Okay, you guys may not know this about me, but I come from an assimilated Amerindian family.
We have a good deal of African blood, with a healthy dose of various European ethnicities, but we are mostly Ameridian, Caribs to be exact.
My mother says that there are many families like ours, assimilated into other cultures, and going under the guise of African or what is called in the Caribbean as ‘red’ aka ‘coloured’ aka ‘mulatto’.
I have, since I was a little girl, identified strongly with Native American and Amerindian populations, and one of my best friends in primary school turned out to be the Eagle Clan in Guyana’s Hereditary Chief. (I knew we were vibesy for a reason, I was the only girl allowed in his gang!) And this was an instinctual affinity, because although my family acknowledges our Amerindian roots, we have no knowledge of it as a culture or as an identity.
It is only in adulthood, that I have had the opportunity to really begin to explore this major part of my ethnic identity.
Okay, so imagine my disgust when I search Google, and all these companies and individuals have Carib in their title, yet no one acknowledges the Caribs as being the original people’s of the Caribbean, I mean C-A-R-I-B-bean! C’mon!
I know very little about this part of myself, but believe you me, I feel it strongly.
I was by a friend this weekend gone, and her Danish boyfriend was listening to me talk about some of this stuff, and he asked me, “Is it really important to know?”
I controlled my look of disgust and spewed some rhetoric about needing too know where my people come from, in order to know where I was going. I thought, how typical of a European. I did point out to him though, that even the Europeans have a culture of remembering their ancestors, even if they don’t have a ritualised system of honouring them. They know where they are going, because they look back to see where they have been, even if their look back is coloured through an inaccurate lens that portrays them as the progenitors of all world cultures and civilisations. At least, if they look in history books, THEIR OWN, that’s what their historians have provided for them… a white washed look at history. I guess it’s lovely to say, my ancestors enslaved and decimated other populations, but that doesn’t have anything to do with me.
Me, I know that in order to live in this life, I have to look back to what my Ancestors went through, what they did, how they suffered, what they learned and the magnificence of their sacrifices and contributions in order to move forward. I have to own their wrong doing, but I also have to lay claim to the amazingly good things they wrought as well.
Not just my African ancestors, but ALL of them: Amerindian (Carib), European (Portugese, Scottish, French, Venezuelan and English), Jewish and whatever else mix up in that that I have in me.
So, this re-assessment of my IDENTITY as an amalgam of these peoples, makes me even more than ever, what to be a part of any force working to bring the Amerindian population of the Caribbean back into prominence, no matter how small they are. These are the last, WE are the last descendents looking out on possessed, raped and violated land that we lived in concert with for thousands of years.
Amerindian populations in the Caribbean live in abject squallor, on ‘reservations’ living with the legacy of broken treaties and the decimation of our numbers, and in my case, the assimilation of our daughters and sons.
I belong here! I am one of the inheritors of this region, and my claim on the Caribbean is defined and definite. All my peoples deserve recognition and above all, as the last remnants of a culture long gone, and exisiting only in the smallest of pockets, need to be properly feed, clothed and above all, deserve a proper slice of the world that foreigners have built on the backs, bones and sacrifice of millions of NATIVE AMERINDIANS!
Pan-Tribal Confederacy of Indigenous Tribal Nations
The work of my primary school friend…..
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