Part IV Cultural Books Important for Teaching specialized vocabulary in Garifuna like dances and religion

Guide to Garífuna Language materials

by Wendy Griffin

Part IV. Cultural Texts which are Important for the Specialized Garifuna vocabulary

Irufamali: la doctrina esotérica Garifuna. By Salvador Suazo.  This is a book which various buyeis or Garifuna shaman helped him research on the finer points of Garifuna religion. Last year this was for sale by Libraria Guaymuras, so it should be possible to order through Libros Centroamericanos or Literatura de Vientos Tropicales. It has been for sale at www.garistore.com..

Griffin, Wendy and CEGAH (2005) Los Garifunas de Honduras. Includes Garifuna and Spanish vocabulary for medicinal plants, for animals which they hunted, foods, plants which they grew, dances, ceremonies, and all the crafts with photos of every craft. Most of the dances here can be seen in either Garifuna in Peril (mascaro, punta, abeimajani) , El Espiritu de Mi Mama (dugu, punta) both available at www.garifunainperil.com or in Tierra Negra (a chugu) a Telesur version of Causa Justa which is available on youtube. Both in this book and on Ayó there are photos of Garifunas using the African origin instrument “claves” (two round pieces of wood struck together). This book was donated to all the Garifuna schools in Colon, Honduras in class sets to help support bilingual intercultural education. In most schools it fared no better than the PRONEEAAH materials and was kept in storage rather than used in classes. It was used as a teacher resource book for the Garifuna Culture class which was part of the training program for Garifunas who wanted diplomas as bilingual intercultural education teachers.  The topics studied in this book are the topics required to be taught by ILO Convention 169 in intercultural education classes—rights, history (including recovering their history before the Europeans came to both the Americas and Africa), religion, the traditional language and the national language,  traditional technology like traditional medicine, cooking/food processing, agriculture and its soil and water preservation techniques, fishing and hunting and techniques for preventing extinction of these species, collection activities in forest and by the shore, and crafts.

Flores, David (2003) La Evolución Historica de la Danza folklorica Hondureña. TegucigalpaÑ IHER. This includes Wendy Griffin’s study of Garifuna dances in Trujillo and has different photos of these dances than the ones in Los Garifunas de Honduras. It also includes the ceremonies and music and dance of the Miskitos, the Black Bay Islanders, (these two also by Wendy Griffin) and Ladinos so that these other Afro.Honduran groups use of masks, special costumes, musical instruments, beliefs in ancestor spririts  can be compared to those of the Garifunas.

Avila, Tomas Alberto (2009) Black Carib-Garifuna. This text includes descriptions of all of the dances and most of the music by ethnomusicologists working in Belize.  There are differences between Garifuna music and dances even ceremonial music between the Spanish speaking Garifuna ceremonies recorded by Wendy Griffin in Honduras and the Belizean ceremonies and music described in this book and in Dorothy Franzone’s Ph. D. thesis. This book also includes the steps and processes by which the Belizean Garifunas documented the Garifuna dances and songs and submitted them to UNESCO to be declared a UNESCO World Intangible Heritage. The video which they submitted to UNESCO is Garifuna Heritage, currently out of stock at www.garistore.com.

Johnson, Paul (2007) Diaspora Conversions: Black Carib Religion and the Recovery of Africa.  University of California Press. This has a very good description of a dugu ceremony in Honduras and has descriptions of Garifuna ceremonies in New York. There are tremendous differences between these ceremonies in New York and how they are done in Trujillo as described in Wendy Griffin’s book. To see a video of a mock dugu see Ali Allié’s El Espiritu de Mi Mama which is in Spanish with English subtitles, which also shows the consultation with the buyei to know which ceremony to do and dancing punta at a wake.

Lopez Garcia, Victor Virgilio has a number of cultural texts which include crafts, foods, parts of religious ceremonies, etc. He is a retired Garifuna teacher from Tournabe, Tela, Honduras.  His books are found under his name in WorldCat. He currently has two books for sale on www.garistore.com. His study of Garifuna food, and Wendy Griffin’s study of Black Bay Islander and Miskito food, and Wendy and Adalid’s studies of Pech food are reproduced in Honduran anthropologist Adalid Martinez’s textbook (2012) Antropología Alimenticia for an UPN class by the same name.

Armando Crisanto Melendez (2004) El Garifuna y Su Folklore.  He also has another book called something like El Enojo de las Sonajas which is available from www.libreroonline.com. He is the above mentioned Director of the Balet Nacional Folklórico Garifuna.

These also might be important.

Garifuna: SA12 Human Relations Area Files, New Haven, Conn. Only one of these authors Joseph Palacio is a Garifuna. He is a Garifuna anthropologist from Belize who teaches with UWI,  Belize. He is also the author of Garifuna Nation which was available through Amazon.com.  This file includes a book by Gullick on the Caribs of St.Vincent which is scarce in the US.

Island Carib: ST14 Series eHRAF World Cultures Middle American and the Caribbean.

Celestino Green and Santos Centeno are two other published Honduran Garifuna authors of multiple books each and members of the Red de Historiadores Locales y Regionales de Honduras, but their books that I have seen were not about culture, but rather history.

There are a number of famous ethnographic and ethnohistorical studies of the Garifunas, but the ones not mentioned here record almost nothing in the Garifuna language.

The modern Garifunas say the Garifunas of the past were “Garifunas de hacha y azadon” (Garifunas of axe and of hoe).  This is supported by the Yale Peabody Museum’s collection of 161  pre-Columbian artifacts from St. Vincent which include stone axes and stone and seashell hoes. Their pre-Columbian collection also includes fish hooks and sinkers for nets from the pre-Columbian period among the Caribbean Arawak. There is a stone statue of the god of Bitter Yuca, which the caption says is carrying a wooden box on its head, but it is clearly a fañine, the round Garifuna basket with an indentation for the head  still used for carrying food such as during the dugu ceremony as shown in Los Garifunas de Honduras. This archaeological collection can be seen online.

The Field Museum of Chicago also has a collection from the Caribs and Arawaks of the Northern South America coast.  One of the relics is a green stone paddle about one-quarter actual size of a paddle, in the same form of Garifuna paddles today. It was probably used as a sign of authority.  This use is probably remembered in the practice of the Garifuna men to have the first man rest his hand on a canoe paddle while singing arumajani, the songs of older men for the ancestors without drums. They also have the large belaire basket sifters for making cassava bread which are identical to the ones the Garífunas use and make today.

The best collections of modern Garifuna crafts in the US are at the Garifuna Museum in Los Angeles and the Burke Museum, University of Washington. Those at the Burke Museum can be seen on the Internet.