Why didn’t
We hear About the Santa Barbara Indians before Now?
(Part 1 of
2)
By Wendy
Griffin
One reason
the Indians of Santa Barbara have been invisible until now is that until the
recent problems with the Rio Blanco and proposed dams in the area, the large
Lenca organizations like ONILH and COPIN have not been very active in
organizing in Santa Barbara communities until recently. Important Central
American anthropologists like Ramon Rivas, Manuel Chavez and the historian
Marvin Barahona mention Honduran Indians in Santa Barbara, El Paraiso and in
the South in the 1990’s, but say they have weak traits as Indians. Linguist
Atanasio Herranz in his book State,
Power and Language on the linguistic policies of the Honduran government, also
divides the Lenca area into weak and strong traits as Indians, but he does
include the Santa Barbara area as Lencas. However, mostly the anthropologists and
historians did not deal with the Santa Barbara because the Indians of Santa
Barbara were not organized into federations and these anthropologists and
historians were studying the Indian movement.
ONILH and
COPIN, the two national Lenca organizations, are quite active in Western
Honduras and in some muncipios like Guajiquiro, La Paz, there is actually a
Lenca council associated with ONILH, formally part of the structure of the
municipal government, noted Guajiquiro native and UPN Economics professor Dr.
Julian Lopez in his book on development projects in Guajiquiro, something the
Garifunas or Miskitos have not managed.
Before
ONILH and COPIN, the older Lenca organization was the la Alcaldía de la Vara
Alta (the Council of the High Staff of Moses) which linked Lenca communities
for communal, usually religious, celebrations. This Alcaldía was founded by
Catholic missionaries to help organize the village saint’s fair and to manage
local resources belonging communally to the community such as cattle pastures
which they managed to raise funds to pay the priest and other expenses. These
type of organizations are known in Spanish as cofradías. Probably the Lencas
who attended the ceremony to ask for rain at the Taulabe Caves came from the
Alcaldias de la Vara Alta and the Indians of Santa Barbara would have been
fully integrated into that. Pre-Columbian statues of Indian leaders also show
them with high staffs (and feathers in their headdresses like the old Lempira
coin, not like the modern Lempira bill without feathers). Among the Lencas and
the Mayas often the leaders of the civil government like the city council, the
mayor, etc. were also the leaders of the Catholic religious organizations known
as cofradías.
Several factors killed the Alcaldia de la Vara
Alta in most Lenca towns except Yamaranguila, Intibuca—the negative attitude of
non-Honduran missionary priests which was so bad that it actually led to the
Yamaranguila Indians physically attacking the priest and him cursing the town
in the mid-20th century, the loss of cofradía lands used to pay for
the ceremonies after three laws getting rid of them-one during the time of Francisco
Morazan, again during the Liberal Reform and the last in the administration of President
Paz Baraona from Pinalejo, Santa Barbara in 1928, the restructuring of
municipal governments and moving the government seat of municipios from Indian
towns to ladino towns that grew up on Spanish owned haciendas, which left the Indian leaders outside of
authority structure in their municipios, the difficult times of Honduran
Indians under the presidency of Tiburcio Carias and after the El Salvador
massacre of thousand of Indians people were frightened, and accusations of
witchcraft against traditional Indians who led ceremonies are some of the
factors known why this institution was lost.
Although
the Honduran government made three laws against cofradía land (1820’s, 1880’s,
1920’s), and took away the vote from Indians for part of the 19th
century, the last piece of Lenca cofradía land was only confiscated in 1994,
and 45 Lencas died of starvation in that area of Intibuca during that year, who
had probably received help from the cofradía funds and land. Atanasio Herrranz
also notes the loss of cofradía lands and cattles caused many rural Lenca
schools in the 19th century to close when schools did not receive
money from the federal government, and then the Honduran law disenfranchised
them for not being able to read and write in Spanish.
There is a
new book out on the Political and Religious Year of the Alcaldia de la Vara
Alta of Yamaranguila, with the Alcaldia de la Vara Alta listed as the sole
author, and published with funds of an SNV (The Dutch government’s technical
cooperation agency) in Intibuca among the Lencas if people are interested in
this organization. See the website www.snvhn.org. The copy I saw was for sale in the
San Pedro Sula Museum.
Why didn’t
We hear About the Santa Barbara Indians before Now?
(Part 2 of
2)
By Wendy
Griffin
The land
problems of the Santa Barbara Lencas have existed for a while. For example,
when I visited Lenca communities with a staff member of A Mano, an agency that
helped market crafts and cashew nuts, in the mid-1990’s, the Lencas said that
through the Agrarian Reform, some Ladino land owners got control of their land,
and they had to move off of it. And because there were no other jobs in the
area, they ended up working for very low wages on the cattle ranch or coffee farm
of the Ladino who had displaced them.
The staff person from A Mano which had extensive craft projects in Santa
Barbara said, “Sure. That is the way it works. The would be land owners go into
the Agrarian Reform office and say, this land here, give it to me. And that
village there, give it to me, too.”
Honduras
and El Salvador dropped the category of Indian off the census about the same. In
the case of El Salvador, it is clear that, first the law said after the 1932
massacre of Pipils and Lencas that there were no more Indians. Then they passed
a law saying it was prohibited to wear Pipil or other Indian clothes, which
would be odd in a country with no Indians. They dropped the category of Indian
off the census and later off of the birth certificate. It was of course illegal
to speak Indian languages in schools in El Salvador as it was in Honduras until
1992.
But then since
the Salvadoran Indians no longer existed according to Salvadoran law, the
colonial land titles of “pueblos de indios” (Indian communities) and Indian
lands in the mountains apt for coffee, became legally vacant land (tierra
baldío) according to a special El Salvadoran law which made them available to be given to Ladinos,
which the government did.
While there
are controversies about how many Indians still exist in El Salvador, that there
were until recently 400 Pipil speakers (there are now only estimated to be 30),
that in 1990’s when Virginia Tilley was working with them and writing Seeing
Indians about the Salvadoran Indians, there were still some old women who had
Pipil clothes that had been illegal for 50 years, that Dr. Lyle Campbell found
older people who remembered words of Salvadoran Lenca and Cacaopeira, a
language related to Matagalpa in Honduras in the 1970’s supports the idea that
in fact, not all the Salvadoran Indians were killed in reality in the 1932
massacre, just on paper they were made invisible, apparently for the precise
reason to steal their land. That there are now postcards of Indians fron
NahuaIzalco (name means Nahua Indians from the Place of obsidian in Nahua and
these Toltec-Pipils were supposedly from Tulan or place of a lot of tule, in
Central Mexico), El Salvador making tule crafts like petate mats also still give
the idea that these Indians really are still alive.
The nineteenth century and early twentieth
situation of Honduran Indian lands and the
laws that affected them were even more complicated than that, but surely
contributed to the numerous Indian uprisings that characterized the Independence
period up to 1933, just as the taking of Indians lands in El Salvador helped
contribute to that country’s only
recently completed civil war. The combined Lenca uprising under Gregorio
Ferrera in Honduras in the period 1932-1933 at the same time as the Indian
uprising in El Salvador, makes this one of the biggest Indian uprisings and one
of the few international Indian uprisings in recent history. Gregory Ferrera’s Lenca troops from Intibuca managed
to reach the American Zone of Puerto Castilla where the United Fruit Company’s
Truxillo Railroad Company was headquartered, according to Garifuna eyewitnesses
like Sebastian Marin. The experiences of the Lenca Indians as soldiers are in
Anne Chapman’s books Los Hijos de Copal y Candela (the Childen of Copal incense
and candles.)
The
situation of the Santa Barbara Indians and many traditional peoples has become
more critical with Pepe Lobo’s administration and leadership of Juan Orlando as
President of the Congress passing laws like the Idle Assets of the Government
law to give 250 mining concessions or the Model Cities laws (RED and ZEDE)
which not only affects Garifunas but even communities like Suyapa on the edge
of Tegucigalpa and Santa Cruz de Yojoa. In the case of Suyapa, the Indians have
organized there as the “Asociación de Indios laborios de Suyapa” (The
Association of Indians who provided personal service to the Spanish and so did
not have to pay tribute), probably first mention of laborios in almost 200
years in Honduras, in order to try to have ILO Convention 169 rights when faced
with the prospect of the Model city being founded on their lands. After the
Indian town of Comayagüela, Tegucigalpa’s twin city, became invaded by Ladinos
after Independence in the 19th century, the Indians of Comayagüela
ran away to Suyapa and some went even further to Sabana Grande.
However,
faced with the problems of possible loss of land, water, fish, and disruption
of the eco-system of the Lake Yojoa area, the national Lenca organizations like
COPIN and the Santa Barbara Lencas have come together to protest the dams proposed
for the Rio Blanco area. While one Rio Blanco (white river) provides a drain for the Lake Yojoa, a sacred
site to the Lencas, to the north, there is also a Rio Blanco town in the
Department of Intibuca on another river (It used to have an Indian name, but
the Spanish changed the name of the town to Rio Blanco). The Honduran newspapers have said that some
of the Lencas in Intibuca and Santa Barbara areas have come to an agreement
with the government about the question of the dams in Western Honduras, many
doubt the veracity of that statement or that is represents the majority of the
Lencas.
ILO
Convention 169 seems to be the only legal straw which some Hondurans have to
grab to prevent the government from massive displacement of people to “develop”
the country. However, as Danira Miralda Bulnes points out in her book on the
Low Intensity War in the Mosquitia, there are people in the Honduran government
who say, “We can not have laws above the
laws of country” and would like to get rid of the protection of ILO Convention
169, as weak as it is, for people claiming to be indigenous. So OFRANEH’s claim
that the Honduran government is colluding with the World Bank in the current
2013 Honduran census to disqualify certain groups, Indians as well as
Garifunas, from being indigenous, and thus not having the right to this
protection as Indigenous people bears listening to.
Also the fact that the Catholic church’s
archives in Comayagua, with all the
colonial birth certificates marked Indian or “mulato” or black, were burnt down
is suspicious. If you wanted to say—these people here who say they are Indians,
are not descended from the colonial Indians who had the land title, burning
that archive would be the way to do it. There are also Hondurans in high
positions who do not want it known that they are partially descended from the
colonial era mulatos, and this would also be the way to erase finding out that
out. The Honduran historian who said he could prove that all leading
politicians in Honduras had at least one Black grandparent had his life
threatened and he never published his research.
The law on
the Idle Assets of the Honduran Government, used to justify the 250 mining
concessions, was supposedly introduced to help the Honduran government pay its
internal debts, which is to say debts with Honduran banks which primarily are
owned by wealthy Honduran people many of
whom are descended from non-Latino minorities in Honduras like Arabs of
Palestinian descent and Jews. That some of the Honduran business partners of these bankers
are also drug traffickers who can not be touched, has been suggested by some
Honduran government employees like those of the INA.
If you have
$500 million in assets, like the drug trafficking family known as the Cachiros,
you are going to need to know a good banker, or several good bankers, as they
had 64 known bank accounts. In Honduras, the families who own banks are also
often active in Honduran politics and often own other companies. Before the
Honduran government and the US Treasury Department moved on the Cachiros, they
worked through the Honduran banks such as requiring anyone with a US dollar
bank account to have their identification scanned, and a form
downloaded from a US Treasury website, filled out by the bank employees,
and they also would not let every day people in Honduras like foreigners in
Trujillo take out cash dollars from
their US dollar accounts, at least 10 days before the Cachiros had their assets
“seized”. Not surprisingly there were no cash assets in their bank accounts by
the time of seizure happened several days later.
While the
Liberal Party candidate for president claim that the strong measures taken by
this Nationalist Party government such as making concessions of the mines, the
rivers, the highways, even opening the possibility of leasing the wind for wind
power, will hurt the Nationalist party candidate for President, the same Juan
Orlando who is currently the president of the Congress and is pushing through
these reforms, he seems to be counting
on the fact that with the opposition split between Libre of Xiomara Castro, the
wife of Manuel Zelaya, the traditional Liberal candidate of Mauricio Villeda, and maybe even a few for Salvador
Nasrala, that he as the only Nationalist candidate will win and the reforms
will all go through. Hondurans say that the Nationalists are at least united,
while Liberals even if they reach power, usually can not agree among
themselves, and so little is accomplished with a lot of time spent changing
people in key jobs.
I have seen some articles and articles on Indian movements in the era of
Neo-Liberal politics and economics, such
as Keri Brondo’s 2013 book Land Grab on
the Garifunas of Honduras’s land problems, and the outlook is not good for the Indians.
The fact that US Liberatarians are behind the idea of the Model City is also
not encouraging. They are trying to claim you can good healthcare, good
education, safe streets, low crime and almost no taxes in the Model Cities in
Honduras all at the same time, and that you will be able to keep them safe even
if they let anyone who wants in, in, even if you build the Model City in San
Pedro Sula, which currently has the highest homicide rate in the world, and the
extorsion rates for protection money and the levels of theft are higher than
the murder rate. And for reasons that I do not know, some Hondurans believe
them.
Why Does it
Matter Who is an Indian in Honduras?
By Wendy
Griffin
In the US,
most people do not realize that the question of who is an Indian is a hot
topic, about which some native people can talk about at length. It might
determine if you could get access to health care at the Indian health Service.
It might determine for example if you could live on an Indian reservation, such
as the Seneca reservation in New York, or not. It might determine if you were
eligible for a scholarship, like ABC (A Better chance) scholarships to certain
prep schools in New England. To market crafts made by a certain Tribe like
Navajo Tourquoise jewelry, you have to be able to prove that you are a Navajo.
It might determine whether or not you can open up a casino and make a lot of
money off of gambling, on land owned by a government recognized tribe. The US
government does not recognize that all the people who claim to be Indians, like
the Wampanoags who met the Pilgrims, are Indians, and those who are not
recognized as Indians lose various benefits from job training programs to
alcohol and drug rehab programs, which are not open to people identified by the
US government as “not federally recognized Indians”. At least one of the tribes
not currently federally recognized has been on the same spot on Long Island,
New York, before there was a New York.
In Honduras
prior to the passing of ILO Convention 169, there were few benefits to being a
Honduran Indian, and certainly almost no benefits from the government, except
they got to live on the ejidal land of the Indian community where they lived
and work the land. While Mexico is famous for having abolished its ejidal lands
within the last 20 years, Honduras has done many things reduce the
effectiveness of ejidal land titles, but they still exist. In parts of the
Lenca area of Honduras, ejidal lands included sometimes up to half the land in
the whole municipio or county. In the colonial period, Ladinos, the mixed race
people were not eligible for any kind of land title, as there were only legal
land titles for Indian communities and Spanish ranches, but no legal land for
Ladinos. The practice of Ladinos moving on to land in or near Indian
communities and holding it force of arms is at least 450 years old in Honduras.
This problem of lack of Ladino land titles still has not been resolved in
Honduras in spite of several decades of Agrarian Reform.
ILO Convention 169 does not protect the lands
of Latin American or Caribbean Blacks, only Indians and Tribal Peoples (like
Blacks in Africa, tribal peoples in
India, etc.) so the outlook for them is even worse in this neo-liberal climate
than Indians. Not all Garifunas are happy with the decision to count
Afro-Hondurans in 2013 census instead of counting Garifunas, Black Bay Islanders,
Ladinos (which includes who knows how many descendants of African slaves in
Honduras, possibly most Ladinos from Mel Zelaya on down), Miskitos, etc.. Just
as it seemed a nothing thing, that El Salvador or Honduras dropped Indians from
the censuses after 1930, it turned out that that made it easy to take away land
from Indians or say to their modern descendants, you are not Indians, and so
have no right to the land titled to the Indians. In the US, American Indians
have treaties that guaranteed them some rights and lands. In Honduras, the equivalent
was land titles for “pueblos de indios” (Indian towns in the colonial period).
The
decision to count Afro-Hondurans could have legal consequences as well,
as the ODECO lawyer speaking at the Garifuna Day assembly in Limon in April
this year, quoted one Honduran who said, “How can we give you land, and deny
access to other Afro-Hondurans (meaning the Ladinos descended from African
slaves)?” In Keri Brondo’s book, one
mestiza woman was incensed that the Garifunas should have protection under ILO
Convention 169, because, “They are Africans. I am an “indio” (an Indian, a
person whose family is descended from the colonial era Indians of Honduras who
were here before the Garifunas.) One
Garifuna said, We are Hondurans. We have lived over 200 years, we should not be
counted as Afro-anything, which is similar to the complaints of
Mexican-Americans who have lived in the US for over 5 generations. Also one
Garifuna historian said, Science shows all of humanity has genes that showed
that the whole human race, we all came from Africa. If we are going to count
Afro-Hondurans we would have to count all the people in the country.
Sharlene
Mollett, a Black Canadian geographer at Dartmouth University points out it is
very hard to divide geography by race, that one group can legally be here and
the other group can not legally be here. As studies of the US South during the
Jim Crow segregationist laws, or South Africa during apartheid, people often
claim racial identities which were convenient under the law. The same held true
for Honduras and Central America during the colonial period, where for example,
mulatto wives of the Spanish were classified legally as Spanish so that their
Spanish husbands would not have to pay tribute for them, during the period when
mulatos were required to pay tribute and the Spanish were not. In Nicaragua it
has been shown that bishops of the Catholic Church who were required to submit
documents on “pureness of blood”, often had at least one mulato grandparent.
In the US,
when it became illegal for Indians to live East of the Mississippi River, some
of the Indians left in the East, hid or lied. In Virginia during Jim Crow days,
it was illegal to put down Indian on the birth certificate of a child, and if
the parents did put it down, the health workers would in later and change it,
but without seeing the child, so some Native American children in Virginia had
one brother or sister listed as White and the other as Colored. When schools
were divided up only Colored and White, many Indian parents in the Southern
United States chose not to send their children to school at all, just to avoid
having to send them to Colored Schools for Blacks.
According
to former UHAH professor Dr. Atanasio Herranz there is no way to identify who
is Lenca and who is Ladino. Similar
problems exist trying to separate out Chortis from Ladinos or Nahuas from
Ladinos. When this is added to the problems of different Indian tribes
intermarrying among each other like Pipils and Lencas, and multiple Indian
languages in some towns or small areas, especially in frontier towns where the
Spanish brought by force, unconquered Indians like Tawahkas and Matagalpas to
live among Mesoamerican Indians like Lencas and Nahuas or Chortis trying to change their language,
culture and religion, Indians who have
non-Indian spouses with whom they have children like the Pech of Silin, trying
to define who has the right to live on Lenca land or Pech land,
for example, or who has right to a scholarship to study high school
through programs to help Indians, can be
very difficult to enforce.
When you
put on top of this the question of corruption, which most organizations and
people put Honduras in top 5 countries in the world for corruption, and greed
because land values have gone up because of tourism and resources are scarce,
human rights abuses are more likely to occur, notes Keri Brondo’s book Land
Grab on the Garifunas.
It is not
only the issue of land that people are corrupt about. When I began working with
the Garifunas and Miskito Indians in 1992, Dr. Lazaro Flores, a Honduran
anthropologist, had arranged for 5 scholarships to be given to Miskito Indians
and 5 to Garifunas so that they could study at the UPN. Five Miskito students
were able to study, and most have gone on to being high school principals or
government officials and several have written books, but only two Garifunas got
to study with university scholaships. The reason was because the Congressman
from Tocoa, Colon got involved, and had three of the Garifuna scholarships
given to Ladinos from Tocoa, Colon instead of Garifunas from Colon. If the abuses are so obvious, but no one does
anything when three light skinned Ladinos show up to claim scholarships for
Garifunas (the Garifunas are so dark their skin color is called blue-black in
the US and prieto in Honduran Spanish), then obviously trying to sort out who
is Lenca or who is Chorti and who is not, and whether they have any rights to
certain programs or certain lands or whether they have the right to go on
international trips as Maya Chorti Indian folkdancers or not is just not going
to happen.
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