Leland's Yurumein Homecoming Highlights Root Causes Garifuna Carib Issues in UN and US Courts Today

Leland’s “Yurumein Homecoming” Highlights Roots of Past Problems of Garifunas, Island Arawaks and Caribs, Which are Still Playing Out in International Courts, UN Forums and US Universities Today-- Part I

By Wendy Griffin  3/27/2015

In the 21st Century, it has become more common for people to be living somewhere different than where they call “home”. Thus the experience of “homecoming”, of going back to that other home far away is also becoming more common. And as attested to by the over 2 million people deported from the US under President Obama’s administration, that homecoming experience, whether it be to crimewracked Honduras or troubled Cambodia, or the slums of Brazil, etc. is often filled with very mixed emotions and experiences, sometimes even life threatening experiences. So Andrea Leland’s 2014 film “Yurumein Homecoming”  provides us with a timely opportunity to reflect on the experiences of going away, coming home, rejoining with those who have been left behind, mourning the losses including of not having known each other and not knowing how the other is doing, and trying to get to closure or peace now, to have a vision of how and where to move on from here and towards what and where.

Some Relations of Leland’s 2014 movie to current situations involving Garifunas and Caribs

Displacement threatens now in 2015 again the two cultures Honduran Garifunas and Caribs shown in the movie. The Honduran Garifunas are threatened by Economic and Development Zones (ZEDE) or Model cities, a new legal regime being planned to be implemented by new Honduran president Juan Orlando Hernandez for almost all the Garifuna communities of Honduras. See www.zede.gob,hn.

The mapping of one of these ZEDE, Sico-Paulaya in the Rio Platano Biosphere where Garifunas and Miskito Indians live with US Department of Defense Minerva Funding to the University of Kansas and American Geography Society and Radiance Technologies is assumed to be in anticipation of displacing the Indians and Garifunas, abolishing the Rio Platano Biosphere an Endangered UNESCO World Heritage Site, and “developing” the Honduran Moskitia through US public private ventures as planned in a 2009 US Embassy document made available through Wikileaks. After a published on the Internet complaint of the Garifuna organization OFRANEH that  this project was violating “ free prior informed consent” law of DRIP and AGS and concern that being employed by the project put bilingual UPN students in danger and neither the UPN university, nor the ethnic organizations felt there had been prior informed consent about the US Department of Defense origin of the funding or the US military and its associates whoever they may be by posting the mapping of the area on the Internet complete with drug airports, as the destination for the reporting, an ethics complaint has been under an ethics review headed by Dr. Susan Mac Neil at the University of Kansas since June 2014 for violating the ethics policy of the partner organization American Geography Society.  

On St. Vincent (Yarumein) the island of Balliceaux where the remains of the 3,000 ancestors of the Caribs and Arawaks who perished in the genocide at the end of the Second Carib War in 1797 remain is now up for sale on www.privateislands.com. 

International legal cases related to the ethnohistory shown in Leland’s movie Yarumein Homecoming including genocide charges against Great Britain by St.Vincent, human rights violation cases against Honduran Garifunas by the Honduran government in the InterAmerican Human Rights Court in Costa Rica, and Political Asylym cases in the US and in Spain regarding Honduran Garifunas, Honduran Indians, other Hondurans and their defenders based on legal discrimination and othering policies and looking the other way at human rights abuses of murder on down of the Honduran government, and their US government funders and US military advisors on the ground and from afar, are all whirling around the Garifuna and Carib protagonists of this film.

In the meetings leading up to the UN General Assembly on Indigenous Peoples in New York City in September 2014, the Carib Indians requested that the UN retitle and reorganize the session on North American and Latin American Indians to include “and Caribbean”, and the UN Secretary did rename the session as “North American, Latin American and Caribbean Indians”. Dominica, the neighbor of St. Vincent, which as Karib Reserves for its Karib Indians, is the only country in the Island Caribbean to approve ILO Convention 169 on the Human Rights of Indigenous and Tribal Peoples.   Outside of Latin America only one African country has approved ILO Convention 169, and it is currently embroiled in a known deadly civil war.  This paper tiger element of ILO convention 169 and even UNESCO World Heritage Site Protected Areas has been reported elsewhere in Latin America. Part of the purpose of the UN General Assembly on Indigenous People was to establish priorities after 2015, when the World Bank’s EFA (Education for All) initiative ends, which could affect funding of bilingual intercultural education in many countries including Honduras.

The Garifuna Language, Music, and Dance, shown in both of Andrea Leland’s Garifuna films, is a UNESCO World Heritage Intangible Masterpiece. I have not heard of one cent coming to save this Intangible heritage as a result of this declaration. It is of limited good to have words for 300 neotropical medicinal plants and 30 kinds of tropical fish, living in public housing in New York City or Los Angeles in the US, and being illegal and unable to access US medical care either. Anyone who has been to the Bronx and to Honduran or Belizean Garifuna villages, or seen Ali Alli’s El Espiritu de Mi Mama view of the comparison of life of the urban poor in the US and a Garifuna village, will imagine if there was any choice at all they would not have left their Caribbean villages in Honduras. Leland’s film shows the same was probably the case for St. Vincent, Yurumein, the Home of the Blessed in Garifuna.

According to Trujillo Garifunas, the Nicaraguan Garifuna town of Orinoco was founded immediately after the British brought the Garifunas to Honduras and a group of Garifunas decided to try to paddle by canoe back to Yarumein. They got as far as Orinoco on Pearl Lagoon and said we will never make it back to Yurumein, we will just settle here. That community is now threatened by the proposed Nicaraguan-Chinese canal scheduled to be three times bigger than the the panama Canal and the Free Trade Zone which will be located at either end of the Canal. The Caribs lived on the Orinoco Delta on what is now the Venezuelan-Guyana border before invading the Windward Islands maybe around 1450, and stories collected among Garifunas in Trujillo, Honduras like La comadrona (the Midwife), it appears the Carib men continued to hunt, plant, and trade with the South America mainland after starting families on St. Vincent, perhaps because St. Vincent was too small to support the bigger South American game animals like white collared peccary (quequeo), peccary (jagüilla),  tapir (danto), armadillo (cusucu) that the older Garifuna women, say Oh yes, that is Garifuna food, although near extinction today in Honduras.

 Leland’s “Yarumein Homecoming” -- Typical Counternarratives  presented as Counterarguments in a Real Estate Theft and Murder Cases Requiring Restorative Justice  and Restorative Funding

I noted in my article about the commonalities of Afro-Honduran, Honduran Indian, and US Indian and Blacks narratives on my blog www.healthandhonduranindiansblacks.blogspot.com that they are often like counterarguments in a real estate law case. These include that the person who sold the land did not have legal title, that the person who claimed the land said he had more right because of his moral superiority, that the people who sold the land changed the law to cover up their theft and make it legal often after the theft, that deaths in “wars” and permanent displacement were often only murders and theft and cultural destruction covered up in moral justifications, that how can the Europeans claim to have “discovered” something that was already inhabited and that it was theirs by right of Discovery.   All of these topics in these types of  counternarratives appear in the oral history of the Caribs in Andrea Leland’s film.

Counter Narratives as Arguments for Restorative Justice

In my blog article written in December 2013, I note US Indians use these counternarratives to justify requests of restorative funding now, like bilingual intercultural education, funding to improve or restore their damaged environments, funding for drug and alcohol treatment, funding for job training in the new economy since the possibility of working in the old economy like hunting  and crafts made of plants in an ecosystem where they no longer lived like birch bark canoe makers moved to Oklohoma was destroyed by official US government policies. US courts have also often mandated financial compensation for land loss. The Garifunas and the Caribbean Island Caribs have been fighting these legal and lobbying battles at the highest levels of international justice, in the media, and in the UN General Assembly of Indigenous Peoples in New York City  last year in September 2014. When the questions of Moral Superiority and Funding actually come together, the results are often not pretty.

Silence, Continuing  Racially Motivated False Historical Myths, Being Complicent in Invisibilization of Significant Issues by US Academics, Universities, and Academic Presses

Not only has the US mainstream press often been silent on the issues affecting the Garifunas and Caribs group in the Caribbean, but most US academic textbooks on Latin America and the Caribbean are complacent to say these Indians all died out. Getting funding for projects or land rights for Indians that highly educated US academics, whether careless historians or US university based testers of Honduran Garifuna DNA samples gotten without prior free informed consent which will show the Garifunas are Africans because there are no living unmixed Arawaks andCaribs in the Caribbean because of genocide to compare them to, have said do not exist is quite frankly difficult to do.  

 

Where are the Myths? On Whose Side is the Historical Evidence?

Except for the issue of only defining Carib as Cannibal, explained more below and in other parts of this series, I find after 18 years of researching Garifuna history and its roots, that Leland’s  ethnohistorical film “Yurumein Homecoming” about the Island Caribs is in all other aspects a historically accurate movie. Thus it is one more piece of evidence that much of what a lot of people think they know about the Americas, from the fact that all the Caribbean Indians died out and thus it was “necessary” to import at least 12 million Africans to work as slaves and Christopher Columbus discovering what was already known and owned by the native peoples including the Taino/Arawak and Carib ancestors of the Garifunas, is based on past historical myth making of epic proportions by Europeans, that needs to be urgently and signficantly critically reexamined.

While most US academic book publishers  who publish about the Caribbean, such as those who not long ago published “Cannibal Encounters” about colonial era contacts with Island Caribs, probably pride themselves  on publishing books less fanciful than the Johnny Depp Pirate’s of the Caribbean clips of painted Carib cannibals attacking him and his men shown as part of Leland’s movie “Yurumein Homecoming”, this may not necessarily be the case.

Cannibalism often shows up in archaeological ruins such as charred human bones among refuse piles. St. Vincent is known archaeologically. To my knowledge, no archaeological evidence has yet been found to confirm the fears of Tainos that Caribs ate their captures. “Blood libel” that the other group eats people when it is not true, such as medieval Jews who heard that Catholic Christians ate the body and blood of Christ, and assumed they ate babies, too, is common in many parts of the world.

 One of the most recent examples being Guatemalan Mayas believing gringos are stealing/adopting their babies to eat them or cut them into parts for operations, which resulted in seriously restricting of adoption laws in Guatemala and in Honduras. If Americans consider this preposterous, read the legal analysis of do you own your body parts and blood under US and Canadian law in Dr. Marie Battiste and John Henderson’s book on Protecting Indigenous Cultural Heritage. There have been cannibal groups in the world, the most famous being in the Aztecs, and if we include headhunters, those who stick skulls into the niches of their homes to have the strength of their enemies, we must include the pre-Roman Celtic ancestors of the French, the Spanish, the Danish, the English and the Irish in this list. US scientists trying to patent other country’s people’s blood for its antibodies has been tried.

 Caribbean Indians-The Arawak speaking Tainos and the Caribs did not all Die Out

However,  not only did the Island Arawaks and Tainos,  and the Caribs they intermarried with, not died out (see The Taino Indians online website), they are still speaking Taino (including in Pittsburgh, PA) and Island Arawak, mixed with the Carib language and a few African, French, and Spanish words in the case of the Garifunas. Island Arawak in Garifuna is called Igneri.

Garifunas--Speaking the Languages, Continuing the Religion, the Crafts, the Symbols, the  Foods, the Livelihoods of the Pre-Columbian Caribbean Indians

Their religion also continues in various forms such as the Garifunas are still doing ancestor ceremonies dances that archaeologists who have studied the Caribbean believe the “canchas” or flat fields were used for on pre-columbian St. Vincent surrounded by carvings representing the ancestors, and they are still cutting seashells in the forms of the Arawak forms of certain gods.  They are still calling the ancestors with maracas typical of the Caribbean Indians on the mainland and the islands, and calling the ancestors by indigenous names gubida (cupita badly intentioned or angry spirit in Arawak) and the shaman buyei (poyai shaman in Arawak) by indigenous names, and eating cassava bread (ereba in Garifuna, erepa in Arawak) which dates back 3,000 years among the Caribs and Arawaks as documented by the small white stones used in the grater and clay griddles to cook them on and firedogs under the griddle, still made of clay in modern Garifuna village of  Santa Rosa de Aguan, Honduras.

 The Garifunas  are still making the baskets of belaire or gomerei a vine, seen on the head of the god of Bittle yuca  or manioc at Yale Universities’s Peabody Museum. Bitter yucca still plays a significant role in Garifuna cooking from which at least 12 different things can be made.  The Garifuna men now use metal fish hooks and lead weights and metal hoes and axes to replace the bone fish hooks and stone fishing weights, but they continue fishing in canoes if they have the chance. Stone axeheads and stone hoes from St. Vincent in Yale’s Peabody Museum, which can be seen on online or in Irving Rouse’s The Tainos and in the book In Search of the Arawaks.  Traditional Garifunas in Garifuna and in Spanish are called “Garifunas de hacha y azadon” (Garifunas of axe and hoe), and archaeological collections indicate that they have been Caribs or Arawaks of axe and hoe since before the Spanish or metal was known to them.

The ancestors in the Garifuna dugu ceremony still rest in hammocks (the English word hammock is from Arawak, the Garifuna word might be from Carib, and were traditionally made of either cotton cloth or from a tree bark string called majao in Spanish, weñu in Garifuna, sani in Miskito, puru in Pech, and the use and the main two style of twisted fibers continue deep into the Amazon Basin notes collections at Chicago’s Field Museum). 

In the Field Museum of Chicago they have a green stone canoe paddle of the type of that Carib kings of the mainland used to show their leadership. It is cut in the shape of the Garifuna paddle, however, the Garifunas of Honduras have substituted mahoghany paddles which appear in the enactments of the “Yarumein” song about St. Vincent, as seen in my book Los Garifunas de Honduras.

 In the dugu ceremony paddles play a number of roles, such as the ceremonial fishermen carrying paddles, leading the way to the ancestor ceremony temple. During the dugu,  traditionally while singing arumajani songs, the songs of old men, one man would lean on a canoe paddle, as if through these ancestral songs always sung in Garifuna, we should be guided as we sail through life and troubles.  The Tulalip Indians of Washington state who were also canoe travelling Indians used canoe paddles as symbols of male authority and leadership in similar ways.

There are Garifuna ancestor songs in a dugu for women abeimajani similar to the men’s songs where everyone is joined by linking little fingers. By being united and together here, we can face what is coming together, is a common symbolism in the names of Garifuna women’s dance clubs like Club or Ensemble Wabaragoun (Let us go forward together) who sing at these ancestor ceremonies. Garifuna dance club Ensemble Wabaragoun was recorded on a CD by Radio France, including these ancestral song, and some libraries like the Schomburg Center of BlackCulture of New York Public Library bought copies.  

The Smithsonian’s Latino Center together with the National Museum of the American Indian is planning a new exhibit on the Indigenous Elements of Caribbean Culture. I was so appalled at their recently conluded Central American Pre-Colubian Exhibit which included not even having the Mayas in the right places on maps where 100 years of the best US universities Tulane, university of Pennsylvania, Harvard had worked with the Mayas, I was terrified what they would do in the Caribbean and donated my books on Garifunas to them so that they could not have an excuse that for the lack of $12 they had not known the Garifunas were the descendants of the Island Caribs and Arawaks and maintain their traditions.    

Myth--If We were Wrong, It does not Matter, as the Issue is insignificant

Leland’s films dispel the notion of some US academics that well, maybe we missed this, as this topic is about a small faraway insignificant group, but it does not matter. The estimated population of Garifunas she gives is 400,000. Tens of thousands lived in the US, usually legally, including in New York City, Los Angeles, Chicago, Miami, New Orleans, Pittsburgh, among other places, even before the current crisis in Honduras. I am sure most US academics can think of prestigious universities with well funded Latin American and Caribbean studies programs in those cities, who are not publishing about the Caribs or Garifunas or Tainos in their midsts. And now the Honduran Garifunas of ODECO have organized a World Summit of Afro-Descent peoples to reach all the 1.8 Billion Afro-Descent people of the World.  Previously the Garifunas were part of the 60 million people represented by the World Council of Indigenous Peoples headquartered in Canada.

I used to wonder what were the issues that made Canadian Indians organize all the Indians of the World to help them get ILO Convention 169 written and approved, and even though Canada did not ratify ILO Convention 169 what has come out over the last 10 years about Canadian Indian boarding Schools into the 1990’sand Healthcare relating to Canadian Indians, make us seriously reflect on who should be watching whom regarding human rights abuses.   Detailed studies of US treatment of US Indians or even the modern issues of US Blacks that led to the “Black Lives Matter” campaign and the comparison of the polite term “Healthcare Disparities” with Honduran Katherine Hall Trujillo’s TED talk about more Black babies dying in US hospitals than all the Wars combined also should raise some doubts about what values are we teaching in the US about the value of human life if that human happens to be poor or not White.  

If Honduran Garifunas feel the need to organize all the Blacks in the World and be part of organizing all the Indigenous people of the world, does it not seem important to find out what is really happening? And if resistance and legal recourse to human rights is not working, why are we surprised to find Hondurans by the thousands at the US Mexican border, and applying for political asylym?

Where are the Real Threats and Are we using Scarce Resources like Money Effectively?

If you are reading books like Confessions of a Bad Teacher about the state of the heavily Hispanic schools in Bronx, New York where the Garifunas end up, why do Americans think the threat to the threat to their personal security and that of their children is somewhere out there, the mythical terrorists, and not from young people in their midst whose aspirations and possibilities we are cutting off at the knees with our laws and policies and funding  priorities and the organized crime leaders here in the US?  Honduran drug trafficker Ramon Matta, prisoner for life in Marion, Illinois would like to know why are no important US drug traffickers caught in the United States and doing time in the US?  I actually think this is a very insightful question. In Spanish the answer is “Tienen cuello”.  

How do we keep US Kids Safe?

What is really going to stop Drugs, US Navy Bases in the Honduran Mosquitia or the Honduran Bay Islands, which are displacing Afro-Honduras like the Garifuna, and DEA involved in killing pregnant Miskito (also an Afro-indigenous group) women and young boys, or investing in drug education prevention programs in Pittsburgh and New York that were cut to pay for the Iraq and Afghanistan war which helped increase heroin imports three and half times? A wise Peruvian economist teaching at the University of Pittsburgh, said we produce many things in Peru, but what the US wants to buy is cocaine, so we sell them cocaine.

If we promote policies in Honduras that cut off the access of Garifunas and Miskitos and Black Bay islanders to hunted meat through national parks, to salt water fish and seafood through marine parks or contamination by agrochemicals or overfishing for export or the tourist trade that we help fund, if we encourage the Honduran government to cut off restrictions for the commercial fleet within 3 miles of the coast (previously either reserved for artisanal fishermen or protected areas for shrimp reproduction), and almost make illegal artisanal fishing, and we encourange industries with multibillion help that pollute the water and kill the fresh water fish, and then we take away the subsistence agricultural lands to give to export industries like African palm, cattle for frozen deboned meat for hamburger, or drug airports (there is a profitable export industry), why are surprised by either high Honduran immigration or by high levels of poor desparate Hondurans selling drugs to get a dollar to buy rice as one Miskito leader said? A 1980’s protest song in the US about Latin America was “Who are the Terrorists? I want to know.”   I don’t see that the answer has changed any.

How could we save money by spending our money on the Real Priorities and Causes?

If we worked on the demand issues, the US would also save money on federal prisons. If we worked so that people in Latin America were not pushed off their lands, often in the name of development which the US supposes will help US companies who want to invest there, a practice which has led to more than 50% of the federal prison population being people who crossed the US border illegally, think of all that money and the money for repatriating 2 million illegal aliens we could save.  

Resistance-500 years, still Resisting and Still Organizing Others to Help in the Resistance

Try to grasp that the people that Christopher Columbus told the King of Spain in his last voyage as he sailed past St.Vincent that the Caribs there are reported so fierce that I recommend that you do not try to conquer them and instead focus on the docile Tainos (with the idea they will do our bidding.)  are still around. And the Kings of Spain never deviated from Columbus’s recommendation and that is why there was French Guyana, British Guyana, Dutch Guyana (now Surinam) and French colonies of Martinique and Guadelupe, and British colonies like St. Vincent and the Grenadines and Trinidad and Tobago, but there were no Spanish colonies in the former Carib Indian areas.

 And these descendants, the  Garifunas have been organizing with worldwide Indian and Black organizations and the Caribbean Caribs since 1992 with access to the Internet and video cameras,and are in English and especially Spanish media hubs like Los Angeles, New York and Miami. This year 2015 might be the beginning of a very interesting UN Decade of the Afro-Descent People.