Kalinago

Carib family (by John Gabriel Stedman)

Drawing of a Carib woman

Carib, Island Carib, or Kalinago people, after whom the Caribbean was named, are a group of people who live in the Lesser Antilles islands. They are an Amerindian people whose origins lie in the southern West Indies and the northern coast of South America.

The people spoke either a Carib language or a pidgin, but the Caribs' regular raids on other groups resulted in so many female Arawak captives that it was not uncommon for the women to speak Kalhíphona, a Maipurean language (Arawakan). In the southern Caribbean, they co-existed with a related Cariban-speaking group, the Galibi. They lived in separate villages in Grenada, Tobago, Dominica and St.Vincent.

History

The Caribs are believed to have migrated from the Orinoco River area in South America to settle in the Caribbean islands about 1200 AD, according to carbon dating. Over the century leading up to Columbus' arrival in the Caribbean archipelago in 1492, the Caribs mostly displaced the Maipurean-speaking Taínos, who settled the island chains earlier in history, by warfare, extermination and assimilation.

Greenstone ceremonial axe. From shell midden, Mt Irvine Bay, Tobago, 1957.

Carib islanders traded with the Eastern Taíno of the Caribbean Islands. The Caribs produced the silver which Ponce de Leon found in Taíno communities. None of the insular Amerindians mined for gold, but obtained it by trade from the mainland. The Caribs were skilled boatbuilders and sailors. They appeared to have owed their dominance in the Caribbean basin to their mastery of warfare.

The Caribs were displaced by the Europeans with a great loss of life; most fatalities resulting from Eurasian infectious diseases to which they had no immunity, as well as warfare. Others were assimilated during the colonial period; a few retained areas such as in Dominica. Small populations survive, specifically in the Carib Territory in northeast Dominica.

The 'Black Caribs' (later known as Garifuna) of St. Vincent ( St.Vincent has some "Yellow caribs' as well) were descended from group of enslaved Africans who were marooned from shipwrecks of slave ships, as well as slaves who escaped here. They intermarried with the Carib and formed the last native culture to resist the British. It was not until 1795 that British colonists transported the Black Carib to Roatan Island, off Honduras. Their descendants continue to live there today and are known as the Garifuna ethnic group. Carib resistance delayed the settlement of Dominica by Europeans, and the Carib communities that remained in St. Vincent and Dominica retained a degree of autonomy well into the 19th century.

The last known speakers of Island Carib died in the 1920s, and the language is extinct.

People

Because of Dominica's rugged area, Caribs were able to hide from European forces. The island's east coast includes a 3,700-acre (15 km²) territory known as the Carib Territory that was granted to the people by the British Crown in 1903. There are only 3000 Caribs remaining. They elect their own chief. In July 2003, Caribs observed 100 Years of Territory. In July 2004, Charles Williams was elected as Carib Chief, who was succeeded by Chief Garnette Joseph. It is said that they are the only remaining full-blood native Carib people, although some have intermarried with the non-Carib Dominican population.

Several hundred ethnic Carib descendants live in Trinidad, Grenada, St. Lucia, U. S. Virgin Islands, Antigua & Barbuda, Guadeloupe, Aruba as well as in St. Vincent, the size of which is not known. Some ethnic Carib communities remain on the South American mainland, in countries such as Venezuela, Colombia, Brazil, French Guiana, Guyana, Suriname and in the country of Belize. The size of these communities varies widely.

Music

Main article: Garifuna music

Garifuna music from the Garifuna people, the descendants of Carib, Arawak and West African people and is quite different from the music created rest of Central America. The most famous form is punta. Its associated musical style, which has the dancers move their hips in a circular motion. An evolved form of traditional music, still usually played using traditional instruments, punta has seen some modernization and electrification in the 1970s; this is called punta rock. Traditional punta dancing is consciously competitive. Artists like Pen Cayetano helped innovate modern punta rock by adding guitars to the traditional music, and paved the way for later artists like Andy Palacio, Children of the Most High and Black Coral. Punta was popular across the region, especially in Belize, by the mid-1980s, culminating in the release of Punta Rockers in 1987, a compilation featuring many of the genre's biggest stars.

Other forms of Garifuna music and dance include: hungu-hungu, combination, wanaragua, abaimahani, matamuerte, laremuna wadaguman, gunjai, sambai, charikanari, eremuna egi, paranda, berusu, punta rock, teremuna ligilisi, arumahani, and Mali-amalihani. Punta is the most popular dance in Garifuna culture. It is performed around holidays and at parties and other social events. Punta lyrics are usually composed by the women. Chumba and hunguhungu are a circular dance in a three-beat rhythm, which is often combined with punta. There are other songs typical to each gender, women having eremwu eu and abaimajani, rhythmic a cappella songs, and laremuna wadaguman, men's work songs, chumba and hunguhungu, a circular dance in a three-beat rhythm, which is often combined with punta.

Drums play a very important role in Garifuna music. There are primarily two types of drums used: the primero (tenor drum) and the segunda (bass drum). These drums are typically made of hollowed-out hardwood such as mahogany or mayflower, with the skins coming from the peccary (wild bush pig), deer, or sheep.

Also used in combination with the drums are the sisera. These shakers are made from the dried fruit of the gourd tree, filled with seeds, then fitted with hardwood handles.

Paranda music developed soon after the Garifunas arrival in Central America. The music is instrumental and percussion-based. The music was barely recorded until the 1990s, when Ivan Duran of Stonetree Records began the Paranda Project.

In contemporary Belize there has been a resurgence of Garifuna music, popularized by musicians such as Andy Palacio, Mohobub Flores, & Adrian Martinez. These musicians have taken many aspects from traditional Garifuna music forms and fused them with more modern sounds. Described as a mixture of punta rock and paranda. One great example is Andy Palacio's album Watina, and Umalali: The Garifuna Women's Project, both released on the Belizean record label Stonetree Records.

In the Garifuna culture, there is another dance called Dugu. This dance is a ritual done for a death in the family to pay their respect to their loved ones. In 2001, Garifuna music was proclaimed one of the masterpieces of the oral and intangible heritage of humanity by UNESCO.

Religion

Caribs are believed to have been polytheists. As the Spanish began to colonise the Caribbean area, they wanted to convert the natives to Catholicism.

The Kalingo religion practised by the Carib had elements similar to the ancestor worship of the Taíno. They believed in an evil spirit called Maybouya, who had to be placated for an individual to avoid harm. The chief function of their shamans, called buyeis, was to heal the sick with herbs and to cast spells (piai) which would keep Maybouya at bay. The buyeis were very important and underwent special training instead of becoming warriors. As they were held to be the only people who could avert evil, they were treated with great respect. Their ceremonies were accompanied with sacrifices. As with the Arawaks and other Native Americans, the Carib smoked tobacco in the rituals of their religion.

Patriarchy

Early Carib culture was patriarchal. Women carried out the important domestic duties of rearing young children, processing and producing food and clothing, and cultivating the land for farming, including sowing and harvesting. In the 17th century, Europeans reported that the women, with their children, lived in separate houses from men, a custom recorded among other South American tribes.

The women were highly revered and held substantial socio-political power. Island Carib society was reputedly more socially egalitarian than Taíno society. Although there were village chiefs and war leaders, there were no large states or multi-tiered aristocracy. The local self-government unit may have been the longhouse dwellings populated by men or women, typically run by one or more chieftains reporting to an island council.

Cannibalism

Carib Warrior (Mixed Media Sculpture by artist George S. Stuart)

The Carib word karibna meant "person". It became the origin of the English "cannibal". Although among the Carib, it was apparently associated with rituals related to the eating of war enemies, some Europeans believed the Carib practiced general cannibalism.

The Kalinago had a tradition of keeping bones of their ancestors in their houses. Missionaries such as Père Jean Baptiste Labat and Cesar de Rochefort described the practice as part of a belief that the ancestral spirits would always look after the bones and protect their descendants.

Italian explorer Giovanni da Verrazzano was killed and said to have been eaten by Carib natives on what is now Guadeloupe (French West Indies) in 1528 (before called "Karukera" by the Amerindian people which means: the island of beautiful waters), during his third voyage to North America, after exploring Florida, the Bahamas and the Lesser Antilles.

Historians have described the cannibalism as related to war rituals. Columbus and his people did not understand what they were seeing, and they were shocked at this cannibalism. In 1503, Queen Isabella ruled that only people who were better off under slavery (a definition which explicitly included cannibals) could legally be taken as slaves. This provided Spaniards an incentive and legalistic pretext for identifying various Amerindian groups as cannibals to enslave them and take their lands away.

To this day, the Kalinago people fight against what they regard as a misconception about their ancestors. The film Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest was criticised by the National Garifuna Council for portraying the Carib people as cannibals.

In Myths and realities of Caribbean history the author Basil A. Reid concluded that "No evidence, either archaeological or from firsthand observations by Europeans, conclusively proves that Island-Caribs ever consumed human flesh."

See also

• Carib Expulsion
• Santa Rosa Carib Community

Additional reading

• Patrick Leigh Fermor, The Traveller's Tree, 1950, pp 214–5

Resources

• Allaire, Louis (1997). "The Caribs of the Lesser Antilles", in Samuel M. Wilson, The Indigenous People of the Caribbean, pp. 180–185. Gainesville, Florida: University of Florida. ISBN 0-8130-1531-6.
• Steele, Beverley A. (2003). Grenada, A history of its people, New York: Macmillan Education, pp. 11–47
• Honeychurch, Lennox, The Dominica Story, MacMillan Education, 1995.
• Davis, D and Goodwin R.C. "Island Carib Origins: Evidence and non-evidence", American Antiquity, vol.55 no.1(1990).
• Eaden, John, The Memoirs of Père Labat, 1693–1705, Frank Cass, 1970.
• "Carib", Ethnologue
• "Kalinago", Name change announcement of November 15, 2010, by the Office of the Kalinago Council posted at Dominica News Online

External links

• Mainland Carib artwork, National Museum of the American Indians