Freedom Roots

Histories from the Caribbean

Laurent Dubois,Richard Lee Turits

• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781469653617
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Latin American & Caribbean History
• Index: History

To tell the history of the Caribbean is to tell the history of the world, " write Laurent Dubois and Richard Lee Turits. In this powerful and expansive story of the vast archipelago, Dubois and Turits chronicle how the Caribbean has been at the heart of modern contests between slavery and freedom, racism and equality, and empire and independence. From the emergence of racial slavery and European colonialism in the early sixteenth century to U.S. annexations and military occupations in the twentieth, systems of exploitation and imperial control have haunted the region. Yet the Caribbean is also where empires have been overthrown, slavery was first defeated, and the most dramatic revolutions triumphed. Caribbean peoples have never stopped imagining and pursuing new forms of liberty. Dubois and Turits reveal how the region's most vital transformations have been ignited in the conflicts over competing visions of land. While the powerful sought a Caribbean awash in plantations for the benefit of the few, countless others anchored their quest for freedom in small-farming and counter-plantation economies, at times succeeding against all odds. Caribbean realities to this day are rooted in this long and illuminating history of struggle.

Part I Land and Freedom

Histories from the Colonial Caribbean

1 The Indigenous Caribbean

In 1789, a Scottish naturalist named Alexander Anderson was determined to find a skull. The founder of the St. Vincent Botanical Gardens, the first of its kind in the Americas, he had studied the forests and plants of the island for years. He was also interested in the indigenous people who still lived on the island, a group who after several centuries of European colonization still remained autonomous. The “Yellow Caribs,” he noted, “considered any attempt to disturb the ashes of their ancestors” as “the greatest of crimes.” Undaunted, however, he rooted around in a burial site until he found a skull that he claimed was one of a chief of the Yellow Caribs. The skull ultimately was sent to Europe, where it was given as a gift to the German naturalist Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, who included an engraving of it in a 1795 work describing the human “races” as a representative of the “American” race.¹

Since the arrival of Europeans in the Caribbean in 1492, the indigenous Caribbean has been the subject of many attempts to categorize, define, and contain. Any reconstruction of indigenous histories, either before or after Columbus, has to start with an understanding of the way power shapes the very language, categories, and geographies through which we tell this story. The broad outlines of this history are well known, and they are those of a cataclysm. Europeans arrived in the so-called New World and very quickly destroyed the populous and thriving native worlds through a combination of military conquest, enslavement, and disease. This story continues to haunt us and horrify us today. It was part of the large destruction of native populations throughout the Americas, in what Tzvetan Todorov and others have referred to as one of the greatest genocides in history.²

How we tell this story is not just about the past but also about the present. The stakes are high, notably for contemporary indigenous communities in the Greater Caribbean, including those in the Kalinago reserve in Dominica and the large population of Garifuna, descendants of a group deported from St. Vincent at the end of the eighteenth century, living in Central America. Today, the Garifuna are the largest group of people who tie themselves to the history of the indigenous Caribbean, and their contemporary life is a reminder that the long struggle to find spaces of sanctuary and autonomy within and against the colonial project is an ongoing one. When we depict the indigenous as having vanished in the face of European conquest, we end up erasing the indigenous entirely from our sense of the broader history of the region. But indigenous populations profoundly shaped the history of the Caribbean from the sixteenth through the eighteenth centuries. The “devastation” most often invoked when speaking about European-indigenous contacts in the Caribbean, while vital to our understanding of the history of the region, is only part of the story. Like other indigenous populations, those of the Caribbean have been subjected for centuries to a narrative in which they are doomed, vanishing, always on the verge of becoming nothing more than a memory. And yet the indigenous Caribbean is still here, in communities who identify as such as well as in many of the lifeways and cultural practices of the Caribbean. They have been told they are vanishing for over five hundred years, but they have refused to do so.

As historian Melanie Newton has argued, the “narrative of aboriginal disappearance” was one of the region’s “foundational imperial myths,” but it has also remained surprisingly present even in twentieth-century anticolonial texts from the Caribbean. “Thinking about the Caribbean as an aboriginal space,” she argues, “and of indigeneity as a key site of struggle in Caribbean history, gives scholars new ways to expose colonial forms of knowledge and power.” This chapter represents an attempt to respond to her call for a different approach to the history of the indigenous Caribbean. It focuses on the long chronology of conquest in the Caribbean, from Columbus’s arrival in 1492 to the deportation of several thousand “Black Caribs” from St. Vincent in 1797. It is the story of how European empires moved into the Caribbean and how indigenous groups responded. The indigenous communities of the Caribbean suffered tremendously under European colonization, and yet many among them found ways not just to survive but to continue to cultivate independent worlds, to envision alternative futures for themselves that did not involve vanishing but rather continuing to live and thrive as individuals and communities. To narrate the history of the indigenous Caribbean in a different way, then, is also to be able to think differently about the future of the region. It is, as Newton writes, a necessary act aimed at rejecting “narratives crafted so that some certain people might get away with murder.”³

Indigenous responses to European invaders were complex and varied, rooted in a longer history of social and political transformation and conflict. Though it was defined most forcefully by violence and devastation, the European-indigenous encounters during these centuries also involved negotiation, exchange, and mixing. The indigenous response shaped the process of European expansion into the area, because resistance, particularly in the Lesser Antilles, helped to slow down and shape the course of colonization efforts. Military resistance took place in most areas of the Caribbean, and in a significant minority of cases it was successful. This was particularly the case in the Eastern Caribbean, where the communities of those who came to be known as “Caribs” managed to survive as independent nations, in practice, despite Spanish assertions of sovereignty and decades of attacks upon them and enslavement of those captured in raids and battle. The Caribs responded with raids of their own against European colonial settlements, including extensive ones in 1510s Puerto Rico with support from the local population. When France and England sought to gain footholds in the Eastern Caribbean, making some early inroads into the Americas, indigenous peoples combined continued military resistance with skillful negotiation and diplomacy, taking advantage of imperial rivalries and conflict in order to create what we might call, following Richard White, a Caribbean “Middle Ground.” By 1660, the indigenous peoples had been pushed out of many islands but secured access to “reserve islands” through treaties with the French and English. These islands, St. Vincent and Dominica, were meant to be protected from European settlement and, therefore, serve as refuges of a kind for indigenous groups, including those driven out of other islands. But over the course of the eighteenth century, the booming plantation economy led to the creation of European settlements in St. Vincent and Dominica despite these earlier agreements. In 1797, the British deported several thousand indigenous people from St. Vincent in order to firmly secure the island for plantation agriculture. These deportees, however, created new communities in Central America while smaller indigenous communities have remained in both St. Vincent and Dominica to the present day.⁴

This history was, from the beginning, partly a struggle over categories and their meanings. European colonialism always combined colonialism in its rawest forms—of killing, enslavement, control—with the work of categorization and description such as that carried out by Anderson when he sought out a Carib skull. We see in this story how calling people certain things was also a way of attempting to write their history, or perhaps to write them out of history. But these categories in turn—most notably that of the Carib and therefore of the Caribbean itself—could shift and sway, the currents of meaning never stable and never fully under control. Those who took on the name Carib and used it to name themselves had their own ideas about what it meant and who they were and could be.

The Caribbean was the first site of European-indigenous encounter in the Americas, and the brutal treatment and rapid decimation of the communities invaded by the Spaniards were to be only the first in a long series of histories of such devastation. Although the devastation of the indigenous population of the Caribbean would prove to be far from unique, the first contacts that took place there remain of particular importance for understanding the broader history of European-indigenous encounter and conflict in the Americas. As Samuel Wilson noted, once the first Europeans had arrived in the Americas, “stories of their strange appearance and practices spread rapidly,” and European trade items “entered into the existing trade networks” and often preceded the new arrivals. European diseases, too, spread rapidly and in advance of the invaders, and often made possible the invaders’ progress, depopulating many areas and transforming them into what colonists opportunistically declared “empty lands.”⁵

Still, there was no other moment after the first encounters in the Caribbean that were so powerfully defined by the profound lack of preparation, and utter surprise, that defined these first meetings. For this reason the Caribbean encounters of the late fifteenth century have been pored over by generations of scholars seeking to understand the beginnings of the broader history of the conquest of the Americas. It is tempting to see in these early contacts the patterns of misunderstanding, hostility, and destruction that would play out again and again and, in retrospect, can seem to have been inevitable and unstoppable. Yet it is also clear that there was much about these early encounters that was surprising and contingent and could well have gone a different way. That we are still living in the wake of the precise contours these encounters took is one reason to continue to return to them, and to attempt to account for and perhaps rewrite this history on different terms.

Traces of the Indigenous Caribbean

The year 1492 is a pivotal date in Caribbean and world history, perhaps one of the most powerful moments in which we can point to a “before” and an “after.” That is also true in the sense that all histories of the pre-Columbian indigenous Caribbean are necessarily refracted through the lens of what happened when the Europeans arrived and of how they described the peoples they encountered. It has been and remains surprisingly difficult to tell the story of the indigenous Caribbean before European arrival without getting tangled up in the colonial categories generated about this so-called prehistory. In fact the categories and interpretations developed during the very first moments of encounter between Europeans and indigenous people profoundly shaped not just what happened at the time but the ways in which we have come to apprehend the world the Spanish encountered. While archaeological evidence has provided enormous insight about life in certain communities, the historical anthropology of the indigenous Caribbean is caught up in a common conundrum: the only existing written sources describing these communities were generated by various European writers invested, in various ways, in the processes of conquest, colonization, and missionary work. These writers included many European missionaries, such as Bartolomé de las Casas, Ramón Pané, and later Jean-Bapiste Labat. Their writings teach us a great deal about the ideological and discursive frameworks of European empire, but they provide us with only frustratingly distorted glimpses of a complex indigenous world. Their texts also represent a world in transition, shaped by reaction and response to European arrivals. So we need to be cautious in using them to understand what came before. It is, in other words, impossible to disentangle accounts of the indigenous Caribbean from the history of how such accounts came to be produced within the history of European empire in the region.

People tend to leave behind unruly traces of their existence. They are, of course, often not particularly sensitive or even aware of the needs of those who will come along later to try to figure out where and how they lived. Archaeologists depend on physical remains in tracking histories of movement and settlement. In reconstituting the history of indigenous communities in the Americas, they depend particularly strongly on ceramics. The construction and decoration of ceramics shift in recognizable ways over time, and so ceramics provide a particularly useful way of reconstituting and dating patterns of settlement and of migration. Among the earliest ceramics found in the Caribbean, for instance, are a large number of shards that show the repetition and consolidation of a style defined by “rules of complex symmetry” that govern “the conventional representation” of frogs, bats, and turtles. The prevalence of such aesthetic techniques, of course, really only proves that these techniques for ceramic production spread throughout the region. Archaeologists have sought to deduce patterns of movement, migration, and population from the patterns of ceramics, assuming that as people move they bring new styles of ceramics with them. Of course, ceramic styles themselves can potentially move between already established communities. Still, through analysis of ceramic as well as other physical remains, and historical and linguistic evidence, decades of archaeological research have provided a tentative map of the history of humans in the Caribbean in the millennia before the arrival of Europeans.⁶

While many of the mainland areas surrounding the Caribbean have been populated for tens of thousands of years, the earliest trace of human occupation in the islands of the Caribbean is on Trinidad from 5400 B.C. At that time, however, Trinidad may still have been attached to the nearby South American mainland, not yet actually the island it would eventually become. The islands of the Greater Caribbean seem to have been first settled by humans approximately six thousand years ago, between 4000 and 3500 B.C., most likely by migrants coming from Central America. Traces of settlements from this period have been found in Cuba, Haiti, Puerto Rico, the Dominican Republic, and Antigua. These early communities were “preceramic,” but they did leave behind stone tools that have been found and examined by archaeologists. Very little is in fact known about their culture, although the groups called “Ciboney” or “Guanahatabey” who lived in Eastern Cuba at the time of the conquest may have been descended from these first migrants. They survived on hunting and fishing rather than farming. This was also true of another group of migrants archaeologists have argued moved into the area in the centuries before 2000 B.C. from South America, occupying many of the Lesser Antilles, where “traces of their small settlements are scattered today,” and as far as Puerto Rico. Although this group too was preceramic, a later group of people archaeologists believe moved into the region after 500 B.C. did produce ceramics and so left traces that provide much more specific information about their history of migration. Archaeologists have dated early settlements to 530 B.C. in Martinique, 480 B.C. in Montserrat, and 430 B.C. in Puerto Rico, and they have found ceramic remains in most of the other Lesser Antilles.⁷

The migrants came from the tropical lowlands of South America, particularly the Orinoco River valley, which formed the “gateway” for migration to the Antilles. They brought with them both plants and agricultural techniques that would take root in the Caribbean. These horticultural techniques involved both the production of staple crops, particularly cassava, or manioc, in agricultural fields and the creation of small gardens bringing together a “seemingly chaotic” selection of trees and plants that produced fruit, peppers, beans, cotton, gourds, and perhaps tobacco as well. They also brought languages that became the dominant tongues spoken in the region by indigenous peoples at the time of the conquest, and since.⁸

Who were these migrants? And what should we call them? The answers have been the subject of much debate in recent decades. The scholarship that developed in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries on the topic used the term “Arawak” to describe the indigenous peoples of the large islands of the western Caribbean. In recent decades, however, scholars have highlighted the fact that, as Peter Hulme writes, this term—and others often used today, including “Taíno”—were never “as far as we know, self-ascriptions.” The first use of the term “Arawak” appeared in 1540 when the bishop of Cartagena used the term “Aruaca” to describe indigenous peoples in the northern r...