Part 3: Why Original Citizens Cannot Be Second-Class People

IT’S clear from all he wrote and said in his groundbreaking book, ‘Views of the Interior of Guiana’ that, never mind his deep affinity with its First People, Robert H. Schomburgk also deeply-held the prevailing British view that their salvation lay heavily with conversion to European Civilisation and Christianity.

He admitted they would not easily dump their traditional ways of life to adopt new forms of living, but he never ruled out ‘Civilising’ and ‘Christianising’ the ‘natives’.

Schomburgk ended his book actually longing-for the full return (to Guiana’s interior) of “the worship of the true God in the interior of Guiana” complete with “hymns in praise of Him who is Almighty.”

But, 182 years after he’d argued that it was ‘heartless’, especially in what he described as “our enlightened age”, for the “Indians” to be considered “incapable of elevation”, original people everywhere continue to struggle, at different levels and phases, for atonement for past cruelty and indiscretions, including Native Genocide.

Schomburgk argued: “It is unreasonable to expect that men, accustomed to roaming and unfettered life, and unacquainted with our artificial wants, should at once abandon their wandering habits, and adopt a mode of living diametrically opposite to their long-established customs, and who but too frequently, where they have been brought into contact with civilisation, have not partaken of its blessings, but merely felt its curse.”

And he went on to say, “The obligations of moral duty, and for obvious reasons, sound policy, ought to direct those who profit by the soil to which the Indians have an undisputable right, to contribute in some degree to their religious and moral instruction. But if it is to be attempted to palliate the neglect which they have received, by the assertion that the capacities and capabilities of the Aborigines render them insensible to improvement, I at once, as a contradiction to this error, adduce to the example of the three natives who accompanied me in 1839 to England…”

The German explorer, backed by Britain, had actually brought three ‘Indians’, from different Guiana tribes, to England for nine months, where — he also admitted — they remained true to their ways most times, never mind their demonstrated ability to adapt to anything they chose to – except living in Europe.

Original people in Guiana and neighboring Amazonian states coexisted with the environment and built levels of sustainability that guaranteed survival over centuries, until the Europeans arrived.

But their surviving descendants are still resisting sometimes irresistible temptations to culturally adapt by adopting the invasive and imposed cultures that came with and after Columbus.

Arriving Europeans, Africans, Indians, Chinese and Portuguese, for example, all met descendants of Guiana’s original inhabitants, who kept their distance over decades and centuries and preserved their basic ways of life.

Today’s Caribbean people of indigenous descent have ensured survival of some ways of life in the face of centuries of treatment as lesser people by those taught that original people have smaller brains and therefore need civilising, educating and gradually assimilating into the dominant European societal ways of life.

Assimilation schemes in Australia and Canada included (respectively, but disrespectfully) ‘giving’ Aboriginal (or ‘Native’) children to European settler families and ‘integrating’ them through ‘residential schools’ where many suffered long lives of abuse leading to death and burial in unmarked graves.

First People’s historical refusal to bow to or willfully accept the imposed or colonially-introduced assimilation practices lent to their long historical ‘isolation’ in interior or specified coastal regions, where their lands had been taken and converted to ‘reservations’ under control of those out to erase their civilisations, seriously endangering the continent’s Maya, Aztec and Inca civilisations that were brought close to extinction.

Caribbean First People put up fierce and stiff resistance — even though overwhelmed by deadlier weapons and through use of deliberately diseased blankets — to efforts to drive them away from their lands to create ‘Latin America’.

Same in the ‘West Indian’ island-chain north of Guiana, where the original people also resisted after their friendship was responded to with use of force and bribery to wipe-them-out and takeover their islands.

The colonially-implanted concept of ‘wild Caribs’ and ‘peaceful Arawaks’ taught in colonial West Indian schools over centuries that also included distasteful tinges of ‘cannibalism’, have been gradually done-away with, as Caribbean historians rewrite and better present more truthful accounts of the region’s history and the roles played by its First People before becoming victims of the Native Genocide that cleared the way for introduction of Slavery and Indentureship.

The region’s original people and their civilisations were ruined and routed by the European invaders in the shortest relative period, their numbers reduced from millions to hundreds in just a few decades, their stories only now emerging in smaller Caribbean islands, mainly through accidental excavation of native Amerindian burial grounds.

But the causes and plights of indigenous people worldwide have, in the past two decades, received more essential international support, including at the United Nations (UN) and regionally through activist and representative entities like the Caribbean Organisation of Indigenous People (COIP).

The COIP emerged from the first Caribbean Conference of Indigenous people hosted in St. Vincent & The Grenadines, attended by Maya and Garifuna delegations from Belize, as well as delegations from Dominica, Guyana and host county St. Vincent & The Grenadines – and recently it met virtually in 2020 and 2021, with annual plans also in place for 2022.

But, more than respect for their land and human rights, the first inhabitants of The Americas and the Caribbean’s long island chain deserve, most of all, their born-rights as equal human beings wherever they are, all the time.

Indeed, there should have been no need to have to legislate and provide for constitutional protection for First People, but insatiable colonial greed caused the embedded imperfections that governments worldwide are today being called-upon to tackle and redress, more quickly.