Caribbean Indigeneity Course Notes

Week 1

Introduction
 The idea that indigenous people are not present now allows people to have a negative
perception on the presence of indigenous people today (the idea that everyone is gone)
 The class focuses on the Caribbean after 1492 (what happened to indigenous people during
that time)
Useful Concepts
 Entanglement: thinking about Caribbean history, Indigenous history and Toronto history –
these histories are connected
 Race, Hierarchy
 Indigeneity and Force labor in
 the America's – Slavery is a known experience in Canada
 Indigeneity and Indigeneity survival is a fact in Canada and the Caribbean
 The concept of the settler will be debated; take this term and understand what that means –
there is a difference in the Canadian context and the Caribbean context
o Who is a settler? Volunteered (European) or Forced (Slaves)
Article: Exploring Hidden Landscapes
 Idea of Appropriation: Erasure
erasure |əˈrāSHər| nounthe removal of writing, recorded material, or data.• the removal of all
traces of something; obliteration: the erasure of prior history.

 Toronto was a prominent meeting place which means that the place where Toronto is
(is/was) an important place for Indigenous people
 Colonial Erasure makes history not eliminated but making it not as important


Week 2
Geography of the Caribbean
o Caribbean is the physical space and a diaspora
o Diaspora population: ancestral or connection of birth to a particular region that they may not live in
permanently but they may still have a relationship with it (imaginative and physical relationship)
o 8 countries in South America: from Mexico to the Panama Canel
o Guyana (independence in 1966 from England – Guiana), Suriname (Dutch- independent 1895),
French Guiana (still under French rule): do not speak French or Portuguese as their first language
o Colonization was more successful in North America and the Caribbean; not as successful in South
America (trading powers in the colonies were set by indigenous people)
o Thinking about the Caribbean as a place of connection across the islands can be limiting
 Near the water; slavery agriculture has allowed that culture to prevail ossoped to being in the
amazon rainforest where that labour could not be as prevellent; innternal experience is
important because it dictates how people relate to the caribbean
 Greater Antillies and Lesser Antillies (leeward island and windward island south)
o Kaliago territory (Dominica) - only place considered as a indigenous land that is indigenously
governed
o Colonial Power
 Forms the sea as a place of conquest, war and forced migration, marks exile
o Hispaniola
 Shared by Haiti (1809 independent )and the Dominican Republic - Santo Domingo [colonial
name] (1844 independent from Haiti) (1865 independent from Spain)
 Cindad Trujillo (1930-1961) name of Santo Domingo Capital during that time
 French Colony (Saint Dominge) Haiti

,  Dominican (Dominica)
 Dominicans Dominican Republic
o The Sea is History Poem
 Himself of the person from the Caribbean; where is your monuments for the Caribbean - in the
Sea (not tribal memory because the lack of non-indigenous history) with the acknowledgement
violence
 The absence of ruins is a sign of lack of indigeneity
o Terminology
 Indigenous? Lets think about it but it can mean a number of things
 Native people, first people, Aboriginal
 Native (by its self): using it a noun - unclear and not ok
 Tribe (shown as a community of not primitive people) and Tribal (legal and political term): don’t
use this word
 Amerindian and Indian: offensive term
 Garifuna
 Carib is offensive everywhere but Trinidad and Tobago
o Archeology
 The field of Caribbean Archelogy is rich; full of debates (Irving Rouse - term of peopling and re-
peopling)
 6000 BCE first know time where there was people in the Caribbean
 Sources used: radio carbon dating - essential for proving wrong colonial falsehoods about the
land
 Midden: a Garbage heap - domestic waste
 Ruins: no monumental architecture in the North Americas but because it is seen in south
America there is assumption of only those places having indigenous history
o Geographic Features
 Colonial people had to settle in indigenous people communities or near them because they
were not able to figure out inhabitants for themselves
 Colonial settlement is influenced by indigenous ways of settling: the way roads are created, how
to get food etc.
 Rock art and cave paintings: which are evidence of indigenous artistry and communicating the
environment around them


Week 3
 Cacique
 Caribe
 Catholic Canine Law; if you did not convert to Christianity you were considered involved for a Just
war against the Spanish
 Caribbean becomes the crucible for the new world and what would happen next
 Two sides of looking at Hispanic Heritage (Genocide of Indigenous people or infusing language of
indigenous with Spanish)
 Mestizo and meshzaje
 Key Dates
o Different waves of Human Migration BC; the northern Caribbean had no one that was invading
from the eastern point of Porto Rico (Carib invasion thesis)
 Archeological evidence does proves that this didn’t happen (many years of settlement and
settlement in the Caribbean – Peopling) - the fact that this Carib invasion (that is false)
creates a narrative that the Caribbean in Roman law tradition as Terra Nullius (no clear
owner of the land)