October 12 – Caribbean genocide

by George Alleyne

The history of meetings between the first people of the Caribbean and Europeans is one of conflict, interruption of thriving societies, and eventually genocide of those who were met here to the extent that at least one territory was left without people.

The Europeans who followed Christopher Columbus’ first landing in the Americas in 1492 were consumed by an avaricious desire for the land on which indigenous people of the Caribbean had lived in their own civilisations for thousands of years.

This greed for the land along with kidnappings for forced labour of the original people presented the first conflict that led to battles and the British kingdom among others providing military reinforcement of the land grabbers, massacres then genocide over a long period.

“It is very clear that there was indeed a wonderful civilisation and one that exists not within the confines or definition of a western civilisation.

“The European invasion put an end to a progressive development of the Kalinago islands civilisation,” said Dominican government cabinet minister, Cozier Frederick, last night.

Frederick is a Kalinago, a group of indigenous people previously called Caribs, and his comments came during a livestream event commemorating the third anniversary of the University of the West Indies Centre for Reparatory Research (CRR).

CRR Director Professor Verene Shepherd chaired last evening’s event and she explained that UWI launched it on October 12, 2017, “to call attention to the colonial wrongs that were perpetrated on indigenous peoples and African people through conquest and colonisation started by the Columbus project in 1492”.

The Columbus project to which she referred was the October 12 first landing of the navigator in the Americas. That date was for a long time called Columbus Day but as the professor explained regional activism
changed that to place focus on victims of what followed Columbus’ arrival rather than on the harbinger of evil.

“We are here marking this third anniversary on a day variously called Indigenous People Genocide Day; African Holocaust Day; and Reparation Day.

“October 12 used to be called something else in our region but civil society activism and enlightened political leadership have ensured that the only time we refer to Christopher Columbus is when we have conversations about what we will do with the statues around the region, about why we allow these s
tatues standing on our landscape. That is unfinished business.”

Minister Frederick who holds responsibility within the Dominican government for ‘Kalinago Upliftment’ said, “the genocidal project of the European invasion has a lasting effect on all of our Caribbean islands”.

“A thriving civilisation with millions of people was destroyed in a number of years, you could argue one generation.

“The people who had a language, a belief system, their own way of doing commerce, own method of education were destroyed.”

He added, “today we live in a space that has everything aligned to a European design. It is very important in our conversations moving forward that we seek to define a balance in ensuring that the remnants of the Kalinago heritage that exists today is magnified.

“It has to be spoken about, unearthed.”

The island territory that European genocide caused to be without people was Barbados.

UWI Vice-Chancellor and eminent Caribbean historian, Hilary Beckles, said that owing to this island’s relative flat landscape compared to other territories, Spanish and Portuguese kidnappers found it easy to make raids here and take the indigenous people for slave labour in places such what is today Mexico and Brazil.

Recognising that the territory was defenceless, those native people left behind eventually abandoned the island.    

“It was targeted as an island that was densely populated with indigenous peoples but because of the geography of the island they thought that these native people would be vulnerable, unable to protect themselves, since there were no mountains, no forests in which they could develop a maroonage culture. So, Barbados was the site of the first major complete genocide.”

That is the reason when the British landed in Barbados in 1627 they found houses and villages but no people.

Beckles relayed that the indigenous people of Dominica told him of how the British defined them as people holding up the advancement of colonisation.

This was proven correct in documented historical evidence.

“The Barbados slave owners, who were the largest slave owners in the 17th Century in this region, requested the King of England to give them military support to invade St Lucia, St Vincent, Dominica, in order to drive out the indigenous peoples so that plantation slavery could expand through these larger islands.

“Their complaint to the king was that the resistance of the indigenous peoples was formidable in these territories and that they were creating the last frontier of indigenous peoples’ resistance.”

Overwhelmed by the British military reinforcement despite their fierce resistance most of the survivors were sent to Roatan Island off the coast of Honduras.

“The British government said, ‘we are sending them to Roatan Island because not even an iguana would survive on Roatan Island’.

“They were sent there to perish, no water. But they survived,” Beckles said.

“And having survived they have rebounded as a cultural and ethnic force in the Caribbean once again.

“In some places we call them the Kalinago then you have the communities of the Garifuna. These indigenous people who survived the genocide.”

The historian said, “we know it is genocide because we have the letters written by officials of the British government in which they were described as persons who were ‘infecting’ the islands of the Eastern Caribbean. And they had the cure for that infestation, ‘extermination’”.

Beckles said that in UWI’s archives are documents revealing instructions from the British government to “eliminate a people from the face of the Earth”.