Language Shift, Intermarriage, and Identifying the Indians of NE Honduras

Who were the Indians of Northeastern Honduras?

By Wendy Griffin

Most archeologists have generally ignored Yoro and Atlantida, the Pech and Miskito areas of Olancho, Colon,  the Moskitia and the Department of El Paraiso assuming the ruins would yield little, since modern Tolupan, Pech, Sumu (including the Tawahkas), Miskito, and Matagalpa Indians make most things out of plants or wood. Recent ethnohistorical and archaeological studies show they may have missed a significant Mesoamerican presence of these departments which lasted until the 19^th century when many of the Mesoamerican Indians became Ladinized (Spanish speaking and Christian and wearing European style clothes) or intermarried with the Tolupanes or with the mulattos of Yoro in Yoro or other blacks and mestizos in the area.

In the Valley of Agalta, Olancho the Mesoamerican Indians also became Ladinos, meaning they had lost their indigenous language, but still in the 19^th century they were doing traditional religious ceremonies in the mountains to non-Christian gods such as the sun and the moon, such as that reported by the assistant of Father Liendo y Goichoecheia in 1808. The Spanish were still grabbing unconquered Indians as slaves in the Agalta Valley in the 1860’s, such as the town of Conquire, near San Esteban Tonjegua, and El Carbon, Olancho which Padre Manuel de Jesus Subirana tried to get land titles for them, but the Spanish carried them away instead.  

 Between the Olancho Valley and Culmi, Olancho and the Ciudad Blanca area,  Nahua place names like Jutiquile (Jutes are a kind of edible snail whose shells are often found in archaeological sites associated with Nahua speakers), Petaste (the Honduran Nahua name for chayote or vegetable pear), Malacate (a spindle whorl for spinning cotton in Nahua), Siguate (The Woman of the Well, the Sirena, the goddess of Terrestial Waters), La Llorona (the Spanish name for a Nahua moon goddess who is the mother of the cipotio or duende and was punished for infidelity and hangs out near water),  and Aguacate (Nahua word for avocado) predominate.

 The Indians of Catacamas were in the ceremony in the mountains together with those of the Valley of Agalta in the 1808 ceremony reported by Father Liendo y Goicoechea’s assistant. The Indians at the Catacamas, Olancho fair still wore feathered cloaks in 1860 when William Wells visited them. These type of feather cloaks were reported by Hernan Cortes in Mexico in the 1520’s.

The Nahua Indians who live outside of Catacamas now on the road to Culmi report that previously  their ancestors together with the Indians of Ciudad Blanca did secret ceremonies in the Laguna de Mescal (the lagoon of mescal, a type of agave plant used until recently by the Nahua Indians to make twine (cabuya) and previously to weave cloth) where they sacrificed a Nahua Indian. The Laguna de Mescal was located along the path from Catacamas to the Ciudad Blanca. These type of sacrificial ceremonies match the ceremonies described by the Spanish in the 1570’s among the Nahua speaking Pipils of El Salvador and Guatemala, where they sacrificed a Nahua child around 12 years old at the beginning, around 25 April,  and the end of the rainy season, around 2 November, in a secret ceremony near water. A similar ceremony was also reported among the Nahualt speaking Aztecs of Mexico City before the rainy season began, according to the Spanish.

 

An archaeological ruin, possibly of the city of Papayeca, the post classic/contact era capital of the Trujillo, Chapagua, and Bajo Aguan area with chiefs with Nahuatl names like  Mazatl (Deer in Nahuatl), near the XV Infantry Batallion Headquarters in Rio Claro, Colon had high walls around the city, ditches, few entrances to the city and temple mounds within the walls, which would support the idea that the Indians there were at war with their neighbors and needed high walls to protect themselves from counterattacks. 

This ruin, built in the Post classic period (900-1500 AD) demonstrates a completely different type of social structure and technology, than the Classic period ruins (300-900 AD) at Silin Farm near Trujillo. Those ruins showed no permanent structure, probably indicating houses made of plants. There bones from 16 different kinds of hunted animals and 16 different kinds of animals with shells like mussels, and a similar number of different types of fish bones, both salt water and freshwater fish, showing a high reliance on wild meats, typical of the Pech Indians, but not common among Mesoamerican Indians.  There is little pottery or stone, and only one piece of painted pottery in Lenca style, again typical of the Pech who travelled a lot to hunt and fish, and who used wooden arrow heads or blowpipes. Pech social structure was apparently so flat that there is not even a Pech word for chief, just the religious leader the Wata, and kinship terms for older leaders, like grandfather.

Large Mesoamerican ruins with lots of earthern and stonework like Papayeca or the Ciudad Blanca usually need an authoritarian unequal social structures to force people to do the building, which does not match what is known of the Pech in historic or modern times, nor the vocabulary of the Pech language. It does match the social and political structures of what is known of Nahua speakers in the early contact period. The Nahua word “macehuales”, usually translated as common people, but Doña Marina Cortes’s translator translated it as vassals or subjects, was used specifically to refer to the Indians of the Bay Islands when the Indians there complained the Spanish were taking their macehuales. The Nahua words “calpisque” (tribute collector) and “tatoque” (leader of the community, usually translated in Spanish as “principals”) are actually recorded in use in colonial documents of Honduras.

The Nahua word for the ruling class was “pipiltin”, which has remained in the Central American name for Nahua speakers “Pipiles”. The word “Nahua” for this ethnic group and its language is related to the words for witch or shaman or healer “Nahuat” and the protective animal spirit Nagual which the priest/shaman could change into in Nahuatl and in Honduran Spanish. Stories of witches changing into animals are common in areas with Nahua place names, including in the Pech/Ciudad Blanca/Olancho (from Ulanco-the place of rubber or hule in Nahua) area, Choluteca (from Cholulateca, people from Cholula, Mexico in Nahua), and the Texiguat, El Paraiso area (The woman in the well or La sirena in Nahua).

The word Nahua is frequently seen in place names like Nahuaterique (the Creek of the Nahuas in Lenca), on the border with El Salvador. In colonial era documents the Indians in places with Nahua place names like Ilamatepeque (Hill of the Grandmother, as the Nicarao Nahua speakers called their Creator goddess), Agalteca (People of the place of Carrizo or Tule), Isatepeque (Hill of obsidian), Texiguat (The Woman of the Well) were often described as great witches and a significant number of the colonial era legal cases against Indians for witchcraft (brujeria) in Central America were reported in these areas. One of Honduras’s most famous novels  by Ramon Amaya Amador is about the Witches (Brujos) of Ilamatepeque whose tombs can still be seen today, reported Honduran anthropologist Adalid Martinez.

Among Nahua speakers, the religious leaders who led the traditional ceremonies were the same people as the ones who provided medicinal plant care and who provided poisons or spells to punish enemies, and were part of the general leadership of the community. Among the Indians of Texiguat they still remember one religious leader in particular Gaspar, about whom more than 100 legends are told. These include that he hides the gold of the mountains near Texiguat from the gringos (similar to the stories of why the Ciudad Blanca is hidden) and that he struggled against the teachings and what the Indians considered mistreatment by the Catholic priests.

This oral literature is supported by the files on Texiguat, El Paraiso in the Honduran National Archives and the General Archive in Guatemala which are full of letters complaining about priests and requesting their removal. The Texiguats were also very active in Honduran civil wars in the early 19^th century, where they are famous both as the personal protectors and troops of Francisco Morazan, and as rising up against the government in a 1845 uprising because of the robberies, murders, and other mistreatment by the Honduran authorities. Other towns associated with Nahua speakers like Mejicapa, Comayagua and Catacamas, Olancho were active in some 19^th century civil wars like the Wars of Olancho when the Indians of Catacamas rose up against the Comandante de Plaza of Olancho and murdered him, because they were afraid he meant to set fire to the town for a second time.

 Honduran writer Julio Escoto noted that the role of interethnic problems, such as the taking of Indian land by Ladinos or giving Indian lands to foreigners or the Ladinos trying to deny the vote to Indians and Blacks who were illiterate in Spanish or forced Indian labor in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, as  factors in Honduras’s many civil wars has remained totally uninvestigated.

Place Names help Identify the Indians of the Ciudad Blanca and their Religion

By Wendy Griffin

The capital city of the state near Trujillo, Colon at the time of the Spanish Conquest was Papayeca,  which came from being the location of the “papa”, or chief priest as translated by Hernán Cortes.   “Papa” according to archeologist Michael Coe, in his book Mexico, refers to the chief priest of Quetzalcoatl in his round temple in his form of god of the Wind in the Nahua Indian language.  Doña Marina, Hernan Cortes’s translator said the Indians near Trujillo spoke like the people of Chulula, a valley and city in Central Mexico which in that period was inhabited principally by Nahuatl speakers.

The Nahua speaking Pipils of El Salvador and Guatemala did sacrifice Indians of other tribes on other occasions, such as to celebrate a victory in war, but for the rain they sacrificed a Pipil child, according to the Wikipedia in Spanish articles on Mitologia Pipil (Pipil Mythology) and Señorio de Cuscatlan (The State of Cuscatlan, El Salvador), so this lends support to the Pech´s stories that their enemies sacrificed them and ate them and worshiped the god of winds or storms (tormentas). Numerous heads of Quetzalcoatl with swirls to indicate the wind are found in the Ciudad Blanca area, such as those seen on the www.roatanet.com/ciudadblanca website.

Clay cups with faces of the rain/thunder/lighting/fire  god called “Tlaloc” by the Aztecs and “Quia” by the Nahua speaking Nicaraos of Central America, as in the town Quiatlan (place of Quia, now Quimistan, Santa Barbara), have been found in the Agalta Valley in Olancho and in the Ciudad Blanca area.  Quimistan is famous for its archaeological sites, especially the Quimistan Bell Cave which had many Pipil copper war bells. According to Spanish colonial era reports, these bells were known as war bells and were played during the ceremonies of human sacrifice.  There are examples of these bells in the San Pedro Sula Museum, the Anthony Key Resort museum in Sandy Bay, Roatan and in the new Smithsonian Exhibit on Central American ceramics in Washington, DC.

Also the place names  La Llorona (the same spirit is also called Sihuanaba or spirit of a woman in Nahua or La Sucia the dirty one in other parts of Honduras) near Culmi, Olancho, Siguate (maybe well of the woman in Nahua or la Sirena in Spanish) near Catacamas, Olancho, Posa de la Sirena (well or deep part of the river of the protective spirit of the fish) west of Trujillo, Colon, and Texiguat (the woman of the well or deep part of the river), El Paraiso and Atlantida  may be associated with tall green stone female statues that were the size of a person that the Spanish reported near Trujillo, in Olancho, and in the Bay Islands.

The Nahuatl speaking Aztecs in Central Mexico had a goddess Lady of the Jade Skirt or Princess Green, whom archaeologists believe is related to the Goddess of Terrestial Waters shown in a cave inside a temple beside water at Teotihuacan in the Valley of Mexico. This goddess may part of the origin of some of the beliefs associated with the Sirena (the goddess who lives in fresh water and protects fish and other aquatic life in the rivers, and lagoons) in Honduras. So there is evidence of rain and water spirits among the Nahua speaking Indians of Northeastern Honduras, which match the descriptions of ceremonies remembered by the Nahua Indians of the Catacamas, Olancho area and the Pech of Olancho.

The rivers or creeks of the Ciudad Blanca and Rio Paulaya areas often had clay pots in them until recently which may have been offerings by the Nahua speakers to the Sirena to ask for fish and/or rain. The Pech until recently made offerings of cacao and wines like yucca wine and corn beer to the Sirena to give them permission to fish, but they used gourd bowls called guacals, instead of clay pots. In Honduras, one of the principal methods of fishing for fish for a ceremony is through fish poison, such as pate ( medicine or poisin in Nahua) by the Ladinos and Pech of Olancho. This use of fish poison has many taboos among most of the ethnic groups of Honduras, and is usually used right before Holy Week when the water in the creeks is not rough. Also the poison causes cattle to abort so maybe they were waiting for wild animals to have their babies in the spring before using it.

The big time to eat fish among Hondurans is Good Friday when there is a special dried fish soup, which many people eat, but it was considered very bad to swim on Good Friday and you would turn into a sirena (mermaid/protective spirit of the fish) if you did swim in a river or on the beach, as people were still told into the 1990’s. The fact that Good Friday  also coincides when some ethnic groups like the Maya Chorti bring the water from a special spring, such as one in Esquipulas, Guatemala (the current city was originally settled by Nahua speaking Toltecs according to the official Esquipulas website), to call the rain and then do the new fire ceremony in the church also to attract the rain, adds to the idea that Sirena beliefs related to Good Friday, are at least partly associated with pre-Columbian Indian beliefs of the Goddess of Terrrestial Water, who was the sister of the male rain/thunder/lightening/fire god among some Nahua speaking groups.

 While the Spanish destroyed the large green stone female statue at Trujillo after the chief priest successfully divined the new Governor of Honduras was arriving from Spain, many small axe-god statues of green stone, designed to worn as necklaces have been found in the Trujillo area, in the Culmi, Olancho area near the Ciudad Blanca, and they were also common on the Pacific Coast of Nicaragua where Nahua speaking Nicaraos and Mangue speaking Chorotegas lived. The source of this green stone was probably at Tulito, an archaeological site with many mounds along the Rio Paulaya, between Trujillo and the Ciudad Blanca area, where Trujillo area Ladinos still bring green stone from to carve and sell to tourists. 

 These large green female stone statues were located in the Bay Islands, Trujillo area and Olancho area (possibly in the La LLorona/Ciudad Blanca area) at the time of Cortes’s visit to Trujillo in 1524. The head priest in the Trujillo area had to be celibate, had long hair which he cut in mourning after the destruction of the green goddess statue, burned incense to the gods, and taught singing and dance, similar to Nahuatl speaking Aztec priests in the Valley of Mexico. Hernan Cortes left orders for his cousin who remained as governor after Cortes left that he should make sure there were no sacrifices held after Cortes left, which also supports the Pech’s claim that there were human sacrifices of their ancestors by their neighbors who lived in stone cities in the valleys. 

According to the Wikipedia in Spanish article on Mitología Pipil (Pipil Mythology)  La Llorona (the woman who cries, name of a hill in Culmi, Olancho) the former moon goddess had a son as a result of her infidelity with the Morning Star. The son was cursed to always be small, and ten years old in punishment for his mother’s infidelity,  and was known as cipotío (little one) in Nahua, which name is still used among some Ladinos, Chortis and Lencas, but this spirit is called duende in Honduran Spanish. In Trujillo the rock of the duende (piedra del duende) is a large stone altar on a hill above central Trujillo which still exists and has been declared a national monument, even though it is on privately owned land.

Language Shifts and Interethnic Marriage Hide the presence of the descendants of Nahua speakers

Part 1

By Wendy Griffin

Osvaldo Munguia, the director of the environmental NGO in the Mosquitia, notes that the importance of monkeys or monkey gods is noticeable in the Ciudad Blanca area. Although the large Monkey God statues which Theodore Morde reportedly saw were according to local Ladinos removed by helicopter, other monkey related carved stone pieces have been reported in Ciudad Blanca area including a petroglyph (rock carving) near the Rio Platano river.  A similar monkey carving which Osvaldo Munguia’s friend had reported seeing several times in the Rio Paulaya area was also cut away and removed even though the stone must have weighed several hundred pounds. There was a monkey god statue in fine clothes, but a monkey face in the Trujillo Museum of Rufino Galan.

These monkey statues may be related to a well known Honduran story of a sisimite (tzitzimite in Nahua) who robbed a human woman and had a son. Among Mexican Nahua speakers in stories collected by Dr. James Taggart, this son grew up, killed his father for mistreating the mother, became the chief of the four thunder gods (Quia), opened the mountain where corn was hidden and taught people to make milpa or plant corn, beans and squash. This would make sense with the many metates or corn grinding stones in the Ciudad Blanca area, the Rio Paulaya area and the Trujllo area, including some huge ones used for some ceremonial purpose.

The name of the sisimite in the Mosquitia may have been translated into Miskito. Miskitos tell so many “kisi” stories, that one word for traditional stories is kiska (stories of kisis). “Kisis” are large, hairy creatures that look like people but larger and hairer, and live in the forest, which is to say they are just like sisimites in the rest of Honduras. The word “kisi” is probably derived from the Bantu word “nkisi” which means any nature spirit according to Dr. Jeanette Allsopp who studies and teaches Afro-Caribbean culture at the University of the West Indies, Barbados.

 Miskitos also know duende stories (cipitio in Nahua) and Sucia stories (Siguanaba “spirit of a woman” in Nahua),  Sirena stories (Texiguat or siguate), and “cadejo” (a type of spirit dog which grows, its eyes glow and it can change shape) stories with Miskito names for the main character which supports the idea that they knew the Nahua speakers who originated these stories, although they may known the Nahua speakers by other names like Rah.

The Rah were generally bilingual speaking Rah, and speaking slowly and with pauses Miskito, according to Scott Wood’s new book on the Mosquitia. Most Rah eventually intermarried with the Miskitos or were killed by the Miskito king in Raititara (Big Cementary) as punishment for eating a Miskito-Rah child. Gotz Von Houwald in his book Mayagna on the Sumus including the Tawahkas of Honduras notes the presence of Nahua derived words in Sumu languages, but no such study has been of Miskito yet. In Honduran Spanish over 300 Nahua words still exist according to studies of Dr. Atanasio Herranz and Teresa Campos, the director of the San Pedro Pula Museum. These Nahua words particularly refer to crafts, craft plants, foods, foods from typical plants, medicinal plants, animals, etc. Nahua is the language which most affects Honduran Spanish, noted Dr. Herranz.

Of the small amount of vocabularly known of the different Lenca dialects, they were also heavily influenced by Nahua.  Chorti also has loan words from Nahua notes anthropologist, Dr. Brent Metz. Historical records indicate some intermarriage between members of different tribes like Nahua speakers with Chortis or Lencas or with Africans or mulattos or with the Spanish. If the Spanish or mulattos or African slaves spoke any Indian language it was usually Nahua, so that would be the easiest group for them to intermarry with.  Also the Spanish purposefully settled in areas with Nahua speakers, sometimes founding special towns for Nahua speaking warriors brought from Mexico like Mejicapa, Comayagua, and Mejicapa, Gracias, Lempira in Honduras and Mejicapa, Usulatan in El Salvador, to have on hand as translators and workers.

The stories mentioned here and in the Wikipedia article on Pipil Mythology in Spanish, these stories are known not just to Indians in Honduras, but also to most Ladinos even Ladinos in the cities and often by Black English speakers and Garifunas, too. People don’t just tell the stories that they happened a long time ago, but rather these spirits like the Siguanaba or la Sucia or the duende are still appearing today and the spirits like the Sirena or Liwa marin (the Sirena’s name in Miskito) and the duende are still causes of illnesses and sometimes deaths, today. In this case, people often say, “Esta historia es verídica” (This story is true, this story really happened).

Language Shifts and Interethnic Marriage Hide the presence of the descendants of Nahua speakers

Part 2

By Wendy Griffin

Dr.  Atanasio Herranz, previously a linguists professor at the UNAH,  prefaces his information about the Nahuas in his book on Power, the State and Language, by saying although there are few Indians left today who identify as Nahuas or speak Nahua in Honduras or Central America, because of their great impact on Honduran culture and language, I am going to include them. According to Wikipedia, there are about 400 Nahua speakers left in El Salvador, mostly in Izalco, and I believe, there are no fluent Nahua speakers in Honduras, but that all 8 million Hondurans speak 300 words in Nahua is impressive as there are other Honduran Indian languages like Matagalpa that not even that many words in their whole language are known today by linguists.

The Spanish had a policy of using the militia of mulattos and “pardos” (dark skinned people) to physically haul Indians out of the mountains to settle them in missions in valleys called “reducciones”.   This continued until the very last years of the Spanish colonial period. This Spanish policy was particularly active in Yoro, in Olancho and in the Department of El Paraiso, so that this policy affected strongly the Tolupan Indians (popularly known as Jicaques), the Pech, the Tawahkas and other Sumu speakers, the Matagalpas (Pantasmas), Lencas and “Mexican” Indians (indigenas mexicanos) who probably spoke Nahua.

The adult Honduran Indians usually repeatedly fled from these missions, and sometimes the free Indians would attack the missions to get their family members back and to drive away the Catholic priests. The missions which brought large numbers of Indians in close contact with European diseases, so that for example, the Yoro mission reports are full of stastics like there were 240 children, but there was a measles or smallpox epidemic and they almost all died, but at least they died in Christ.   The Tolupan Indians let the main mission church in Luquique fall into ruin after the end of the colonial period and in the early 20^th century the Tolupanes still refused baptism on the ground that it obviously made people mean, which they apparently decided on the basis of  evidenced as the treatment of Christians of them.

Although the town of Agalteca, Yoro has a Nahua name, has historical reports of Mesoamerican drums like toncontin or tunkul, remained inhabited during the colonial period when most Tolupan Indians who were big hunters and fishers rather than agriculturalists fled to the mountains. The colonial Indians of Agalteca also helped produce dyes for the Spanish like cochinella for the Spanish in colonial period which the Tolupanes did not adopt cotton until the 19^th or even mid-20^th centuries. In their oral literature in Agalteca, they talk about the arrival of the Aztec Emperor Moctezhuma, however now the Agalteca, Yoro Indians are part of the Jicaque Indian Federation of Yoro (FETRIXY).  Most people assume that all Jicaques were speakers of Tol and were all Tolupanes, but in fact there is a lot of evidence of possible Nahua Indian presence both at the time of conquest, such as stone ruins, plazas and temple mounds, Aztec gods carved in stone and even ballcourts in Yoro,  and the possible Nahua speaker presence continued into the colonial period in Yoro and Atlantida, when they were allied with Miskitos and traded with the English. Since almost all Tolupanes and the descendants of the Nahua speakers now speak Spanish, and have probably intermarried, now the Agalteca Indians are consider Jicaques, rather than part of the Nahua Indian Federation which only includes Olancho Indians who may be descended from Nahuas. 

The “Sules” and “Cumayagues” Indians reported in the Agalta Valley, Olancho may have been descendants of the Indians of the Sulaco (Place of doves or pigeons in Nahua), Yoro, Sula, Santa Barbara (near Naco), and several communities known as Comayagua or Comayagüela who probably had Nahua leaders although the ethnicity of the common people may have included Lencas, and who had been taken to the gold mines to work as slaves and they escaped to the Agalta Valley, elsewhere in Olancho and in the Department of El Paraiso after the big rebellions of the 1540’s. Ruins, Pech Indian oral literature, and early Spanish Conquistador reports seem to support the idea that there were already Nahua speaking groups and states in the Agalta Valley where San Esteban, formerly Tonjegua, is the main city,  at the time of Conquest. This region is now all Spanish speaking, but it was still not completely conquered when the Spanish colonial period ended in 1821.

The town of Catacamas, Olancho was founded as a “reduccion” and the Indians of other parts of Olancho first taken there by force.  San Esteban in the Agalta Valley was originally  founded much later in 1808 as  a “reduccion”, although all the Pech taken there ran away.  Texiguat, El Paraiso was probably another “reduccion”. This is why there were probably both Lenca and Nahua speakers and maybe even other Indians like Sumus and Matagalpas  in these frontier communities formed between Free Indians and the Spanish colony, who all eventually mixed. Much of Yoro, Atlantida, Olancho and El Paraiso and all of Gracias a Dios deparments remained outside of the control of the Spanish during the whole colonial period. 

Both the Indians of the Catacamas Region of Olancho and the Indians of the Texiguat region of El Paraiso as well as Indians in Santa Barbara and in Southern Honduras have problems being recognized by the Honduran state for being unable to prove they are Indians, even though a number of important Honduran and Salvadoran anthropologists like Ramon Rivas, Manual Chavez and Lazaro Flores have found indications that the old Indians of the “pueblos de indios” of the colonial period are still nearby.

  Since they have lost their languages and now speak Spanish, they  especially have trouble proving which tribe of Indians they are. The Honduran Ethnic Census of 2001 did not permit Indians to choose to identify themselves as Nahuas or Pipiles, Chorotegas or Matagalpas (Pantasmas) or other Sumu speaking groups like Ulwas, the main ethnic groups thought to have lived in these regions in the colonial period, so the fact that no Nahua Indians or any of these other tribes of Indians were registered in the 2001 Ethnic Census had to do with what choices  were allowed to be chosen, not the fact that these Indians do not exist. Many people all over Honduras chose Jicaque in both the 1988 and 2001 censuses, but do not appear to be related to Tolupan Indians. This is because of the use of the term “Jicaque” for all the wild unconquered Indians by the Spanish, not just the speakers of Tol.

Some historians and university students have told me that different Indian groups of Honduras like the Lencas, the Chortis and the Nahuas have lost their culture, because their culture is the same as Spanish speaking Ladinos and they speak Spanish not an Indian language. In fact, the reason that the Ladino and Mesoamerican Indian cultures are similar is because the Ladinos or mestizos have not lost many elements of the Indian cultures they are descended from, such as the foods and crafts and popular religious practices or agriculture or traditional medicines.  Most Honduras Ladinos are probably descended from Lencas who extended from the department of Ocotepeque to El Paraiso, but there are definitely Ladinos descended from other Indian ethnic groups including Nahuas, Chorotegas, Tolupanes, etc.

Honduran Government language and education policies affect  Honduran Indians and Garifunas

By Wendy Griffin

Although there are currently 6,000 languages in the world, it is estimated that 3,000 will disappear in the next 100 years, reported a professor from Mexico at the Salalm conference in Miami in May 2013. That so many languages are disappearing at one time shows that something seems to be causing them to disappear.  The fact some languages already have under 10 speakers in Mexico and several languages in Honduras have under 400 speakers, is a symptom of a larger international problem. Dr. Lyle Campbell of the University of Hawaii has started a website on endangered languages, www.endangeredlanguages.com to highlight the problem. The Smithsonian Institute’s Folklife Festival is emphasizing the issue of language loss this year in Washington, DC.

That most Honduran Indians have either lost or are in the process of losing their languages is part of purposeful policies of first the colonial Spanish government and the Catholic Church and then of  the Honduran state and the Catholic Church after Independence to try to cause to disappear “hacer extinguirse” the indigenous languages, according to the studies of Dr. Atanasio Herranz, a former UNAH linguistics professor. There are a number of reasons the government and the Church had this policy—better control, easier to talk to workers or Christianize Indians if they speak your language, beliefs that that the Indian languages were diabolic that it would be a sacrilidge to teach Christianity in such diabolic languages, prevent the Indians from saying things about the Spanish that they did not understand, like plot against them, etc. In Honduran Spanish, people still say, “Hable en Cristiano” (speak in Christian), when they want you to speak in clear Spanish.

There were European ideas of the state and the nation that everyone in the country should speak the same language, which in Europe led to almost disappearance of a number of European languages and dialects like Scots, and Welsh or Cataluña and Gallego or Occitaine French. There was discrimination or actual physical punishment against people who could not speak the prestige dialect or who spoke an Indian language or Garifuna or English in school or those who could not read or write the prestige language, like taking away the right to vote in the 19^th century, while the same government did not provide schools to teach the Indians and Blacks reading and writing.

 The fact that there were forced labor laws that affected Honduran Indians into the 1940’s, also impacted on the decision of a family to teach its children an Indian language and to try to teach their children to be proud of their culture or have them pass as Ladinos. Trying to avoid the high tributes and forced labor requirements imposed on Indians, some Indians actually had legal cases to declare them as Ladinos, which established a lower tax burden and they did not have to participate in forced labor. However, during the whole colonial period, Ladinos had no rights to get a land title to land, which led they to adopt the technique of taking over land by force and holding it against comers, a land tenure technique that still affects and informs the land problems of Ladinos, Indians, Bay Islanders and Garifunas, and even gringo immigrants.

The new policy of the Honduran government or European funders to not accept certain people or Indians as legitimate Indians because they do not speak the language, while having been the exact people who caused them to lose their languages is troubling.  Funders from the European Union came to the Pech villages of Moradel and Silin, where only one or two Pech families speak Pech out of 450 residents, and said, “We only want to help the legitimate Pech. So we will ask each of you to say something in Pech to prove that you are legitimate Pech and then we will note your children to receive the help.” This would have eliminated almost everyone in the village from receiving the help.

The founder of the Pech villages of Silin and Moradel came to the North Coast as a young girl almost 90 years ago.  Her parents died a short time after she arrived to the North Coast. She did not grow up speaking Pech even though she is 100% Pech. So it is not surprising all her descendants in the community do not speak Pech either.

Her son had been chief for 10 years, and everyone said he worked hard and got many good projects for the Pech. But the Minsitry of Gobernacion (the Honduran Ministry of the Interior) said they wanted the Pech of Silin and Moradel to have a Pech speaking chief.    This is the first time in 500 years the Honduran government has tried to have a voice in who is the Pech chief, who is not paid one centavo by the Honduran government and it is not a government post,  and this is a very troubling trend.

There were only two adults who spoke Pech in the two villages and so the inhabitants voted for one of them, even though in past years there had been so much strife against this family that the other Pech would tell visitors those Pech speakers don’t live here and on one occasion physically barred the community to not let visitors to come in and visit this Pech speaking family.

The Ministry of Gubernacion has also sent out notes saying that “civil societies” can not have members who are related by family, and if there is more than one family member in a leadership position, one has to resign.  In small ethnic groups like the Tawahkas with 900 members and the Pech with about 3,600 this is almost impossible as everyone is related. Even among large groups like Garifunas, many people are closely related. Often the older person is elected to one position, because of their knowledge of the culture, respect, the traditional language, etc. but they do not read or write well in Spanish or know how to use computers, while the younger family members read and write Spanish well, but does not know the culture or traditional language as well and does not have the respect because they are young.

 Taking out either one or the other hurts the organization.  The fact that the older person does not know how to read or write well in Spanish is usually a direct result of Honduran government policies to not provide schools in rural areas where the Indians and Garifunas lived until after the 1990’s, and the schools were very unfriendly to non-Spanish speakers, so again the government is punishing the Indians and Garifunas for problems the government itself has caused. For example, Garifuna students how spoke Garifuna in school were made to stand up with their arms outstretched for a long time and made fun off. Bay Island and Miskitos who did not speak Spanish remember being hit such as with rulers. When the current Pech chief of Moradel sent her older daughter to school and the daughter only spoke Pech, the teacher came to her house and scolded her for not teaching Spanish to her daughter before coming to school.  My friend was embarrassed by the teacher’s scolding and taught her other children Spanish, and now some of her children and none of her grandchildren can speak Pech.

In the US there are similar problems reported Tulane linguist Judith Maxwell, where the US government has denied legal status as “Indians” and as a “tribe” to Louisana and other Indians, like the Wampanoags the Indians who greeted the Pilgrims, who could not prove they were Indians, because they did not speak the language and often the tribe in the Eastern US has lost its land base, because of US government removal policies of the past. If the Indians speak the language, it is fairly easy to get federal recognition she said, but if they have lost their language, it can be difficult or impossible. The Wampanoags have said if they knew how the descendants of the Pilgrims were going to treat them, they would have let them starve, instead of helping them with food during the first hard winter in the US.

In Rich Heape’s Productions’s video on Indian Boarding Schools in the US, many of the older Indians cried remembering how they had been taken away from their parents at any early age and beaten until they forgot all their language except their own original name, which the boarding school people changed.  The Indians blamed many of current problems on US reservations on the Boarding School system where they or their parents or grandparents did not have the possibility of living with loving older Indian adults teach them how to good productive adult Indians and parents in their society. With such negative experiences, it is not surprising many US Indians dropped out of school at a fairly young age.  In the US South, many Indians chose to drop out of school rather than go to Black schools during the period of Jim Crow laws when after third or sixth grade there were no more Indian schools, only Black or white schools, in the few Southern states that still had American Indians.  

The issue of Indigenous laws and customs and what rights they have under the laws of Latin American countries is a topic that is just beginning to be raised. Some Latin American countries have changed their constitutions so as to recognize the pluricultural state of their countries, reported Teresa Miguel Stearn of Yale. Many fewer have recognized their states as plurilegal, permitting Latin American Indians to determine certain things according to local traditions. Honduras does not have any legal recognition that indigenous or Garifuna people or Bay Islanders or even poor Ladinos might have a different systems of understanding legal rights which impact things like inheritance, giving land titles, who has the right to sell land,  and who has rights to resources like water and trees and subsoil rights,  marriage customs and rights of legally or not legally married spouses and their children, adoption or foster children customs, who governs in the community and who has the right to make decisions and settle disputes, etc.

 Many many problems occur in Honduras because the government and the people are not working on the same understanding of what the law is or should be, beside the fact that the actual Honduran laws as they are written are often not followed by anyone. That most people have not actually seen the laws, including many lawyers and almost all politicians and government employees, because Honduran laws are not computerized and are not taught, and indeed,  I am not sure if anywhere in Honduras there is actually  a complete physical copy of all Honduran laws, not even the land laws,  also affects the issues. That Antonio Vallejo, the head of the Honduran National Archives, after searching for 30 years, could not physically find copies of several of the main laws that affect Honduran land from the nineteenth century to include in his 1911 recopilation of Honduran land laws, “Reglas para Agrimensores” (Guide for Land Surveyors) is very bad sign. Armed violence or witchcraft against perceived wrongdoers and running away are sometimes the only possible ways people feel that they can keep bad laws from being enforced on them.

The question of whose law will we follow was an issue at the very beginning of the Spanish conquest of Honduras.  In Pastor Gomez’s 2012 book on Gold Mining, Black slaves and Interethnic Relations in the sixteenth century, he has the King of Spain’s letter to appoint Governor Lopez Salcedo the governor of Honduras, with its capital in Trujillo, Colon in the early 1500’s. The King said he was sending Lopez Salcedo to bring the King’s Justice and Mercy to Honduras. Governor Lopez Salcedo set about immediately on a slaving raid that enslaved 2,000 Indians to carry gold and  equipment to mine gold in Nicaragua, his men fed the Indians to the dogs, cut their heads off on the trail if they got weak, set fire to houses with the Indians in them, enslaved nobles who were exempt from slavery, and eventually only around 100 Indians arrived alive in Nicaragua, the Spanish having killed most of the rest, and all of Colon, Olancho in Honduras and Nueva Segovia, Nicaragua were in open rebellion and the governor was put in jail in Nicaragua for a year for causing the uprising, although he later described this as a successful slaving raid.

If this was the King’s Justice and Mercy, God help the poor Honduran Indians. Perhaps God was watching as the Governor Lopez Salcedo died a short time after his release from the Nicaraguan jail due to his health having been broken due to his year in jail. The Garifunas in Trujillo frequently say, “Estamos a la mano de Dios”, (We are only protected by the hand of God).

 Even the official Honduran government archivist in the 19^th century when he reported Honduras’s first census since Independence in the 1880’s Antonio Vallejo had to admit that the Spanish had almost caused the human population of Honduras to disappear, and it still had not recovered.

Honduran Indians fought hard and disappeared into the mountains and jungles to remain free from  the difficult Spanish policies, all around Honduras, not just in the Kingdom of the Mosquitia (now the Department of Gracias a Dios). Only in the 20^th century did the Honduran government actually reach the areas of many of the Honduran Indians, which is partly reflected in the Honduran map which shows border disputes on every side as the independent Honduran government tried to take control of areas the colonial Spanish had not controlled.

 That the Honduran or US or Guatemalan Indians exist at all is a significant triumph, but in many cases their language did not survive the centuries of negative government policies, so it seems extremely unfair to try to eliminate Indians from programs or from offices within their ethnic group’s organizations because of being able to speak the traditional language or not or needing help with written Spanish from younger family members or not. Of the 175 US Indian languages still spoken in the US, of the estimated at least 450 languages at the time of European contact, 145 are in danger of disappearing in the next 100 years, according to the speaker at the SALALM conference in Miami. This does not include the Latin American Indian languages spoken by immigrants. The fact that so many Zapotec Indians are in Los Angeles, including leaving some towns as ghost towns, inspired two of the Mexican Indian movies at Salalm, as well as Garifuna in Peril movie about the loss of the Garifuna language partly due to immigration, which were shown at SALALM in Miami in May 2013.