TRINIDAD
& TOBAGO
Indigenous Resurgence in the Contemporary Caribbean: Amerindian Survival and Revival. Edited by Maximilian C. Forte. Published by Peter Lang, New York, 2006
Contributor: Ricardo Bharath Hernandez has been the President of the Santa Rosa Carib Community of Arima, Trinidad, since 1976. Bharath Hernandez has been a central figure in the revitalization of the Arima Carib Community, following his return from living in Detroit, Michigan, during the early 1970s. He has served four terms as an elected representative on the Arima Borough Council, with responsibility for culture, and has recently been appointed Deputy Mayor. His primary activities have been the annual preparation of the Santa Rosa Festival and the maintenance of Carib traditions in processing cassava and in weaving, which he also teaches to school children. Bharath Hernandez has also been responsible for building a wide network of exchange and solidarity with numerous Amerindian communities and organizations across the Caribbean, South America and North America. His work in representing Arima’s Caribs has taken him to indigenous gatherings in Canada, Cuba, Dominica, Guyana, Belize and as far away as India.
Contributor: Maximilian C. Forte is an Assistant Professor in Anthropology in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Concordia University in Montreal, Canada. Forte, a Permanent Resident of Trinidad and Tobago, lived and studied in Trinidad for almost seven years, with most of those years spent in Arima researching the Santa Rosa Carib Community. He has also conducted limited field research in Dominica. He obtained a PhD in Anthropology from the University of Adelaide in 2002. His dissertation research focused on practices of representation by and about the Caribs of Trinidad and the cultural politics of indigeneity. Related research foci included ethnohistory, colonial political economy and globalization. He has published aspects of his research in Cultural Survival Quarterly, Indigenous Affairs and The Indigenous World. He is the founding editor of the Caribbean Amerindian Centrelink (www.centrelink.org) and the current senior editor of Kacike: The Journal of Caribbean Amerindian History and Anthropology (www.kacike.org). Forte also serves as the webmaster for the Santa Rosa Carib Community and has posted numerous research essays online. A book, based on his research in Trinidad, titled Ruins of Absence, Presence of Caribs: (Post) Colonial Representations of Aboriginality in Trinidad and Tobago was published by the University Press of Florida in 2005 (click here for more on that book).
Chapter: Chapter One. Introduction: The Dual Absences of Extinction and Marginality—What Difference Does an Indigenous Presence Make?
MAXIMILIAN C. FORTE
[click here for a copy of the chapter in PDF format--146 kb]
Abstract:
In this introductory chapter the primary themes of the volume (presence, identities, rights, relations with the nation-state, and regional organization) are related to one another, whilst providing an analytical overview of the contemporary situation of indigenous peoples in the Caribbean and some of the challenges they face in making their identities present. The arguments presented hinge on the view that acknowledgement of the presence of the indigenous in Caribbean societies significantly challenges not just previous scholarly displacements and erasures of indigenous survival and indigenous inputs in the creation of local Creole cultural practices, but also political and economic processes that have the effect of marginalizing contemporary Amerindians. The dual theme here is of extinction and marginality—the former speaking of Amerindians as an absence, the latter proceeding as if they were in fact absent. This dual theme is used to frame the combination of both Island and Mainland cases in this volume, where extinction theses have pertained mostly to the former, while marginalization on multiple levels continues to confront the latter. The chapter contains a review of the main currents in the historical and anthropological literature pertaining to the Amerindian presence. Issues surrounding definitions of survival and revival, continuity and change, essentialism and constructionism, and authenticity and invention are also debated. Through a concise overview of the chapters in this volume, the introduction argues that no proper understanding of the contemporary Caribbean can be achieved without understanding and appreciating the meanings surrounding continued and renewed indigeneity.
Chapter: Chapter Six. “In This Place Where I Was Chief”: History and Ritual in the Maintenance and Retrieval of Traditions in the Carib Community of Arima, Trinidad
RICARDO BHARATH HERNANDEZ and MAXIMILIAN C. FORTE
Abstract:
This chapter outlines and explores the cultural practices of the Santa Rosa Carib Community, a formal organization located in Arima, Trinidad, consisting of a core of roughly 45 individuals related through ties of kinship, and a supporting network of over 300 individuals in the wider Arima area. This is a community that has long been neglected in the modern historical and anthropological literature on Trinidad and thus, to a limited extent, the aim of this chapter is to outline the nature of the identity and history of this body. The leadership of the Carib Community has publicly acknowledged that its activities represent part of Trinidad’s ethnic revivals of the last three decades. In addition, multiple projects have been developed for maintaining, preserving and retrieving lost cultural traditions, in part through ‘cultural interchange’ with neighbouring Amerindian communities in the Caribbean Basin. The authors will discuss and analyze the ways in which certain material practices, objects, private religious rituals, and kinship ties have served to maintain a focus and sense of communal bonding and veneration for indigenous ancestry amongst the members of this population. The temporal scope of the chapter focuses largely on the period from the 1970s to the present, with some preliminary consideration of the history of Arima as an Indian Mission and as an area of Trinidad that has been recognized by both state and society for possessing an organized body of indigenous descendants.Chapter: Chapter Thirteen. Searching for a Center in the Digital Ether: Notes on the Indigenous Caribbean Resurgence on the Internet
MAXIMILIAN C. FORTE
Abstract:
This chapter explores several issues and problems concerning the media and outcomes of indigenous self-representation on the Internet, especially those cultural practices that utilize the Internet as a means of challenging myths of extinction and realities of marginalization. This chapter is based on the author’s six years of experience in coordinating and developing two resources related to the Caribbean indigenous resurgence on the Internet—the Caribbean Amerindian Centrelink and Kacike: The Journal of Caribbean Amerindian History and Anthropology—in addition to experience as the web developer for the Santa Rosa Carib Community of Arima, Trinidad. Several questions will be concisely explored as a means of rounding out this section of the volume pertaining to regional and international networking and organization. Amongst these questions are: 1) To what extent has the Internet been useful in furthering Caribbean indigenous goals of self-representation, regional organization and actual change ‘on the ground’? 2) What are the challenges facing Caribbean indigenous utilization of the Internet? 3) Are the self-representations propagated via the Internet a mirror of what we see offline? 4) How far have myths of extinction and realities of marginalization been successfully challenged via Internet communication? The chapter will conclude that, by and large, only a select minority of indigenous Caribbean communities has been in the position to make most use of the Internet, and yet, the Internet may become to indigenous resurgence what the printing press was for early European nationalists.
Websites on the Caribs of Trinidad:First Peoples of Our Nation: Address by Ricardo Bharath Hernandez
The Santa Rosa Carib Community Website
Ruins of Absence, Presence of Caribs
Extinction: The Historical Trope of Anti-Indigeneity in the Caribbean
The Caribs of Trinidad: Caribbean Amerindian Centrelink