Part 5: Much Has Been Done, But Is It Enough?

GUYANA’S Annual National Toshaos Council (NTC) conference, required by the Amerindian Act, gathers indigenous leaders from over 212 communities located across the nation’s vast interior.

It’s an annual platform that allows Amerindian leaders to engage Guyana government officials on developmental issues affecting their communities.

It’s also been hosted under a ‘Big Tent’ format, the objective being to facilitate better mutual understanding of respective perspectives and generation of ideas to develop common plans and platforms.

Guyana’s NTC gathering takes place alongside similar but separate efforts by indigenous entities and representatives facing representation issues across the Caribbean, in like and different ways, in different territories, whether continental or islands.

Distinct indigenous groups also exist in Belize, Dominica, Grenada, St. Vincent & The Grenadines, Suriname and Trinidad & Tobago and each island in the chain between Jamaica and Trinidad is able to trace its original roots to their earliest known beginnings.

Likewise, Cuba and Hispaniola, as well as the remaining European colonies in the Caribbean: the French and Dutch ‘Overseas Departments’ and ‘Antilles’, respectively.

Of late, much has been done by governments Belize, Dominica, Grenada, Guyana, Jamaica, Suriname and Trinidad & Tobago — CARICOM member-states with the most active groups and entities representing Indigenous people and regional entities — to give assurances their respective indigenous people will not easily be forgotten.

In Dominica, where a colonially-assigned ‘Carib Territory’ officially exists, there’s been much progress in terms of appreciating the indigenous heritage and culture: the current Minister for Kalinago Affairs, elected MP Cozier Frederick, refuses to use the word ‘Carib’, insisting on Kalinago — the original indigenous name; and he also de-emphasises using the island’s colonially-christened name ‘Dominica’, instead opting for the original indigenous name ‘Waitikubuli’.

Dominica’s Kalinago, St. Vincent’s Garifuna, Belize’s Maya and Garifuna and the indigenous Santa Rosa communities in Trinidad & Tobago and their counterparts in Suriname, all work better together today than yesteryear.

During Slavery, the indigenous in some Caribbean territories entered into alliances with rebel African Freedom Fighters, as in the case of the Kalinago and Garifuna in the smaller Windward Islands, including Barbados.

Today, their descendants have ongoing historical and contemporary developmental issues and challenges still to be addressed by governments and the related communities.

Take land rights, which is not even everywhere.

In 1797, some 5,087 Garifuna, mainly from St. Vincent & The Grenadines and representing the majority of the population, were forcibly banished to Roatan Island (off Honduras), from whom those in Belize today have descended and whose roots have also extended over the two centuries to Guatemala and Nicaragua, numbering in hundreds of thousands.

The 50,000 Maya and Garifuna-descendant citizens of Belize comprise roughly 10 per cent of the population, but both have issues with the government — and between them — regarding ancestral land and inheritance rights.

Dominica has the longest history of an active indigenous community struggling to preserve itself among the islands, with government support — but here too, land titles have an interesting history.

Crispin Gregoire and Natalia Kanem point out in an article in September 1989 entitled ‘The Caribs of Dominica: Land Rights and Ethnic Consciousness’ that “the last survivors” of the Caribbean’s original inhabitants “live in Dominica and St. Vincent & The Grenadines, as well as in Guyana, Brazil and Surinam.”

They also note that Dominica and St. Vincent & The Grenadines have had historical land rights claims dating back to 1748, when, mainly due to the levels of resistance put-up by the indigenous people in those to territories, the British and French signed the Treaty of Aix-La-Chapelle, agreeing to not attack or try to occupy the two territories and to treat them as ‘neutral’.

But, as per usual, the French and British both violated the treaty, which fell apart after the British attacked in 1783.

The British would allocate 233 acres of land in St. Vincent & The Grenadines and 232 acres in Dominica for establishment of indigenous reserves and in 1903 expanded Dominica’s Carib Reserve to 3,700 acres (or two per cent of the island’s total land mass).

In 1930, a group of British marines invaded Dominica’s Carib Territory, deposed the Chief and stole the official land titles.

Nearly five decades later in 1978 — the year Dominica became independent – the UK government rejected the island’s plea to return the land titles for the Carib Reserve, leading to passage in the parliament (on November 29, 1978) of the Carib Reserve Act, giving control of the territory to the Caribs, who changed the name from ‘Carib Reserve’ to Carib Territory.

Successive Dominica governments have done much to give more attention to the nation’s Kalinago citizens, but Prime Minister Roosevelt Skerrit and his ruling Dominica Labour Party (DLP) have done more than most, especially in the past two decades, to bring pride to the Kalinago citizenry.

The Caribbean Organisation of Indigenous people (COIP) was established in St. Vincent & The Grenadines in 1987, when and where the first conference of the region’s indigenous people was attended by delegations from Belize, Dominica, Guyana and host nation St. Vincent & The Grenadines.

The COIP’s inaugural conference called for the 90s to be designated the Decade of The Indigenous People and in late 1993, following a recommendation by the World Conference on Human Rights, the United Nations General Assembly proclaimed 1995 to 2004 as the Decade of the World’s Indigenous People; and 1990-2000 was also designated Decade of the Rain Forest, also observed by indigenous people in Guyana’s Amazon region, as well as in Suriname and French Guiana (Cayenne).

But what’s happened in the last two decades to harness the information and common undertakings by stakeholders to follow common courses based on common experiences?

A lot has been done at national and regional levels to address the region’s indigenous people and communities’ concerns, but obviously not enough.

More can and needs to be done, but what?