Leland's Garifuna movies Two Parts of the Carib Indian/Garifuna History Part II

Leland’s Two Garifuna  Movies—Two Complementary Parts of Carib Indian/Garifuna History  Part II

By Wendy Griffin  3/27/2015

Filmmaker Andrea Leland, who currently divides her year between the US Virgin Islands in the Caribbean  and the San Francisco Bay Area in California, has done two Garifuna related films. Her first movie “Garifuna Journey” was about the formation of the Garifunas (Previously Black Caribs in English, Caribe Negro or Moreno in Spanish, Garinagu in the Garifuna language) on the Caribbean Island of St.Vincent (Yurumein), their exile to Honduras and spreading out to the rest of Central America. Tens of thousands of Garifunas eventually end up in US big cities like New York City, Los Angeles, Houston, Chicago, and Miami. Since the Caribbean Sea is named for the far ranging Carib Indians who harassed Arawak/Taino Island communities and later Spanish, French and English Island communities alike during the pre-Columbian and colonial periods, perhaps this inspired her to document in film these histories often unknown to Americans.

The fact that most US published textbooks about Latin America and the Caribbean begin with saying all the Indians in the Caribbean Island died out, which made it “necessary” to import African slaves, probably discourages most anthropologists, linguists, archaeologists, and historians for looking for the modern Taino/Arawak, and Carib Indians.  The Carib Indians have legal reserves on Dominica and St. Vincent, and have since 1992 (the year of the “Encounter of Two Worlds” controversy /500 years of Indian, Black and Popular Resistance throughout Latin America and the Caribbean) been organized together with their Central American Garifuna brethren in Belize and also with the Caribs of Trinidad and Tobago and those of Guyana. Yarumein House in New York City facilitates exchanges between New York Garifunas, like Belizean Garifuna singer, musician, filmmaker, and Garifuna language activist James Lovell and those on Yurumein (St. Vincent).

The Prime Minister of St. Vincent who appears in Leland’s Yurumein movie saying ,“Those War Criminals would be killed by an honest War Court”, has been arguing for Great Britain to pay reparations for the attempted genocide of the Caribs and Garifunas, part of a general controversy between Carmicon members and Great Britain being followed by The Miami Herald, the Garifuna activists and their electronic media. The topic of leaving living Caribbean Indians out also came out as part of the meetings leading up to the UN General Assembly on Indigenous Peoples in New York City in September 2014, which was organized by presentations by indigenous representatives of different parts of the World. The Carib Indians presented a formal petition to the UN General Secretary coordinating this assembly that instead of just saying North American and Latin American Indians, to please organize that section of the presentation as North American, Latin American and Caribbean Indians which was accepted according to the official websites about this World Conference on Indigenous Peoples

That World Conference was being held at the end of the Second UN Decade (2004-2014).  In January 2015 the UN Decade of Afro-Descent People began, a UN initiative requested by the Declaration at the end of the First World Summit of Afro-Descent Peoples in La Ceiba, Honduras and coordinated by the Garifuna organization ODECO. This UN Decade has not received the fanfare or funding of the UN Year of the Indigenous People (1993) or the Two Decades of Indigenous Peoples (1994-2014). 

Relationship World Conference on Indigenous Peoples and Funding for Cultural Programs

Although there is a lot of smoke and mirrors about UN Declarations, they do make available some funding, and the World Bank initiative EFA (Education for All) ends in 2015, so part of the purpose of the UN General Assembly on Indigenous Peoples in 2014 was to reflect on what are our funding and policy priorities now that EFA in ending in 2015.

 Through the EFA initiative the World Bank is funding, and organizing other bilateral donors to fund, bilingual intercultural education in a lot of places, including Honduras. This is to comply with ILO Convention 169 on the Human Rights of Indigenous and Tribal People of which about one third of the articles spell out what are guarantees or rights are for Bilingual Intercultural Education. Dominica is the only island in the Caribbean that has ratified ILO Convention 169 for its Karib Indians, while of the countries where Garifunas live,  Honduras has ratified ILO Convention 169.

Contested Indigenous Peoples Status of Garifunas in International Court Cases

Since its ratification by Honduras at ILO convention headquarters in Geneva, Switzerland in 1995, ILO Convention’s rights and funding had been being applied to the Honduran Garifunas. However, in the legal case of Triunfo de la Cruz Garifunas versus Honduras for which oral arguments by Garifunas were heard in the InterAmerican Human Rights Court in Costa Rica in May 2014,the Honduran government  in its written arguments in June 2014 claim the Garifunas are not indigenous and thus do not have rights under the UN Declaration of the Rights of Indigenous Peoples ( Commonly referred to as DRIP) provision for “free and informed consent”, the main legal doctrine the InterAmerican Human Rights Court is considering in this case.

UN Conventions for Indigenous peoples (And Not For Blacks) Another Form of Racism?

My book “Los Garifunas de Honduras: Cultura, Lucha y Derechos Bajo el Convenio 169 de la OIT” (The Garifunas of Honduras: Culture, Struggle, and rights under ILO Convention 169)  shows the Honduran Garifunas should be able to be protected under International Labor Organization (ILO) Convention 169 as either indigenous or tribal people under the ILO 169 Convention, but the legal requirements of DRIP to meet the legal requirement of being indigenous might be different than for ILO 169. 

Inquiring minds, including Mexican and Canadian Indians and Honduran Garifuna Celeo Alvarez Casildo,  the head of ODECO, ONECA/CABO (Organization of Central American blacks), and General Secretary of the First World Summit on Afro-Descent People and myself, raise interesting questions regarding the issue of ongoing racism against both Blacks and Indians in these declarations,  about why only indigenous peoples (as defined by White people informed by educational systems and legal systems that are known to be rife with racism) have rights and Afro-descent groups and mixed race people do not have rights under UN Declarations?  

What is Really happening Today with the World’s Indigenous Peoples?

The reports that led up to the UN General Assembly on Indigenous People were also not encouraging that the UN was doing much of anything to improve the administration of these Declaration of Human Rights, whose violations as included in the official UN reports included from murder, genocide, cultural destruction, displacement, and destruction of their habitats on down.

What are UN Organizations like the World Bank Doing About This?

The response of the World Bank to these criticisms was to recommending lowering social and environmental safeguards on their projects, a topic of hot debate at the March 2015 Society for Applied Anthropology annual conference in Pittsburgh, PA, whose members are more inclined to recommend strengthening the social and environmental safeguards required of World Bank loans and banks in which they hold equity positions in Third World countries like FICOHSA in Honduras. In general, World Bank projects, which are part of the UN system, are considered a major cause of destruction of indigenous people’s habitats and cultures, including looking the other way when these projects cause the actual death of people like Garifunas, Lencas, and Ladino peasants in  Honduras in the Tela, Lower Aguan/Trujillo/Limon area, Patuca III dam, and Rio Blanco, Intibuca conflicts or even causing genocide of whole cultures like the Ache of Paraguay.

What is the Relationship of Caribs in the Caribbean and Garifunas in Leland’s movies?

Andrea Leland’s new movie “Yarumein Homeland” is about two Diaspora groups going home to Saint Vincent or Yurumein for National Hero’s Day- a new Diaspora Carib Indian Dr. Cardin Gill who practices family medicine in Los Angeles and Honduran Garifunas or Black Caribs of the National Garifuna Folklore Ballet. The ancestors of the Central American and US Garifunas were exiled to Honduras in1797 from Yurumein or St.Vincent about 6 months after the 1796 death of Chief Satuye (Major in the French military or Supreme Chief Joseph Chatoyer to the French and the British who vied with each other and the Caribs for control of St. Vincent during the 1700’s) and the Carib Indian and Garifuna defeat in the Second Carib War against the British.

According to spiritual counselor Eckard Tolle in his book “The New Earth”  he says all of us in our lives have that active time when we are going out, but at the end of our lives, there is also a inward movement, a returning home, a gathering in. So Leland’s two Garifuna movies complement each other in the life of this ethnic group—the going out, the gathering in,the first movie the story of those who left and the second movie story of those who stayed.

The Relevance of this Story of Leaving St.Vincent in the Modern Garifuna Culture

The reactment of that arrival of the Garinagu ancestors to Honduras (12 April), to Belize (19 November), and to Guatemala are still known as Yurumein (St. Vincent) in Garifuna and as a result of Garifuna activism are now national holidays in those countries and 12 April also closes the officially decreed Garifuna American Month in New York City. This reenactment also forms part of the Garifuna dugu ancestor ceremony where a male child is dressed as a Wanaragua (The Dance of the Warriors) dancer who accompanies the ceremonial fishermen and the male and female children dressed in red, who arrive in 3 canoes, representing the arrival of the ancestors, the arrival of the blessings of provisions from the sea, and the beginning of the main part of the dugu ceremony which has been described in books like Diaspora Conversions, Garifuna Tomas Alberto Avila’s book Black Carib-Garifuna only available from Amazon.com,  and my book Los Garifunas de Honduras.

The Relationship of the dance of the Warriors (Wanaragua) and the Exile of Garifunas

The reason for the clothes of the Wanaragua dancer is Satuye’s wife Barauda’s suggestion to Satuye that if he does not know what to do about the British maybe he should give her his pants and he could wear her skirt, a scene shown in the Garifuna in Peril movie. Satuye changes the suggestion to  dressing his men in women’s clothes and covering their hair (the colonial British always mention the hair gave the Black Caribs away as different from the Red Caribs, which is reflected in Leland’s Yurumein Homeland movie with Carib boys on St.Vincent showing “I have Carib hair”),and thus thinking to get close to spy on the British who will be unconcerned about a bunch of women dancing nearby. A similar technique had been used by Queen Ya in Ghana about a century earlier against the British reports Ghanan videographer Tete Cobbah. This previous experience in Africa may have informed the Garifuna’s use of the ruse on St. Vincent.

The music and dance steps and the red mask themselves of the Garifuna Dance Wanaragua or Mascaro are from the Mandigo Red Mask Dance, which was a male secret society iniatiation dance, of the old Mali Empire in Africa.  In other parts of the Caribbean,including the Honduran Bay Islands among Black English speakers. this dance is called John Canoe (Yan Canu in Honduran Spanish), reportedly named for a British slaver in Ghana John Canby. The Garifuna version of this dance can be seen in the trailer of the Garifuna in Peril movie at www.garifunainperil.com and a painting of the Yan Canu dance by Garifuna painter Peter Centeno was put on a Honduran postage stamp issued to commemorate the 200^th year anneversay of the arrival of the Garifunas to Honduras in 1997.  See my article on War, Music and Dance in this blog for more ties of Garifuna music and dance to wars on St. Vincent against the French (Gunchai) and the Garifuna national anthem “Yurumain”.  

Chief Joseph Chatoyer or Satuye in St. Vincent and Among Garifunas

Chief Satuye, shown in the film in both Carib Breechcloth and in his French military uniform, is one of the heros remembered in St. Vincent’s National Hero’s Day, now that St. Vincent has recieved its independence from Great Britain after 200 years. Satuye is remembered in the Caribbean with everything from his painting on prepaid phone cards to a plaque where he died on St. Vincent. In Honduras buildings of the Garifunas and the Honduran government are named for him like Satuye Cultural Center where ODECO’s office is and Police Post Satuye outside of La Ceiba. Statues of him grace entrances of Garifuna schools. The Los Angeles, California Garifunas have done two plays about him, one by Belizean Garifuna Bill Flores was included in the 2012 award wining movie “Garifuna in Peril”. The New York City Garifunas have given the name Chief Joseph Satuye to one of their two professional Garifuna dance groups in New York City.

The Women in Satuye’s Family Also Strongly remembered by Garifunas

 Honduran Garifunas have also given Satuye’s wife’s name Barauda to a dance group. Satuye’s wife Barauda and his daughter Gulisi appear in the movie Garifuna in Peril and the Dangriga, Belize Garifuna Museum is called the Gulisi Garifuna Museum in her honor. She lived to immigrate to Belize in the early 19^th century. All the immigrating Garifunas and the several hundred French speaking Black speaking soldiers from Guadelupe and Martinique who were deported to Honduras with the Garifuna in 1797,  were given Spanish first and last names in Trujillo before 1799, and so we can not find Satuye’s descendants in censuses and church records due to not knowing the Spanish names they were given.

Some of Satuye’s children had also apparently been given French names on St.Vincent, notes Dr. James Sweeney who researched the Second Carib war which led to the Garifuna’s exile. We do not know the correlation of their Garifuna nicknames to those French names either.  Satuye’s son surrender speech which has been published in Spanish by historical geographer Dr. William Davidson in Yaxkin (1985) and in Etnología e Ethnohistoria de Honduras (2009) in articles on the arrival of Garifunas to Honduras (La llegada de los Garifunas) in Honduran government’s Honduran Institute of Anthropology and History (IHAH) publications. The original in English is in Colonial Office, Public Records Office documents in London, England.   

Where do the Names of Carib, Garifuna and ultimately the Caribbean Sea come from?

The film “Yarumein Homecoming” tells the history of the Caribs in their own words. After 18 years of studying Garifuna history in oral history, archaeology, linguistics, and documents, I found no historical errors in the history of the Caribs as recounted in this film, which is unusual as other authors who write about Garifunas and Black English speakers of Honduras will attest I sometimes send voluminous comments about their published materials. My only minor complaint of the film “Yarumein Homecoming” is that Ms. Leland begins her film with the definition of the word Carib or Caribe as Cannibal, without offering other alternative explanations of the word. This seems to be because of not having had access to Spanish language sources about the Garifuna language.

Garinagu, Garifunas’ name for themselves

According to Garifuna historian Prof. Santos Angel Batiz the Garifuna word for their ethnic group Garinagu comes from Kalina, the name of a Carib speaking tribe also in Guyana, and –nagu a corruption of the Spanish word “negro” (Black). This explanation of the meaning of Garinagu actually makes sense in the linguistics of Garifuna where two consonants can not be pronounced together, where whole syllables with the sound of r disappear in the Iriona dialect of Garifuna and o’s like in the place names Limon and Trujillo are often changed to u’s when speaking in Garifuna.  So Garinagu means Black Carib or a Black member of the Kalina Carib speaking Tribe.

Garifuna-Theories of origin of the word

There are several different theories of where the ethnic group name “Garifuna” comes from. According to Honduran Garifuna linguist Salvador Suazo in his book Conversemos en Garifuna which is on the Lea Honduras website,  it may come from kalipona meaning people of the Kalina tribe. Another theory is that it comes from the French Caribphone, which would mean speakers of Carib regardless of their race like Francophone Africa or Anglophone Caribbean. In the Garifuna language, syllables must be open—one consonant sound and one vowel. They can not end in consonants, so to make Caribphone a Garifuna word they needed to add an “a” sound Caribfuna and Garifuna syllables can not end in a consonant, so finally Garífuna.  The changing of k’s to g’s are common in linguistic changes in languages overtime or in different dialects of the same language. According to Santos Angel Batiz, Garifuna is not the singular of Garinagu in Garifuna, as Salvador Suazo claims, but rather like the word Kalipona refers to unmixed Carib Indians, known in British documents as Red or Yellow Caribs, as opposed to mixed race (African blacks and Carib-Arawakindians) Black Caribs.    Profesor Santos Angel Batiz says the Garifuna language also has a word for the unmixed Africans who intermarried with the Arawaks and Caribs.

A New Diaspora Carib coming Home to St. Vincent in “Yurumein Homecoming”

Her 2014 film “Yurumein Homecoming”  follows two quite different international homecomings. One story line follows the Carib Indian Dr. Cadrin Gill who practices family medicine in Los Angeles. He is part of the recent Caribbean Diaspora to the US and to England. New York City is one of most Caribbeanized cities in the US. Dr. Gill is going back to St. Vincent to Yurumein (The Island of the Blessed in Garifuna) where he has not been home for 20 years. To him, the Carib community of Sandy Bay on St. Vincent has changed, but is still familiar and full of familiar faces, familiar stories, familiar music and songs, familiar places.

St. Vincent  is  the place where his parents and grandparents and 500 plus years of Carib ancestors and 3,000 years of Arawak ancestors who intermarried with the Caribs lie buried.  The Arawaks and Caribs are thought to have danced and sang and provided music  for their ancestors even before the coming of Africans, that they over time have mixed with. Flat areas called “canchas” in Spanish, had stone statues around them probably representing the ancestors, and these flat fields with or without palm leaves above to provide shade were thought to be areas where Caribs and Arawaks danced for their ancestors.

The Relationship of Caribs, Arawaks and Tainos and the Modern Garifuna

While the Arawak speakers with whom the Caribs (Kalina in their own language, a tribe of Caribs known to have existed in Guyana) intermarried are usually called by their language name Arawak, they are the same Indians as almost all the other Caribbean Islands between 1,000 BC and the coming of Europeans, who are generally known by their tribal name Tainos. Many people in the Dominican Republic, Cuba, Puerto Rico, smaller islands like St. Lucia claim ancestory back to the original Taino or Arawak speaking natives of those Caribbean Islands.

The Caribs who followed the Arawaks up from the Amazon Basin along the Orinoco River at thought to have been late comers to the lower Windward Islands, but there are still Carib or Karib communities in St. Vincent, on Dominica, and they have recently organized in Trinidad and Tobago where some of the Red Caribs from St. Vincent took refuge after the eruption of the Soufrere volcano on St. Vincent in the early 1800’s devastating the remaining Red Carib reserves which in any case the British were selling in London and eventually dissolved, as shown in Andrea Leland’s movie “Yurumein Homecoming”.

National Garifuna Folklore Ballet of Honduras Also Come Home After 200 Years

The second storyline follows another group of homecomers—Honduran Garifuna members of the National Folkloric Garifuna Ballet, which is an autonomous project of the Honduran government, based in Tegucigalpa which has existed over 40 years under the leadership of choreographer Armando Crisanto Melendez.  Crisanto is from the Honduras Garifuna community of San Juan outside of Tela and he is the author of several books, some still for sale on the Internet like “El Enojo de las Sonajas” (The Anger of the Maracas). He and his daughter Ashanti and one other Honduran Garifuna are interviewed at different points during the movie. Ashanti’s own story and why she does not speak Garifuna, a language in danger of dying out in the next generation, is interesting and was revealed in an El Heraldo article which is on the Internet. 

Examples of Ties Between Dr. Gill of Sandy Bay, St. Vincent and Honduran Garifunas

Gil is still a family name among the Honduran Garifunas like my colleague from the Garifuna Emergency Committee of Honduras (CEGAH) Profa. Carolina David Gil. There is oral history that Sandy Bay on the island of Roatan, Honduras was at one time a Garifuna community and then a mixed Black English speaker and Garifuna community, and is now mixed Hispanics, foreigners mostly from the US, and Black English speakers.   This is the Sandy Bay that was all over  the news a year and a half ago because of the murder of Marjorie Merriweather Post’s great granddaughter and heiress there at her 2 acre spa on the beach, news stories that I felt totally missed the big questions like how do US heiresses come to own 2 acres on a beach in a country which prohibits the sale of land within 40 miles of the Coast in its Constitution, on a coral island with almost no beach, and what had happened to the different waves of original inhabitants of Sandy Bay, Honduras—indigenous, Garifuna, and Black Bay Islanders? 

Leaving Home, Being Behind, Returning Home after Absences Common Garifuna Themes

The experiences of  being left at home while others go away, such as Aurelio Martinez’s Yalifu (The Pelican), the experience of leaving and the processes that caused the Garifuna Diaspora first from St. Vincent like the song “Yurumein” recorded by Aurelio Martinez and available to listen to on the Garifuna Coalition of  New York’s website , or  to the US are common themes in Garifuna popular music in several genres. The hunguhungu song Yarumein (St. Vincent) is considered the national anthem of the Garifunas and is sung at most important occasions from Garifuna Day (12 April in Honduras), Garifuna-American Month in New York City (11 March-12 April), the Patron Saint Fairs including Trujillo’s on the summer solstice/beginning of the Caribbean rainy season and planting season/St. John the Baptists’s Day, and for Christmas/New Years/winter solstice/end of the rainy season/celebration of the rice harvest in Honduras, known as Fedu (Celebration).

Homecoming of a US Garifuna in Los Angeles to her rural community Plaplaya in the Honduran Moskitia, also the home community of Aurelio Martinez and the president of ODECO and ONECA Celeo Alvarez Casildo, and her Garifuna culture is the theme of Ali Allié’s first Garifuna film “El Espiritu de Mi Mama” (The Spirit of My Mother) which includes finding out from a buyei or Garifuna shaman what ancestor ceremony is being called for, doing a bath of the soul ceremony, and preparing for and doing a dugu ancestor ceremony, which are generally not allowed to be filmed, partly  because of the belief that new modern things like cameras are more likely to bring witchcraft and thus a bad end to an ancestor ceremony.

Part of the purpose of the Honduran Garifunas and the Carib Dr. Gill to return home to St. Vincent/Yurumein is  to Honor the Sacrifices of the Ancestors and  to Remember them, to make them happier, and to Restore Relationships that had been broken or strained both between the ancestors and their descendants, and between the different groups of their descendants, so that they will have the blessings of the ancestors as they go forward.  And for this reason, they offer food and music and purification, and learn about what has been happening with each other while they were apart to offer each other their help and support. Many people before an ancestor ceremony report being sad and in down spirits like the Caribs, but with the support and love and music and restoration of being together, their health returns and they are ready to go forward. The Carib offering of music and song and story is on St. Vincent, but the main offering of the Honduran Garifunas is on Balliceaux itself where so many Garifunas died.