The Relationship between the Caribs of Trinidad and Dominica

Santa Rosa Carib Community

The Relationship of the Caribs of Arima with the Caribs of Dominica, 1992-1997

Maximilian C. Forte, 1999, 2001, 2006

Upon entering the Santa Rosa Carib Community Centre one is faced with walls and a small stage adorned with various Amerindian artifacts. Some of these pertain to Trinidad's Caribs. Others, however, serve as traces of encounters and exchanges between the Arima Caribs and their counterparts in the Carib Territory of Dominica. While modern day relations go as far back as 1968, the most important linkages and connections were forged in an intense five year period, from 1992 to 1997.

Those who know Dominica's Carib Territory will be familiar with the name of one of the six key hamlets, that being Salybia. Oddly enough, on the northeast coast of Trinidad, a region that looks like Dominica's Carib zone, there is a town that is called Salibia. According to various sources, this town in Trinidad was the site of a settlement of Dominican or Vincentian Caribs established toward the end of the 1700s by the last Spanish governor of Trinidad, José María Chacón. According to Arie Boomert, an archaeologist, in his 1982 article in the Trinidad Naturalist (37-38): “Throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries Amerindian groups from the mainland and Lesser Antilles went to live in Trinidad, with or without consent of the government. In 1786 Governor Chacón granted some land to a group of Kalinago (Island Carib) from St. Vincent. They settled in the Salibia area of north east Trinidad. Most of them returned home in 1795 but other island Caribs came to Trinidad after a volcano eruption had destroyed their settlements in St. Vincent in the early nineteenth century. They were granted land near the Arima mission”. Also, according to Marie Therese Rétout, these were Black Caribs and they stayed in Salibia until 1795.

More recently, when speaking to the daughter of the late Queen Edith Martinez, Norma Stephens, she showed me a photograph of one of Dominica's Carib chiefs (Mas Clem Frederick) and told me that he had visited Trinidad on a number of occasions, back in the 1960s, before there was any formally organized and registered "Santa Rosa Carib Community." According to the daughter of the late Queen Edith Martinez, he had developed a simple friendship with her mother and even toyed with the idea of purchasing land in Trinidad on which to settle. When I visited the Dominica Carib Territory in September of 1998, I accidentally ran into Mas Clem and told him that I had seen his photo in Trinidad. He confirmed that he had been there and had attended the Santa Rosa Festival when Edith Martinez was Queen. This was a personal relationship, not one deliberately fostered between organizations. It is also one of those older stories that many would not pay attention to and it risks passing into oblivion. Indeed, very few who know either Mas Clem in Dominica or the late Queen in Trinidad, know of this friendship.

However, it is really with the advent of the Santa Rosa Carib Community's membership in the Caribbean Organization of Indigenous People (in 1992) that relations became more formalized and regularized. The impetus toward greater and more formal contact got underway in November of 1991, when Caribs from across the Caribbean met, along with hundred of Amerindian organizations from across the Americas, in Ottawa, Canada, for a congress hosted by the Assembly of First Nations of Canada, and sponsored in part by the World Council of Indigenous Peoples. The Carib President, Ricardo Bharath, and the Youth Representative, Suzan Campo, traveled to Ottawa and met with their Dominica Carib counterparts, Chief Irvince Auguiste and Sylvanie Burton. Next came CARIFESTA in 1992, 1995, and 2006, all three held in Trinidad, which featured delegations of Amerindians from across the Caribbean being hosted in Arima. These proved to be momentous events for the Carib Community in Arima. More visits from Dominica Caribs came in 1993, 1996 and 1997. The Youth Representative herself spent a year in Saskatchewan, Canada, studying on a scholarship at a Federated Indian College along with other Caribbean Amerindian scholarship recipients, in the 1992-1993 academic year, among whom were students from Dominica. This was a special scholarship, coming at the time of the Columbian Quincentenary. The Youth Representative also visited the Dominica Carib Territory.

The artifacts in the Carib Centre thus represent traces of relationships. Memories by the key participants called up names of Dominica Caribs. Events, their brochures and programs, and newspaper coverage further filled in the picture. All of these provided me with the necessary leads to be able to follow up sources in both Ottawa and Dominica, both of which I did in June and September of 1998 respectively in order to make my ethnographic research both more historical (investigating relationships back in time), more personal (meeting people who knew Trinidad Caribs or had been to Arima), and more multi-sited (following connections and processes through space).

TRACES OF DOMINICA'S CARIBS IN THE SANTA ROSA CARIB COMMUNITY CENTRE
At left: a miniature canoe brought as a gift by a Dominica Carib delegation, and installed in an Amerindian altar within the Carib Centre. Centre: a carved calabash from the Dominica Caribs. At right: baskets woven by Dominica Caribs during a cultural exchange visit when they shared their weaving skills with members of the Arima Carib community.

While in Dominica I met with several Caribs, seeking out those who I knew for a fact had been to Trinidad (armed in part with a list of names, addresses and phone numbers provided by the Carib President, Ricardo Bharath, who also made telephone calls in advance of my departure). After making new contacts, I was able to piece together a conservative estimate of how many individual Dominica Caribs had been to Trinidad and how many organized visits there had been. It seems that no less than 37 individuals had visited Trinidad on no less than 10 distinct occasions between 1992 and 1997. This is a remarkable figure, especially when we consider that the active core of the Arima Carib Community itself consists of no more than 30 individuals.

The Dominica Caribs' delegations included specialists in dance, weaving and painting, not to mention the crew from the Gli-Gli Carib Canoe that visited in May of 1997. A five-member team of Dominica Caribs, funded by the British Development Division and the Caribbean Association of Local Government Authorities, spent two weeks in Arima in October of 1997. The interests of this group included canoe making, weaving, women, and politics.

What I discovered in Dominica is that those who had visited Trinidad still had very strong memories of all those they met there in the Carib Community. Despite the passage of six years, in some cases, they could easily recall names of all the people I have been working with in Trinidad, even their children's names, even the President's non-Carib driver. Moreover, they seemed to have exceptionally strong emotional attachments to the people they met in Trinidad. Some claimed to have uncontrolled urges to pick up the phone, regardless of long distance costs (exorbitant as they are in the region), just to hear the voices of their friends in Trinidad. I was frankly quite overwhelmed by the outpouring of emotion that came out in interviews with my five key informants in Dominica. I was also fascinated by their detailed knowledge of even intimate events and issues internal to the Arima Carib Community. It was, in fact, in Dominica that I first encountered the strong view that the two communities should merge, that intermarriage should be promoted, and that population exchange should occur. There was, of course, the corresponding resentment against the visa restrictions put in place by Caribbean states, seen as especially unfair to the region's indigenous inhabitants who have had at least a 5,000 year history of inter-island movement and contact.

Perhaps one of the strongest expressions of affection came for former Dominica Carib Chief, Irvince Auguiste. In his view, the Arima Caribs are a source of hope and inspiration, given that they live as scattered individuals in a large urban environment (Arima is in fact almost twice the size of Roseau), without any lands of their own, and yet are able to preserve and maintain traditions some of which, he said, no longer exist in Dominica. Given all this, he felt that if Amerindian cultural traditions can continue in Arima, then, there is every reason to feel encouraged that they will continue in Dominica. There were, I must add, differing perceptions among those who had been to Trinidad of who had to benefit the most from cultural exchange, with those feeling that Trinidad's Caribs had more to learn from the Dominica Caribs outnumbering those who felt that either the reverse was true or that they had an equal amount to learn from each other. There is much more to be added here, but I must reserve it for elsewhere.

The focus on emotion here is greatly important, especially as I did not go to Dominica expecting this to be a central phenomenon in the relationship. My primary interests concerned strategic alliance building, racial consciousness, and political pragmatism as bases of this relationship. While all of these hold some limited merit, they do not account for the high level of personal sympathy that was expressed, in my view. The depth and extent of sharing and of mutual knowledge led me to the conclusion that it is not possible to properly study the Caribs of Trinidad without any reference to the Caribs of Dominica.

Back in the Carib Centre, one sees photographs of Chief Irvince Auguiste visiting in Arima; engraved calabashes from Dominica; baskets from Dominica, and their local replicas made as a result of classes held by one of the Dominica Carib visitors in Arima; small replicas of canoes, and a number of other items. To the anthropologist these are useful traces of behaviour, and are of interest in seeing how they have become incorporated either into religious ceremonies, or serving as a symbolic and artifactual reservoir surrounding members whenever they meet in the Carib Centre, encasing them in an Amerindian identity quite literally. To the Arima Caribs themselves, they are potent reminders of long-lost/new-found friendships, and of the enduring modern day distance that threatens to render their relationship a mere passage in history.

References:
Boomert, Arie. 1982. “Our Amerindian Heritage.” Trinidad Naturalist. 4 (4) Jul-Aug: 26-38, 60.

Rétout, Sr. Marie Thérèse, O.P. 1976. Parish Beat. Port of Spain, Trinidad: Inprint Caribbean Ltd.