A few weeks ago, the debate broke out yet again between those people who celebrate “Columbus Day” and still tout Christopher Columbus’ “discovery” of the Americas, and those celebrating “Indigenous Peoples Day,” honoring the native people who were already here when Columbus got lost looking for India.

One of the sidebars of this history discussion is that Indigenous people in the Caribbean were all wiped out soon after Columbus’ arrival due to disease and brutality, and enslaved Africans took their places. That’s what I got taught in grade school. Yes, millions of the original inhabitants did die; however, they were not completely erased and their languages, beliefs, foods, and in some cases their descendants still shape what we know of as a key part of Caribbean cultures. Join me below to learn about some of the survivors.

Caribbean Matters is a weekly series from Daily Kos. If you are unfamiliar with the region, check out Caribbean Matters: Getting to know the countries of the Caribbean.

Before I went to grad school, where my anthropology “area of study” was the Caribbean, I thought I was pretty well educated on Native American history. I had already had face-to-face experience with various Indian nations here in the U.S., working with groups like the American Indian Movement (AIM). Though I had extended family and friends from the Caribbean, none of them were “Indigenous,” though a few from the Dominican Republic and Puerto Rico spoke of having Taino ancestry, who were once the most numerous Indigenous people of the Caribbean. However, most historians talk about Columbus and company having wiped out the various tribes. Somehow, I managed to get to age 50 without knowing that on the island of Dominica there was a “reservation,” along with a small settlement of natives on St. Vincent.

This 1989 article in Cultural Survival Quarterly, “The Caribs of Dominica: Land Rights and Ethnic Consciousness,” is by Crispin Gregoire, the former permanent representative to the United Nations for the Commonwealth of Dominica, and Natalia Kanem, currently executive director of the United Nations Population Fund, the UN’s sexual and reproductive health agency. It gives an in-depth look at both the history of the Kalinago people and their political situation up until the late ‘80s. 

In 1797, 5,080 Caribs - the majority of St. Vincent’s population - were forcibly removed from the island by British troops and banished forever to Ruatan Island, off the coast of the Republic of Honduras. The Garifunas of Belize are their direct descendants today. The few Caribs who remained on St. Vincent were allocated 233 acres by the British government for their subsistence. In Dominica, the Caribs’ loss of control of their lands had some similarities to the situation in St. Vincent, but they were not forced to migrate. By 1764 the Caribs had jurisdiction over only 232 acres in a remote area called Salybia on the Atlantic coast.

On the recommendation of the British administrator, Sir Heskeith Bell, the British government in 1903 expanded the Carib community area to 3,700 acres and officially called it the Carib Reserve. Located in the northeast of Dominica, the reserve is equivalent to 5.77 square miles, or 2 percent of Dominica’s total area. The declaration establishing the reserve officially recognized the authority of the Carib chief, but he was not given actual control of the area. At that time. The British government’s policy toward the Dominica Caribs was to maintain the Caribs’ distinctiveness. From its inception, the Carib Reserve continued the communal land tenure system of pre-Columbian times; it is probably the last remnant of communal land in the Caribbean today.

In 2015, the name of the Carib Reserve was officially changed to “Kalinago Territory.” This was fought for in order to deal with stigma attached to the name “Carib,” which had often been associated with cannibalism.

Here are two mini docs that will provide you with an introduction to the Kalinago people, their history, and a glimpse of the beauty of Dominica. Kalinago interviewees talk about who they are as a people, the struggle to pass on and preserve the culture, and plans for future economic development.

YouTube Video

YouTube Video

While I was collecting material for today’s essay I was delighted to find a new person to follow on Twitter, a Kalinago linguist, Dr. Keisha Josephs, who is Afro-Caribbean and Kalinago.

Here’s the rest of Josephs’ thread on Threadreader:

The reality is that both groups were Arawakan people, with the Kalinago being mixed with Carib. Both Taino and Kalinago are Arawakan languages, but Kalinago has more Carib vocabulary. Dassit.

Carib (who refer to themselves as Karina or Kalina) are just another Indigenous group who traveled up the Caribbean chain of islands long before Columbus. There are still Carib peoples in South America.

Most people, even other Natives in North American, aren’t aware that there is a reservation in the Caribbean, though Kalinago generally don’t like the world “reservation”. The island of Dominica is home to the Kalinago Territory, located in the northwest.

The Kalinago territory is home to the largest population of Kalinago, (latest numbers say 2,500, though more live off the territory). But there are Kalinago on other islands like St. Lucia and St. Vincent. …

The Kalinago of course, never were “warlike cannibals”, but labeling them as such was a convenient way for the European invaders to justify claiming land. 🙄

Also, I cannot forget the Santa Rosa Indigenous community in Trinidad!

What happened was that Taino and Kalinago regularly communicated, so of course when Columbus was murdering Taino, the rest of us in the Caribbean heard about it and defended ourselves. In some cases, the Kalinago shot so many arrows that the Europeans couldn’t even make it land.

And the resistance continued for centuries. Once slavery started, the Kalinago regularly took in escaped slaves to add to their numbers for resistance. (So much so that an Afro-Indigenous tribe, the Garifuna, formed, and they still exist to this day too.)

So yeah, long story short Kalinago are still here, but for some reason we get written out of the story, along with other Indigenous Caribbean groups. Or when we are written in the story, it’s at best, inaccurate and at worst, pretty damn racist.

As I pointed out in an earlier story in this series, Dominica is not the Dominican Republic, though when Hurricane Maria struck, it was often confused by reporters who should have known better (or looked at a damn map). I hope you will now never make that mistake.

Join me in the comments below for more on the Kalinago, Dominica, and a roundup of news from the Caribbean. 

Read the first installment of Caribbean Matters here, and last week’s entry on Haitian history—here.