Honduran Ethnic Groups. Wikipedia and Video Resources Related to Their Modern Health Issues

Honduran Ethnic Groups and Some Video Resources to learn About Them and Their Modern Health Issues

Prepared by Wendy Griffin (2014)

The current Honduran government recognizes the following ethnic groups in Honduras. See the website of SEDINAFROH (Secretary of the Development of Indians and Afro-Honduras) for the Honduran government’s official account of these Indian and Afro-Honduran groups. (This oficial government website is now down and the Ministry was downgraded to a Directorate within the Ministry of Social Inclusión under Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernandez).

Mesoamerican Indians (corn based diet, sedentary villages)

Maya Chorti Indians  (Wikipedia article Ch’orti’ people)

Lenca Indians (Wikipedia article Lenca people)

Nahua or Nahoa Indians  (Wikipedia article Pipil)

Tropical Forest or Rainforest Indians  (usually root crops based like yuca/manioc, hunting and fishing important)

Pech Indians (Wikipedia article Pech people)

Jicaque Indians and Tolupan Indians (Wikipedia Tolupan Indians)

Miskito Indians (Wikipedia article Miskito people) This mentions decompresion sickness as a health problem.

Tawahka Indians (Wikipedia article Sumo people)  this mentions the issue of mining contamination as affecting health of the Mayagna of Nicaragua.

Garifunas-There is a Wikipedia article, also see the article Garífuna Immigrants Invisible by Wendy Griffin on the Garifuna in Peril website www.garifunainperil.com   go to about and Garifunas, and there is the pdf Garifuna Immigrants Invisible for free which can be downloaded to learn about modern Garifunas. This –pdf includes many of the US Garifuna websites. See also the book Black Caribs-Garifunas available from Amazon.com by Tomas Alberto Avila, a Garifuna living in Rhode island.

In Honduras There are also Black English speakers who migrated to Honduras particularly during the 19th century after freedom came to nearby English islands like Jamaica and Gran Cayman, and also to Belize.  There is no good Wikipedia article on Black English speakers in Honduras. See the following book by Wendy Griffin available free online.

Griffin,Wendy (2004) The History and Culture of the Bay Islanders and North Coast English speakers

.s114101627.onlinehome.us/files/Isleno.pdf

To see the history of the Indians before the Independence of Honduras in 1821 see:

Griffin, Wendy (1994) The History of the Indians of Northeastern Honduras: Prehistory to 1820: Contact, change, and resistance Across the Mesoamerican-Tropical Forest Tribe Cultural Fronteir www.books.google.com/.../The_History_of _Indians_of_Northeaste.html?id.

The English version  which was written two years after the Spanish version is significantly different. It talks about the techniques of Indian resistance in all the different periods. There is a fairly good description of how different sources of information like linguistics, modern ethnography, archaeology, and historical documents are used to write ethnohistory and some limitations or problems of each. Although this book in English and the two volumes in Spanish say the history of the Indians, they were among the first books in Honduras to document the Blacks in the Spanish controlled parts of Honduras from the rebellions in the gold mining areas to the infantería de pardos y mulatos which were used to control the Indians in the mines and in the Indian towns and in the missions. 

The Ethnic Groups which live in the Rainforest in the Mosquitia section of Northeastern Honduras include

The Miskitos, the Tawahkas, the Garifunas and the Pech Indians. 91% of the Honduran Mosquitia is made of up people who come from ethnic groups that speak languages other than Spanish and who descended from rainforest Indians. The largest protected área in the Honduran Mosquitia is the Rio Platano Biosphere.  The Rio Platano Biosphere borders on the Tawahka Asagni Biosphere. These together with the Patuca National park form the Mesoamerican Biological Corredor (formerly the Path of the Panther) which links to the Bosawas Reserve in Nicaragua.

This área is under heavy attack for deforestation.  The contrast between the video “Discover the Rio Platano Biosphere in Search of Ciudad blanca”  available on Youtube in Spanish and in English versions, and filmed in 2000 with its heavy foliage and the video “Paradise in Peril” filmed in 2011 and significant áreas clear cut for cattle is startling, and the reports of Pech Indians and the Honduran newspaper la Prensa, the problems have gotten even worse over the last three years since Paradaise in Peril was filmed. The Commissioner of the Rio Platano Biosphere during Honduran President Pepe Lobo’s adminsitration was his son Jorge Lobo, who is now head of Cattle Ranching and Agriculture under Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernandez.

1.Background on the video “Discover the Rio Platano biosphere in Search of Ciudad Blanca” and its relation to health practices of the Garifunas.

This movie features a Garifuna guide Roberto Marin who tells about guifity, the traditional Garifuna healing wine with herbs to clean the blood, he shows medicinal plants in the rainforest, he talks about the problems in the Biosphere and is shown when they find people taking out jaguar pelts, killing peccaries, talking to school kids in Biosphere schools about the need to protect the Rio Platano Biosphere, showshim going up to huaqueros who are digging up artifacts near a petroglyph, and particularly dramatic, he talks about donations of money arrive in Honduras to protect the Rio Platano Biosphere, but the Biosphere is the same, there is no protection. The video also has short interviews with Osvaldo Munguia, the executive director of MOPAWI the environmental and development NGO which works in the Mosquitia, Wendy Griffin, Paul House the ethnobotanist who worked at the UNAH for more than 10 years, other Honduran environmentalists, the son of Jesus Aguilar Paz, people who sell Honduran archaeological pieces on the illegal art market, and the nephew of Theodore Morde.  Although there is a version in 4 parts for free on Youtube in English and in one part in Spanish, if you buy the DVD from the makers of the film it comes with about 15 minute extra of archaeological pieces in private Honduran collections from the Northeastern Honduran area where the Ciudad Blanca is. It is available with Spanish or English soundtrack. The website associated with this video is www.roatanet.com/ciudadblanca.   For biggest effect, see this video which shows heavy vegetation in 2000 and then see Paradise in Peril on Vimeo.com which shows the destruction of the Rio Platano Biosphere in 2011.

 The Pech Indians are rainforest Indians who now primarily live in the department of Olancho, but also in the Rio Platano Biosphere in Eastern Honduras. They are mostly famous for telling the legend of the Ciudad Blanca or White City, a large archaeological ruin in NE Honduras. A video about the area where the Ciudad Blanca ruin is  and its archaeology featuring Wendy Griffin can be seen on Youtube. Search Ciudad Blanca Honduras and is also in the University of Pittsburgh library. Wikipedia in English has a good Ciudad Blanca article. This ruin has been the subject of specials by A and E network and National Geographic and the new book Jungeland.by Wall Street Journal Editor Chris Stewart.

The drastic loss of rainforest in this area between the Youtube video shot in 2000 and the Paradise in Peril video shot in 2011 is alarming and is confirmed by Pech residents in this area. The book with the Ciudad Blanca legend and the ethnohistory of the area is in “Dioeses, Heroes y Hombres en el Universo Mitico Pech” (Gods, Heros, and Men in the Pech Mythical Universe)  is in  the University of Pittsburgh library, as are the books Los Pech de Honduras (The Pech of Honduras) , los Garifunas de Honduras (the Garifunas of Honduras) and  La Historia de los indigenas de la Zona Nororiental de Honduras tomo I y II (The History of the Indians of Northeastern Honduras Vol.I and II)by Pittsburgh native Wendy Griffin and are available through Interlibrary loan. Many of these books are also at the Burke Museum, University of Washington.. It is in the collections of the University of Pittsburgh, Tulane, IHAH, the UPN,  and the Burke Museum, University of Washington. It was originally for sale on the Internet.

2. Videos Related to health practices by Garifunas-- Garifuna in Peril movie and El Espiritu de Mi Mama

Garifuna in Peril is Ali Alie’s second film about the Garifuna.  The first film “El Espiritu de Mi Mama” (The Spirit of My Mother) released in 1999 in Spanish with English subtitles was about a Garifuna woman in Los Angeles bothered by dreams of her mother who goes home to the Honduran North Coast to see if her mother needs a traditional Garifuna ceremony.  The film shows her consulting a buyei or Garifuna religious leader about the dreams, and preparing for the ceremonies of the bath of a soul and the Garifuna’s largest ceremony for ancestors a dugu, which consists for three days and two nights of dancing and singing and drumming, plus food is offered to the ancestors on the last day.

  This film was favorably received by Garifunas who sold it on the Internet on a Garifuna e-commerce store (www.garinet.com) and by video distributors like Blockbuster Video and Amazon.com. It is still available on Amazon.com and is sold directly on the Garifuna in Peril website for $9 plus 4 dollars for shipping and Paypalfees. When I reviewed the film  for the Honduran English language newspaper Honduras This Week Online in 2002, I recommended it to people interested in a video showing Garifuna dances, drumming and traditional religious ceremonies including the most important one dugu, as well as the striking contrast between the Garifuna’s homeland in Honduras and the grafitti covered streets of Los Angeles where they have ended up in search of better economic opportunities (www.marrder.com/htw/2002jul/cultural/htm).. I know some US universities that teach about Afro-Latinos and Afro-Caribbeans like Tulane University of New Orleans have bought the film. I am also recommending this movie for people interested in the question of treating  traditional people in the US medical systems when they often have different views about how illness is caused and cured. Gubida or ancestor spirits do affect Garifunas in the US, as the filmshows, and as a Garifuna friend’s granddaughter was in the hospital in New York for 3 weeks until they found out it was gubida illness and took her out of the hospital.

The Garifuna in Peril movie is now available for sale as a DVD. The Garifuna in Peril movie has won three prizes at Film Festivals in the US in 2013 (Boston, Houston, and Tuscon, Arizona and also  in Italy.)  It has been shown in many places in the  US, also in  Canada, Central America (Belize, Honduras, Guatemala),  South America, Africa and Europe (Berlin, Cannes, Italy, London). This movie models good behavior in relations to AIDS, a visit to a buyei to consult about a health problem, many Garifuna songs and dances. See www.garifunainperil.com to order El Espiritu de Mi mama, Garifuna in Peril, also two videos made by Belizean Garifunas. Someone asked me about the issue of Sex Tourism, which brings to mind the issues of teen pregnancy, AIDS, and people being upset about outside men messing with their women.  It is interesting that three out of four videos made by the Garifunas on this site touch on these themes.

10.  Videos by the Comite de emergengia Garifuna from Witness.com The problems of environmental destruction and its affects on the drinking supply and crops and the problems of hurricanes as it affects people.

Honduran Garifunas, Hurricane Mitch, and Organizing to Recover from Disasters--Some new Honduran Garifuna NGO’s appeared after Hurricane Mitch in 1998.  Hurricane Mitch which was a category 5 hurricane and one of the worst in the 20^th century stalled for 3 days in front of the Garifuna community of Limon, Department of Colon.  More than 16 Garifuna communities are located in Colon, including very traditional communities where most people still farmed and houses often had palm frond roofs. In the Garifuna farming community of Barranco, about 11 km from Trujillo beside the Guaymoreto Lagoon, most of the houses also had walls of cohune palm leaves, locally called “manaca”. With Mitch it rained around 23 inches a day for more than 3 days and continued raining for most of a week with high winds.  The eye of the hurricane passed over Barranco. The destruction was devastating. Only one house was left habitable in Barranco.  In Trujillo, 13 Garifuna houses were destroyed and many more lost roofs.  In nearby Barra de Aguan and Santa Rosa de Aguan, over 400 acres of land was lost due to the sea swallowing two blocks of houses and the Aguan River changing course and joining the lagoon, which caused 39 deaths of people, and widen to eat another block of houses and of over 3,00 head of Garifuna cattle. 75% of the houses were destroyed, even cement houses, because Dole containers fromOlanchito when the flood waters of the Aguan River lifted themup,they acted as battering rams against houses and against bridges taking out for example the bridge at Bonito Oriental. Other Garifuna communities were also affected like Limon where wooden houses were lifted up off their foundations (Griffin and CEGAH, 2005)

Even more critical was the agricultural damage.  The Garifunas primarily grow root crops like manioc or yuca, sweet potato (camote),  and yams and banana like plants (guineos, chatas, platanos), which rotted in the ground in the rain and the part of the plant needed to replant also rotted.  There was a serious possibility of long term hunger in the Garifuna communities of the Department of Colon.  Yet when the Garifuna leaders of Trujillo asked the Honduran government for help for the Garifunas of Colon, they said, “We are busy in the South and Tegucigalpa. We can not help you.  Find your own help.”  Other indigenous leaders of other groups like the Miskito Indians were told the same.  So the Garifuna Emergency Committee of Honduras (CEGAH) was formed by the Garifunas of Trujillo to get help for stricken villages.  They had to rent canoes to get food out to isolated villages.  They hiked one and hour into the mountains to find yuca stocks needed for planting that had not rotted and then had to carry them out of the mountains again. They were able to raise enough money to rebuild 13 houses in Trujillo, but to this day in 2013 there has been no Honduran government project to rebuild the community of Baranco, even though the nearby Pech Indian villages of Silin and Moradel have had 3 housing projects since Mitch. In Griffin and CEGAH, 2005 and in many Honduras This Week Online articles (http://www.marrder.com/htw)  there are stories of Hurricane Mitch devastation and rebuilding after Hurricane Mitch from all over Honduras. Hondurans in New York, including Garifunas, and Connecticut also formed organizations, such as SHANY (Sociedad de Hondureños Activos en Nueva York) to raise money and collect donations for the people affected by Hurricane Mitch. The Brooklyn, New York NGO GROOTS was active in helping the Garifunas recover after Nitch.

Southern Honduran towns like Choluteca and the relocated village of Orogüina had new houses within a year of Mitch.  It took years to get housing projects for the devastated Garifuna communities of Barra de Aguan and Santa Rosa de Aguan which had to be relocated. The housing projects required the Garifunas buy land to build the new houses and donate some of their agricultural land for houses for Ladinos from a nearby community of Vuelta Grande, whom the Garifunas considered land invaders. Funders required a road be put in to move the housing materials to the new location of Santa Rosa de Aguan.  The Honduran government said, We will provide the machinery, but the Garifunas have to provide 100 barrels of gasoline for the machinery.  These Garifunas had lost everything.  They had been poor before they lost everything. The Comite de Emergencia Garifuna bought land, and helped pay for materials. Garifunas in the US helped. The housing project finally had to be built without a bridge ever being built over the river that crossed the road, and the Garifunas had to ferry the materials over the river to rebuild Santa Rosa de Aguan. There was also problems the Catholic Relief Services gave funding to a Tocoa  NGO to supervise the rebuilding, and they did not finish building,they took the Garifuna’s land titles which they had paid for personally and held the land titles hostage and would not return until the Garifunas finished paying aobu $40,000 or $50,000 per each house, even though the women did all the labor,and they finished the hosues with help from their families and the Comiteite helped buy some of the sand,etc. and land in La Planada to rebuild Santa rosa de Aguan. 

With Witness, a NGO in New York the partners with people and organizations to use videos for advocacy, the Garifunas of CEGAH and an American-Trinidadian advisor made two videos, one about Hurricane Mitch and Santa Rosa de Aguan through the experiences of Garifuna children  When the River Met the Sea (Cuando el Rio y el Mar Se Unieron)  and Lucha Garifuna (Garifuna Holding Ground) about an illegal highway through Garifuna lands from Ciriboya, Iriona to Sico, Colon so that it reached the Rio Platano Biosphere above the USAID drinking water project for 14 communities, including 4 large Garifuna communities in Colon.

 Under Honduran laws, the catchment basin for a water project is a protected area, and the highway clearly went through cropland where the Garifunas currently had crops with no purchase of the land. Honduran law requires that a highway have a construction permit from the municiapality  which was turned down by the Garifuna dominated municipality of Iriona, and they requested the people who wanted to build the highway use the terraplen, a flat area of access instead of through the mountains above the water project. Honduran law also requires an approved environmental impact statement from SERNA, which this highway did not have. The highway was built with government equipment by Juan Gomez, a Ladino who has a construction company in Colon which builds many roads and bridges that wash out. For his part in keeping on his hacienda the bridge for Santa Rosa de Aguan and for building the illegal highway, he was awarded the governorship of Colon by the following administration.   Lucha Garifuna won first place in a Latin American Environmental Video Festival at Tulane University. These videos in either English or Spanish are available from Witness (www.witness.org). It costs $20 for one DVD with both the videos together. There are shipping charges.  It is better to call them rather than to email, as they often do not answer the email on the website. The increased drug trafficking going through this area and the illegal logging of hardwoods in the Rio Platano Biosphere as well as other issues like stealing archaeological artifacts from the Ciudad blanca area are all related to this illegal highway which 10 years after the film was made, still remains open.

On www.Vimeo.com there are 159 videos about Garifunas, including one “ Comite de Emergencia Garifuna “ (CEGAH).     www.vimeo.com/242885331  This video on Vimeo about the Comite de Emergencia Garifuna by the Equator Initiative of UNDP  is narrated by the current executive Director CEGAH Nilda Gotay and tells about their work while showing photos of their work. The video was commissioned by the Equator initiative of UNDP. The Garifunas of CEGAH were one of 24 semi-finalists for the Equator Prize in the whole world for combining development projects while at the same time protecting the environment.  They were invited to speak at the COP-7 conference in Kuala Lumpur Malaysia and speak about their work when they were named semi-finalists. The Comite de Emergencia is also the co-author of my book Los Garifunas de Honduras.  There were numerous articles in Honduras This Week about the Garifuna Emergency Committee where I volunteered for about 7 years including one specifically on Lucha Garifuna and at least 4 on the problems of rebuilding Santa Rosa de Aguan. Most of the articles I did for Honduras this Week for the 1999-2000 time period were articles on one year after hurricane Mitch stories, including southern Honduras, the Chorti area, the Pech area, Roatan and Guanaja in the Bay Islands, the Mosquitia (Puerto lempira, Brus Laguna,Tawahka area) and everywhere on the North Coast including visiting every agency that controlled protected areas on the North Coast.

11. Revolutionary medicine: the Video on the First Garifuna hospital

In health there are over 34 Garifuna doctors and dozens of Garifuna nurses working in Honduras.  One Garifuna doctor gained fame in the US because he had worked hard to open the first Garifuna hospital in the remote area of Iriona, Colon where there are thousands of traditional Garifunas as well as a number of Ladino communities. This hospital was open during Manuel Zelaya’s presidency, but after the coup was threatened to be shut down. There is a link to the hospital on BeingGarifuna.com.  There is now a movie about the hospital made by some Canadian students called Revolutionary Medicine: The First Garifuna Hospital. They have a Facebook page which is the easiest way to contact them about trying to get a copy of the video. Writing to their emails does not work. This film was shown at the UW Medical School in 2013 and at the Society for Applied Anthropology conference in 2014. University of Pittsburgh medical school students and Global Links in Pittsburgh are among the US organizations helping the hospital whose founder Luther Castillo is finishing a Master’s in Public Administration at Harvard through the Mason Program.

12. The Mormon Church’s video A Story of About the Garifunas on youtube,

The issue of Immigration of the Garifunas is also highlighted. Dozens of the Garifunas affected by plans to put in a charter city or model city in the Trujillo-Santa Fe area are actually Garifuna US citizens who after working 35-40 years in the US legally, usually beginning as sailors,  and then they retired to Honduras again to live on their pensions and social Security.

15.  Medios del Pueblo and RealNews.com  and UNAH Videos

Realnews.com has done a 2012 video on the militarization of the Mosquitia which includes photos of the Joint Task Force Bravo sign on the Caratasca lagoon, the Miskitos carrying their things on their backs and a spokeswoman saying, “The people are leaving almost voluntarily”, information on the Public Private memo to develop the Mosquitia which WikiLeaks released info on in 2009 and information on oil in the area,so it is a good complement to Danira Miralda’s book La Guerra de Baja Intensidad y los Pueblos originarios Parte I.   They also did a report on the Garifuna’s land situation in the Trujillo area in 2013.

MediosdelPueblo is doing a series of training workshops to produce videos and radio reports and have worked in the San Juan Tela area where the Garifunas are struggling with Jaime Rosenthal, in the Sulaco, Yoro area, in the Rio Blanco area where the Lencas have been protesting about the dam to be built there, and  worked with the Garifunas in Trujillo in 2013.. There is a mediosdelpueblo.com website.

The UNAH film crews filmed part of the Central American Linguists Conference which was in Tegucigalpa in August 2013There was a very interesting forum on bilingual intercultural education as part of the conference, where representatives of each ethnic group spoke which was very interesting and the Black English speaker teacher Diana Beneth was particularly upset that no one in the capital had heard of Black English speakers on the Bay islands since she arrived in the capital. The film crews videoed the craft display the Indians  had, but did not speak to  the Pech or the Garifunas or Tawahkas who had crafts for sale. 

Tierra negra, by Causa Justa, on Youtube  This is a segment of a Telesur Spanish language TV show on the issue of the Garifunas losing their land either due to mega-tourism projects or Model City projects. Very good.

Land Grabbing, a webinar available from the Presbyterian Church USA on the issues of Land Grabbing in Honduras in the Chaco area of South America and in Cameroon in Africa. Very good.

See Garistore.com and Garitv.com  for more examples of Garifuna videos.

See the video Negro by an Afro-Panamanian filmmaker on the delicate topic of being Black in Central America and the Caribbean. Includes interviews in Honduras. In these interviews the black people speak for themselves, this is not others analyzing the issue.

Some Examples of indigenous movies to consider.

Seeds of harvest from Third World newsreel on how US policies overseas are causing the unprecedented Latin American immigration to the US.

We Women Warriors (Tejiendo Sabiduria) How the drug wars and the FARC are catching Columbian Indians in between and like 39 tribes in columbia are being driven to the edge of extinction being caught in the middle. The Afro-Columbians are also being affected.

Many videos related to Rio Blanco and the Lenca Indians in Honduras on the COPINH website on Vimeo.com and on Youtube.

Some Garifuna videos on the OFRANEH blog www.ofraneh.wordpress.com

There is a good video on Vimeo about the issue of using agricultural crops for oil and giving credits when in fact this is killing people due to agrochemicals like 8,000 people with renal insufficiency in Nicaragua, it is destroying the rainforest and the fish, and displacing people and making them more vulnerable as far as food sufficiency.