout the centuries with a certain amount of agency, and we can talk about agency later on, to assimilate. Um so there's pressures to assimilate, but this was prior to their exile from St. Vincent and also throughout their existence in Central America. We have demonstrated in the book that this is not necessarily uh mobility that has caused a detriment to their expressions of culture and heritage language. And we'll come back to that as as I'm sure you'll ask questions about those um particular concepts later on.

The Third Exile Framework

Speaker 1 33:53

Definitely, because I think there are several interesting points in the book, but um one of them to me was this presentation of the third exile, right? And so, you know, in your answer to that question, you sort of bring us to the first two in a sense. Um but the third exile bridging contemporary communities um with this past history. And so, what for you does the third exile refer to? And um, what does placing contemporary migration alongside these earlier histories of displacement help us to understand about the Garrifouna experience?

Speaker 2 34:28

Yeah, I really thank uh Sarah England who made that contribution to the book. The concept of the third exile is an analytical framework developed by her, uh, Sarah England. She expands upon a term that was originally coined by Ofrene, uh the Organización Fraternal Negra de Honduras, which describes the widespread migration of Hondurans making the dangerous journey through Mexico to seek asylum in the United States of America, often with very, very little hope of returning to their villages in Honduras, except as deportees, uh as deportees, and I make the difference now as uh between uh deportation and uh and uh and exile. The reality is particularly worrying given that uh the Garinagu have historically maintained the transnational identity, a theme explored already uh in the beginning of the uh the year 2005 by um Joseph Palacio in in an anthology he entitled The Garifuna, a nation across borders essays in social anthropology. The problem with this wave of displacement, which is lived as a third expulsion, continues to create social problems, including poverty and unemployment, cultural readjustments and cultural erosion because there are there's outside influence that disrupts uh uh traditional practices, and added to that mental health issues related to the trauma of displacement. So let's understand the third exile as the third part of a triple exile in the Garifuna experience, first from Africa during the slave trade, then from uh we're looking at the uh 16th, 17th, 18th century, uh, from St. Vincent at the end of the 18th century, and now this movement to uh the United States as uh as refugees, and uh in that chapter, uh Sarah England traces how the Honduran Garifuna migration uh has transformed over the last 30 years. They've always moved, they've always been mobile, but there's a shifting, uh sort of a shift from a relatively flexible travel between both countries, the United States and the Honduras, uh, to a high risk irregular transit through Mexico, asylum claims at the US-Mexico border. And as I've stated before, it's not new, but historically the connection to the land was never really seen as something that jeopardized their um their existence and their and their resilience. Instead, it has actually served to strengthen and reroute Garifuna culture in new locations, as we've seen from the exile from St. Vincent. Today, however, intensifying hardship in Honduras and harsh US border policy have turned uh migration into a path of exile, dispossession, and the Sarah England uses the term of racialized rightslessness. And even against these conditions, uh the term resilience has all often been associated with the Garrifuna experience. Their unity as a people and identification with uh Garrifuna culture still remain strong. So there we have it.

Reclaiming Language Through Education Policy

Speaker 1 37:58

We've talked, you know, both in that answer and then overall in the our conversation about the sort of um continuities of language, you know, of the uh ways that culture, maybe that you know, music, dance, rituals have maintained. And so could you sort of point us to, and you you did this a little bit in terms of the identification of you know concessions as you know, holding on to the idea of their identity as Carib. Um, but could you sort of present other ways that help us to signify the cultural and linguistic loss of this carapoon identity with the ways that you know the identity still is maintained can seem paradoxical, um, as you sort of outlined to us in the understanding of Carib and where the word comes from. But what efforts have really been made to reclaim this heritage, whether that be in St. Vincent, in the diaspora, and you know, even other parts of the indigenous Caribbean?

Speaker 39:02

Mm-hmm.

Speaker 2 39:03

Well, let's think about the the case of St. Vincent and the Grenadines, where uh Garifuna culture has been seen as lost through exile. Um so while they have come to terms with their roots, our O U-T-E, as the fact that they they've been forced to leave St. Vincent have and have kept the heritage alive, modern day St. Vincent and the Grenadines shows very little remaining evidence of their uh the identity. The language isn't spoken, and the cultural practices of Vincentian indigenous groups uh are virtually indistinguishable from the rest of Vincentian um Creoles, let's say Creoles or people of African descent, or in any case, people who do not identify themselves as Carib, uh Garifuna or Kalinago. And another this time, Sarah Lee Gonzalves, uh, wrote a chapter here uh entitled Becoming Garinago: The Prospects of Intercultural Bilingual Education for the Reclamation of Garifuna Heritage in St. Vincent and the Grenadines. And she advocates for including indigenous culture and language in the Education Act in St. Vincent and the Grenadines. So this is a uh a call for a rights-based education model to reclaim Garifuna language. Um, of course, uh, she criticizes the monolingual approach to language that we've had, language and education we've had in the territory in the territory where Gary Funa language originated. So there's a sort of paradox here. It happened here, uh, but we have lost all of it. And there are elements of um of a return to this heritage language, but it's really just on and off. Sometimes uh you would have somebody take an initiative of organizing language courses. But Sara Lee is calling here for uh a model that should be taken up by the Ministry of Education, Simmons and the Grenadines, um, so that the authorities can actually uh move away from referring characterizing St. Vincent and the Grenadines as an Anglophone state, um, because this state this status is actually challenged. Because if steps were taken to recognize Siners and the Grenadines as the homeland, Uromaine of the Garinago, uh, for indeed the Garinago themselves still continue to refer to St. Vincent and the Grenadines as homeland, a name which stood since the 17th century already, then it would be logical, won't it, uh to establish policies uh for intention students to learn the rudiments of Garifuna as a start and then develop communicative competence towards fluency. Uh Sarali Gonzal states that through the IBE, a model uh for the intercultural bilingual education, which is similar to programs already um set up in some parts of South and Central America, a permanent and equal exchange of cultures and language can be fostered. And this would of course reduce, uh, in the eyes of the author, reduce the social exclusion and discrimination faced by many Vincentians who identify as Gary Funa and Kalinago and also strengthen national identity grounded in the nation's history. So um with respect to education, I think there's there's a uh desire uh to have something done. Um the language can also be incorporated in expressions of dance and uh and music, but we are making very, very small steps in that direction.

Speaker 1 42:48

The question of language is one that I think is always so it's very pervasive across the region, you know, whichever way we want to take it, but one that I think definitely um is evident in the case of St. Vincent and the Grandians, as you said, right? The language gets its home on on these lands, and it's not something that you know is maintained and being taught within you know schools today. So I look forward to reading that chapter, and I think you know a lot of our listeners will definitely find interest in it as well.

Cassava Bread Memory And Meaning

Speaker 1 43:20

I have been taking feverish notes uh as we've been talking because you've shared so many various resources with us from films to you know other works that are um you know part of this longer history. Um but I'd love to know what maybe are some of your favorite examples of how the history of you know the Garifuna um show up in popular culture today.

Speaker 2 43:44

Yeah, that's a good one. Um I I think I'll be um I'll I'll I'll I'll I'll I'll sort of be um influenced by my own experience as somebody who grew up uh with uh uh the the food of the Garifuna without knowing That it is the food of the garifuna. And one of the symbols of the Garinago today is the Areba, it's a heritage word for cassava and uh the arrow root plant, which is used in the preparation of the cassava bread. Still continues to be a uh a staple of the Garifuna culture. The story says that the arrow root rhizome is said to have been concealed by the Garinagu uh during their displacement to Roatan. And we see this in the film that I spoke about the Garifuna journey as well as the Romaine homeland from uh uh Andrea Leland. That they later plant transplanted, replanted them in their new settlements in Central America to serve to secure survival beyond its primary agricultural utility, the persistent um cultivation of the rhizome, I think it symbolizes the successful transplantation of Garifuna culture, uh serving both as a literal agricultural foundation and a metaphor for collective customs and growth. However, in Syn Vestern Grenadines, we uh just think about the cassava bread, it's in fact, as it's recognized as a vital part of our own subsistence. Uh we call it the bam bam. So whereas there that we talk about language again, what we have lost, they call it the Arabah, and we uh we simply use uh um a syllable that's repeated, bam bam, that stands out in my uh in my mind as a favorite of of the Garyfuna popular culture.

Speaker 1 45:42

That's a very interesting point that you know for Jamaicans we call we have Bami, which I think is a little bit similar. It's you know, fried cassava um in a sense. So, you know, ways that again our indigenous communities are connected and you know, these histories have maintained in ways that we virtually have not necessarily connected. So wonderful,

Music Tourism And Hybrid Futures

Speaker 1 46:07

wonderful. Um I want to close us out on sort of a final question, and that's you know, in thinking of these communities and their responses to um migration, tourism, generations of change and so forth, how can you know we continue to see these traditions like Bam Bam, for instance, right? Um, continue to evolve while maintaining a meaningful sense of you know who we are in terms of especially you know thinking of Garfuna and Kalanago identity.

Speaker 2 46:40

Yeah. And uh particularly with reference to um migration too and uh and uh globalization, um I think um, and this gives me the opportunity to speak about uh another um contribution, it's uh one by uh Lauren Madrid uh Pulura. Um she entitles chapter Keeping the Culture Alive: Hybrid Identities and Music Making in a Globalizing Um Gary Funa Village. She doesn't talk much about food, but um more about music. She's an ethnomusicologist, and she shows how um Garyfuna culture is affected by globalization. Um in fact, cultural exchange and impressing the outsider, whether it's with respect to food and other cultural expressions, here it's music, within their own cultural performances, is one way in which they respond to globalization and and tourism, as we see in the experience of the drummers that she um she features, the Le Beha drummers of Hopkins uh Belize. The drummers, um uh Lauren Paluha describes them as um participating in a vibrant touristic border zone. Uh these musicians uh play garapunal rhythms using traditional um instruments, the guar won, cisera and their and the turf shells at their center in in Hopkins, but also in local resorts, in uh restaurants. And um in this chapter um uh Lauren Madred Poluja uh illustrates how Garifuna culture is kept alive within a growing industrial tourism industry through the community's openness to adaptation. And this would be also with respect to food, but also hybridization and change. We haven't talked much about hybridization. I'll come back to that if you would so allow me. In hybridized um globalized settings, such as uh the one we've seen in Carib in Garifuna Belize, rigid binaries such as authentic versus inauthentic, whether it's food music, native versus foreigner become blurred. Uh we spoke about agency earlier on, and I think this is one of the areas where we see um that the dynamics of the Garifuna in Belize uh highlights their their agency. Um the author shows uh that the drummers have had to face criticism for com commodifying their culture for tourists, but she also demonstrates how, as custodians of of their identity, that they take that responsibility, the responsibility, and exercise agency as they make music, as they take decisions about how to balance tradition with evolution in the music, ensuring that their performances remain grounded rather than confirming passively to um tourist uh expectations. But let me come back to this question of hybridization because it also helps us to understand how um questions of food, uh, music and dance, um, as they transform continue to remain garifuna in in general. I use the word um hybridization in the title of the of the book, and um I'm sure it's one of the the terms that will probably um raise ants-ness, because um the term is very often associated with botany, biology in release and relation to mixing and blending. And it's true that um in the beginning, uh from the first use of the term, uh, even before Renaissance, it actually meant going beyond what nature offers. But over time, the association with progress and added value was reinforced that as human beings understood that if they wanted to really survive, they had to adapt to the growing, the changing ecologies, uh, because human beings would have lacked the substances which were vital to their survival had the process of um hybridization not been established. The word the peanut is a a good example of a uh a hybridized product. And so from the 19th century onwards, the term hybridity acquired negative connotation um relating to crossbreeding, especially in botany and genetics. And uh when I listened to uh Dr. Denny spoke about uh Mendelian um genetics, also, and I I want to insist on this point, Mendelian experience in plant breeding uh gradually helped reverse the perception that hybridization was not good, uh, because um there was that idea that hybridization would have been a process that helped us to understand adaptation and enrichment. Uh 18th century uh English French did not know about the process of hybridization as uh as um outlined and described uh by Mindel. But the the idea of restoring the term's earlier meaning is what I would like us to understand in my use of hybridization. The idea that adaptation uh allows us to conceive of a dimension uh of how the the carifuna, the Kalinago, in fact um change with their ecology, not only their physical environments, but also the groups that they encountered and that they have to live alongside. So adaptation does not preclude resistance to change. I believe that focusing on adaptation solely uh obscures the dynamic nature of these encounters, and so uh the the chapter I spoke about on how the the the the the young drummers in fact transform their drumming while still grounding it in what is um let's say authentically, but the the the the author takes some distance with the term authenticity. Um so what is authentic to them, uh and so uh the idea that there's uh there's a dynamic change, a dynamic nature of uh encounters where there is a constant negotiation between indigenous and other entities. And I think um the idea of foregrounding mixture as an outcome is not what we'd want to leave the readers with, but basically a social, historical, and and and cultural force that forces in individuals to work together, to be interconnected, to be interdependent, and to create and strengthen each other in their existence.

Speaker 1 53:38

Thank you for that. I think it brings us to a point of you know truly understanding what we would conceive of the Girafuna today, right? It's not just as we've outlined, this forced exile um and displacement. It's a history of a people who have maintained despite these forced migrations and what we do and we make of it, as we would say in Jamaica, we can uh mecfashan, but in the case of the Girafuna, right? Um, they've had to maintain these identities despite um coming into contact with new peoples in Belize, in um Honduras, in moving to New York. And so I think that's a beautiful way for um us to close.

Book Recommendation And Farewell

Speaker 1 54:20

Thank you so much, Dr. Prescod, for joining us for this episode. Our listeners, um, you know, I will of course link it in our show notes for you to check out, but I cannot um more recommend the Carib, Kalinago, and Garafuna people's indigeneity, hybridization, and the mobility in the Americas um as a book for you all to check out this fall. So um again, Dr. Prescod, thank you so much for joining me for you know this vivid and just wonderful conversation on indigeneity in the Caribbean. And we hope you enjoyed our um for our listeners tuning in. Till next time, click Lore.